What gives a figure like Jacques Lacan his continued prestige and influence?

In the first place, there is the attraction of an authoritarian discourse, that is, an intellectual tradition based on an authority figure, or figures. Behind Lacan there stand two or three authorities, Freud, Jakobson, Saussure, who are no longer seen as part of an ungoing tradition of intellectual inquiry, but as fixed beacons. When Lacan speaks of the unconscious as being structured as a language, he has in mind a particular version of structural linguistics. To the extent that the authority of Lacan is based on superannuated scientific models (Freud and Saussure), it is possible to ask whether his work can be questioned from a purely scientific perspective.

Of course, literary critics do not appeal to Lacan as a scientist: the idea is that this version of psychoanalysis is a convenient fiction of purely heuristic value. But if this is the case, though, what is the point of translating one fiction (a novel by Faulkner say) into another (a Lacanian metalanguage)? Why gives the theoretical metalanguage “authority” over a literary language? In the U.S. academy, certain kinds of theory are frozen, detached from the context of their original production and debate, and so become virtually meaningless. To object to such use of “theory” is not to be “antitheoretical,” but to call for a more rigorous investigation of why we believe what we do.

Paul de Man’s rhetorical analyses are not what they seem: to me, their famous appeal to rigor and unrefutability seems rather specious. It has been pointed out, for example, that what he calls a metaphor in Proust is actually a metonymy or synechdoche.

David Antin, in a recent book-length interview with Charles Bernstein, points out that the “theory” behind much language poetry is based on an antiquated linguistics. Bernstein does not object. His Wittgenstenian background saves him from some of these theoretical quagmires.

I dislike writing grant proposals. Having to justify what one is going to do in the future. Couldn’t they just extrapolate from what I have already done and predict that I will do more of the same? I don’t see myself as doing research, but as writing about what I already know. That is to say, my research never stops. I am constantly reading, developing ideas. Then writing. I have written much since last spring: an article on Jorge Riechmann for "Insula." Another, longish article on Spanish poetry of the 1950s generation, in which I refute the idea that these poets used “ordinary language.” A third article, not yet completed, on Carme Riera. A review of Claudio Rodríguez’s complete poetry for Revista de Libros. I found a way of quoting John Riley’s "Beyond Bop Drumming" in an academic article.

I have a modest collection of books of the New York School Poets. Books by Ashbery, Koch, O'Hara, Guest, Koch. Some of the second generation poets like Ceravalo, Berrigan, Padgett, Mayer, Shapiro. My father used to drop me off in Serendipity Books in Berkeley on Shattuck Avenue and I would browse for hours. This would have been when I was about 15 years old. The core of my collection began then. I have added to it by fits and starts since then, buying new books by these poets as they came out, and occasionally searching for specific items. The total number of books in this collection is about 250 (depending who I count as a New York poet), and very few of these books are worth more than $50.

This blog is my intellectual biography.

The great saxophone players, for me, are Lester Young, Coleman Hawkins, Bird, ‘Trane, Ornette, Rollins, Dolphy, and Konitz. What is amazing, however, how good the next tier is: Wayne Marsh, Johnny Hodges, Wayne Shorter, Dexter Gordon, Art Pepper, Cannonball Adderly, etc... Even a hypothetical third tier would be comprised of exceptional players like Flip Philips, Paul Desmond, Illinois Jacquet, Sonny Stitt, Harold Land, Lou Donaldson, Ben Webster. It seems ridiculous to even call them third tier players. Of course I’ve left out Bechet, Getz, Dewey Redman (and Joshua), Lovano, Woods, and many others that I would have to place at one of these three levels. (This exercise is entirely arbitrary. This is the kind of thing I think about in the car driving to Kansas and back.) There are people still waiting for Branford Marsalis to come into his own as a major figure, but, judging by this list, I don’t see it happening. He is just one more good tenor player in a generation overshadowed by Coltrane and Rollins.

