To a large degree the canon I am setting up in this project follows directly in the footsteps to some of the Spanish critics whose work I most respect, like Miguel Casado and Julián Jiménez Heffernan. In that sense i am the American Hispanist working in this field who takes the same line taken by one particular faction in Spain. I didn't intend for this to happen. In fact, my preferences were formed before I knew that this was a faction. It's more a matter of saying that these are my friends because of the kind of poetry I was writing about, rather than vice-versa.

***

One quote I keep coming back to is by Jameson:

if the poststructuralist motif of the "death of the subject" means anything socially, it signals the end of the entrepreneurial and inner-directed individualism with its "charisma" and its accompanying categorial panoply of quaint romantic values such as that of the "genius." Seen thus, the extinction of the "great moderns" is not necessarily an occasion for pathos. Our social order is richer and more literate, and, socially at least, more "democratic." [...] [i]t no longer needs prophets and seers of the high modernist and charismatic type, whether among its cultural producers or its politicians. Such figures no longer hold any charm or magic for subjects of a corporate, collectivized, post-individualistic age; in that case, goodbye to them without regrets, as Brecht might have put it: woe to the country that needs geniuses, prophets, Great Writers, or demiurges.

Richard Rorty and Marjorie Perloff have quoted this too, I think, mostly in order to take issue with it, as I do. I hate the sneering tone of those scare quotes. The term "cultural producers" is also telling. What happens to a room of "cultural producers" or "creative writers" when a poet walks in the door? Surely embarrassment on all sides. "Creative writing" is a branch of the English department. "Cultural production" is a sector of the economy. Now it's true that a poet might belong to such a department and that he or she belongs to that sector of the economy--almost nobody is free of all institutional ties--but what happens if those definitions become primary. If you refer non-ironically to your manuscript of poems as a "thesis," you are defining this poetry by its function in the academic credentialing process. Nothing wrong with that if it's what you want to do.

I was in Chicago for the weekend celebrating Julia's 14th birthday, so I had two days of "breaking the chain," after working 31 consecutive days on the project. Today I'm back working on it, refreshed.

One of the problems I'm working on is the relation between poetry and history. I'm not talking mostly about poetry that talks about historical events directly, or history as a poetic frame of reference. (That would be kind of obvious.) Rather, the historical consciousness that goes into something like the concept of modernism itself. Pound's translation of "The Seafarer" is a modernist poem, for example. Its historical frame, in terms of its creation and reception, is the time when it was written.

The same for St.-John Perse's Anabasis, for example, which takes place in some mythic time with no direct relation to the present. Even when there is a real time in poetry, there is also, at the same time, a kind of other time. There is also the sense that a future reader might be distant from the any of the various time frames of the poem. For example, I inhabit neither the historic frame of the original "The Sea Farer" (Old English) nor that of Pound himself. The reception of a work of art stretches out indefinitely into the future.

The first review of Apocryphal Lorca is on line and I couldn't be much happier with it if I had written it myself.

(102)

Charnett Moffett. beauty within. (1989)

I've switched to vinyl for my main record purchasing. There's just something about that 12" disk and the physicality of that, plus the adventure of the $2.99 bin at vintage vinyl here in St. Louis and similar stores. The 70 buck turntable I bought from amazon works fine, hooking up directly to some headphones or speakers. Eventually I'll get a decent stereo amp and some better speakers.

I have no interest in converting my vinyl to mp3s. The whole point is to get away from the mp3.

This is an album by bassist Moffett (playing both electric and upright bass) with numerous family members, in a kind of fusion / funk mode. Stanley Jordan, Kenny Garrett, and Kenny Drew play too. The leader, whom I knew mostly through his work with Ornette, wrote all the compositions.

I'll give this 3 and half stars for its sheer obscurity and funkiness. If you see this in the bargain bin, by all means pick it up.

