Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays 9780226199559

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Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays

For Isagani R. Cruz

Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays MaRjoRIE PERloFF

Edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot

The University of Chicago Press Chicago and London

The University of Chicago Press, Chicago 60637 Copyright © 2013 by Marjorie Perloff Afterword © 2013 by David Jonathan Y. Bayot All rights reserved Originally published by De La Salle University Publishing House, Manila, Philippines, in 2013 University of Chicago Press edition 2015 Printed in the United States of America 24 23 22 21 20 19 18 17 16 15

1 2 3 4 5

ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19941-2 (paper) ISBN-13: 978-0-226-19955-9 (e-book) DOI: 10.7208/chicago/9780226199559.001.0001 Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Perloff, Marjorie, interviewee. Poetics in a new key : interviews and essays / Marjorie Perloff ; edited by David Jonathan Y. Bayot. pages cm Includes index. ISBN 978-0-226-19941-2 (pbk. : alk. paper)—ISBN 978-0-226-19955-9 (e-book) 1. Perloff, Marjorie—Interviews. 2. American poetry—History and criticism. 3. Criticism. I. Bayot, David Johnathan. II. Title. PS29.P47A3 2015 810.9—dc23 [B] 2014008629 o This paper meets the requirements of ANSI/NISO Z39.48-1992 (Permanence of Paper).

Contents Acknowledgments

vii

Preface

xi

Marjorie Perloff

Part I: The Critic 1 2 3

Becoming a Critic: An Academic Memoir A Critic of the Other Tradition Interview with Hélène Aji and Antoine Cazé Marjorie Perloff On & Off the Page of Poetry Interview with Kristine Samson and Nikolaj Rønhede

3 28 50

Part II: A Poetics 4 5 6 7 8 9

The Alter(ed) Ground of Poetry and Pedagogy Conversation with Charles Bernstein Mapping the New Interview with Rain Taxi Review of Books Modernism / Postmodernism? Will the Real Avant-garde Please Stand Up! Interview with Jeffrey Side (Un)Framing the other Tradition: On Ashbery and Others Interview with Grzegorz Jankowicz Robert Lowell, Now and Then Conversation with David Wojahn Futurism and Schism: Close Listening with Marjorie Perloff Interview with Charles Bernstein

71 92 100 110 118 131

10 The Challenge of Language Interview with Enrique Mallen 11 Conceptual Writing: A Modernist Issue Interview with Peter Nicholls 12 Still Making It New: Marjorie Perloff in Manifesto Mode Interview with Ellef Prestsæter

145 157 163

Part III: To Praxis 13 What is Poetry? Interview with Fulcrum 14 On Evaluation in Poetry Dialogue with Robert von Hallberg 15 Teaching Poetry in Translation: The Case for Bilingualism 16 The Internet Moment in the Life of Publishing Interview with Front Porch Magazine 17 The Intellectual in the Twenty-First Century

175 181 208 218 222

Afterword David Jonathan Y. Bayort

227

Interviewers

233

Index of Names

235

acknowledgments

The interviews and essays in this book originally appeared in the following publications: “Becoming a Critic: An Academic Memoir” by Marjorie Perloff first appeared in Epsians 2 (2012): 1-24. “A Critic of the Other Tradition” first appeared as Hélène Aji and Antoine Cazé, “A Conversation with Marjorie Perloff,” Sources: Revue d’études Anglophones 20-21 (Automne 2008): 27-42. “Marjorie Perloff On & Off the Page of Poetry” first appeared as Kristine Samson and Nikolaj Rønhede, “Interview: Marjorie Perloff,” Apparatur 8 (2004): 91-98. “The Alter(ed) Ground of Poetry and Pedagogy” first appeared as Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein, “A Conversation on Philosophies of Poetry,” Fulcrum 2 (2003): 56-70, and was subsequently published in Attack of the Difficult Poems: Essays and Inventions by Charles Bernstein (University of Chicago Press, 2011). “Mapping the New” first appeared as “Mapping the New: An Interview with Marjorie Perloff,” Rain Taxi Review of Books 6.2 (Summer 2001): 46-48. “Modernism / Postmodernism? Will the Real Avant-garde Please Stand Up!” first appeared as Jeffrey Side, “Interview with Marjorie Perloff,” Poetry Salzburg Review 10 (Fall 2006): 180-87.

viii “(Un)Framing the other Tradition: On Ashbery and Others” first appeared as Grzegorz Jankowicz, “Marjorie Perloff: Interview,” Odra 10 (2008): 31-35. “Robert Lowell, Now and Then” first appeared as Marjorie Perloff and David Wojahn, “A Critical Exchange on Selected Poems by Robert Lowell,” NOR (New Ohio Review) 1 (Spring 2007): 216-25. “Futurism and Schism: Close Listening with Marjorie Perloff ” first appeared as Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein, “Futurism and Schism: Close Listening with Marjorie Perloff,” Jacket2 (2012), and was adapted from a Close Listening conversation recorded on November 11, 2009, at Clocktower Studio in New York, and available at PennSound (http://writing.upenn.edu/pennsound). “The Challenge of Language” first appeared as Enrique Mallen, “The Challenge of Language: Interview with Marjorie Perloff,” N/S: New World Poetics 1 (Spring 2010): 26-46. “Conceptual Writing: A Modernist Issue” first appeared as Peter Nicholls, “Conceptual Writing: A Modernist Issue,” Journal of Philosophy 6.13 (Fall 2010): 62-64. “Still Making It New: Marjorie Perloff in Manifesto Mode” first appeared in Norwegian as Ellef Prestsæter, “Still Making It New: Marjorie Perloff i Manifestmodus,”Vinduet 3 (2012): 40-47. It has not been previously published in English. “What is Poetry?” first appeared as “Poetry and Truth,” Fulcrum 4 (Fall 2005): 67-70. “On Evaluation in Poetry” first appeared as Marjorie Perloff and Robert von Hallberg, “A Dialogue on Evaluation in Poetry,” in Professions: Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies, ed. Donald E. Hall (Chicago: U of Illinois Press, 2001), 87-108.

ix “Teaching Poetry in Translation: The Case for Bilingualism” by Marjorie Perloff first appeared in Profession 2010 (2010): 99-106. “The Internet Moment in the Life of Publishing” first appeared as “Interview,” Front Porch Magazine (inaugural issue 2007). “The Intellectual in the Twenty-First Century” by Marjorie Perloff first appeared as “Intellectuals,” PMLA 112 (October 1997): 19-21. The editor would like to thank Marjorie Perloff for her close collaboration on the book’s content and design. It’s the editor’s great pleasure to work with such a real presence and a most beautiful mind! He is also grateful to all the interviewers of Perloff in this volume, since without their dedicated labors, this book would definitely have been impossible. The editor would like to acknowledge particularly the following interlocutors who have given the editor their words of support for this project: Charles Bernstein, Antoine Cazé, Grzegorz Jankowicz, Enrique Mallen, Ellef Prestsæter, Robert von Hallberg, and David Wojahn. He would also like to express his gratitude to the editors of the journals and the magazines which provided the interviews and essays their first homes. Isagani R. Cruz and Antonette “Tiny” Talaue-Arogo have offered the editor their interest in the project from the beginning and the needed encouragement as the work went along—a big thanks to both of them! This book owes much to Vicente “Vince” Garcia Groyon for his unstinting confidence in a friend since (before) day one of his work at the DLSU Publishing House. Heartfelt thanks to Joanne Castañares and Louise Jezareth “Reith” Antipala for undertaking the onerous task of proofreading the manuscript; Walter Bauman and Star Black for submitting the proof to a close reading—their labor of love has saved the book from the embarrassment of typographical and semantic lapses. Finally, the editor would like to acknowledge The Museum at De La Salle University, its curator Lalyn Buncab, and

x its board member Della Besa for granting his request to reproduce the painting Ani by National Artist Jose Joya, from the Wili and Doreen Fernandez Art Collection, for the cover art of the book.

xi

Preface

In the 1970s, when I was teaching at the University of Maryland at College Park, I had an excellent PhD student from the Philippines named Isagani Cruz. In those days, when the New Criticism was at its height, Cruz wrote his thesis on the criticism of Cleanth Brooks, especially in relation to T. S. Eliot. But upon his return to Manila in 1976, Cruz began to carve an amazing career as educator, writer (both in English and Tagalog), and cultural leader. He has done much to shape what is a new postcolonial Filipino literary consciousness. What serendipity, then, to receive a letter from one of Cruz’s former students, a young professor and editor of the De La Salle University Press named David Jonathan Y. Bayot. David had edited the festschrift in honor of Cruz published in 2010, to which I contributed an essay on Samuel Beckett’s poetry. He now suggested he would like to publish a selection of my interviews, together with some relevant essays not available in book form. A whole book of interviews? I was at once honored and mystified. Yes, over the years I had been interviewed a number of times for various journals and online programs, but I considered the transcripts of these interviews little more than afterthoughts to my “real” work. Then, too, with rare exceptions, I treated these interviews casually, responding, whether orally or in writing, without much preparation. Indeed, I regarded them largely as conversations, many of them with friends and colleagues, in which I had the opportunity to air certain issues and debate the role of various poetic movements and poets, as well as the larger relationship of poetry to culture. Once completed and published, I largely forgot about them.

xii Imagine my surprise, then, when David, an indefatigable scholar, sent me a long list of interviews and essays he had unearthed by means of diligent sleuthing on the Internet. Rereading the texts from which David and I made our selection, I found myself once again absorbed in the discussion and pleased to find that, despite certain gradual and inevitable changes in outlook, the interviews and essays, occasional and fugitive pieces though they are, have a common thread. In his own commentary (see Afterword), David places me, broadly speaking, in the aesthetic camp as opposed to the sociopolitical one that was very much his own when he began his career. He talks about me as a formalist, but, as he well knows, my formalism has a particular historical and evaluative cast. It is very important to me to place individual works and authors in their larger context—a context that transcends Anglo-American paradigms as my studies of French and German, Russian and Brazilian poetry hopefully show. In assessing placement, I put great emphasis on what I take to be the value, or lack thereof, of the works in question. In most academic circles today, as I know only too well, the very reference to value is taboo: one accepts what a given poet or movement has done as emblematic of a particular cultural, racial, ethnic, or gender complex—a complex one wants to define—and hence it really doesn’t matter whether the exemplar in question is an especially “good” poem. What, for that matter, is “good” anyway? Yet, as I have often noted, we all make value judgments, if not of the poetic texts themselves, then in our choices of the theorists we cite or cultural paradigms we apply to the work. “As Agamben says . . . ,” “as Badiou notes”: these stock phrases immediately impose particular values. Again, the very choice of subject is always already a value judgment. For better or worse, in any case, I have increasingly come to drop the “as . . .” clause and rely on my own judgment, informed, as I hope that judgment is, by years of reading and studying poetry. Then, too, I have come to realize that each of us has his or her own preconceptions and predilections—preconceptions often highly personal, and culturally as well as biographically grounded. I myself, for example, have never shared my colleagues’ admiration for

xiii Charles Olson; for me he fails on two counts: his language does not have the density I look for in poetry, and his rhetoric is insistently and overtly masculinist in ways I find irritating. Conversely, I find that, however questionable the late politics of Gertrude Stein (currently a hotly debated topic in literary and art circles), the unique and revolutionary language construction of such volumes as Geography and Plays—construction more revelatory at each reading—places her squarely at the center of my own personal poetic canon. But of course one cannot draw a hard and fast line between the aesthetic and the cultural. As someone whose roots are in the Central European world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an empire abruptly destroyed in World War I, I learned at a young age to adopt an ironic posture—to laugh at one’s own situation so as to avoid tears. Consequently, I put great stock in a sense of humor. Gertrude Stein is wonderfully funny—her portraits of Apollinaire or Duchamp or Edith Sitwell—are full of comic and malicious touches—whereas Olson is, for my taste, a bit too serious—so given to what D. H. Lawrence, writing about some of Whitman’s more bombastic poems, called chug chug chug. Then again—and this is why I am so drawn to the conversational mode of the interview—I am quite willing to be persuaded that I have been wrong. Make a good case for Olson—as Robert von Hallberg does in his important study of this poet—and I am quite willing to back down—at least to a point. And here again, a sense of humor, or at least of the absurd, may be necessary. I will always treasure the exchange I had with John Cage about Jackson Mac Low. I confided in Cage that I had a hard time appreciating some of Mac Low’s long “writing-through” sequences. “Forget about the quality,” Cage responded, “and think of the quantity.” Over the years, I have treasured that advice. My great subject, to which the bulk of these interviews testify, has been the avant-garde, both of the early twentieth century and its contemporary—now 21st century—counterpart. Recently, the venerable Poetry magazine asked me to contribute to a roundtable to be published in the Spring 2013 issue commemorating the centennial of Ezra Pound’s ground-breaking piece “A Few Don’ts,” published in Poetry in 1913. Perhaps my own version of Pound’s manifesto, adapted here from the Poetry selection, will set the stage

xiv for the spirit in which the interviews and essays that follow were written. My Few Don’ts —Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. —Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. —Don’t be “viewy”—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophical essays. —Ezra Pound, 1913 —Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death. —Frank O’Hara, 1964 —No more superiority of the interiority of that unnatural trinity—you, me, we—our teeth touch only our tongues. —Vanessa Place, 2012 Plus ça change . . . Frank O’Hara’s admonition “Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial” echoes Ezra Pound’s prescriptions about accuracy and precision: don’t waste the reader’s time by adding to the storehouse of clichés (e.g., “dim lands of peace”) or producing “pretty little philosophical essays.” “Our teeth,” after all, “touch only our tongues.” The slightest loss of attention leads to death. O’Hara’s aphorism is little honored these days when any and all demands upon poetry

xv as an art form are dismissed as elitist, undemocratic, and just plain cranky. To declare oneself a poet is to be a poet! Basta! Who’s to say otherwise, to spoil the party? Here again I turn to Pound: The mastery of any art is the work of a lifetime. I should not discriminate between the “amateur” and the “professional.” Or rather I should discriminate quite often in favor of the amateur, but I should discriminate between the amateur and the expert. It is certain that the present chaos will endure until the Art of poetry has been preached down the amateur gullet, until there is such a general understanding of the fact that poetry is an art not a pastime. And Pound adds, “If a certain thing was said once for all in Atlantis or Arcadia, in 450 Before Christ or in 1290 after, it is not for us moderns to go saying it over, or to go obscuring the memory of the dead by saying the same thing with less skill and less conviction.” Or so common sense would tell us. In “To Hell With It,” O’Hara declares: (How I hate subject matter! melancholy, intruding on the vigorous heart, the soul telling itself you haven’t suffered enough ((Hyalomiel)) and all things that don’t change, photographs, monuments, memories of Bunny and Gregory and me in costume The word “Hyalomiel” inside those double parentheses above, is the name of a French vaginal lubricant, a kind of miel (honey). So much for the cry of the suffering soul and for an “elevated” subject matter. When O’Hara says “Don’t be proud,” he means,

xvi don’t be so self-important. Or, in Vanessa Place’s formulation: “No more death without dying—immediately.” For the centennial of 1913, that annus mirabilis for avant-garde poetry that gave us Georg Trakl’s Erste Gedichte, Apollinaire’s Alcools, Blaise Cendrars’s La Prose due Transsibérien, and Anna Akhmatova’s Chetki (The Rosary)—I have extrapolated a few further Don’ts—don’ts squarely in the Pound tradition but also, I hope, apropos in 2013. 1. Don’t assume that “free” verse, now the default mode of poetry is equivalent to the mere practice of lineation. Greeting cards, advertising copy, political mantras: these are lineated too. “Don’t imagine a thing will ‘go’ in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose” (Pound). Conversely, if you use traditional poetic devices like rhyme, remember that “A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure” (Pound). Or, in the words of poet-sculptor Carl Andre, “Verse should have that quality of surprise which endows familiar things with strangeness and makes the strange familiar. A tension between irregularity and habit.” 2. Don’t take yourself so seriously. In the age of social networks, of endless information and misinformation, “sensitivity” and the “true voice of feeling” have become the most available of commodities. Remember that, as Wallace Stevens put it, “Life is a bitter aspic. We are not / At the center of a diamond.” 3. As a corollary of #2, don’t underestimate the importance of a sense of humor, of irony. Remember that satire, parody, mock-epic, and burlesque are hardly “inferior” forms of poetry. Rather than worshipping at the shrine of the Poet with a capital P (e.g., Heidegger’s Hölderlin), let us reread Swift and Pope. The comic Byron of Don Juan, for that matter, was surely as masterful a poet as the very serious Shelley of Prometheus Unbound. 4. Don’t play the victim card, now the staple of much of what passes for poetry. Where, after all, are those virtuous beings, those sages who stand outside the capitalist system, refusing to accept any of its goodies? Are you and I really not

xvii complicit? The current opposition of the 99% (“us”!) to the 1% (them!) may be a great slogan for political action but it doesn’t make for a challenging poetry, shutting, as it does, the door on defamiliarization and on tough-minded thinking. “Don’t think,” we read in a Gertrude Stein play of 1921, “a shot tower means war, it only means shot guns, or shooting.” Or in Place’s words, “No more politics put politically: let the thing be concretely.” 5. Don’t forget that, whether consciously or unconsciously, all poems are written with an eye (and ear) to earlier poetry and that to write poetry at all, one must first read a lot of it. And of course one reads poetry and writes about it in the light of theory—but it should, to my mind, be literary theory. So I would say put down thy Agamben and pick up Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, and, turning to poetry itself, pick up thy Auden, thy Ashbery, thy Rae Armantrout. Put down thy Badiou and read Beckett, Bernhard, Bachmann, Christian Bök. Put down the latest Žižek (at this writing, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 2012) and read Chaucer through the lens of Caroline Bergvall’s Muddle English, Charles Peirce through the lens of Susan Howe’s Pierce Arrow and That This, and Goethe’s “Erlkönig” side by side with Charles Bernstein’s “Elf King.” Translation, adaptation, citation, comparison, re-creation: to my mind, Pound’s “A Few Don’ts” is still the best road map we have for the understanding of how poetry works. Even if ours is, as Vanessa Place and Craig Dworkin have argued, a new “nonretinal” poetry, it remains just as true as it was for the O’Hara of the early 1960s that the slightest loss of attention leads to death.

xviii *********** Attention: It is the faculty that David Jonathan Y. Bayot, like his mentor Isagani Cruz, displays so tellingly in his presentation of and afterword to my writings here. The connections he has found— especially to Roland Barthes, perhaps my favorite French critical theorist—are especially illuminating. And as someone who has spent much time in recent years in China, Japan, and Korea, and who has a special admiration for East Asian culture, I am happy to have this book of interviews and essays emerge not from the usual channels of the US academic and poetry world but from a Philippine press. And doubly happy that the University of Chicago Press, which has been publishing books of mine since 1986, wants to extend this book’s reach by reproducing Poetics in a New Key for publication in the Americas and in Europe. Without the initiative of my Chicago editors Alan G. Thomas and Margaret Hivnor, it could not have happened. Marjorie Perloff Pacific Palisades, California December 2013

1

Becoming a Critic: An Academic Memoir Marjorie Perloff

I came to the study of poetry relatively late in my career. As an undergraduate, I was, like most students, much more interested in fiction than in poetry; my favorite novels were the “big” ones of the nineteenth century by Balzac and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but I was also keen on Modernism and wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on “James Joyce and The Stream-ofConsciousness Novel,” followed by an M.A. thesis on “Privileged Moments in Proust and Virginia Woolf.” It was only in my first year of graduate school at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, that I began to discover the pleasures and challenges of poetry. Three amazing professors—James Hafley, Craig La Drière, and Giovanni Giovannini—taught me basically HOW TO READ. They, in turn, had been influenced by an extraordinary body of criticism then available—not only to specialists but to the larger literary public. The fifties and early sixties are regarded today as the heyday of the “New Criticism”—a term that has become a dirty word, signifying the narrow or “close” reading of autonomous poems while ignoring their political and cultural significance, their treatment of race, ethnicity, and gender. It is true that most

4

Poetics in a New Key

(though not all) of the poems discussed by the so-called New Critics were by white men and that some of these critics were writing from a conservative Christian perspective: Cleanth Brooks, for example, read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as exhibiting the central Christian paradox that life without faith in God is really a form of death and that conversely death can be lifegiving.1 Again, Brooks and his colleague Robert Penn Warren— the two wrote the key textbook of the period, Understanding Poetry2—tended to equate poetry with metaphor: they especially admired the lyric of the Metaphysical poets—say, John Donne’s “A Valediction forbidding Mourning,” which makes an extended comparison between two lovers who must be briefly separated and twin compasses that cannot be severed even as the outer leg (male) goes around the circle, bending away from its (female) partner. But there were other studies, more historical than “merely” formal, that we read and that shaped our thinking in the late 1950s. The first I want to talk about here is W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, which was completed in 1953, the year I graduated from college.3 The first essay in this collection, written together with Monroe Beardsley, was called “The Intentional Fallacy,” and I still think it is basically correct. The fallacy in question is the belief that we can judge an author’s work by his or her stated intention. It is, of course, always useful to learn what the author was trying to do, but, as Wimsatt argues, “the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art” (Verbal Icon 3). The word “success” here implies that there is such a thing as literary value, that there are “better” poems and “worse” poems—a very unfashionable view today but one which, in fact, we all espouse by our choices of what to read, teach, etc. And we might also note that long before Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault talked about “the death of the author,” Wimsatt and his colleagues were insisting that authors say all kinds of things to “explain” or account for their work—and yet that interpretation and evaluation must finally rely on the text itself.