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Anthony Braxton’s approach to standards (“Seven Standards, 1985, Volume 1”) is strongly intellectual, analytical: he begins each tune by playing the melody fairly straight once through, with some minimal ornamentation and melodic paraphrase. He seems to be studying the tune, taking it apart, finding the places where he will explore it in the subsequent choruses. Tension builds up in these subsequent improvisations, as he plays in an increasingly more “avant-garde” style, faster, higher, and freer and with a somewhat harsher tone. He is still playing melodically, not just blowing over chord changes; he is always relatively restrained, as though keeping himself in check, even at the climax of the solo. He ends by coming down to a lower level of tension, providing the classic resolution. He is brilliant on Clifford Brown’s “Joy Spring.”

A row of hard-bound books on a bookshelf at the “ranch,” a property in Napa county owned by my Grandfather and subsequently by my father with his siblings. They must have been mid-level novels of the 1950s of the Louis Auchincloss variety, though probably by writers now even more obscure. “Serious literary fiction” of no particular renown. (My Grandmother would not have kept her Proust or Henry James, or even her Auchincloss, at the ranch.) I remember looking at them when I was 12, or perhaps older, leafing through a few. It is as though they were printed with blank pages: they could make no impression on me, and of course my memory of this event is even blanker than the original experience. The property was sold years ago and I have no idea what could have happened to these books.

What makes writing last? These writers must have been cultivated, literate people with stories to tell. I don’t mean to condescend, but an episode of “I Love Lucy” from the same period holds much greater interest. “Popular entertainment” is usually superior to “middle-brow” culture.

Lester Young was reportedly the first person known to use the word “cool” in its modern, colloquial sense.

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A brief poem by Antonio Machado, “Sobre la tierra amarga,” contains four words of Greek etymology: laberínticos, criptas, melancólicos, quimeras. I contend that these should be translated with their English cognates: labyrinthine, crypts, melancholy, and Chimeras, not, as one translator does, with maze, vaults, wistful, and fantasies. The Greek words form an “underlying network of signification,” to use a phrase from Antoine Berman: they have specific historical and linguistic resonance. A labyrinth contains a Minotaur in a way that a maze does not. A crypt is a tomb or something hidden, as in a “cryptic message.” A vault might be found in a bank. Burton did not write an anatomy of wistfulness. A Chimera is a specific mythological beast, etc... (Of course fantasy is also a Greek word, but not the one Machado chose!) Should the translator always go for the cognate? Of course not, but when the cognate is a richer, more resonant, or more specific word, the easiest solution becomes the best solution.

For “quimeras rosadas” the eminent Robert Bly translates “mythological beasts, rosy ones.” It is as though he had looked in dictionary under Chimera and found “mythological beast,” and put this dictionary definition directly into his translation.

Minor Poets of the New York School

He spoke sharply--as though a shark’s fin
Could wound the sea, or the fog
Be subject to a tongue-lashing--
Impatient, but not rushing the beat.

The world had coarsened, a meaner
Conception taken hold; or he had
Idealized Surrealism, badly
Misjudged the loyalty of goldfish.

A manuscript, "Minor Poets
Of the New York School,"
Lay unfinished on the kitchen
Table. The fog closed in.

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I see 1960, the year of my birth, as the high point of culture in the twentieth century. Monk, Miles, Mingus, and Ornette were at the height of their power, as were Ray Charles, Sinatra, and Samuel Beckett. Picasso, Breton, Frank O’Hara, and Jack Spicer were still alive. This is the year of Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry. Yet by the time I was forming my own taste, around 1975, most of this had faded from view. I remember assuming, as a child, that jazz belonged completely to the past. This would have been only a few years after the death of Coltrane. I remember the debate about whether the Beatles were as great as Mozart. Why the Beatles and not, say, Coltrane, Monk, or Ornette? I was reading some of Ned Rorem’s Diaries and essays a few months ago. He had a controversial article about the Beatles in the 1960s, yet he rarely engages jazz in any significant way. At one point he speaks of Ornette’s trumpet and his white imitators of the 1950s, leading me to think he meant to say Miles Davis. This from a composer who claims Billie Holiday as a significant influence. Buying a loaf of bread at St. Louis Bread Company one morning, I heard Monk’s “Brilliant Corners,” played as background music. No one else was listening, I suspect.