I got Un armario lleno de sombras, Gamoneda's memoir, in the mail yesterday. It provides the referential frame for much of Gamoneda's poetry, in the sense that he will insert lines or images from his poetic works directly into his prose texts, with no quotation marks even, or retell a story implicit in a poetic text with a referential framework. At other times he will quote from his poetry with quotation marks.

At one point, my project was going to be a book about Gamoneda emphasizing the theme of historical memory. That has now become a mere chapter of the book. I don't feel like doing a monograph on a single author right now. My working title is Fragments of a Late Modernity: Lorca, Valente, and the Intellectual Traditions of Spanish Poetry. This is my outline:

Introduction: Chasing Tigers in Red Weather

PART ONE: LORCA

1. Lorca and the Paradoxes of Modernity
2. The Contested Legacy of the Duende

PART TWO: MODERNISM ACCORDING TO VALENTE

3. Jorge Guillén, Luis Cernuda, and the Vicissitudes of Spanish Modernism
4. From María Zambrano to José Ángel Valente: The Origins of Late Modernism
5. Fragments of a Late Modernity: Valente and Beckett

PART THREE: THE PERSISTENCE OF MEMORY

6. Claudio Rodríguez
7. The Persistence of Memory: Antonio Gamoneda and the Literary Institutions of Late Modernity
8. Ullán and Núñez
9. Olvido García Valdés

Conclusion: The Unfinished Business of Modernity

I've written chapters 1, 3, 5, and 7, though 1 is in Spanish and translating it will involve adding material and totally recasting everything as though I had written it directly in English. It may not be worth translating. I'd rather start from scratch.

Take two poets, Valente and Rodríguez. They are equally difficult and linguistically dense. If anything, the more intellectual of the two, Valente, the one with disciples and an accreditated lineage, is more transparent, less clotted and baroque, than the "dumb poet." We might expect the opposite, but there it is.

Julia was volunteering at the library. While waiting for her I pulled a book off the shelf by Stanley Cavell. Now Cavell should interest me because of the Wittgensteinian angle, but I had a hard time with his writing, because he isn't very concise. In 40 pages that I read i barely got the sense of what it was all supposed to be about. There was a lot of wordy transitioning and something terribly important sounding that he never quite got around to articulating. He likes to refer at length to other writings of his which presumably explain all this better. I know he admires Wittgenstein, Emerson, Thoreau, Jane Austen, and classic movies, but what is the damned point of it all? Are we just supposed to admire him for admiring all these things?

There are some suggestive ideas, maybe at the ratio of one per 10 pages. The comparison between Austen and Nietzche...

Valente is very, very closely identified with the study of Spanish mysticism, especially Miguel de Molinos and san Juan de la Cruz. Since I've always known this, it's taken a while for the full implications to sink in. Valente criticism just tends to echo Valente's own positions, so there's a problem, or a series of problems, here that hasn't quite been resolved. What does it mean for a basically secular intellectual to be so invested in mysticism? In other words, there is nothing in Valente's writing that makes any more or less secular person reject it: everything is framed just so. The reader doesn't even know the confessional status of the authorial voice. Of course, we take the side of the mystic, Molinos, against the Inquisition that sentenced and imprisoned him, the side of heterodoxy against orthodoxy, but presumably a reader would do that whether he or she was agnostic or a Catholic believer--or the believer in any other creed for that matter. So Valente gets to have it both ways. He gets to be the modern secularized intellectual and the champion of mysticism.

My second idea for the day is this: Valente's poetic theory / combined with Claudio Rodríguez's poetry. Rodríguez is known as a dumb poet rather than a smart poet like Valente (Julián Jiménez Heffernan makes this distinction--questioning if of course). A dumb poet is someone like Lorca or Rodríguez, that is, a poet without a theory of poetry. A smart poet is someone like Valente, who develops the theory of what he's going to do and then does it exactly like that. My idea is that Valente's theory--developed mostly on the basis of María Zambrano's philosophy--predicts and explains Rodríguez's poetry. But that Valente tended to ignore the existence of Claudio, after an early review praising Claudio with some reservations. Claudio's poetry, in fact, is a better exemplification of Valente's theory than Valente's own poetry.