Becoming a Critic

5

I still warn students to beware the intentional fallacy. It’s wonderful, say, to read the many interviews given by the late Robert Creeley or the great volumes of letters, recently published, by T. S. Eliot: these interviews, letters, and diaries shed important light on the poetry, but they can also be partial or misleading. Consider the response to Kenneth Goldsmith’s repeated insistence that his “uncreative writing” needn’t be read at all, that it is much too “boring” to read and only the idea counts. Even if Goldsmith believes this himself—and I think he is of course being playful—once the book—say, Traffic—is there—proofread, copyedited, and printed with a special design and cover—it is obviously demanding to be read. And when it is, authorial surprises are certainly in store for the reader. Or again, when Brian Reed took up the challenge of Craig Dworkin’s parody grammar book Parse—another ostensibly “unreadable” book, whose author claims that he is making no “personal” intervention—he discovered that fifty pages or so into the text, “errors begin to creep in ... and Parse turns out to be intermittently fascinating, even at times laugh-out-loud funny.”4 But to return to The Verbal Icon. One of my favorite Wimsatt essays encountered in graduate school was a fairly technical one called “One Relation of Rhyme to Reason” (153-68). Here Wimsatt argues that the poet can use the sound coupling of rhyme to create a semantic charge as well. In the heroic couplets of Alexander Pope’s “The Rape of the Lock,” for example, we read: One speaks the glory of the British Queen, And one describes a charming Indian screen. where the implication is that there is little difference in the regard felt for Queen Anne and a piece of exotic furniture. Or take the following couplet: Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law, Or some frail China jar receive a flaw. Wimsatt writes, “In the first line the breakage [Diana’s law is that of chastity]; in the second line another fragile thing (the

6

Poetics in a New Key

jar) and then its breaking (the flaw). The parallel is given a kind of roundness and completeness” (Verbal Icon 162). Again, the implication is that we are dealing with a society where young girls are equated to delicate objects—things not to be “broken.” The New Criticism is always charged with ignoring the cultural dimensions of the text, but the fact is that Wimsatt is here calling attention to Pope’s trenchant critique of the high society world of early eighteenth century London, which equated virginity with a perfectly intact China jar—a luxury item carrying a high price and hence to be carefully protected. Another poet who used rhyme thus brilliantly was Byron, who could round out an ottava rima (abababcc) stanza with a devastating rhyme, as in this stanza from Don Juan: T’is pity learnéd virgins ever wed With persons of no sort of education, Or gentlemen, who, though well born and bred, Grow tired of scientific conversation: I don’t choose to say much upon this head, I’m a plain man, and in a single station, But—Oh! ye lords of ladies intellectual, Inform us truly, have they not hen-pecked you all? (Canto 1, stanza 22) Here it is the tongue-twisting couplet rhyme itself that makes the pseudointellectual Donna Inez, the hero’s mother, look so wonderfully absurd. Or again, consider the wit of Eliot’s intermittent rhyme in “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock,” for example: Shall I, after tea and cakes and ices, Have the strength to force the moment to its crisis? Wimsatt’s essay on rhyme stands behind my PhD dissertation Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats (1970), where I similarly tried to show how Yeats’s rhyme words often epitomize—and even create—the meaning of a particular poem. Yeats usually began the first draft of a poem by jotting down a series of rhyme

Becoming a Critic

7

words in the right margin; then he filled in the lines: for example, the opening stanza of the famous “Wild Swans at Coole”: The trees are in their autumn beauty, The woodland paths are dry. Under the October twilight the water Mirrors a still sky; Upon the brimming water among the stones Are nine and fifty swans. Here a ballad stanza—abcb—of uneven line lengths culminates in a couplet whose harsh rhyme epitomizes the import of the poem: swans—beautiful, graceful, traditional symbols of the soul—are juxtaposed to the harsh reality of the “stones”: for Yeats, it is among STONES—in a bad or at least difficult environment—that swans are to be found. The rhyme is pivotal. But to return to Wimsatt. There is another crucial essay in The Verbal Icon called “The Structure of Romantic Nature Imagery.” Here Wimsatt asks himself the question whether Romantic poetry “exhibits any imaginative structure which may be considered a special counterpart of the philosophy, the sensibility, and the theory” of Romanticism (p. 104). Note that such a project can only be undertaken by a critic well versed in the intellectual history of a particular period—something the New Critics are always accused of ignoring. Wimsatt’s way of proceeding, however, is not to perform some kind of background study but to look closely at the imagery of particular Romantic poems. Consider these lines from the opening stanza of Wordsworth’s “Tintern Abbey”: These plots of cottage-ground, these orchard-tufts, Which at this season, with their unripe fruits, Are clad in one green hue, and lose themselves ‘Mid groves and copses. Once again I see These hedge-rows, hardly hedge-rows, little lines Of sportive wood run wild: these pastoral farms, Green to the very door; and wreaths of smoke Sent up, in silence, from among the trees!

8

Poetics in a New Key

The images, seemingly just descriptive, are, on closer inspection, chosen to define the absence of outline or distinction in this rural landscape, where the undefined sights and sounds seem to blend into one whole. The stage is thus set for the assertion of the poet’s “sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns.” Interfusion, blending is the dominant motif here. Unlike traditional metaphor in which two disparate objects are yoked together so as to assert their identity (e.g., Shakespeare’s “Kingdoms are clay,” where the subject (kingdoms) is rendered by the vehicle “clay” so as to form a figure of identity), Romantic poetry does away with the distinction between A and B, preferring “to read meanings into the landscape.” For these poets, nature is itself understood as hieroglyphic: everything seen and heard and perceived in the external world has a deeper mysterious and spiritual dimension. Such nature imagery is the inevitable expression of the then sacramental view of nature as the indwelling of God. “Nature,” as Emerson put it, “always wears the colours of the spirit.” From here, we might add, it is just a step to the Symbolist poetry of the twentieth century—to the “curveship” of Hart Crane’s Brooklyn Bridge or the yellow fog of Eliot’s “Prufrock.” I can’t begin to convey to you the range and brilliance of the literary criticism we read in graduate school in the 1960s: from Wimsatt and Joseph Frank (the author of “Spatial Form in Modern Literature”) to the more cultural criticism of Lionel Trilling’s The Liberal Imagination, the semiotics of William Empson’s Seven Types of Ambiguity, and the synoptic theory of Northrop Frye’s Anatomy of Criticism, which provided encyclopedic accounts of the different literary modes, forms, and genres from ancient times to the present.5 One thing missing in this critical literature, however, was an understanding of such Modernist experiments as James Joyce’s Finnegans Wake or Ezra Pound’s Cantos. These, after all, did not exhibit what the New Critic Reuben Brower called a “Key Design”—a design boasting an “Aura around a Bright Clear Centre.”6 On the contrary, Gertrude Stein’s “Rooms,” the third section of Tender Buttons, begins with the sentence, “Act so there

Becoming a Critic

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is no use in a centre.” At Catholic University, I was introduced to the work of these poets, especially Ezra Pound, then incarcerated (for eleven years!) at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in downtown Washington. My professors paid regular visits to Pound at St E’s, as it was called; some of my classmates tagged along out of curiosity and came back with mixed reports on Pound’s behavior. I never quite wanted to participate in these visits, disliking, as I did, the poet’s politics, his displays of racism and anti-Semitism. But when in Dr. Giovannini’s Modern Poetry class we read “A Retrospect” and the other pieces collected in Literary Essays of Ezra Pound (1954: I still have the same copy), I was hooked. “A Retrospect” (1918) opens with the three principles of Imagism: 1. Direct treatment of the ‘thing’ whether subjective or objective 2. To use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation 3. As regarding rhythm: to compose in the sequence of the musical phrase not in sequence of a metronome.7 It was not that I took up Imagism—a short-lived movement that Pound himself soon abandoned in favor of his adaptation of the Chinese ideogram—but that especially (2) and (3) seemed so sensible. Circumlocution and what the Romantics dismissed as Poetic Diction seemed then—as it did at the beginning of the nineteenth century and as it does today—to be the bugbear of poetry. Use absolutely no word that does not contribute to the presentation: this principle, which Pound derived from his studies of Chinese poetry, has always been a yardstick for me, as has the notion of the “musical phrase” rather than the tum-ti-tum of the metronome. More important were Pound’s negative prescriptions: “Vers libre [free verse] has become as prolix and as verbose as any of the flaccid varieties that preceded it.” A hundred years after free

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verse became the norm for poetry, this is truer than ever. And here are its corollaries: Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something. Don’t use such an expression as “dim lands of peace.” It dulls the image. It mixes an abstraction with the concrete. Go in fear of abstractions. Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose. Don’t imagine that a thing will “go” in verse just because it is too dull to go in prose. A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure. Note that this last prescription was one Wimsatt endorsed, without being aware, I would guess, that Pound had made it. This set of axioms could easily apply to the poetry of the twenty-first century, as we confront it in such “leading” magazines as The New Yorker. The path of least resistance—and Pound knew it—is the confessional free-verse lyric in which the poet defines his feelings vis-à-vis some object or event s/he has encountered. But what makes such self-revelation poetry? In the next essay, “How to Read,” we are given a broader definition of literature that follows upon these axioms: Great literature is simply language charged with meaning to the utmost possible degree (Literary Essays 23). Poetry, as Pound was to add in the ABC of Reading, “is news that stays news.” Or, as he put it in a related formulation, in response to the question, “What is the difference between poetry and prose?” “Poetry is the more highly energized.”

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The New Critics like Wimsatt would have had no quarrel with most of these prescriptions, although their emphasis was on figurative language and organic unity rather than on the sound and visual appearance of the poem. But Pound’s own poetry—especially the Cantos, written over a fifty-year span— uses techniques unanticipated in most of his own prescriptions, important as they are. When the New Critics confronted Pound’s elaborate montage, they found it hopelessly formless. For what to make of a passage like the following at the opening of Canto 81: Zeus lies in Ceres’ bosom Taishan is attended of loves Under Cythera, before sunrise and he said: “Hay acquí mucho catolicismo— (sounded catolithismo) y muy poco reliHion” and he said: Yo creo que los reyes desaparecen” (Kings will, I think, disappear) That was Padre José Elizondo in 1906 and in 1917 or about 1917 and Dolores said: “Come pan, niño,” eat bread, me lad Sargent had painted her Before he descended (i.e. if he descended but in those days he did thumb sketches, impressions of the Velásquez in the Museo del Prado and books cost a peseta, brass candlesticks in proportion, hot wind came from the marshes and death-chill from the mountains. Even Pound’s friend Yeats complained of such passages that “he [Pound] has not got all the wine into the bowl,” that “form must be full, sphere-like, single.”8 Yeats himself, after all, wrote in complex

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rhyming stanzas; his poems moved, however obliquely, toward closure. The Cantos, by contrast, struck the major critics of the 1950s and 60s as merely random, disorganized, and incomprehensible. The reading into the landscape that was the mode of Romantic and classical Modernist poems here gives way to a dense network of allusions, documentary references, proper names of persons and places, and snatches of remembered conversation, primarily in a foreign language although—and this is one of Pound’s jokes—the English translation immediately follows the foreign—in this case Spanish—phrase. Coleridge’s stable “I,” confronting childhood memory, is here replaced by spatial and temporal indeterminacy. Only in the last two lines of the passage—“hot wind came from the marshes / and death-chill from the mountains”—does Pound set the scene where he is located. But then again the opening has already set the scene at night (“Zeus lies in Ceres’s bosom”) under the stars: “Taishan,” evidently the mountain seen from his prison cell at Pisa which Pound names for the sacred mountain in China, is seen under the light of Cythera (Venus). In the happier days of 1906, we learn, the young poet, travelling in Spain, chatted with a priest—Padre José Elizondo—who said—and of course this was about to happen—“Kings will, I think, disappear.” To recreate the scene, Pound provides the exact Spanish pronunciation where the soft “c” is pronounced “th” and the “g” of “religion” becomes “H.” Again, the poet remembers a girl at an inn named Dolores, whom he compares to a figure in a painting by John Singer Sargent. And the thought of that painting leads in turn to a memory of the copies of Velasquez paintings Sargent made in the Museo del Prado. The structure of this passage, metonymic rather than metaphoric, with its juxtaposition of parenthetical remarks (“i.e., if he descended”), casual remembered detail (“and books cost a peseta”), foreign citation, and the invocation of the dead via proper names, looks ahead, I came to see, to the citational poetics which is my subject in Unoriginal Genius. But at the time I first read The Cantos, I was especially aware of the fragmentation and dislocation of images, the absence of time signals or first-person pronouns, even as the “free” verse line repeated the dactylictrochaic unit of line 1—(/ / x x x / x) again and again with slight variation, as in “hót wínd cáme from the márshes (/ / / x x / x).

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No one else, I knew, wrote the way Pound did: he was, as I discovered when I assigned students to write their own sample Cantos, unique—and uniquely appealing to read and memorize. The critic who did most to disseminate Pound’s poetry was the great Canadian-American scholar Hugh Kenner, the author of The Pound Era, which was to become a classic. I recently wrote an essay revaluating this book for the journal Modernist Cultures. Kenner, whose brilliant books on Joyce and Beckett I’m sure some of you know, was a student of Cleanth Brooks’s at Yale, but his sensibility was entirely different. It was Kenner’s conviction that a new age demanded the poet to make it new, that, as Pound put it, “No good poetry is ever written in a manner twenty years old.” The technological age of World War I demanded a new poetics of speed—of graphic layout on the page as well as rapid transformation. Not stanzas as in Yeats or long verse paragraphs as in Eliot, but a verbal collage rather like the visual ones of Kurt Schwitters or the assemblages of Moholy-Nagy. In The Pound Era, Kenner also wrote perceptively about such poet-friends of Pound’s as William Carlos Williams and later Louis Zukofsky. Again, the New Critics had paid little attention to Williams, considering his lines too flat, his images too trivial to create much interest. Kenner knew better: here he is on a Williams lyric called simply “Poem”: As the cat climbed over the top of the jamcloset first the right forefoot carefully then the hind stepped down into the pit of the empty flowerpot.