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After I started playing drums I developed the ability to hear a poet’s individual sound as though it were a ride cymbal pattern. With Clark Coolidge, a drummer who employs this analogy himself, this is a natural step. He does phrase like a bop drummer. But I can hear Beckett’s ride cymbal as well. As a teacher of literature, how do I teach such things? Students want different sorts of answers, though in my translation course I am closer to teaching what I truly believe in.

The idea of translating in order to arrive at “what the poet would have written / had she written in English.” This is a cliché, of course. More than that, it is radically false. How do we know what kind of English Homer would have written? How would Mozart have phrased his solos on 52nd street in the 1940s? A sonnet in English might have a totally different rhythmic feel from a sonnet in Italian: yet many would accept this exchange as “formal equivalence.”

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A diary in which nothing has yet happened.

The first Monk album I bought, when I was sixteen or perhaps slightly younger, was “Solo Monk.” This record had a profound effect on my musical taste. Monk’s take on the stride tradition is austere and even monotonous, but at the same time fresh and witty. The contrast between the bouncy, corny sounding standards like “I’m Confessing” and “Dinah” with originals like “Monk’s Point” and “Ruby, My Dear” was quite stimulating, as was his use of dissonance and rubato. If I had encountered the album at a later date I might have concurred with the consensus that views this as a perfunctory recording: “He delivers these pieces indifferently, as if it were a duty and an imposition” (Thomas Fitterling). At the time, however, I was not yet familiar either with Monk’s music or with standards like “These Foolish Things” or “Everything Happens to Me.” Perhaps Monk’s approach to the music does betray a certain sense of tedium, yet my fresh ears heard this as sardonic, melancholy humor. I would still defend my initial opinion: although I have not listened to this music for many years, I can still hear it in my mind’s ear as I heard it then.

Who are the Spanish poets of today? Antonio Gamoneda’s “Libro de los venenos” is a commentary on Andrés de Laguna’s sixteenth-century commentary on an ancient medical/pharmacological text of Dioscurides. Gamoneda reproduces, in three different type faces, Dioscurides’ text, Laguna’s commentary, and his own metacommentary, based on his own extensive reading of other ancient texts. The physical effects of poisons; insect and snake bites; attacks of rabid dogs; antidotes and treatments—this is great stuff. Gamoneda suggests we read it as a complex and engaging palimpsestic narrative. The language is very dense; I don’t in fact possess the technical knowledge of the subject matter to dechiper the text in its entirety. It is not a matter of looking up words in the dictionary: Gamoneda’s book is itself a kind of dictionary of poisonous substances and their corporeal effects. What makes such a work “poetry”? I don’t much care whether we call it that or not. To say that it is not poetry would imply that poetry is a “genre” rather than a mode of signification.

I’ve just published an article entitled “Poetry, Politics, and Power” in the “Journal of Spanish Cultural Studies,” in the UK. My thesis is that the Socialist Government of Spain in the 1980s promoted a school of poetry that mirrored its own mediocre yet grandiose cultural ambitions. The so-called “poesía de la experiencia” is a banal “realist” poetry of everyday life, not dissimilar to U.S. poetry-workshop poetry. (I use Charles Bernstein’s handy catch-phrase “official verse culture.”) I’ve written two or three articles now attacking this particular group of poets. I am both loved and hated in Spain.

What makes this article “cultural studies” is that I do not quote a line of verse.