***

This lightbulb went off in my head yesterday evening. The lightbulb flash should happen to you when you are working on a project, maybe an average of once or twice every day. This is when an idea falls into place, the "aha" moment. You should notice when this happens. It calls for a brief moment of self-congratulation. Most of the work of writing does not consist of light-bulb flashes.

David Bromige has died... What a loss. A marvelous man and a marvelously modest poet.

You didn't always realize how good Bromige was (I didn't, I mean), because he didn't seem to be making an undue effort. He wasn't trying to impress you all the time. I also like many poets who are making that obvious effort too; I'm not saying one is better than the other. It's just easier for some to appreciate the Oscar Petersons of the world, with their incredibly fast sextuplet runs.

David was a different kind of poet. One of his most representative works is a work in which he just sets out to explain what his poetry does. "My Poetry." At the beginning of the work, he deliberately disavows that kind of attempt to make a strong impression through flashy stuff, but rather works cumulatively and slowly:

‘My Poetry’ does seem to have a cumulative, haunting effect — one or two poems may not touch you, but a small bookful begins to etch a response, poems rising in blisters that itch for weeks, poems like ball-bearings turning on each other, over & over, digging down far enough to find substance, a hard core to fill up the hand. ‘It’s through this small square that my poems project themselves, flickering across the consciousness, finally polarizing in the pure plasma of life. The reader grows impatient, irritated with my distancing style, coming at him in the rare book format, written under not one but two different kinds of dirty money, & knowing me to be an english teacher.’

Interestingly, with this modesty this paragraph does actually make an assertive claim for its effects.

Take "Dixieland" jazz. Armstrong's Hot 5 and Hot 7 sessions are perfectly listenable today. They still sound fresh and new. But any attempt to play in this style, by anyone after about 1940 who wasn't part of the music in its day, is absolutely vile, in all cases, a priori and forever, categorically, amen.

While I don't appreciate the hard bop of the "young lions," I think it is still a legitimate style. Hard bop still doesn't sound dated even today. Diana Krall, though she is not all that good in comparison with Ella, Sarah, Nancy, Dinah, etc... , can still be listenable at times, but the same problem of datedness applies. It's not simply a matter of not being as good: there is a fundamental wrongness to the return to an ossified style.

Why can't you write like Keats today? It is obvious that you can't. It simply can't be done. The results would be vile pastiche. Yet you can still read Keats fine... Why is Campion's Latin verse, undoubtedly, lacking in aesthetic interest. It is the relation to the language itself that changes. Imagine an adept forger of Picasso, in 2030. If we like Picasso, wouldn't it make sense to train people to make new cubist paintings, in that exact style? But almost everyone would agree that there is not point to that. Anything interesting that might come out of trying to paint like Picasso at a much later date would be in its radical difference from Picasso. This shows that what makes modern art valuable is its relation to its own time, its radical contemporaneity. And this applies to "modern" arts of the past two. Horace was his own contemporary. He is still a modern, so to present him in "modern dress," to contemporanize him, is fundamentally misguided. There is no "past," there are only other times that used to be the present.

What defines an epoch? What makes the past the past? What is "pastness"? Is it the sense of irrecuperability? Alienness? Datedness? It is us who define the past as such. In other words, the past is deictic.

These are the main ideas about time and anachronism:

(1) One could be "of one's time." That implies synchronicity, contemporaneity, possibly representativeness. Also the possibility that not everyone is of his or her own time.

(2) One could be 'behind" the times. All the rhetoric of belatedness, for example. To be behind one's time implies ideas of contemporaneity also (something to be behind.)

(3) Being "ahead of the times," out in front. In all three modalities (present, past, future) there is an implicit idea of directionality or progress. To be of one's time, one has to be just slightly ahead of the curve.