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The poem, writes Kenner, “is one sinuous suspended sentence, feeling its way and never fumbling. Its gestures raise anticipatory tensions, its economy dislodges nothing.”9 Williams’s great feat is syntactic and prosodic: his lineation tracks the actual movement of the cat as it climbs “Over / the top of / the jamcloset,” “first the right,” and then, with some surprise, not “then the left,” but “then the hind.” But what is a “jamcloset” anyway? The only slightly arcane word in the poem, and surrounded by simple monosyllables, “jamcloset” demands some explanation. Kenner, always insisting on knowing the etymology and history of a given word or word group, writes: It pertains to a half-vanished America with cellars....Into the cellar every fall went the preserves, after an orgy of home canning, to be carried up jar by jar for winter breakfasts from the cool closet where they were stored. That was the jamcloset. And things, unused in winter, like flowerpots, accumulated on jamclosets. They were in dark unvisited parts of basements, well away from the furnace. So any mention of the clutter atop a jamcloset might easily tip into nostalgia, and it is interesting that in “Poem” this does not happen. In that machine made out of words “jamcloset” is a term, not a focus for sentiment; simply a word, the exact and plausible word, not inviting the imagination to linger: an element in the economy of a sentence. (Pound Era 404) And Kenner goes on to argue that the Objectivist poets—Louis Zukofsky, George Oppen, Charles Reznikoff, etc.—similarly used language with such care. Note here that Kenner’s notion of a poem as “a machine made out of words,” which was Williams’s own definition, is very different from the “organic” concept of the New Critics. For

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Kenner, the issue is not what a poem is but how it works. And in this case, although Kenner doesn’t say so, the key to “As the cat…” is probably the word “pit” in line 10. Pots, flower pots or otherwise, have a bottom; that bottom is not usually referred to negatively as a “pit.” But the use of “pit” gives the poem the slightly “dark” edge Kenner talks of; it works, moreover, to produce the intricate alliteration and consonance of t’s and p’s: “into the pit of the empty flowerpot”—a brilliant sound structure. And of course the monosyllable “cat” fits into this system. “Into the pit / of the empty / flowerpot.” In 1965, the year I received my PhD, there appeared a small book from the Regents Critics series at the University of Nebraska called Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays. Because of the political situation of post-1917 Russia and resulting exile of many of its writers and artists, Russian Formalism came into the Anglophone world relatively late—not until the 1960s, well after the New Criticism. The first of the essays in the Nebraska collection, Viktor Shklovsky’s “Art as Technique,” originally published in 1917, became a sort of bible to many of us. Shklovsky, himself a poet and novelist, argued that art is a form of defamiliarization, of making strange (ostranenie): Habitualization devours works, clothes, furniture, one’s wife, and the fear of war....Art exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony. The purpose of art is to impart the sensation of things as they are perceived and not as they are known. The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception....Art is a way of experiencing the artfulness of an object; the object is not important.10 I remember finding these words thrilling. Together with the collection Readings in Russian Poetics, edited by Ladislav Matejka

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and Krystyna Pomorska, published in 1972 but now available in a Dalkey Archive paperback edition with an excellent introduction by Gerald Bruns, the Russian Formalist critics gave me a handle on poetry more systematic and radical than that of Anglo-American criticism. This was the case although the examples Shklovsky himself gave in “Art as Technique” were not primarily from poetry but from fiction: the scene in War and Peace, for example, where the fourteen-year old Natasha is taken for the first time to the opera and tries to understand what’s going on. As Tolstoy puts it, “The man in the tight-fitting pants on his fat legs finished his song alone; then the girl sang. After that both remained silent as the music resounded.” Such seemingly simple sentences, Shklovsky showed, “increased the difficulty and length of perception,” by casting the familiar (the opera scene onstage) in an entirely different light. Defamiliarization, as many later critics have noted, is little more than a latter-day version of Romantic theory: the program laid out in Wordsworth’s “Preface to the Lyrical Ballads” (1800), after all, had as its goal to make readers see familiar experiences in an unfamiliar light and vice versa, to present the strange and unknown in a manner that would allow for “the willing suspension of disbelief” on the reader’s part. Shklovsky, however, went further in reminding us that “the object is not important,” what matters is the way it is rendered. At a time where journalistic criticism once again judges every artwork according to its topical subject matter (e.g., this work gives us a devastating look at cancer or AIDS or racism)—a situation that guarantees a short life to the work in question, as other issues come to the fore— defamiliarization must be understood as central to art making. A good recent example would be Christian Marclay’s brilliant conceptual work The Clock, a twenty-four-hour sequence of one-minute (or less) film clips presented in the viewer’s real time, each one containing an image of a clock or wristwatch, a churchbell chiming or spoken reference to the actual time (e.g., 11:43 AM)—a shot that, sixty seconds or less into it, is cut and collaged with an entirely different sequence from a different film,

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the montage producing an extraordinary defamiliarization of time as we perceive it. The notion of defamiliarization was especially valuable, as regards the important issue of literary change. I have already talked about Wimsatt’s analysis of the difference between Romantic imagery and its predecessors. In his essay “On Literary Evolution,”11 Juriy Tynyanov begins with the important premise that “one cannot study literary phenomena outside of their interrelationships” (71). If we think of the literary field as a system, we can then understand literary history as a dialectical process. “Evolution is caused by the need for a ceaseless dynamics. Every dynamic system inevitably becomes automatized and an opposite constructive principle dialectically arises.” A device obsolete in one period can be restaged and reframed at a different moment and in a different context and once again made “perceptible.” The poetry of Velimir Khlebnikov is a case in point. “Transrational language” [zaum], writes Tynyanov, “always existed in the language of children and mystics, but only in our time did it become a literary fact” (74). The charade, on the other hand, currently dismissed as no more than a children’s game, was in late eighteenth-century Russia a genre taken seriously. Consider the fate of free verse. When first used by Whitman in the mid-nineteenth century, free verse seemed quite radical, the embodiment of a new freedom. And in the 1920s, when Pound and Williams discarded meter and stanzaic structure in favor of “free verse,” their prosody was regarded as quintessentially modernist, even avant-garde. A century later, free verse is the staple of Establishment poetry magazines and even greeting cards. Far from being daring, free verse has indeed been automatized; it is now merely the norm, to be deconstructed by shifting to new spatial configurations, as in concrete poetry, to prose, to procedural poetries like those of Oulipo where particular rules generate a surprising rhythmic and linear patterns—or even—and this is already happening—back to metrical norms, even if these are given a parodic edge, as in Charles Bernstein’s recent elegiac lyrics for his daughter Emma. The dialectic of literary change also animates the theoretical writings of Roman Jakobson, perhaps the best known of the

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Russian Formalist critics. Jakobson began as a Futurist poet: in his memoir My Futurist Years, he tells us how, as a high school student of fifteen or sixteen, he began frequenting poetry readings and performances at nightspots like the Stray Dog Café, where he made the acquaintance of Khlebnikov, Vladimir Mayakovsky, and Anna Akhmatova, among others. One of Jakobson’s great essays is called “On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets,” written shortly after Mayakovsky’s fabled suicide in 1930.12 The latter, Jakobson argues, relied too heavily on his personal force as effecting revolution: drumbeating for Lenin and later even for Stalin. “Opposed to this creative urge toward a transformed future,” writes Jakobson, “is the stabilizing force of an immutable present, overlaid, as this present is, by a stagnating slime, which stifles life in its tight, hard mold. The Russian name for this element is byt (Jakobson 277). Byt, “with its swarm of heartbreaking trivia” (294), crushes both love and the hope for revolution, the Utopian vision. In assessing that vision, Jakobson notes shrewdly that Mayakovsky’s cult of the future went hand in hand with a strange dislike of children—no doubt because the existence of a child threatens the poet’s own claim to be at the forefront of new youth, the cutting edge. In the end, an entire generation, of which Mayakovsky was just the key representative, was defeated. “We strained toward the future too impetuously and avidly to leave any past behind us. The connection of one period with another was broken.... We lost a sense of the present” (299). Note that Jakobson’s analysis here is cultural as well as literary. Mayakovsky’s poems are seen as cultural constructs, defining a particular moment—the decade after the 1917 Revolution, undone, in Jakobson’s analysis by byt, the routine of everyday life. His essay is a profound elegy for a generation of which he himself was a part. A related essay, “Marginal Notes on the Prose of the Poet Pasternak” (301-17) formulates Jakobson’s famous distinction between metaphor (association by similarity) and metonymy (association by contiguity). In Safe Conduct, Jakobson notes, “action is replaced by topography”: Pasternak’s poetic grammar is designed to dissolve the self in its environment, thus emphasizing the self’s passivity, its inability to act. “Show us your

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environment,” Jakobson remarks, “and I will tell you who you are” (313).

A Step Away from Them In the 1980s, the kind of critical study practiced by the Russian Formalists (and, in a related vein, by the French phenomenologists like Jean-Pierre Richard and Jean Starobinksi, whose studies of poetry have meant a great deal to me) increasingly gave way to the so-called New Historicism and Cultural Studies. The author, it was argued, should be understood not as an individual but as a function of a larger cultural formation, a symptom of something else. In his wonderful essay “What’s Art Got to Do with It? The Status of the Subject of the Humanities in an Age of Cultural Studies,”13 Charles Bernstein performs a hilarious send-up of what he calls the “cultural orthodontics” (teeth must be straightened!) of the Academy in these years. “Behind every successful artist,” Bernstein quipped, “is a new historian who says it’s all just a symptom. Behind every successful new historian is an artist who says you forget to mention my work—and boy, is it symptomatic!” (48). As for the fabled “death of the author,” proclaimed first by Foucault and Barthes but then, more systematically, by Pierre Bourdieu, Bernstein writes: While one of the defining axioms of cultural studies is the death of the author, the authors of cultural studies seem to exempt themselves from the full effect of this theory, much the way a queen might be exempted from her own decrees. The theory death of the author seems to apply to other people’s authors.” (My Way 45) Such downplaying of the literary function can hardly be blamed on the great cultural critics. In his famous essays on Baudelaire,14 Walter Benjamin places the poetry in a minutely detailed and analyzed political-social-cultural complex—that of

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Second-Empire France, the cradle of Modern Capitalism and bourgeois sensibility. Baudelaire’s poems—like “A une passante” (“To a Passer-by”)—are read in conjunction with Benjamin’s profound analysis of the new urban experience, the life of the flanêur on Paris’s crowded boulevards and in its shopping arcades, where the different social classes—and potential lovers— encounter one another. No detail—a leather glove, a shop sign, a popular song—is too small for Benjamin’s attention. Yet—and this is always Benjamin’s method—he never forgets that the curious “shock experience” defined in Les Fleurs du Mal and the prose poems is not merely a synecdoche for a general malaise experienced by the crowd in the mid-nineteenth-century city, but that, on the contrary, Baudelaire’s unique vision has itself created the phantasmagoria his reader associates with Paris. Indeed, that Paris is in many senses the creation, first of Baudelaire, and then of the Benjamin who expatiates on it. What Benjamin understood, as have few later cultural critics, is that the poet is at once representative—but also quite unrepresentative—of his or her culture. Here Gertrude Stein, who, as an American writer, was unknown to Benjamin, is a key example. Stein, born to a German-Jewish family, brought up in Oakland, California (the enclave, across the bay from San Francisco that, so Stein declared, had “no there there”), studied medicine at Johns Hopkins, gave it up in midstream and moved to Paris with her brother Leo, and became an art collector and salonnière. An expatriate and lesbian (she lived the bulk of her life with her companion Alice B. Toklas), Stein refused to leave France when World War II broke out, even though the Jews were in great danger; indeed, in the early years of the German Occupation, she translated the speeches of the Maréchal Pétain, the Chief of State of Vichy France. These bare facts have led to countless attempts to classify Stein, to find the clue to her difficult work, her all but impenetrable (so critics still say) writing. Should she be labeled a Jewish writer? A feminist? Lesbian? An American immigrant? Expatriate? Cubist (for her association with Picasso)? A connoisseur of neurology and physiology (her subjects at medical school)? A Modernist? A

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precursor of Postmodernism? The problem is that Stein did not fit into any of these rubrics. A secular Jew who wrote the opera Four Saints in Three Acts; a lesbian writer who distrusted most women, preferring the company of male artists; an expatriate who remained proud of her American ethos; a cubist whose poetry was closer to Dada than to Picasso; a Modernist who liked neither Joyce nor Proust and was, in turn, made fun of by Eliot and Pound, Hemingway and Wyndham Lewis. Periodization and classification are thus tricky problems for the literary scholar, which makes them all the more fascinating. My own development as a critic took a decisive turn in 1975 when I began to write my book on Frank O’Hara. It happened fortuitously. In the 1970s, the critical journals used to run omnibus reviews: if they asked you to do the annual poetry review, they would send you about 150 books and you could sort them out and decide which to include. In 1973, Contemporary Literature asked me to do the omnibus piece. Among the hundreds of books arriving at my door—most of them throwaways—there was the Ron Padgett and David Shapiro Anthology of New York Poets (Random House, 1970), which included a sizable selection of O’Hara’s poems. In the New York art world, O’Hara (he died in 1966 at the age of 40 in an unfortunate accident) was something of a cult figure, but in the Academy—at least not at the University of Maryland where I was then teaching—no one had heard of him: we were busy dissecting Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath (on both of whom I wrote) or, if we were more adventurous, Charles Olson. I found O’Hara’s seemingly casual, graphic, and documentary “I do this I do that” poems a breath of fresh air: the most casual details of a Manhattan lunch hour or a newspaper headline could be defamiliarized and produce poems like “Khruschchev is coming on the right day!” My omnibus review, when I wrote it, centered on O’Hara. The next year, the MLA convention was in New York, and on the last day I found a free hour to visit the bookshop at the Museum of Modern Art in New York, which in those days had an unparalleled selection of art books. Here I came across O’Hara’s Art Chronicles—his reviews and articles about the Abstract Expressionists and related artists, produced while he was curator

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at MOMA. I asked Doris Grumbach, a writer-friend, who was then literary editor of The New Republic, whether I might review them and she said yes. My review came to the attention of the art book publisher George Braziller and, next thing you know, I had a contract to write a book on O’Hara. My Frank O’Hara: Poet among Painters (1977) was not quite the popular biography Braziller wanted—it was, for their taste, too analytical, focusing on the mode and genre of the poems rather than the poet, but writing it opened up many doors for me. I was living in Philadelphia at the time and could go to New York to interview such O’Hara friends as the painters Grace Hartigan and Norman Bluhm and the poet John Ashbery. Theirs was a brave new world for a rather sheltered academic, and if they didn’t teach me much about O’Hara, they were fascinating in their own right. Through Ashbery, I came to know the work of John Cage, Jasper Johns, and Merce Cunningham. I travelled to Bolinas outside San Francisco so as to consult O’Hara’s editor Don Allen, an astonishingly learned—but quite unacademic— scholar-editor. And Don, in turn, introduced me to Robert Creeley and the poets of the so-called San Francisco Renaissance. From then on, the avant-garde became my special interest. The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981) was subtitled “From Rimbaud to Cage”: it began by tracing the line of what I called, following an Ashbery poem, “The Other Tradition”—a tradition of open, nonsymbolist, nondiscursive poetry that, I felt, began with the oddly literal, hallucinatory Illuminations of Rimbaud and culminated in the work of Ashbery and Cage as well as the “talk poet” David Antin, with Stein, Pound, Williams, and Samuel Beckett featured in the intermediary chapters. When I reread Poetics of Indeterminacy now, I feel its central thesis is not quite right. I argued that there were two branches of Modernism: the Eliot “Symbolist” school and the RimbaudPound anti-Symbolist one. In fact, though, Eliot was himself, at least in his early poet, an avant-gardist who certainly had a major influence on Ashbery even as the Romantic poets had influenced O’Hara. Moreover, despite Beckett’s declaration in Watt, “No symbols where none intended,” and the indeterminacy

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of Ashbery’s imagery, a case for symbolism in both writers can certainly be made. The neat division between A and B, in any case, did not hold up. Still—and I would caution you all about this aspect of criticism—no theoretical generalization is foolproof: one advances a hypothesis in order to open up the discussion and to suspend the reader’s disbelief in new ways of reading or in the value of unfamiliar new work. In retrospect, what I was really doing in this book was attacking, not Eliot, but his latter-day heirs like Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht— poets highly considered in the Academy (they are still treated very respectfully) whom, I felt, had transformed Modernism into a kind of scholastic exercise in metaphor making. In order to make this case, one had to go back to the early twentieth-century and rethink Modernism itself: I tried to do this in The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant-Guerre, and the Language of Rupture (1986). Continental Modernism, in its Futurist and Dada incarnations, had a very different trajectory from its then prominent Anglo-American counterpart. Marinetti’s Parole in Libertà, with their verbal-visual-sonic configurations, the great war poems of Blaise Cendrars and Apollinaire, and especially the poets of the Russian avant-garde— Mayakovsky, Khlebnikov, Kruchenykh, Akhmatova—displayed a side of Modernism that made much of the neo-Modernist poetry, prominent in the American Academy of the post-World War II era, seem trivial. Jed Rasula’s monumental new “metropolitan anthology” Burning City documents, more fully than any earlier such text I have seen, how rich and diverse the early Modernist tradition really was.15 Gone are the days when a critic as notable as Frank Kermode could criticize the politics of “Modernism,” all the while tacitly referring only to British writing. The inclusion of non-Anglophone materials demanded some familiarity with other languages. German is my native language (I can take no credit for that), and I do have a good reading knowledge of French and some Italian, the latter learned years earlier at the Berlitz School when I was planning a trip to Italy. But in order to write The Futurist Moment, I had to know at least a modicum of Russian; I spent a summer at the University of

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California-Irvine in a Russian immersion program where I was renamed Masha and struggled with the daily quizzes. I can’t say I now know Russian—that is my daughter Nancy’s domain— but it meant that I could read the Cyrillic alphabet and hence go to the library and check out Russian books, of which I could get some sense with a dictionary and an available translation. And I realized that the Russian Formalists I had already studied in graduate school now stood me in good stead: the theories of ostranenie (making strange), sdvig (orientation toward the neighboring word), faktura (the materiality of the text), and slovo kak takovoe (the word as such), were directly relevant to a reading of Mayakovsky or Akhmatova or to the Russian artist books. The Futurist Moment is more an historical than a theoretical study and from the late eighties on, literary history, rather neglected in my earlier training, became more important to me. Although, like everyone else at the time, I read Derrida and Foucault, Julia Kristeva and Jean-François Lyotard and cited their theoretical statements as a matter of course, I always had reservations about Deconstruction, the great exception being Roland Barthes, himself, like Benjamin, first and foremost a creative writer and one whom I return to again and again. My reservation about Derrida’s Grammatology and Writing and Difference was that the literary text was no longer primary: it became an example to illustrate a key point. Thus Rousseau’s phrase in his Confessions, le petit supplement, a phrase meaning both addition and replacement, became a buzzword for professors and graduate students who had never read the Confessions. Again, when Derrida wrote his essay on Joyce’s phrase “he war,” the intricate artistry of Joyce seemed to disappear into the ether, and it was Derrida’s wordplay that was prominent. I am simplifying enormously here, of course, but I have increasingly come to feel that the mystification endemic in Deconstruction was a dead end. When, in the nineties, I became interested in Wittgenstein, it was precisely because he himself rejected theory and metalanguage for a philosophy that, in his words, “leaves everything as it is”—that describes rather than translates. Charles Bernstein pinpoints the difference in his essay

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“The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein” (1981).16 “In Wittgenstein’s accounting,” as Bernstein puts it, “one is not left sealed off from the world with only ‘markings’ to ‘decipher’ but rather located in a world with meanings to respond to.” Wittgenstein’s aim, far from showing that meaning is always elusive, that the sign is never equal to the referent, tries to account for the way language is actually used in the world. And that makes him remarkably helpful for those who want to understand the language of poetry, even though he himself has little say about the poetic as such. Not surprisingly, then, Wittgenstein, as Terry Eagleton pointed out in a 1994 essay,17 became the philosopher of poets and artists. In my Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), I tried to understand how this process works. And I have been writing on Wittgenstein ever since, each time revising a previous formulation as more and more elements in Wittgenstein’s work become known to me. He himself was always recasting his propositions, correcting, refining, and even changing his formulae as new things occurred to him. Such change, he understood, was not a deficit because what matters in philosophy is not the product but the process of thinking. I believe of all twentieth-century philosophers, Wittgenstein is the one who most teaches us how think. At the same time, he is himself a poet. “Philosophy,” as he said, “should really be done only as a form of poetry.” I cite this now famous sentence which has impacted on my own criticism from Radical Artifice (1992), the book that has just been translated into Chinese—an event for which I am very grateful—to the present. In the interim, my critical work has become less theory dependent—at least in the strict sense of that term—and more likely to find its principles in the work of the poet or artists I write about, from Duchamp and Cage to Bernstein or Susan Howe, Caroline Bergvall or Yoko Tawada, as in my Unoriginal Genius. Perhaps this is partly a function of age: as one gets older, one is less likely to feel the need to support one’s every assertion with phrases like, “As Foucault says…” or as “Julia Kristeva says…” But it is also the case, I think, that the power

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of Theory as metalanguage has been, paradoxically, undercut by the current interest in Conceptualism, where “theory” generally is the artwork and vice versa. Yet though the value—or even the possibility—of Conceptualist poetry is now hotly debated, even here, as I have argued in recent essays, there is no escape from the sort of questions Wimsatt and critics like him posed. What sound repetitions occur and what do they accomplish? What is the “dominant” (Jakobson’s term) of this particular poetic formation and how do we differentiate it from an earlier aesthetic like that of Language Poetry? What claims are made by the new poets and why must they be taken with a grain of salt? What is the specific relationship of the “poetry” to its digital culture? And can a citational poetry be better than that which is cited? What, finally, makes the text before us poetry? To answer these questions is to begin, as has always been the case, with the practice of “close reading”—close reading of both text and context, which are always intertwined, whether historically or geographically. Close reading, after all, is merely rereading, and whatever else poetry is or is not, we can, I think, agree that poetry is that form of writing which cannot be “read”— it can only be reread.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5