Criticism in my academic field (contemporary Spanish poetry) is deadly. It is a specialization-within-a-specialization, and rarely attracts first-rate minds. To find a more stimulating group of people to talk to, I would have to go into cultural studies; yet such people usually have very little interest in “poetics.” Scholars in my field still tend to see the poem as a decontextualized “text” to be picked apart on the page. Those with a broader knowledge of contemporary Spanish culture, on the other hand, don’t see poetry as relevant in the least.

The principle of non-repetition: once I begin to say the same thing over again, this blog will come to a halt.

Barbara Guest’s “Musicality” is a poem from the collection “Fair Realism.” But it is also a book, a collaboration with artist June Felter printed in an edition of 1000 copies. The text seems impoverished when printed as words alone, without Felter’s art-work. In “Musicality (the book) the phrase “levelled crusts” appears, all alone, opposite a pencil-drawing of a row of low houses that does in fact look like a “levelled crust.” In the pictureless “Fair Realism” version of this poem, this line might easily pass unnoticed. Needless to say it doesn’t get a page of its own.

Felter’s drawings have a “transparent” quality. They are both simple in technique and extraordinarily subtle. People reading this poem in its more widely disseminated version will never see these drawings, unless they are so taken with Barbara Guest that they order every possible available item listed on amazon.com. Of course, this collaboration between an artist and a poet is ostensibly “about” a third art, music. At one point, pencil outlines of trees are interpreted by the poet as “half notes.”

I’ve always wanted to learn how to draw. I went to the bookstore the other day to see if I could get a how-to book, but was put off by the illustrations in the books I found: I didn’t want to learn to draw like THAT. They were the exact opposite of Felter’s drawings, in that their technique was “busy,” over-complicated, in proportion to the relatively meager results obtained.

Years ago, before I played drums or knew anything about tuning, I saw drummer Kenny Washington and was impressed with his extraordinarily warm yet well-defined sound. It was in West Lafayette, Indiana and he was playing with McCoy Tyner. Washington, I now realize, is one of the premier mainstream jazz drummers of the past twenty years. I was gratified to read, recently, a sentence in Kenny Matheson's book "Giant Steps": "....Kenny Washington relates a story about how he physically destroyed his first juvenile drum-kit in a desperate attempt to capture [Max] Roach's sound." This anecdote helps me understand and reconnect with what I had heard ten years ago..

Sam Beckett’s Ride Cymbal

If quick decay short sustain. And so to conclude vice-versa. To conclude no. Too early. Just about begun. Again. Struck with authority with butt-end of stick near the bell it speaks out brightly. Then continues its dark rumbling. A long while. Unless stilled by hand. Still. Which cannot but feel the vibrations it stills. Again.

From a distance the rumbling inaudible. Visible perhaps to the naked eye the vibrating surface. Vice-versa again. Before little by little dying long sustain interrupted. Long interrupted. By glancing blows. When not the choking hand. Still or once again. In the wash and swell still to be heard when not seen or felt blows. This time with stick’s tip. Dog walk the dog walk the dog walk the dog walk the. How else affirm the undying pattern? Fading or about to fade again when struck again so never silent. Unless stilled. For several minutes thus. Then finally still. This time of own accord.

Held close to the surface the ear savors the undying roar. Not long after last blow struck. Untouched this time by hand or stick. As though measuring long relatively long decay. Sustain. Brighter voice gone in a flash. Roar outlasting it by a minute. A minute and a half. Except when stilled by impatient hand. Throttled! As this time not for worse or better. Or struck again therefore to begin again slow measuring of decay. From the top. The vibrations perhaps still visible to impatient eye. Palpable were the hand to grasp it again.

How long? The scene to hold attention or the surface to shimmer fainter and fainter till struck again? Both. Neither. Both or neither. To conclude again not having concluded from the top. Little to have concluded when not yet started. In haste now the bell ever brighter struck in same repeating pattern each stroke engulfed in its turn in ever less audible wash! Stilled again or still of its own accord. What difference?