(4) Being "out of time," atemporal or eternal. Having an oblique relationship to time. Lyric moments of the eternal present or ideas of "universality."

(5) Ideas of recuperation or restitution, making up for past injustices or past defects. Re-creating truer ideas of the past.

(6) The past as a "foreign country." Its fundamental alienness. Even if we think we understand it, do we really? Aren't we always presentist even when trying not to be? Thus are vision is anachronistic by definition, evne in the absence of outright anachronism.

(7) It's a fallacy to present Shakespeare in modern dress, to update him in trivial ways. It's also a fallacy to present Shakespeare in period costume, according to some anachronistic idea of the "Elizabethan." There's no way out either way.

To think about overnight. What is anachronism? What does it mean to be out of synchronization with one's own time, by either being too far ahead or behind? I've identified several main ideas about time in literary history I'd like to explore tomorrow when I'm not quite as tired.

What is the phenomenology of one's experience of thinking about, imagining, the past?

"Su muerte me ha entristecido. Era un hombre necesario que destacó por su honradez intelectual y capacidad de crítica. Lo que intentó hacer lo hizo bien. Cumplió su propósito ampliamente. Respeto su manera de entender la poesía pero no la comparto. Para mí, la palabra meramente informativa y la crítica moral tiene su lugar en los periódicos, en la televisión, en los púlpitos si se quiere, pero la modalidad esencial del pensamiento poético no es ni reflexiva ni crítica sino un tipo de otra naturaleza, y determina un lenguaje que también es de otra naturaleza..."

[His death made me sad... stood out for his intellectual honesty and capacity for critique... did well what he proposed to do... I respect is way of understanding poetry but I can't share it. For me, the merely informative word and moralistic criticism has its place in the newpaper, on televsion, even from the pulpits, but the essential modality of poetic thought is not reflexive or critical but something of another nature, which determines a language also of another nature...]

When they asked Gamoneda about Mario Benedetti, who had just died, that was what Gamoneda said, more or less. Very respectful, but basically saying that Benedetti wrote entirely outside of "the essential modality of poetic thought." Of course Gamoneda thinks that. So do I.

Of course, the poets who don't like Gamoneda had a field that with that, attacking him in the press, as they did after Ángel González died and Gamoneda also said the truth about him, getting attacked by that same group--Benítez Reyes, Luis García Montero, Sabina... Of course Benedetti lived in Spain for years, and had more of a base of support there than anywhere else, with the possible exception of his native Uruguay.

The problem is that, since he is a huge leftist icon, nobody can come right out and say that Benedetti is (was) a crappy poet. (There, I've said it.) Everyone knows this, of course, probably even the people defending Benedetti, who represents the absolute worst dimension of Latin American crappy political poetry. I'm sure if I read more of Benedetti's poetry, I would hate it even more.

Ideas for the day:

What if the "modernist turn" in recent poetry is a conservative one, a repression of the radical spirit of the avant-garde half of "postmodernism"? What then? Huh? Huh? What then?

***

A critic I admire a great deal, Julián Jiménez Heffernan, who has translated a couple of Ashbery books into Spanish, says that there are two histories of poetry, the external and the internal. The internal is just the history of a (Bloomian?) strong poetry. That allows him to just ignore conventional literary history. I find this a useful move.

***

The intervention of the strong critic actually alters the course of literary history itself--if we consider that literary history is "made up" anyway. In other words, literary history is not the history of some object, literature, that has an independent existence outside of literary historiography itself. There are the "primary texts" themselves, of course, but who determines which of these "count" as part of literary history? Imagine a history of modern Spanish poetry that left out Lorca, Jiménez, Machado, etc... but did include other primary texts by poets we tend to see as secondary. So the judgment of what counts has to precede the writing of history, which is then a matter of piecing together "what counts" in some coherent narrative.