Cleanth Brooks, “The Waste Land,” in Modern Poetry and the Tradition (1939; Chapel Hill, University of North Carolina Press, 1971). Cleanth Brooks and Robert Penn Warren, Understanding Poetry (1938; rev. ed. New York: Henry Holt, 1960). W. K. Wimsatt, The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry (1954; Noonday Press, 1958). Craig Dworkin, Parse (Berkeley: Atelos, 2008); see Brian Reed, “Grammar Trouble,” boundary 2 36.3 (2009): 133-58. Joseph Frank, “Spatial Form in Modern Literature,” The Idea of Spatial Form (1945; New Brunswick, NJ: Rutgers University Press, 1991); Lionel Trilling, The Liberal Imagination: Essays on Literature and Society (1950; New York: Doubleday, 1953); William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity (1947; New York: New Directions, 1966); Northrop Frye,

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7

8

9

10

11

12

13

14

15

16

17

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Anatomy of Criticism: Four Essays (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1957). Reuben Brower, The Fields of Light: An Experiment in Critical Reading (New York: Oxford, 1951). Ezra Pound, “A Retrospect” (1918), The Literary Essays of Ezra Pound, ed. T. S. Eliot (New York: New Directions, 1954), 3-15. W. B. Yeats, Preface, The Oxford Book of Modern Verse, 1892-1935, ed. W. B. Yeats (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1936), xxiv-xxvi. Hugh Kenner, The Pound Era (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1971), 398-99, cf. my “Modernism in Review: Hugh Kenner’s Pound Era,” Modernist Cultures, 5.2 (2010), 181-94. Viktor Shklovsky, “Art as Technique,” Russian Formalist Criticism: Four Essays, trans. Lee T. Lemon and Marion J. Reis (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1965), 3-24, p. 12. Jurij Tynjanov, “On Literary Evolution” (1929), in Readings in Russian Poetics: Formalist and Structuralist Views, ed. Ladislav Matejka and Krystyna Pomorska (1971; Chicago: Dalkey Archive Press, 2002), 66-78. Roman Jakobson, “On a Generation that Squandered Its Poets” (1931), in Language and Literature, ed. Krystyna Pomorska and Stephen Rudy (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1987), 273-300. Charles Bernstein, “What’s Art Got to Do with It? The Status of the Subject of the Humanities in an Age of Cultural Studies,” My Way: Speeches and Poems (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1999), 3651. The key essay is “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire” (1939), widely reprinted; together with the essays later to become part of the Arcades Project, it is most conveniently found in Walter Benjamin, The Writer of Modern Life: Essays on Charles Baudelaire (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 2006), 170-210. Jed Rasula (ed.), Burning City: An Anthology of Metropolitan Poetry, forthcoming. Charles Bernstein, “The Objects of Meaning: Reading Cavell Reading Wittgenstein,” Content’s Dream: Essays 1975-1984 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1986), 165-83. Terry Eagleton, “My Wittgenstein,” Common Knowledge 3.1 (Spring 1994): 152-57.

2

A Critic of the Other Tradition Interview with Hélène Aji and Antoine Cazé

Hélène Aji: My first question is about The Vienna Paradox, because to me, although it is a recent book, it returns to the sources of everything that you have done, and as a publication from New Directions, it is presented as a memoir—most interestingly a cultural and critical memoir. So, I’d like to know more about the genesis of this work. Marjorie Perloff: The memoir came about rather fortuitously. When James Laughlin, the founder and publisher of New Directions, who was a good friend, read the Introduction to my Wittgenstein’s Ladder, where I talked a bit about Vienna and about my family, he said, “Why don’t you write a memoir?” I said, “No, I really don’t like the genre that much; I don’t like the idea of writing about myself.” But then I started thinking about it and the idea became more appealing. Meanwhile Charles Bernstein suggested that I didn’t need to tell all, that I could write the book as a kind of collage, and that would be more fun. I agreed and started writing it. As it turned out, it’s more “normal” than the word “collage” suggests, especially in the later sections. But its focus is indeed cultural: specifically, I felt I had a great story to tell.

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My Viennese Jewish family was, as were so many upper-middle class families, entirely secular, and a number of relatives had been baptized. They were themselves somewhat anti-Semitic. Their true religion was KULTUR; they lived for their humanistic and artistic interests. My grandfather was a leading diplomat (the only Jew to become Foreign Secretary ever) and so thought of himself as somehow exempt from the Nazi terror. When the Anschluss occurred, he escaped by walking over the Alps—rather like in The Sound of Music. But he was not entirely blameless in that he, like so many of the educated Jews, didn’t see the handwriting on the wall even though, from the late 20s on, the Nazis in Vienna had terrorized university students suspected of being Jewish, and Hitler was very popular. When Chancellor Dolfuss, himself an autocratic leader but not a Nazi, was assassinated right in his office in 1934, it should have been clear to Grandfather Schüller and others that it was only a matter of time before the Nazi takeover occurred. Then, too, I wanted Americans to understand how different my own Jewish upbringing was from that of most of my American Jewish friends, who were, like my husband Joseph, the children of East European immigrants. In the US, it is standard practice for Jews to observe the high holidays, have their children barmitzvahed, and so on. There is, in other words, a strong Jewish allegiance and a certain Jewish pride. In Austria between the wars, this was quite different—but for good reason. Jews couldn’t get most professional jobs or participate in most social activities and so there was much pressure to “pass.” It was a very problematic period, and it’s difficult for American Jews, who have never quite endured comparable difficulties, to understand. The curious thing is that whenever I’ve given talks based on The Vienna Paradox on various campuses, students of different ethnicity—say, Chicano—have come up to me and said, “That’s just like my story and I can really relate to that,” so that even though it is a very particular story, people seem to relate to it nonetheless. Aji: Do you think this type of culture has informed your critical approach to poetry?

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Perloff: Absolutely. On the one hand, I do believe in High Culture; I believe there is “great” art and genius and this is a view that was instilled in me in childhood, where Goethe and Schiller were read out loud to us and we were brought up to believe much of popular culture was mere kitsch to be ignored! At the same time, my own predilection was for Modernist difficulty and especially for the avant-garde, the offbeat, the oppositional. And what I loved in an artist like John Cage was that although he admired and studied with Schoenberg, he wanted to write a truly American music, and his philosophy came out of Dewey and the pragmatists. That appealed to me because I am in many ways a True Blue American. [Laughter] Antoine Cazé: Coming back to what you said about the narrative of identity that you found yourself doing, you used two words: collage and informal memoir. Collage sounds very much like the Marjorie Perloff I know, with a strong interest in form and formalism, while the informal is a totally different approach to identity. Could you comment on those two ways? Perloff: By informal, I suppose you mean l’informe? It’s true that I am at heart something of a formalist, in the sense of Russian Formalism. I like structure although not necessary collage structure. But, yes, collage allows one to avoid dealing with causality, something I’ve always had difficulty doing. In college, I once took a course in Ethics and wrote a paper on free will versus determinism. I got a C+—my only such grade—with the comment that I was a master of the non sequitur! Well, I made a virtue of necessity, and parataxis is a mode of avoiding logical continuity. But it’s also the case that I am a Modernist at heart. For example, I have little in common with most Americanists because I really don’t want to study eighteenth-and nineteenthcentury American literature, which is too didactic, too overtly moral for my taste. I’m being partly facetious here—of course I love Melville and Dickinson and Whitman—but I have a greater affinity to European modernism, whether German, French, or

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Eastern European, than I do to American Studies. And although I’ve written a great deal on “postmodernism,” I have come to believe that the real revolution in the arts came at the beginning of the twentieth century and that it came in Europe. The World War I period is the period I love. I think I’m a Modernist in the sense that I do believe in art as somehow transcendent and I care about its formal values and admire difficulty. Then, too, I am more at home with irony than, say, with melodrama or invective. That taste has a lot to do with Vienna—its early twentieth-century writers and artists were markedly ironists: Karl Kraus, Schnitzler, Musil, Kafka. I love Joseph Roth’s Radetsky March. And that irony points the way to such later poets as Frank O’Hara, where play is so central. Aji: Could you elaborate on this logic, though, given that you’ve created a “Perlovian” canon, almost, or at least a Perlovian corpus? There’s a constellation of writers there… Perloff: Well, I don’t know that there’s a Perlovian corpus! But let me describe how I became interested in the avant-garde and then in such recent American movements as Language poetry and Conceptual Art. Part of it was fortuitous. In 1973 or so, after I had finished my book on Robert Lowell (not very avant-garde, that one!), the journal Contemporary Literature sent me a vast quantity of books to consider for an omnibus review. In those days, journals featured such reviews. I must have gotten about 100 books, most of them very dull. But one stood out: Ron Padgett and David Shapiro’s Anthology of New York Poets. There were John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, and I fell in love with the latter right away. The technique—seeming anarchy and “I do this, I do that” structure—appealed to me because I wanted to see how it was really put together. Then, by chance, I came across O’Hara’s Art Chronicles in the Museum of Modern Art bookshop and bought them. I wrote my friend Doris Grumbach, then literary editor for The New Republic, and asked if I could review the Art Chronicles. She said by all means. When the review appeared, I got a call from George Braziller in New York asking me if I wanted to write a book on O’Hara for his publishing house. What serendipity!

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In working on the O’Hara book, I came to know a lot of New York poets and artists. At the same time, I was attending the Ezra Pound conferences in Orono, Maine, and between these and the New York world, I developed an interest in what Ashbery calls “the other tradition,” which became the subject of The Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage. Modernism, for me, could never mean Robert Frost. I agreed with the epigraph to David Antin’s Talking at the Boundaries: “If Robert Frost is a poet, I don’t want to be a poet.” I reviewed Talking for The New Republic, and that’s how I got to know Antin and later Jerry Rothenberg. Then my former student at the University of Maryland Douglas Messerli1 introduced me to the work of Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe. I was at first quite skeptical because the poetry made no sense to me whatsoever. But when I heard Charles give a reading for the first time in LA in the early 80s, I was hooked. And I agreed wholly with the oppositionality of the Language Poets, their insistence that poetry be more than a parlor game, an endless lyrical outpouring of what I felt when I found a spider in the refrigerator and so on. This did not mean, in my case, a rejection of my Modernist favorites: I still love Yeats and keep teaching his poetry and writing about it, and I also adore the earlier Eliot. And although it may be an extraliterary interest, I do still find Sylvia Plath very interesting. But I differ from most of my American colleagues in having little taste for Elizabeth Bishop, considered by many the great postwar American poet. It’s not that I dislike Bishop; I just never think about her. It’s a question of ambition: Bishop’s whole oeuvre is very narrow as are her subjects, which, yes, she handles with great perfection. But I demand more from poetry than this “exquisite” miniature work in traditional lyric forms. It’s not a challenge. As the Brazilian concrete poet Haroldo de Campos said to me when Bishop was living in Brazil: “she is a very nice lady, but not very interesting.” I think here again my Viennese background is showing. The paysage moralisé, in which Bishop’s speaker casts the fish back into the water (“Rainbow rainbow rainbow / So I let the fish go”) doesn’t speak to me. And I think it also has to do with my

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tradition not being the Anglo-American one. For the past fifty years or so, the poetry wars in the US have had a lot to do with one’s stance vis-à-vis the Anglo tradition—say, Philip Larkin in relation to Wordsworth. But as the US absorbs more and more minority and ethnic cultures, it is separating itself from the Anglo model, I believe. Cazé: Coming back to the topic of exile, you make it sound like exile and literature are formally tied together in some sense, in particular when you insist that literature should be difficult. Could you comment on that connection between exile and literature, their being two conditions that have something in common? Perloff: I think you’re right about the commonality. There is no question that Modernist and Postmodernist literature is by definition an exile literature. Think of the Romantics and Victorians in England—Wordsworth, Coleridge, Byron, Shelley, Keats, Tennyson, Browning, and the novelists Jane Austen, George Eliot, Anthony Trollope, Charles Dickens—they were all English writers, with English names, and they were all Christian. In the twentieth century, this changes. Think of the “French” poets Apollinaire and Cendrars, both of them pseudonymous poets who were not French at all. Think of Tristan Tzara (Sammy Rosenbaum) or the Czech Jewish Kafka writing in German or in the US, the various African-American poets. By the later twentieth century in America, exile has become the aesthetic norm from Black Mountain (founded by Josef Albers) to the absorption of French poststructuralist theory and the Frankfurt School. The New Critics (John Crowe Ransom, Cleanth Brooks, Allen Tate) were largely Christian Americans; later critics primarily came from elsewhere—Hugh Kenner, for instance, from Canada—or were, like Harold Bloom, Bronx Jews. In his academic memoir, the scholar Alvin Kernan, a rather traditional Yale and then Princeton professor, describes the postWorld War II moment in the Yale English department when the Jews first appeared on the scene: Bloom, E. D. Hirsch, Geoffrey Hartman (an exile). They challenged many of the traditional

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values of the academy. But this is not to say that the challenge was all positive and that much wasn’t lost. I continue to be a great admirer of those Yale professors, Maynard Mack and W. K. Wimsatt, who performed such miracles of close reading on Pope or Blake, Shakespeare, or Donne. But it did seem, by the 1980s, that, when it came to contemporary poetry, the work valorized by the New Critics—say, the poetry of Richard Wilbur or Anthony Hecht—was no longer enough. That, so far as poetry was concerned, we were ready for something else. Cazé: Where do you see this something else emerging? Perloff: Well, I tried to lay out some of the terrain in my talk yesterday and also in the essay I did for Hélène on Language poetry.2 The latter was an important corrective to the “expressivist” lyric of the 1970s, but it has also by now run its course. What we are witnessing now, I think, is a return to form—whether concretist form, or the constraint of Oulipo and related movements, or a more conceptual poetry using much appropriation and found text. We are also witnessing a return to emotion—emotion, which was a bugbear for most of the Language poets. I will come back to this point later. Aji: As you know, there’s been a lot of debate about the relations between avant-garde poetry and theory. From what I hear now, it seems to me that it’s not the theoretical side you’re interested in but more the philosophical side of it all. Perloff: Well, when I now look at some earlier examples of Language Poetry, say, the work featured in Ron Silliman’s anthology In the American Tree, some of it does look like versified Derrida. The theory was very useful originally, especially the whole issue of referentiality and the construction of self, but it became programmatic. And it’s true that I have learned much more from philosophy, especially Wittgenstein, than from poststructuralist theory. Reading some of the more programmatic asemantic, asyntactic poetry began to make me feel some longing for a good old landscape poem!

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Cazé: Although the good thing would be that now, the landscape would be mediated by the whole range of theory-bound writing that has been done in between. You’d never get the same landscape as before, right? Perloff: Exactly! I think we will go back to a poetry of feeling, but it will manifest itself in a different way. For instance, Craig Dworkin has written a poem called Dure that I have written about in a forthcoming essay. Dure—which is about a broken love affair in a very complicated and oblique way—is a very passionate poem although its basic mode is ekphrasis—the elucidation of a Durer self-portrait in which the nude subject points at a spot near his groin, a mysterious wound. Dworkin’s ekphrasis takes over the allusiveness, concern for etymology, and difficulty of Language poetry but not its intentional impenetrability and broken syntax. I also feel that we are currently witnessing an increasing emphasis on sound. Language poetry downplayed sound repetition in favor of disjunction and fragmentation, but the current revival of sound poetry has taught us that how much can be done by foregrounding various soundings, in relation to musical values—say those of Cage or Satie, or, more recently, hiphop and various new musics. And I think the poetic line, when used at all, must be used well. Frank O’Hara used the poetic line brilliantly; he created a taut and tense musical line whose cuts were always significant. Pound is the great exemplar here, and Williams is another. I think there’s much too little attention now paid to sound. An exception would be Steve McCaffery, whose career began as one of the Four Horsemen, the “sound poetry” group. The importance of sound was raised here in France not long ago by Jacques Roubaud, who brought up the issue when we were all at a conference and reading series in Amiens.3 Listening to the poets read, Jacques asked, “Why is it that many of you don’t even stop at the end of a line? You don’t raise your voice at the end of a line; what does that mean? What’s your concept of a poem anyway?” These are key questions because much of what passes for poetry today is just lineated prose. One can relineate it at will and nothing changes.

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Cazé: I remember when Roubaud raised this question. I think there was a risk there, however, of understanding his criticism as a conservative way of looking at what the line is, wasn’t there? There is a thin line, of course, separating a conservative approach to form from… Perloff: I know some of the poets in the audience felt that way, but I think they misunderstood. What Roubaud is essentially saying, here and elsewhere, is that poetry is a special kind of discourse; it must manifest itself as poetry even when it seems totally improvisatory and casual. Otherwise, why bother? Why lineate if the lineation has no effect and one can’t hear it at all? Roubaud is objecting to what he calls “International Free Verse”—a verse wholly translatable because it’s just straightforward prose, using normal syntax. And his invocation of Pound and the Troubadours was picked up by Haroldo de Campos in his astonishing “prose” work Galáxias, where sound controls meaning in startling ways. It was true of Joyce, too, and of course of Beckett. The visual is equally important for poetry. I was looking at Beckett’s notebooks today at the Pompidou Center exhibition. He has things like little diagrams in different colors, and he always writes on only one side of the page, and the other side is then used to stick in notes, and the drawings, the paintings are little works of art, they really are, amazing! So again, Beckett would be a model for me. Aji: When you talk about the musical quality of the poem, the fact that it should be sounded, are you thinking also in terms of performance? Perloff: Yes, although the poem should work on the page too. Some performance is very sloppy and too easy. But yes, I think the most interesting poetry being written today is very aware of performance—for example, that of Christian Bök or Kenneth Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall, Tracie Morris. Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe were always amazing performers. There are other poets, though, who emphasize visual defamiliarization: Cole Swensen would be an example. In either case, the Poundian

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adage still holds: “Use no word that does not contribute to the presentation.” And again, “Poetry is news that stays news.” I tend to go to much fewer poetry readings than I used to because so much of what I hear is slack—there is endless filler. The “famous” American poet Jorie Graham is Exhibit A. Her long lines are full of dead prepositional phrases or needless adverbs. Aji: As a translator, I have experienced that poetry readings, or at least the reading of a poem aloud, actually narrows its meaning, while at the same time it prevents a sort of unlimited interpretation. Perloff: That’s a very interesting point. The convention of the poetry reading does pose problems. It assumes that one “gets it” at first hearing. You notice at poetry readings, people applaud and say, “Wow!” or “Terrific,” as if they had already taken it all in. How can this be? A reading by John Ashbery, for instance, is interesting mainly because one wants to know how he emphasizes certain words and phrases, but it is by no means definitive. And other poets—Williams, for example—were not good readers of their own work. Frank O’Hara read in a nasal New England accent I dislike; I prefer the videos others have made of his poems, for example, Joseph Fusco, whose rendition of “Song (is it dirty)” you can see and hear on YouTube. These videos bring out fascinating interpretations of the poetry and are more interesting than the poet’s own reading. Aji: Actually I’ve wondered whether the flatness of a Williams wasn’t intentional to a certain point, precisely to prevent the narrowing of the interpretation and to keep the poems as open as possible. Perloff: Maybe so, I don’t know. But certainly, it’s wonderful that we now have PennSound and that all these readings are made available, so that you get a good sense of them.4 My students listened to Pound on PennSound, and one of them came up to me and said, “Oh! I don’t care whether he was a Fascist or not… That’s the most amazing sound I ever heard!” When you hear

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Pound read those Cantos, the variety is unbelievable, and yet you always recognize his voice, and you could chart its rhythm and understand why Pound’s sound structures are so unique. He had an incredible ear: just listen to those lines [quoting by heart the beginning of Pound’s Canto IV], “Palace in smoky light, / Troy but a heap of smouldering boundary stones, /ANAXIFORMINGES! Aurunculeia! / Hear me. Cadmus of Golden Prows!” From “smoky” to “smouldering” to “golden,” Pound develops the o sound brilliantly, in contrast to the long Greek and Roman names that follow, all the while varying the trochaic rhythm. How many poets could create such variety and yet unity? It’s interesting, in this regard, how concerned with precision the poet-composer-artist John Cage was. When he was staying at my house in Palo Alto in 1992, the Museum of Contemporary Art (LA) curator Julie Lazar came over to consult him on the planning of the Rolywholyover Circus, the forthcoming exhibition of his work. He was fussy about the actual presentation of his supposedly improvisational work, telling Julie, “No! I don’t want that! No, that can’t be there! No, this has to be two inches from that! No, it has to hang this way! No it absolutely can’t be done!” That kind of care is rarely found in contemporary poets, Language poets or otherwise. But I mention it because the usual view is that Cage just let “anything” happen. One should just “open one’s ears” to the sounds out there and all would be well. But in reality, Cage, and also Jackson Mac Low and then the language poets, took quite seriously Adorno’s notion of art’s resistance. Poetry could never merely reflect. Cazé: Talking of resistance, does a poet necessarily want to reach a broad audience? Perloff: Yes and no. Everyone would like to reach more people; it depends, though, what one is willing to do so as to reach them. If it means talking down to your audience, it’s not very desirable. On the other hand, a poet like Christian Bök, who uses Oulipo devices and elaborate scientific analogies to create quite wild sound effects, is very popular with engineering students,

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scientists, computer programmers. They understand what he is doing. And Kenneth Goldsmith’s “uncreative” has also hit a real nerve. I would say recently we have poetry that is both difficult and yet more accessible. Still, literary people are often suspicious of Bök or Goldsmith because the inwardness of the lyric “I” just isn’t there. Cazé: But what about the autobiographical dimension of a poem? Saying “I” in a poem, since there is no fiction pact in poetry, necessarily implies something more complex than a straightforward autobiographical stance. What is your view on that question of the first person in poetry? Perloff: Well, in good poetry of whatever period, the “I” is always an invention; it is, as Yeats put it so well, “not the I that sits down at the breakfast table; it is always a phantasmagoria.” But the American poets of the Lowell generation lost that sense of phantasmagoria; it was always a confessional “I,” presented in as flattering a light as possible. In Denise Levertov’s poetry, for instance, you have an “I” that knows and judges but is not personally responsible. Aji: But when you look at Rousseau’s Confessions, it’s all a question of self-defense—showing the nicer side of one’s personality… Perloff: True, but Rousseau was always quite willing to be honest about all the things he had done. I like the way Frank O’Hara did it when he wrote in “Naptha,” “I think I was made in the image of a sissy truck driver.” [Laughter] He had the ability to laugh at himself. John Ashbery has this gift as well, the gift of being able to look at himself from a distance. But you have that quality in any good poetry, really—in T. S. Eliot for instance, in the early Eliot of “Prufrock,” that capacity for “dédoublement.” A version of this is the ecstasis, which you have in Rimbaud or in Sylvia Plath— an utterance, your back turned to the audience, with voices that speak through you. Je est un autre. That is wonderful! Rimbaud, for example has that great line in Une saison en enfer, when he is

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trying to make himself over as a native African, only to suddenly note that “Les blancs débarquent.” He wants to get away from his “white” self but he can’t. It’s a terribly personal statement, but it’s objectified in a distinctive way. The same thing is true of George Oppen. He has that gift for taking an “I,” sometimes a “we”—as in Of Being Numerous—and distancing himself from himself and looking at himself almost as if he’s an object, and that’s wonderfully done and very moving because you just feel the difficulty which is there all the time, even when he says “Here is the brick […] Mary-Anne”5—that difficulty of pinpointing it which is so beautifully done in Oppen. So we have here a personal “I” in a way, but it’s depersonalized. Now compare this effect to the use of the first person in Elizabeth Bishop’s widely praised “In the Waiting Room.” I don’t think that when you sit in the dentist’s office waiting for your turn and you pick up the National Geographic, you look at that picture of African natives and then you suddenly realize “This is what it means to be a human being,” it just doesn’t ring true to me and I don’t believe it. “I am an Elizabeth” is asserted, but the recognition is hollow because the context hasn’t been sufficiently established. Cazé: Would you say that in Oppen, it’s a question of “an I/eye that includes history,” to paraphrase Pound? Perloff: In a curious way, he’s all history. I think that at every turn in Oppen when you look carefully you could find that sense that he ruined his life in many ways, that he was wrong, that the Soviet Communist block was wrong; it’s not that he ever quite understood what was right, but that years were spent barking up the wrong tree—there’s something very tragic in all this. Cazé: Maybe we could speak of how to include some sense of community in the first person, then? Perloff: Yes, community. In Oppen, the “I” becomes an “I” for our time or for a later time, the “I” has to be part of the

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community—that’s true in Zukofsky, too. The “I” isn’t so much the “I” of what “I feel or think”; now, autobiography can certainly appear in whatever dress, but it has to be absorbed somehow into the fabric and artistry of the poem. Robert Lowell, too, handled that well in Life Studies and For the Union Dead, though less so in later volumes. He regarded himself wryly, for example, in the poem “Eye and Tooth”—a poem which I recently discussed in an interview for an online journal, The New Ohio Review—a very autobiographical and realistic text in which Lowell speaks of his pain even as he comes to recognize that “everyone’s tired of my turmoil.” But voice is terribly hard to create convincingly. Pound’s habit was to begin with an external—“The enormous tragedy of the dream in the peasant’s bent shoulders”6—and then qualify it—“but the twice crucified”—and then move on to a particular anecdote or historical fact so as to make the reader realize that there’s a world out there. Cazé: Framing and unframing, changing frames all the time… Perloff: Yes, exactly. Frank O’Hara solves the problem by using direct address (to a friend? lover? the reader? himself?): “I am the least difficult of men. All I want is boundless love.”7 [Laughter] It’s a great line because the second sentence so nicely contradicts the first and so we laugh at the lack of self-knowledge. And in this sense, poets can still do wonderful things with the first person. Peter Gizzi’s poetry provides a contemporary example: voice in his poetry is always shifting, elusive, self-contradictory. But very much his particular form of voicing. At this writing, Craig Dworkin is editing a little anthology online called An Anthology of Conceptual Poetry,8 and it’s going to be a book, too, which he and Kenneth Goldsmith are putting together. The issue here, as Craig says in the little introduction, is whether it might be possible to move from a poetry of personal emotion to a poetry of intellect and ideas—a conceptual poetry. Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather,9 the record of a year’s worth of radio weather reports, is a case in point.

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Cazé: When you describe yourself as a historian of poetry, do you mean your main interest is in the genealogy of the contemporary? Perloff: Well, I like to try and understand what it is that has happened and why. Why do movements—say, Concrete Poetry— seem to go under and then reappear? Why do certain poets and movements seem important at one moment in history but less so later? Why is a poet like Ashbery revered by such otherwise disparate audiences? Then, too, I like to pick the winners— to see who “the great ones” are. I think on the whole, time has sanctioned most of my choices. Aji: What’s the ideology and the intention behind the processes of selection when editing volumes of selected poems?10 Perloff: That’s a great question. I think the selections that poets do themselves are in fact a way of thinking through their work and thinking what won’t totally last, since no reader can read all of their work. Williams made his own selections from his poems, Oppen was so careful to winnow out his poems that he helped secure his reputation. But it’s dangerous to use too much control. In recent years, Language poets have attacked Ginsberg’s politics and the politics of the Beats, saying, “They didn’t understand politics; they were just protesting in an overt way, but they didn’t understand that you can’t protest in direct language; and then, we came along and we did it the right way!” Aji: Was that at the 1960s conference in Maine?11 Perloff: Yes, I believe so. And I find that extremely irritating, because Ginsberg really was a political figure, and he made a difference around the world and gave people permission to do and say certain things; he was very bright that way and very learned, a very interesting poet. I thought it was really unfair to make slurs— the notion that “We arrived” and the other group is wrong, “We vs. Them”…That has to go! Labels such as “Post Avant-Garde”

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and “The School of Quietude” are really unfortunate terms!...The School of Quietude is “everybody else,” poets writing from the personal “I,” the lyric “I”—the mainstream, in other words those poets who get discussion in the magazines. Cazé: One thing that strikes me is how the critical style of French theorists is so much more poetic, in a sense, than the style of their counterparts in the United States—so that when French Theory was invented in the States, the theory was imported without the style… Perloff: That’s absolutely true—Barthes is for instance a great poetic writer. Foucault had a beautiful style, so did Deleuze and Derrida… Cazé: …and so isn’t there the risk of a misunderstanding here, when American poets think they write theory or philosophy…? Perloff: Yes, the inclination towards theory was a big push, because if you didn’t do theory you were considered a nobody, especially among women. I remember Kathleen Fraser telling me that the men of the Language group would not let her be part of their group if she didn’t participate in their theoretical discourse. But in the US “theory” was watered down to refer to a few key terms—rhizome, différend, death of the author, interpellation, supplement, doxa. Aji: You’ve told us several times that poetry has to be grounded in the every day; it has to be linked with life. How do you understand this practically or pragmatically? Perloff: I think everyday material, whether it’s political or something else, has to be included in one’s work. We do live in the world. I always like the work best that takes into account— that doesn’t mean, only takes into account—what is actually happening and is aware of the craziness of the culture, whether it be advertising on the billboards and posters, all the nonsense of it.

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Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery, for instance, use film imagery brilliantly in their work. And we have great documentary poets like Susan Howe. Now an interesting question I ask myself is why do I find documentary material interwoven with poetry so exciting? In Susan Howe’s work (to me, she is one of the most important poets), there is always a mix of very high, lyrical style and documentary bits with precise data and facts. Jacques Roubaud’s reference to rue de la Harpe in his preface for Haroldo de Campos’s Galáxias is another example. I could picture it exactly: it’s a narrow street, and its right here and now, and then you can move out from there. I think documentary veracity is extremely important. The Belgian poet-critic Jan Baetens (who writes in French) has argued that the Minimalist poets of the Anne-Marie Albiach circle are perhaps too remote, too removed from the everyday. There is something disingenuous in being too remote, I think. In other words, if you were Hölderlin, you could ignore the everyday, because you would be living in an entirely different world. But today it is hard to evade engagement. I think Susan Howe has done wonders in her various books with inserting documentation into lyrics, autobiographies, and so on. She places a treated photograph next to a lyric passage with a commentary on both and creates highly stylized complex texts. Cazé: And again, it’s a way of showing that the everyday is something constructed, not something natural. Perloff: Of course. It’s never natural. There’s no such thing as the natural. Roubaud’s Quelque Chose Noir (the constraint-based poetic elegy for his wife), for example, is highly constructed, but it gives you the sense that you are there, a sense of authenticity. The same thing occurs in the writings of Sophie Calle—a constructed authenticity that is wholly compelling. I had a discussion with Susan Howe the other day and asked her, “Why do you like dates and facts so much?” You know that she actually will give a date, and she sort of then recreates that date, whatever it is. It becomes a generative device, controlling your way of seeing things. It’s exactly the same thing in Frank O’Hara when

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he writes “It’s 12:33 on a Monday”—it is a way of creating intimacy and drawing the reader into the poem. But it is a difficult technique to keep up, as O’Hara learned toward the end of his short life. Cazé: You mentioned earlier the Anthology of Conceptual Poetry; can you talk a little bit more about anthologies? Perloff: Well, I’m not a great fan of anthologies, and I never use them in class. I take seriously David Antin’s quip that anthologies are to poets as the zoo is to animals. It is almost impossible to anthologize Pound because snatches of the cantos are not sufficient. The same thing is true of Zukofsky’s “A.” Anthologies always favor those who write short poems, and they give a skewed view of the state of the art. Then, too, the Internet has made them somewhat obsolete because now one can pick and choose and make one’s own selection. Cazé: But there’s a practical dimension to anthologies: they serve to introduce texts to people who would otherwise never read these authors. Perloff: Yes. I mentioned before that I first encountered O’Hara in the Anthology of New York Poets. So it’s true that sometimes anthologies introduce us to new work. And anthologies like the Jerome Rothenberg-Pierre Joris Poems for the Millenium12 are artworks in their own right; indeed Rothenberg has put together many intriguing, highly original anthologies like Revolution of the Word or Shaking the Pumpkin. These represent his own creative collaging and are very attractive, but I would caution that they are often misleading for students. Aji: What about anthologies compiled by poets? Usually they can be seen as manifestos: so what kind of manifesto would come out of conceptual poetry? Perloff: Yes, that’s very much a manifesto. These texts—like those by Vito Acconci which Craig Dworkin has edited and which are

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odd, experimental little texts in the Fluxus vein—are they really poetry?13 And if so, what is “poetry” anyway? There’s a lot of that material, conceptual poetry from the 1960s or 1970s, that they will have in that book about which many people will say that’s not poetry at all! You can find the first version on UbuWeb as well.14 These anthologies are best understood as manifestos. There are other anthologies like Jahan Ramazani’s Norton Anthology of Modern and Postmodern Poetry in two volumes that do try to be inclusive. Ramazani includes Hejinian, Howe, Bernstein, Michael Palmer. But there are many other equally important poets whom he does not include: for example, Rae Armantrout or Bruce Andrews or Rosmarie Waldrop. Ashbery must be the only poet who makes it into all of the anthologies, whether mainstream or not, and it would be interesting to examine the reasons for this ubiquity. Then too there’s the national problem. Steve McCaffery was omitted from every one of the early Language anthologies because he counts as Canadian. How do you solve this problem? One anthology I’d like to cite is Mary Ellen Solt’s book, Concrete Poetry: A World View, which unaccountably has never been reprinted. It was published in 1968; it’s the book on the topic. And she includes a little MacLow and Creeley under that rubric, which illustrates the fact that you can group people in different ways.15 In recent years, oddly, anthologies have gotten narrower rather than broader: we have rubrics like “experimental women poets,” “British poets,” “Asian American poets,” and so on. Cazé: Part of the problem is how do you assess the value on the contemporary. Perloff: Well, it’s a risk. And there is so much out there! My own way of dealing with the problem is to trust my own choices. Choose ten poets you really like, make up your own “anthology,” and teach that. It doesn’t have to be comprehensive, and at least you will be happy with your own choices. A more serious problem is that there is so little good discourse about poetry. My wish is that there would be a much

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better discourse: I think it was better in previous decades. I liked the days (in the sixties) when John Ashbery could write a review in the New York Times Book Review, saying that Adrienne Rich suffered from “objective-correlativitis,” otherwise known as Dutch Elm Disease! One could actually be irreverent. You could never say things like that now! Everybody is so polite. We have to get away from that politeness, because if no one is willing to argue the relative merits of this or that work, in the end nothing matters. But it should not be done in a personal or nasty way—which is why it is so hard to do—poetry should be openly debated. And then we need much greater precision. At a conference at Cornell University on “experimental” poetics, I made a real experiment once, putting side by side on the same sheet of paper one poem by A. R. Ammons, whom I like very much, and one by Denise Levertov. She was considered a “New American Poet” (Donald Allen’s term), a worthy heir of Williams, whereas Ammons was dismissed by this group as “mainstream.” As it turned out, no one in the room could tell which of the two poems belonged in the “experimental” category! It shows how superficial our classifications can be. And incidentally Ammons was also writing in the Williams tradition. So we must try to maintain a certain openness, which is not the same thing as mere inclusiveness however. Aji: “Does this really talk to me?” is the question that I always ask myself. It boils down to something very subjective. Perloff: I agree with you! Finally, we have to realize that we all have certain preconceptions and are looking for particular things. Bear in mind David Antin’s comic (but also very profound) aphorism, “From the modernism that you want, you get the postmodernism you deserve.” Poundians will quite naturally gravitate toward the Objectivists, the Black Mountain poets, and then contemporaries like Susan Howe who produce comparable documentary collages and treat proper names in Poundian ways. Those whose favorite modernist is H. D. will turn to a rather different postmodernism— say, the work of Robert Duncan, and beyond Duncan to Michael

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Palmer. And so on. I’m very interested in the historical dimension of all this, and why certain poets come to the fore when they do. That’s one of the fields in which fruitful research can be conducted. We could have dissertations endeavoring to refigure and remap things. Charles Bernstein, for instance, probably has more in common with a New York Jewish poet like David Antin than with West Coast language poets like Ron Silliman. So it’s a question of reconfiguring and reconnecting people differently. I believe I think of myself more as a historian than as a theorist, a historian-critic of poetry, although many people, I suppose, take such a designation as pedestrian. I like to try and understand why people write the way they do at a certain period, why other people react as they do, why writing is so eclectic now. I find the little magazines, online journals, and even blogs very fascinating. It’s a lively, confused, exciting time for poetry and poetics—a time that calls into question most of our earlier suppositions.

Notes 1

2

3

4

5 6 7

Poet Douglas Messerli is the editor of an important anthology of avantgarde poetry, From the Other Side of the Century: A New American Poetry 1960-1990 (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon Press, 1994). “Avant-Garde Tradition and Individual Talent: The Case of Language Poetry,” Revue Française d’Etudes Américaines 103 (février 2005): 117141. This was during a poetry reading at the Musée de la Coopération Franco-Américaine in Blérancourt (Aisne), organized by Jacques Darras for the “Poésie Américaine 1950-2000” conference in December 1999. Among the poets reading were Charles Bernstein, David Antin, Jerome Rothenberg, and Jackson MacLow. Hosted by the University of Pennsylvania, PennSound is an audiovisual archive making historical as well as more recent poetry readings and performances available for free on the Internet. http://writing.upenn. edu/pennsound/ George Oppen, Of Being Numerous, section 21. Opening line of Ezra Pound’s Pisan Cantos (Canto LXXIV). Frank O’Hara, “Meditations in an Emergency.”

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9

10

11

12

13

14

15

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The UbuWeb Anthology of Conceptual Writing, introduced and edited by Craig Dworkin, http://www.ubu.com/concept/ Kenneth Goldsmith, The Weather (Los Angeles: Makes Now, 2005). Cf. Marjorie Perloff, “ ‘Moving Information’: On Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather”, http://www.ubu.com/papers/kg_ol_perloff.html. A conference on Selected Poems was held in Caen in January 2008, organized by Hélène Aji and Jennifer Kilgore. “The 1960s: A Decade of Hope, Rage, & Change,” Orono, The University of Maine, October 29, 2004. Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry (U of California P, 1998), 2 vols. Craig Dworkin, Language to Cover a Page: The Early Writings of Vito Acconci (Cambridge: The MIT Press, 2006). http://www.ubu.com/ UBUWEB is produced by The Poetry Foundation. M. E. Solt, Concrete Poetry: A World View (Indiana UP, 1968). The book can be read on UbuWeb at http://www.ubu.com/papers/solt/

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Marjorie Perloff On & Off the Page of Poetry Interview with Kristine Samson and Nikolaj Rønhede for Apparatur

Apparatur: With one of your upcoming books in mind, I would like to ask you what the relation is between Marjorie Perloff and Gabriele Mintz? Marjorie Perloff: Gabriele Mintz is my real name. I changed it when I became an American citizen at age 13. I was just the age when one wants to be like everyone else, and I hated the name Gabriele, which I now find so pretty! I was named for Gabriele von Bülow, who was herself a noted writer and the daughter of Wilhelm von Humboldt. Evidently my mother wanted to commemorate them! But when I was 13 and people would call me “Gabby”—and I did talk a lot!—or “Gabi,” which is a Victorian word meaning “idiot,” the sort of word George Eliot might use, I was embarrassed. And I had a big crush on the girl who was assigned to be my guide in eighth grade, when I first came to the Fieldston School, which was an elegant private school. I had gone to public school till that point. Her name was Margie Leff, and I still make my capital M’s just as she did. She was my idol then;

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I looked up to her and I wanted to be just like her. Later, I lost touch with her completely. That is the Gabriele part, and the Perloff part is my husband’s name. I come from a generation where one still took one’s husband’s name. My daughters kept the name Perloff, but in my day one didn’t. It was just automatic; no married woman kept her maiden name. So whenever I see that name “Marjorie Perloff” in print, I always think it must refer to somebody else. It just doesn’t sound like me, and I now dislike the name Marjorie. It always makes me think of Marjorie Morningstar, the vapid heroine of Herman Wouk’s novel—a silly novel and film. And the name also recalls the radio character “My Little Margie.” When the prologue to my forthcoming The Vienna Paradox came out in Modernism/Modernity (April/2003), I got a very funny letter from John Ashbery, asking me if I remembered the sitcom character named Marge, Marge Hale on the radio program Easy Aces, which, he says, had been one of his favorites. And then some years ago, Charles Bernstein found out, and he wrote a poem for Gabriele Mintz: “Gertrude and Ludwig’s Bogus Adventure.” It is about Gertrude Stein and Wittgenstein, and I talk about that poem in the first chapter of The Vienna Paradox (2004). Most people who have read it have no idea it’s about me. Apparatur: Let’s move a little further back into your career. I noticed at the seminars that when you were presented to the audience, they started with The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981). Maybe it is possible to see that work as a turning point, so how was that book received and how do you look at it today? Perloff: Yes, I’ve noticed here that the persons who introduce me at the lectures always begin with The Poetics of Indeterminacy, whereas at home, they usually start with Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (1977). And before I published the O’Hara book, I had written two other books. First, a very technical study called Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats, which was my Catholic University PhD dissertation. It argued for a strong semantic component to rhyme, and I still think this is important.

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But I used statistical tables and so on, as was the custom then. The funny thing is that certain critics like Hugh Kenner take it to be my best book because it’s so “factual.” Then in 1973 I published The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell. This is my only book now out of print, and I am no longer a great admirer of Lowell’s although I just wrote a long essay for the journal Parnassus on the Collected Poems, which has just been published. I wanted to reassess Lowell’s achievement. But it is true that when The Poetics of Indeterminacy came out, it gradually had an impact. Originally, though, there were some nasty reviews, saying the theory was all wrong, that I didn’t understand indeterminacy, and so on. The early reviews were less interested in my account of particular poets than in the “theory” itself. But in time, readers came to see that what mattered was not some hard-and-fast theory but that the book gave us a way to understand John Ashbery, John Cage, and the “literalist” tradition out of which they came. The Princeton University Press was not very enthusiastic, and when I asked when it would appear in paperback, their editor said that they didn’t usually put monographs in paperback! I didn’t know my book was a “monograph.” But then Northwestern picked it up and brought out the paperback in 1984, and it’s been selling well ever since. But I wrote Poetics of Indeterminacy more than twenty years ago, and if I were to write it now, it would probably be rather different. Apparatur: I think it was a very useful distinction you made in The Poetics of Indeterminacy between the symbolist mode and what you there call “The Other Tradition” the antisymbolist mode— because it gives you something to work with, which means you can separate for instance Samuel Beckett and W. H. Auden—two poets of the same period that has just about nothing to do with each other. Perloff: I really felt that the Beckett connection was important. Beckett is rarely classified as a poet, and yet he is of course one of the great ones. The short prose pieces like “Imagination Dead Imagine” and “Ping” and the monologic novels like “The Unnamable” are very poetic, so I really wanted Beckett there.

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The book began with the following question: how does one read, say, John Ashbery? At that time, even people who now like him like Helen Vendler were saying his work was no more than meaningless nonsense. Ashbery has the poem that begins with the line, “You can’t say it that way anymore”: what he meant, I think, is that a new historical and cultural situation demands new and different modes of writing. When critics finally came to accept Ashbery, they insisted that there was nothing new, that it was just an update of Eliot or Auden or Stevens. Thus they conveniently forgot how difficult they themselves had taken this poetry to be. Most of the poetry at that time was based on the straightforward “here’s what happened to me” model: a coherent first-person speaker ruminating on something that happened to him or her. And Ashbery doesn’t fit that mold. In retrospect, though, it is true that there is a lot of Eliot in Ashbery, which is not to say the two poets aren’t also very different. A critic named James Longenbach wrote an essay arguing for Ashbery’s Eliotic “modernism.” I responded to it in a piece called “Normalizing John Ashbery” for the online journal Jacket. To normalize means to leave out all the difficult parts of the poems; then of course he “fits” into this or that tradition. The Poetics of Indeterminacy also introduced me to John Cage in the sense that it was after that book that I met him, and that was very important to me. I invited Cage to a session at the Modern Language Association meeting in NY and that was the start of a wonderful friendship. Apparatur: I remember that David Antin in what it means to be avant-garde (1993) tells a story about the conference where you presented the chapter from The Poetics of Indeterminacy about him and John Cage as poets, and that it was not very well received. Perloff: Yes, that was an amazing incident! There was a conference called “After the Flood,” referring, I believe, to the flood of Romanticism—the really great poetry in English. I was the only woman speaker at the conference—that, of course, wouldn’t happen today—and the other speakers were Harold Bloom,

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Donald Davie, W. S. Merwin, John Hollander, and Richard Howard. Howard and Hollander both gave papers on Ashbery because they wanted to please Harold Bloom. I can’t remember what the others talked about. At any rate, I gave my talk on the performance poetics of Cage and Antin. It was a difficult venue because the Folger Theater is completely dark; you can’t see the audience from the stage. When I finished there was a silence, and then Harold Bloom said, “Do you think these writers are of any interest to anyone?” Can you imagine? What could I do but say yes, and then Bloom added, “I don’t think people here need their time wasted by discourse about such writers.” Period. Even Donald Davie, who was quite conservative, came to my defense. I was teaching at the University of Maryland outside Washington at that time, and I had a student named Don Duncan who was sort of the black leather radical type, and he raised his hand and said, “Professor Bloom, don’t you think it is time to move into the twentieth century and open yourself up to new things?” Whereupon Harold Bloom stood up and said, “Young man you have insulted me!” and he stalked off the stage—and simply left. It was awful. There was a cocktail party afterwards where everybody felt sorry for me, but it was very humiliating. That night I kept thinking about things I could have said, as one does the night after, but it was too late! And then it turned out that I had made a great faux pas. When Bloom said that he didn’t like Antin or Cage, I responded, “I suppose our tastes differ. I, for instance, don’t like Robert Penn Warren” (whom Bloom had written about at length). Then it turned out that Robert Penn Warren’s daughter Rosanna Warren, who is now a very well-known poet in the US, was in the audience. I must say I find her work even less interesting than her father’s. But Robert Penn Warren was the author of All the King’s Men, and he was a very familiar name because he had also coedited the famous textbook Understanding Poetry with Cleanth Brooks. This textbook, known as “Brooks & Warren,” was used in every classroom. But I never found his own poetry interesting, and how could I know his daughter was in the (dark) audience? So I suppose I got into big trouble!

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The next day, Harold Bloom did apologize because everybody had evidently been so angry at him. He got up, and he said, “I must apologize to Marjorie for yesterday because it was like three men (himself, Howard, and Hollander, who all objected to John Cage especially) raping one woman!” I should have said I do hope if I am to be raped by three men, it will be a better set than this little group! Anyway, the incident became famous! I now consider it one of the best things that ever happened to me, because if I could deal with this barrage of direct insult, I suppose I could deal with almost everything. I have many colleagues who never dare to say what they think, especially in a public situation. But we need a little courage! In any case, no one ever asked me again whether “these people” were worth talking about. So it was a victory of sorts. Apparatur: In The Dance of the Intellect (1985), you write that the dichotomy between the symbolist and the antisymbolist mode in retrospect perhaps was “too neat” and in The Futurist Moment (1986) a year later you say it was “too sharp.” What made you change your mind? Perloff: Over time I came to see that the distinction was less hard and fast than I had made it. Ashbery, for instance, was deeply influenced by Auden, on whom he wrote his undergraduate thesis at Harvard. There is a strong gay connection that I had underplayed. And early Auden is often difficult in an Ashbery vein. Then, too, I came to see that the poets I was discussing in Poetics of Indeterminacy did use metaphor as well as metonymy and vice versa. And even Frank O’Hara’s poetry has some key symbols. So to put Eliot and Auden in one camp and Ashbery in the other was an exaggeration, although I like to think that it was a necessary exaggeration. At the time, it was important to stress that symbolism was not the only game in town. And a slightly exaggerated, controversial view forces people to think. My thesis was truer with reference to Cage and Stein than to O’Hara or Ashbery. I stand by everything I say in the Stein chapter, and it’s important to understand the literalism of her

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mode. But in hindsight, O’Hara’s proper names, which I took to be “just” names, do signify. One sees these things after the fact, when the poet’s work is familiar and we begin annotating the texts. This happens in the case of all writers, I think. Apparatur: And at the same time you have the first essay on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry in that book—The Dance of the Intellect—in 1985; I guess it was almost the only thing written about them by others than themselves, so again that must have meant something? Perloff: That essay came out in American Poetry Review even earlier and was reprinted in The Dance of the Intellect. That made a big difference, and that is because again things happen fortuitously; I am a big believer in that. I was introduced to L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry by a student at Maryland, Douglas Messerli, who became the publisher of Sun & Moon Press and now Green Integer. He was very close to Charles Bernstein, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, and Susan Howe—and he introduced me to them. I had never heard of them in the late seventies, and Douglas was editing various little magazines where they were featured. Then, as often happens, there was a personal circumstance. Charles Bernstein happened to come to LA, where I live, and gave a reading at the Beyond Baroque poetry center, and that is how I got to know him. When I heard him, I became very much interested in the poetry, even though when I had just read it on the page, I had my doubts. Once I had become interested in Charles, I began to read the other Language poets. So you see, things happen fortuitously. In the early 80s, I was writing a regular column for American Poetry Review, and I told the editors I wanted to write a piece on L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry (as it was then designated), and the editors were highly dubious, but they did print the piece. Twenty years have gone by, and they’re still deeply suspicious of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry.

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Apparatur: Let’s move into The Futurist Moment (1986), where you say that it was perhaps “too sharp” a distinction between the symbolist and the antisymbolist mode. Isn’t that almost like saying that the distinction doesn’t hold? And in that book you also go more into the relationship between the historical background and the works. Perloff: The Futurist Moment provides the background for The Poetics of Indeterminacy. In other words, whereas the latter is a synchronic study, The Futurist Moment is diachronic. What I wanted to do was to go back and trace the derivation of the phenomena in question in Poetics. After all, I had discussed Rimbaud, but I had not previously studied the derivation of collages and manifestos and these hybrid forms which I had already been talking about in terms of Cage. In fact, it is Cage who also directed me toward Futurism because he was interested in the noise music of Luigi Russolo and in the idea that any sound can be “music” if rightly understood. There is the essay in The Dance of Intellect on Cage that also deals with breaking down of genres. So actually I think the three books discussed so far are closely related, and indeed, John Ashbery wrote a blurb for The Futurist Moment as did John Cage. Both Ashbery and Cage, and especially David Antin, were students of the early avant-garde. I still am interested in the prewar decade. And 1913 remains my favorite year! It was the year of Stravinsky and Swann’s Way, and of an extraordinary number of avantgarde works. And I was really interested in the French of that period before the war and how incredibly innovative they were, and David Antin had put me on to Blaise Cendrars’ “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian.” So everything relates: for a long time, David had urged me to read Cendrars and dismissed Pound as someone who was thirty years behind European time. That’s exaggerated, but I know exactly what David means. Now regarding Pound, whom I loved and still love in many ways, I am in the process of writing a review of the 1200-page edition of Pound’s poems and translations (minus the Cantos), put together for the Library

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of America by Richard Sieburth. The volume includes Pound’s translations from Italian and Provençal, the Noh Theater, and the Confucian poems. I’ve been reading it on and off in my hotel room on this trip, and, taken at face value, it does seem quite oldfashioned, compared to the work of Cendrars, Apollinaire, etc. For example, it uses many archaisms. Meanwhile, Cendrars was writing casually—“It was in the time of my adolescence”—and producing a very daring and original poetry. Between these poems and the manifestos and typographical collages of the Futurists, it was an amazing period. The artists of “The Futurist Moment” prefigured so much of what was going to happen in our own time. So actually, I think those books are fairly closely related, except that The Futurist Moment is more historical, but I actually think of myself as perhaps more of a historian than a critic because I really am interested in literary history. I am really interested in how things change and evolve—that whole issue of how avant-gardes change and how movements change and why, and how such change relates to the culture and the history. And so The Futurist Moment provides a backdrop for these things—for example, the breakdown between the distinction of verse and prose—I have a whole chapter on that in the book and then it ends with Robert Smithson’s conceptual art, which is again so curiously contemporary. Apparatur: Could you say a little more on your distinction between movement and moment? Perloff: Movement would refer, say, to Italian Futurism—its origins, membership, contribution to various fields. But I write not about that whole movement, which has been chronicled often enough, but about the Futurist Moment, which is to say, the moment across Europe and indeed in the US, when a certain ethos dominated the art scene. I make no attempt at coverage— for example, I say nothing about the Italian poet Papini, who was a member of the Futurist movement. On the other hand, Blaise Cendrars was not a member at all; he just shared certain views and predispositions.

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The moment in question is the particular moment before World War I when art underwent a revolutionary change, a real rupture that changed art habits for the whole coming century. I think that the avant-garde is much more interesting in this earlier period than it was, say, in the 20s where you had surrealism. I have never cared much for surrealism. I’ve always thought of it as a throwback to romanticism. Surrealism went back to notions of the absolute and transcendence and the unconscious and personal emotion, in what was finally a version of romanticism. That doesn’t mean there are no individual surrealists who are very interesting, but I never thought it was as important as the earlier movements. I also disliked their politics; Aragon and Breton were communists—an irony since they could have hardly been more elitist and had no use for the working class. Surrealism is very popular, I think, because you can analyze its works in a way you can’t analyze those of earlier movements, for instance, the writing of Stein. I like the surrealist cadavre exquis and so on, but in general when it comes to Joyce and Stein or Eliot and Pound, the earlier work is better than the latter, and by the late twenties modernism has become very problematic. Apparatur: It is in “Modernism and Postmodernism—Approaching the Present in American Poetry” (1972) that David Antin says that “Pound was really 30 years behind European time.” And in that essay he ends up saying that Pound and Williams aren’t really the significant poets of the twentieth century—the significant poets are Stein and Cage. It looks a little like you have picked up on that. Perloff: I agree although I love Williams, I always teach Williams, and I have written quite a bit on Williams. What David means, and he is purposely exaggerating, is that Williams is still quite a romantic in many ways; he doesn’t question basic forms like the lyric or epic, and Paterson is thematically somewhat thin. But I am less exclusionary than David. I like almost all the “big” Modernists—Pound and Williams, Eliot and Wallace Stevens. Williams was the one the sixties made such a fuss about, Williams was the guru for Creeley, for Olson, for O’Hara, for all

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the New York poets, and I think they overdid it a little bit. I think this may be what David means in part about Williams. From the vantage point of 60s poets, one would think that Williams was the ultimate inventor of a “natural” speech-based poetry, which is hardly the case. But in the case of Pound, I disagree with David; I think Pound is incredibly important, and I don’t think David has ever really read the Cantos with the attention they deserve. I wrote a piece recently to a current issue of Paideuma (formerly the Pound journal, now a more general journal for Modernist Studies), on Pound’s nominalism vis-à-vis Duchamp’s “infra-thin.” The essay is coming out in my new collection of essays, Differentials (2004). There are aspects to Pound that are absolutely unique—his use of proper names, for instance, and his use of documentary material. Students continue to be fascinated by his grand experiment. Now, David is speaking from the point of view of the practicing poet and discussing what he takes his influences to be, and I appreciate that, but it can sometimes be irritating. Pound scholarship, let’s remember, is superb. As weak as Stein scholarship is, you have the best people writing on Pound: Richard Sieburth, who just edited the Library of America edition of the Poems and Translations; Hugh Kenner; Guy Davenport; Christine Brooke-Rose; Eva Hesse; the late Donald Davie—all these are themselves interesting writers who also write on Pound. It’s an amazing body of scholarship. Now, at the Paris Pound conference, eight poets were asked to read, among them Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin. The audience was of course made up of Pound scholars. David’s contribution was to tell the tale of how and why he had no use for Pound. It was funny but perhaps not the right venue! Apparatur: I would like to take up the question of history. You said earlier that you sometimes consider yourself more of a historian than a critic in some ways. Could you expand on that? Perloff: I shouldn’t have said “more than” but “both.” I do feel that today there is much too little historical scholarship. The

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New Historicists never really dealt with contemporary material. And you can only understand certain things by placing them in a context and on a timeline, and then they begin to make sense. Take for instance The Poetics of Indeterminacy: once you see Ashbery in the Rimbaudian context, his poetry makes more sense. Framing is crucial to literary study. Literary history is often dismissed today as “mere” positivism, a false temporality, but although Foucault taught us that we don’t have “text” and “context”—that all texts are interwoven—it is still important to track change and development. For example, it’s important to understand that American poetry, poetics, and criticism are very much divided between those who still come out of a British tradition and those who don’t. The British poetic tradition is much more conservative than ours: they look for echoes of Thomas Hardy or the Victorians in contemporary poetry. Critics like Sir Frank Kermode are wholly suspicious of avant-garde developments and prefer, say, Richard Wilbur to John Ashbery. The well-made poem still rules. Even for Harold Bloom, whose own roots are hardly English, the Anglo Romantic tradition dominates. He approvingly called Ashbery a “spent seer.” No modern or contemporary poet, in this scheme of things, can ever surpass—or even move away from—Wordsworth or Emerson or Emily Dickinson. It seems to me a restrictive point of view. Many of our poets, after all, were influenced by European developments. Bloom further insists that it is impossible to be influenced by somebody who writes in another language. The French, he argued, have no understanding of American or English poetry— what can you expect of readers whose favorite American poet is Edgar Allan Poe! Now that the French have promoted L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry and other European countries like yours have too, the word is they really don’t understand that poetry anyway, so— so what? Danish and Swedish poet-critics might like Gertrude Stein, but that doesn’t mean anything. Or again, John Hollander once dismissed John Cage, arguing that Cage just doesn’t “work” hard enough! I suppose by that he means that the poet must

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imaginatively reconstruct the universe and things. Or that the poet should comment on public events. Ironically, Renaissance scholars are often much more tolerant of the New Poetics. Renaissance poetry, after all, does not boast great or unique subject matter; it may be no more than the poetry of unrequited love, for example. The poet’s job is not to invent new subject matter but to use language as inventively as possible. And so one hopes that there can be some sort of “opening of the field” without such resistance to the New. Apparatur: Then again, when it comes to the connection across the Atlantic between Europe and the United States, it is almost as if there always was one in the past two centuries, whether it is romantic or in the other tradition. Perloff: Exactly. I think a lot more needs to be written on these connections. To begin with, we never had an avant-garde in the United States until after the Second World War when the refugees came to US—Max Ernst to New York, Josef Albers to Black Mountain College, and so on. That created for the first time an avant-garde that influenced people like Cage because an earlier avant-garde like “New York Dada” was mainly the reflection of Duchamp’s presence in New York. It took a while for the United States to catch up. Now it looks as if it is the other way around. Here in Denmark, you seem to be looking to American poetry and art for inspiration. But I am not even sure that is fair because I think you have a richer and much older tradition in some ways than we have. When it comes to theory, American aesthetic has been highly dependent on French theory. In the beginning L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry was basically poeticized poststructuralist theory, but that was useful because it was a corrective to the untheorized poetry of the sixties and seventies. Theory had a big impact. It has less so today, because few people now read French. Steve McCaffery, the Anglo-Canadian poet who knows French well, was reading Foucault and Derrida back in the early 70s. Now we are more dependent on translations, so there is a time gap.

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Apparatur: To make a jump and go up to 21st-Century Modernism (2002), in that book you put, perhaps suddenly, Eliot and Ashbery in the same boat and Charles Bernstein at their side. How did Charles respond to that? Perloff: Very favorably. At first, it seemed as if people would object to my “return” to Eliot. But I always loved the early Eliot; it was only the public image of Eliot that was so bothersome. I still don’t like the late religious Eliot of Four Quartets. And when I reread Eliot’s essays like “Tradition and the Individual Talent,” I noticed how similar the viewpoint was to, say, Charles’s, even though the elitism that runs through Eliot’s essay is different. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets have regularly cited the Objectivists (Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff) as their key influence or have paid homage to Stein, but I don’t think that Charles is, in fact, anything like Stein. He has written very interesting things about Stein—that’s a different issue—but his own racy, documentary, satiric, colloquial poetry is hardly stylistically related to Stein’s or, for that matter, to the Objectivists. But when Charles says, as he does in his essays, that every word counts when making a poem, that to change one word is to change the poem, he sounds just like Eliot! And I noticed that, whatever else, my students have always loved “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock.” They think it’s a great poem, a poem as “modern” today as when it was written. It has ironies and tonal shifts that remind me of Charles’s poems. I am not saying that he consciously comes out of Eliot, but his poetry does testify to a great respect for the modernist tradition. “The Lives of the Toll Takers,” for example, is a poem that recalls the verbal density and complexity of The Wasteland. Then too, I always think it is helpful to juxtapose texts that normally wouldn’t be juxtaposed. Actually Charles was quite intrigued by my commentary. I wanted to see what would happen when we looked at the earlier Eliot and understood that here was an avant-garde that was squelched abruptly by the Great War, by the “march of events,” as Pound put it. Then in the forties and fifties, Eliot was claimed by the Right as a great Traditional Poet. So I wanted to reverse

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that image of Eliot. Ironically, I now get constant requests to write on Eliot—because he has until recently been delegated to the Other Side. I did write a second piece on Eliot, this time on “Gerontion,” that is coming out in my new book, Differentials. No sooner had I written 21st-Century Modernism than I was asked to give a lecture for the Eliot Society. This is the way things work when one doesn’t tow the party line. We are, in any case, beginning to have revisionary readings of Modernism. I heard the critic Charles Altieri recently say that it was time to revaluate the Williams-Stevens relationship and that, in the end, Stevens was the much more important poet. Williams appealed to the Beats as a marvelous urban poet, a democratic and colloquial poet, unlike Stevens. But today things obviously look somewhat different. So, to come back to Eliot, when you read the lines “Let us go then, you and I / When the evening is spread out against the sky / Like a patient etherized upon a table,” as if for the first time, these lines absolutely knock you out! They are so graphic and arresting. In America, 21st-Century Modernism was criticized not for devoting space to Eliot but for saying that his later poetry is not as good. My dear friend and colleague Al Gelpi objected as did many others and they hope to convert me to Four Quartets. Maybe they will. Apparatur: I am thinking of the essay on postmodernism, reprinted as the first in Poetry On & Off the Page (1998), where you are talking about the “synecdochic fallacy”—taking one work to represent a poet or a period. Isn’t it a kind of synecdochic fallacy you are making here taking “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock” to represent the early modernism of the twentieth century? Perloff: Touché, although I use Duchamp, Stein, and Khlebnikov to represent other equally important facets of Modernism. Remember that this was a commissioned book in the Blackwell Manifestos series, although of course it couldn’t really be a manifesto either, given the Blackwell format. Space limitations were severe. And I thought: if I deal with the whole twentieth century, how can I leave out Eliot? I had written a great deal on

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Pound and Williams so I didn’t feel it necessary to go through that material again. So I decided to write about Eliot’s use of the mot juste and the new rhythm as exemplary of one facet of modernism. Take rhythm. When you read Eliot’s earlier poems against the background of English poetry of the period, you are bowled over. Take the lines “Here I am an old man in a dry month / Being read to by a boy waiting for rain,” which culminate in the passage, “Nor knee deep in the salt marsh, heaving a cutlass / Bitten by flies, fought…” The way the voice comes down heavily on that crucial word “fought” is simply brilliant. It can’t be duplicated, as we can tell when we look at translations of the passage. I think the main change in my point of view toward twentiethcentury poetry is that, as time has gone by, the big division between modernism and postmodernism that once seemed crucial no longer seems so. The real break came not in the sixties, as is sometimes thought, but much earlier. Modernism was a revolution; we can see that now. Apparatur: It makes perfect sense. But don’t you think there are some advantages in getting rid of Eliot, and Pound for that matter, with all their anti-Semitism, their weird politics, and so on? Like for instance Charles Bernstein did, when he took Zukofsky and Reznikoff as a point to depart from? Perloff: That is true, but remember that every poet reacts against an earlier generation that seems threatening, politics or otherwise. Of course Modernist politics and racism are unacceptable today. But we have to remember how and why these views arose, and after all, Zukofsky himself was a devotee of Pound, whom he idolized. Why was that? Because Zukofsky understood that Pound’s aesthetic was a great breakthrough, politics notwithstanding. And bear in mind that we can’t take the Language poets at face value. Just like any of their precursors, they state certain views that the poetry itself dispels. It’s the point Jerome McGann made in The Romantic Ideology. We can’t read the Romantics merely according to their own lights. Now that we have some distance on Language poetry, the same holds true.

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Look at Abstract Expressionism, which was considered such a break with the past. Robert Rosenblum came along and noted the relation between Mark Rothko and Turner and traced the genealogy of Abstract Expressionism back to the romantics. But when I am asked “Are you not contradicting yourself?” I want to say with Whitman, “Do I contradict myself? Very well, then I contradict myself.” That’s how ideas develop. I am always suspicious about a theory that is absolutely fixed in certain ways because of course it is going to have to change depending on external circumstances. You need certain correctives, and you need a corrective to that. Thus Foucault’s emphasis on power qua power rather than ideology now seems dubious. But this is in no way a critique of Foucault because he was talking about something very relevant at the moment. In my essay on Stein in 21st-Century Modernism, I make a case for Stein as a modernist. Now there is at least one book, Ellen Berry’s, on Stein as a precursor of postmodernism, and indeed it seems as if she was “ahead of her time” and paved the way for feminist, lesbian writing. But in a larger sense, Stein was very much the modernist, for instance in her belief that art makes life matter and that there is a basic gulf between high and pop art. For Gertrude Stein high art was the thing; yes, she used every day elements, but she certainly didn’t want to be considered somebody who was just like everybody else, producing a populist art. On the contrary. Then, too, Stein respected the integrity of the individual media; she barely broke down the genres, and she certainly didn’t believe in intermedia works, so she was very much of her period in that way. And she wanted Eliot to like her and Pound to like her and shared their view of the “great” artwork. This leads to a crucial question about the current scene and the conflation of high and low. If one really gets rid of all separation between “art” and “life,” high and low, what’s left? Why, then, support the arts or concern oneself with artists? The everyday is good enough. It’s a very unsatisfactory position. We now have a younger generation growing up in the United States that would like to have a little “art” in their lives. They are reading Joyce and Pound and Yeats again and are thrilled because it’s all new to them.

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Andreas Huyssen, who argued so persuasively that there is no distinction between “high” and “low” in his book After the Great Divide, has now called his argument into question. At a recent meeting of the Modernist Studies Association (MSA), he admitted that, carried to an extreme, his theory made art itself redundant and that we do need art. Another point is that one can’t simply study poetry or fiction as cultural artifact. After all, the poets themselves have read a great deal of earlier literature, and so, in order to understand them, you must know some literary history. Apparatur: That makes me think of Jerome McGann and how he again and again has taken some of the modernist works and revitalized them by reading them from new points of view—take for instance his reading of “The Snowman” in Radiant Textuality (2001)—is that more fruitful in your opinion? And maybe you could relate it to your essay “Pound / Stevens—Whose Era?” reprinted in The Dance of the Intellect. Perloff: Yes, I know Jerry’s essay on “The Snowman,” and it is very interesting. And yes, you have to go back and read the “map”; that’s what people have always done to see the literature through new eyes. Speaking of new eyes, “Pound / Stevens—Whose Era?” has been the subject of a recent roundtable the Wallace Stevens Journal conducted, and I wrote a short piece pointing out that, useful as my piece was when it appeared in the early eighties, I no longer feel the same way. You see, at the time, there was all this fuss about Stevens, and nobody read Pound, especially at Yale where there is the Beinecke Library that has THE Pound Archive. The curators at the library were complaining that no one was ever using the library. In the Yale English Department, Pound was taboo because of his politics, and the “Yale School”—Harold Bloom, Geoffrey Hartman, Hillis Miller and Paul de Man—took the Cantos to be unpoetic whereas Stevens was their god. That made me want to take up the cause. But actually when you go back to Stevens now from the vantage point of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, you can see

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that his strange language, partly very abstract, partly so concrete, was very innovative. And the titles are very much like the titles of some Bernstein or McCaffery poems—these strange titles that have nothing to do with the poem. So Stevens certainly now needs to be reconsidered from that angle. Susan Howe for instance says that Stevens is her favorite poet. Different poetic formations reveal new things about the poetry of the past. There certainly was a political motivation for my Pound/Stevens essay. The politics of 21st-Century Modernism, by the way, and I have not mentioned this—I thought I had said this in the Introduction, but maybe it isn’t clear enough—is that I wanted to take Eliot away from Mark Strand and Robert Pinsky and all those conventional poets who claim they are the heirs of Eliot and that these other poets are just interlopers. I wanted to show that, if you read contemporary radical poetry accurately, you will see that the derivation works quite differently from textbook history. So I have wanted, throughout my career, to make an intervention that would change things. As Stevens himself said, “It must change.”

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The Alter(ed) Ground of Poetry and Pedagogy Conversation with Charles Bernstein

This conversation was conducted by e-mail between October 15 and November 22, 2002. I sent Charles one or two questions at a time, and he responded exactly as he saw fit. There are two major threads here: (1) the changing state of poetry culture over the past two decades and the response of pedagogy to those changes and (2) a discussion of specific Bernstein poems and how they work. The second area is one Bernstein has often seemed reluctant to talk about. Marjorie Perloff: Charles, almost twenty years have gone by since that fateful MLA when you delivered the lecture “The Academy in Peril: William Carlos Williams Meets the MLA” (1983). I still remember what a tempest you caused and how furious the old timers like M. L. Rosenthal were at your demolition job. You were, in those days, a great fighter against “official verse culture.” How does the “situation in poetry” today relate to that earlier moment? Do you feel the fight against official verse culture has been won? Can it ever be won? How would you describe the current scene vis-à-vis that of 1983?

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Charles Bernstein: I remember after that speech—and it was more a speech than a “paper”—Allen Ginsberg told me that while he liked what I said, I should talk more slowly and breathe between phrases. I think I must have been going at twice the words per minute than the other people at the MLA, but they seemed to get the drift. I don’t think I’ve slowed down in the meantime, but then I’m more a tortoise type than quick like a bunny. Perloff: You a tortoise? You’ll have a hard time convincing your friends of that because you are in fact super quick on the uptake though I agree you’re not a bunny! Bernstein: Well, slow and steady and all that, if not unrelenting. I take it as a given that the situation has changed, but I believe the necessity to respond to our current predicament is as acute now as ever. In 1983, I didn’t anticipate that my remarks would provoke repeated waves of applause, though I did expect the ire. The response to that talk, and lots of other interventions many of us were making at the time, suggested that certain long-entrenched views about American modernist poetry were collapsing under the weight of their own dogmatism, if dogmatism can be said to have weight and not just bark. It was a commonplace, in those distant days of yore, to accuse those of us questioning such dogmatism of being dogmatic, but I have long found that some of the more narrow-minded people are the quickest to cry “Ideologue!” at those who question their prerogatives. Of course— Today we live in far different times: We have no poetry wars, no aesthetic crimes; At last, we are all one big family Under the tent of art and harmony. (I sometimes ask Felix, my ten-year-old son, if my silliness is going to cause him some future harm. I mean things like breaking out into doggerel in the middle of lunch or telling jokes that are all schtick and no punch line.)

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What I think has changed is that the radical modernism I was putting forward in that address—poets and poetics—has received much greater acknowledgement since that time, both inside and outside the academy, as the result of the advocacy of many poets, scholars, and editors. At the same time, modern and contemporary poetry is, if anything, becoming more peripheral to literary studies, not only in the universities but also in elementary and high schools. Nor has the problem with “official verse culture” disappeared, despite far greater prominence for several of my contemporaries and the continued resilience of many of the approaches to poetry that met with so much resistance in the 70s and 80s. I do think that Creative Writing programs, taken in aggregate, are more open now to alternative approaches to poetic composition, but when I read The Writer’s Chronicle of the Associated Writing Programs, I mostly see the same problems many of us criticized two decades ago, though now expressed with a kind of embattled, nostalgic tinge of those who have known their ground is more like thin ice: better to skate on than to pound. I find the publication rather charming, in a perverse way. Almost any poet will tell you not enough poetry gets reviews in publications with wide circulation (PWC): big city newspapers, the newsweeklies, and the national journals of culture and opinion. Part of the problem would simply be solved if poetry were treated by these publications as a national cultural “beat”: if poetry were covered the way art or TV is. But the reality is that poetry is economically too small potatoes (even if the potatoes are sweet) to be able to count this way. The larger problem is that contemporary poetry books suffer the same neglect as contemporary philosophy books (as Peter Hare pointed out to me recently) or really any number of “scholarly” books, books not intended for a “general” audience partly because the general audience is kept ignorant of their existence and the chronic significance for their lives, if we consider the life of the mind essential for the body politic. And while you might make an argument for the fact that poetry ought to be of greater “general” interest than these other “difficult” books, I wouldn’t, since I see the fate of all of us as related to a lack of

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judgment, a lack of cultural and intellectual commitment, on the part of the PWC. In contrast, I am impressed and grateful that such small publications as The Boston Review and Rain Taxi can offer more thorough and thoughtful book reviewing than the combined efforts of the PWC. When it comes to poetry, the PWC do a great disservice to their readers: their coverage is, to use the terms of opprobrium so popular in their reviews, inadequate and of poor quality. Almost no coverage is given of the field, something that is otherwise the prerequisite of journalism, and the choices of what is reviewed seem at best arbitrary, though obviously skewed to the trade presses, even though these presses, by almost anyone’s measure, are responsible for only a small proportion of the significant poetry of our time. (Sometimes this point gets misunderstood: it’s not that I think that any given book that is reviewed is no good or that no book I care about is ever reviewed nor do I think only the books I prefer should be reviewed or that if a few of them were that would solve the problem.) In any case, and to put it baldly, I think only a very few of the poetry books published over the past twenty years that you or I would value most highly have received any attention in the PWC; no matter how important these works may be for many of us involved with the art, they remain invisible to the literate reader who relies on these publications for news of what is going on in poetry. There is a connection here to literary prizes, too: not so much who wins them—since there are a great number with many different perspectives—but which ones get reported in the PWC. The Pulitzer, one among many prizes at least its equal (and one with a track record as bad as, but similar to, the PWC)—gets special attention because it is a journalism award: an award given by a group that cares little or nothing for poetry but gives plenty of attention to its self-promotion in its own organs. I recall when Jackson Mac Low won the lifetime achievement award (then called the Dorothea Tanning and now the Wallace Stevens prize) from the Academy of American Poets in 1999, there wasn’t even a mention of that in The New York Times, which nonetheless has often reported on the award, calling it poetry’s best-paying prize;

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but then Mac Low, even when honored by nothing less than Official Verse Culture at its best, is presumably one of the unmentionables in the land of the PWC. Does it matter? It’s not that the books don’t circulate or are not taught in universities or discussed in small press and Web journals or on LISTSerV discussion groups. What difference does it make? I know a lot of people are indifferent, focusing their critiques more on universities than the PWC. But I think what Andrew ross called “the oxygen of publicity” matters quite a bit. Poetry survives and thrives nurtured by its committed readers and practitioners, but I think the value of poetry is not just for us but indeed for this wider public and that the culture suffers when it isolates itself from its poets. Perloff: What you describe seems to me entirely accurate, but it’s more symptom than cause, isn’t it? If the PWC felt that the public “out there” had even the slightest interest in the material in question, of course they would review it and write articles about it. And the university presses would want to do more to promote the work. So where did this vacuum come from? Is it that English Departments themselves have abdicated their “literary” role, wanting desperately to teach and study anything but “literature”? Is it just a general dumbing down of the culture? But if the latter is the case, why do certain very difficult works get quite a bit of attention? For instance Oulipo. Perec’s Life a User’s Manual had, I recall, a front-page review in the TLS, and even La Disparition, translated by Gilbert Adair, did relatively well. And then in the architecture world, people will pour into shows of very arcane and avant-garde material—I’m thinking of a recent Coop Himmelblau exhibit at the Schindler house in LA—and my hairdresser, to give just one example, went all the way to Bilbao to see the Frank Gehry Guggenheim Museum, and he’ll go see Surrealist art shows at this or that museum. So what is it about “poetry” today that makes it seem so “specialized” to people? Or, to put the question another way, why do people accept the “new” and unexpected in architecture and often in the visual arts in general but want their poetry to be “clear” à la Billy Collins?

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Bernstein: You tell me. There are so many directions to go in answer to your question I feel like the guy at the end of Bergman’s The Passion of Anna who is pacing from the left to the right of the screen with that drop-dead chilling voice-over, “This time his name is Andreas Winkelman.” This time its name is American poetry. On the one hand, yes of course the PWC are responding to a profound lack of interest in poetry as an art form, but on the other hand, do they aid or even foment this disinterest, or are they just the messengers reporting the news? Why do they cover the poetry they do cover rather than something else? Why is the aesthetic right given such free reign to trash “radical poetry” while the views of the other sides (all 44 and a half of them) go largely unheard? By the standards of “massed” media, none of this poetry—not any of it—amounts to a hill of beans in Iowa or a barrel of orangutans in the new Times Square. On the one hand (if you can keep all these hands away from the threshing machines), some poets and poetry do-gooders think the answer is to go with the flow, to try to make poems that, while still unpopular at the Prom of American Culture, are a little more popular (and don’t assume I am not one of them). The classic 50s response is to become raincoat Adolescents, the hipwithout-being-cool dropouts or rebel saints who figure, as social gesture, into the romantic Ideology of a rock ’n’ roll culture that replaces poetic work with poetic attitude and whose heroes are not poets at all but pop stars like Jim Morrison or Bob Dylan or Patti Smith. I don’t really need easy listening poetry if I can listen to the Sex Pistols or New Formalism if I have randy Newman. For “My Generation” (formally the journal of the American Association of retired Persons), it’s not the anti-modernist poetry championed by the Mediocracy that is clawing at poetry’s share of the consciousness of the American muddled class but the Golden 60s Boxed Set rerereleases of The Who’s Greatest Hits (What’s on second, Leonard Cohen shortstop, Joni Mitchell on bass). They paved Poetry Paradise and put up a Pop Music Lot. Popularity or immediate accessibility is not a criterion of value for poetry in our time. Poetry can provide not an extension of the dominant values in American culture—as the poetry favored by the PWC does—but multiple discrepant alternatives to them: often

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messy, inchoate, disturbing, unhappy—indeed sometimes worse— alternatives to boot. How the culture and how the PWC responds to this is a judgment on them. A culture’s refusal of its poetry is not without consequence or redress. So when you ask if “the public [has] even the slightest interest in the material in question,” I would say that the PWC’s spurning of this, indeed, material in question, is a direct violation of the public interest, that we won’t have a public worthy of the name until we engage with such material, in poetry, philosophy, history, sociology, theology, and, indeed, politics. Perloff: Touché. I think there’s also a “skill” or “expertise” problem. To be an architect, you do have to learn very specific things. And a composer obviously has to know something about music. But anyone, it seems, can be a poet. The New York Times praised Dana Gioia precisely because he had worked for ten years for General Foods and made his mint before turning to poetry— evidently something one can do by a sheer act of will. One declares oneself a poet, period. So then anyone of course can also be a poetry critic and comment on the quality of the poetry. This past week The Wall Street Journal announced that Gioia was one of “our finest poets” without ever saying how or why. It seems their columnists simply know. And in response to the staggering multimillion Gertrude Lilly bequest to Poetry magazine, Joseph Parisi, the venerable journal’s current editor, produced some sobering statistics. For instance, the circulation of Poetry today is 10,000. But every year the journal gets 90,000 submissions. Poetry, it would seem, is much more fun to write than to read! Clearly, PhD programs like the Poetics Program at Buffalo have gone a long way in rectifying this situation and demanding some knowledge on the part of their would-be poets. Could you comment on how this has worked at Buffalo? Since the program is largely your brainchild, how did you go about inventing it? What are its best features? Are there things you would now do differently? Bernstein: In terms of reviewing and awards, there is sometimes a presumption that a person who never reads poems and has no

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apparent interest in poetry should be able to judge what’s good or bad in poetry, because we are all “human beings” after all, as the coordinator of a recent very-minor-award panel informed me a few days ago. Sometimes that goes for the “general reader” qualifications of the reviewer/judge, and sometimes it’s a criteria used to evaluate poetry. The “we’re all humans” proposition is not just a harmless shibboleth: it is a chief means of riding roughshod over aesthetic and ideological differences and enforcing—now here’s a ten-buck word—uniformitarianism. The poets I most care about are, maybe, trying to become human—or nonhuman; anyway, they are not so quick to assume what the human is or how it manifests itself. The problem with lots of poetry that bills itself as easy reading is that there’s not a lot of there there, or what there there is doesn’t hold up to more than a quick and casual glance. The irony is that “difficult” poetry may actually provide a good deal more immediacy and affect than much of the more “I am my subject matter and don’t you forget it” variety. That’s why I would cast the issue in terms not just of aesthetics but aestheticism—linguistic sensation. There is much still made of the alleged problem that lots of the poems you and I like to read are not point, click, and play, but the alternative provided is not like asking the readers to write their own poems (though that’s a fine activity too, for another time) or stare into the abyss (though that may be something that comes up along the way). The difference is more like the one between riding a motorbike and taking a taxi (substitute your own engine-free metaphor if you like). Personally, I prefer teleportation, since that gives me more time for reading hard-core poetry. As to the Poetics Program, university english departments typically separate poetry writing courses from poetry reading courses, and we all know that the former are on the rise while the latter are on the wane. The Poetics Program, as we formed it in the early 1990s in Buffalo, rejected this dichotomy, not just in an informal, or class-by-class, basis, but as a matter of policy, and not just at an undergraduate or master’s level but also, and even primarily, in the PhD program. The poets teaching in our graduate Poetics Program—Susan Howe, robert Creeley, Myung Mi Kim,

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Loss Pequeno Glazier, Dennis Tedlock—teach not creative writing but rather doctoral seminars; the students don’t submit poems or manuscripts but essays and dissertations. The Poetics Program students are often poets, and we support the activity of writing poetry as a positive contribution to teaching literature classes, writing criticism, and doing scholarship. This is not to say that all the Poetics students are poets, but lots of them are, and they have formed their own immediate local context of exchanging work, publishing magazines and books, and organizing reading series. No poetry community is without troubles, and ours has its share, but it is vital and sizable and even formidable since our program, having surprising little competition among PhD programs, has attracted (in early and not-so-early stages) some great poets, scholars, critics, and editors over the years. Because we have some funds available, we are able to provide a small amount of money to any of the students who want to have a series or press—and that little bit of money goes a long way. This approach to funding—giving to a highly decentered not to say idiosyncratic set of projects—can lead, as Joel Kuszai put it a while back, to a place with “all leaders and no followers,” but at least it avoids the committee-driven decision making of many official university magazines and reading series, where money is centralized and consensus is emphasized. Anyway, this has been my philosophy. We also have lots and lots of visitors, who meet with students in seminars as well as give readings or lectures. So it’s all very poetry intense, with lots of fellow poetry devotees and lots of activities. And also a strong web presence, with the electronic Poetry Center and also the Poetics List. Looking back, I think the Poetics Program was an intervention particularly relevant for the 1990s and so one that now needs to undergo some serious and necessary transformations, as I think all institutions do, lest they become stagnant, victim of their own successes or preoccupied with their own failures. There is always a lot of concern expressed among poets about the relation of poetry to the academy. (I wish I could say there was comparable concern in the literary academy for this topic.) Without jumping into the quicksand of this topic, I would say that my own

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commitment has been to find ways to use the university and its resources to support poets and poetry, especially poets outside the academy. As I said in an interview with Andrew epstein for Lingua Franca on this topic, the issue isn’t that, as a poet, you have a university job but what you do with it. Perloff: I’ve always felt the “issue” of the poet in the academy was a red herring. Poets have to make a living somehow, and some choose teaching even as others (Kit Robinson, Ron Silliman) work in the computer industry and others, as lawyers or psychiatrists. But enough sociology; I want to turn now to your poetry, which, it seems to me, has gotten somewhat short shrift vis-à-vis your essays, manifestos, lectures, etc. Especially in the UK, critics and reviewers talk of you as the chef d’école of the Language school rather than as the very particular poet that you are. Suppose we look at what I take to be a particularly brilliant recent poem, “The Manufacture of Negative Experience,” in With Strings (Chicago, 2001). What was the actual process of composing this long poem? Where did you begin? Do you start with a particular conception and then “fill in,” or does one perception immediately lead to a further perception, as Olson put it? Do you assemble the found texts ahead of time? Do you move passages around a lot? In short (ha!), can you describe for our readers how composition took place? Bernstein: I wrote the poem, using some notes I had assembled over the previous year, in Provincetown in August 1992. I was there with Susan, of course, but also with emma, who was seven (echoes of her presence in §41—“When I say ‘no’ I mean / maybe, probably not, what’s / the matter with you?, do I / make myself clear?…”), and Felix, who, at a few months old, may well be the “beeper” of §333. Like most of my poems, I wrote this one in a bound “sketch”type notebook, then typed it up and revised. “The Manufacture of Negative experience” is one of a number of longish serial poems: loosely linked stanzas, all bouncing off, or getting sucked into, the black hole of the title. It’s a constellation or array, or then again maybe something like a charm bracelet.

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One of the charms is §482: the set of jokes in the form of one-line questions, all with same answer, “No.” One of my obsessions has been to include—fully and faithfully (or is it faithlessly, I always get those confused)—a set of Henny Youngman-style jokes within a poem. So here it’s 11 questions spread over 15 lines. And those questions also rhyme with similar jokes or quasi jokes in other parts of the poem. (Was that a real joke or did you just mess it up?) There are thirteen parts to the poem. Another way I think of these is as something like conical sections arcing around a numinous center (negative experience). That’s one way to understand erratic numbering (3, 17, 37, 38, 41, 46a, 57, 71, 333, 334, 482, 501, 788), which is both one of those stock jokes I like so much, while at the same time giving a sense of the space between the sections. The form is probably more like Wittgenstein’s Philosophical Investigations than Olson’s Projective Verse, but it’s true I want the parts to concatenate. Lots of contrasting materials by way of language, style, prosody, subject matter: fractured aphorisms and slogans (§38), semi-nursery rimes (§17, §57), speech acts (§41), riddles with no answer if not no for an answer, and some parts that combine these (§3). A lot of the poem sounds like you’ve heard it before but can’t place it, or just when you think you remember, it’s on the slip of your tongue until it gets bounced out of mind by a quick dissolve to the next illusionless allusion or allusive elision, or a pop fly to third when you still don’t know who’s on first. And that, again, brings up the title as organizing principle: less negative experience as in “I had a very negative experience at polka night at the supper club” and more as in Adorno’s “Negative Dialectics”: “Truth is the antithesis of existing society” (which is the epigraph to a related poem, “emotions of Normal People” in Dark City). Or like that great “Not this” in ron Silliman’s Tjanting. Section 37 is taken from a school report on my twin nephews, who were in elementary school at the time. I jotted those sentences down when I was over to my sister- and brother-in-law’s house for Thanksgiving. I am one of these mildly unsocial people at family gatherings who do things like that: scribble things in my notebook from school reports, scan the popular magazines on the table,

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record overheard conversation, all in the endless quest for material. School reports are classic fodder for my hypnopompic mill: such school blotter characterizing may not kill you but the wounds… they don’t so much heal as morph. I identify with everything that’s said about David and Ian, and so those statements form the poetics of the piece. I guess, to get back to your question, a lot of the poem is pulled from the air, from signs in my mind and on the street, from what I am reading in the newspaper or hearing on the radio; everything gets considered as possible material to be transmuted, sputtered, turned topsy turvy or tipsy flopsy. As if “negative experience” could be the portal into a world next to the one we usually pretend to inhabit, less through the looking glass than the blank side of the mirror that doesn’t reflect but allows for reflection. For example, in writing this I was casting around for an adjective to go with “mill” to describe the fuzzy logic of interconnections in the poem; for some reason hypnogogic came to mind, but I wanted something that meant the opposite, which is when I lighted on hypnopompic: a state of dawning consciousness, just after sleep. Meanwhile, while working on this explanation, and it was getting late, emma wanted to use the computer to play a biology CDrOM, so all of a sudden, out of the blue, I heard this disembodied, hypercalm voice, talking about the plasma membrane of a cell as a “fluid mosaic,” and I realized this was another way of talking about poetic structure; in this case, the internal elements that make up each section as well as the relation among the sections. Which leads me to §3: “Madder / than a scratched eel at a / Crossing Guard kettle-shoot.” The kettle shoot is always the highlight of the Crossing Guard annual convention in Whipsalantamariaozoola, even though the scratched eel underwater diving meet is my personal favorite. Well, you’d have to have been there to take it in fully; this was the best way to evoke the experience, a painful one that I will remember for the rest of my life. What else to say? As you see, I guess I am more tempted to write another stanza than offer up an explanation. Not that I mind explaining anything, which anyway is always more a supplement than a substitute, or so I would hope.

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Perloff: Your account shows how absurd it is to talk of yours as a poetry where “anything goes”; indeed, how carefully you plan the poem’s overall architecture. But I still have some questions. First and foremost—and this would apply to most of your poems, whether in With Strings or in earlier volumes—how does the reader deal with the hermeticism of the allusions? In §37, for example, once you explain that Ian and David are your sisterin-law’s twins, the section is perfectly clear. But if I didn’t know that, I would assume that Ian is a character, perhaps in Cowper’s Task, perhaps in another Cowper poem or related text, and that you’re modernizing the situation for parodic effect. Now, you can say it doesn’t matter, that the thematic import would be the same. But it does help (I’ve found) if the reader knows the New York world you’re so often referring to—a world of those Henny Youngman jokes and phrases like “a wolf in schlep’s clothing.” So I wonder whether you think someday your poems will or should be annotated by editors? And of course if this were the case, the annotations would be longer than the original poem or perhaps themselves a new poem, which might be fun. I’m of two minds about the question of reference. Part of me feels that anyone living in today’s media world, whether in Helsinki or Hackensack, will read “The Manufacture of Negative Experience” with a big smile and a great shock of recognition. But then I’m always surprised how many people even in (or perhaps especially in) our own social circles have never heard of No-Doze, pastrami, the Aswan Dam, or the self-help movement. For example, at the recent Modernist Studies Association meeting in Madison, I was astonished to learn that none of the people I was dining with—the poet Cole Swensen, the philosopher Jean-Pierre Cometti (French visitor, very sophisticated, who writes on Wittgenstein and Musil), or the young poet-critic-academic Craig Dworkin—had ever seen The Godfather or knew anything about it. I assumed EVERYONE had seen that film, or part of it, at one time or another. So—to pose what is probably an impossible question: how do we deal with complex cultural reference in the Age of Billy Collins and Dana Gioia? Yours is, to quote William James on Gertrude Stein, “a fine new kind of realism.” I see you as one of

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the central chroniclers of our culture. But can we ask readers to know what Charles Bernstein knows? Bernstein: We have to make the reader an offer she can’t refuse, can’t even imagine refusing, whether or not all the references are known, and all this within the limits of poetry alone (that is, the threat is not of diminished physical capacity but of diminished aesthetic capacity, which remains a looming threat for many Americans). By refuse, I mean that turning away in the face of the daunting challenge of decoding the references, conceits, forms before even starting to read the poem. My idea, and certainly not mine alone, was to make poems that allowed for ambient access, that you start by getting the hang of, more than figuring out. It doesn’t mean that at some other point in your experience with the poem you won’t ponder those obscure references but that the poem encourages you to go on what you experience not just what you already know. Pragmatism, pragmatism, joggity jag. You’ll remember the Chinese translator, in the giddy conclusion to A Test of Poetry (in My Way), asked just the question you raise about the title of my poem “No Pastrami” (“Does the pastrami refer to a highly seasoned shoulder cut of beef?”). But, then, what is the meaning of pastrami? Would it be enough to define it ethnically or would you really have to have a slice and not just a slice but a pastrami on rye at the Carnegie? But wouldn’t the Stage be better? Or maybe only the Second Avenue Deli would do? Yes we have no pastrami, yes we have no pastrami today. The interesting thing about the translator’s questions in A Test of Poetry is that the difficulty posed by the poems were not syntactic or grammatical or even structural but rather questions of cultural reference, especially from American popular, local, and mass culture. That’s partly because this particular translator was a scholar of American poetry and was able to navigate through those formal aspects of the poems more readily, though another reader, someone who shared my mass and pop cultural experience but not my poetic interests, might have just the opposite difficulty. Still, the Chinese translator’s predicament is hardly unique to non-Americans but, rather, is a defining condition for everyone in American culture.

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Anyone who teaches contemporary literature will have the experience that the most common cultural references of their own younger days are as obscure as Greek myths to those waves of ever younger people who were not “in” the culture at that time. The bigger they are, the harder they fall. (“All right, Mr. DeMille, I’m ready for my close-up,” as some of us will recall Norma Desmond saying in Hollywood Boulevard.) You sometimes hear people lament the decline of the big three TV networks as creating a crisis of decentralization, as if Lloyd Bridges on Sea Hunt provided a shared national experience that we now suffer from the lack of, as we contend with the dispersed sons of Lloyd: Beau and Jeff. I use this example—knowing full well that you may never have heard of Sea Hunt, which had its first TV run from 1957 to 1961 and which had a kind of ominous, not quite existential, feel—because it was turned down by the networks and was an early example of syndication that ultimately robbed “us in the US” of the common culture…like they had over there in russia, with the one TV station! The Web, which makes 50s TV syndication seem like the tiniest hairline fracture of network hegemony, provides quick information on an amazing range of once-famous references, Sea Hunt and the Aswan Dam included. (I guess for my work you can’t go too far wrong thinking of the 50s and the Cold War as a possible backdrop, once you start to see the pattern.) Google is both a veritable Guide to the Perplexed and a fomenter of perplexity, both a handle on and a downward slope into the Babel (or is it Bible?) of information on the Internet and the concomitant eclipse of central authority. (Lately I’ve been fascinated by the difference between the Web sites developed for poets, say on the ePC, and the fan sites you get for every which manner of things, like the one for Sea Hunt.) You touch on some of these issues in fundamental and illuminating ways in your recent essay, “The Search for Prime Words: ezra Pound as Nominalist” on the use of proper names in Pound, and Yunte Huang also addresses this issue in a recent piece, “Was ezra Pound a New Historicist?” The question in both your essays is, “How are we supposed to know the significance of certain anecdotal references in The Cantos?” In both eliot’s and Pound’s

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modernist practice, there is a professed commitment to a canon of Historical events and Cultural Works that are presented with the (implied) injunction that readers have an obligation to know what they are or, if not, learn about them. Stein and Williams might stand for the opposite if those Proper Names weren’t ones that you and I, after all is done and said, would expect those reading this exchange to know about (or if they didn’t possibly prompt them to find out). The problem you and Yunte raise in regard to Pound’s work is whether we are to take his anecdotal references as such luminous details, especially if they refer to his own particular experiences, such as restaurants he visited in New York or Paris. (Do readers of this exchange really need to know the difference between the Stage and the Carnegie?) Yunte argues that you always need paratextual information and that there is not necessarily a value in imagining a poem as self-evident: I stare at the page and all the significance of the Proper Names immediately manifests itself to me, to ponyback (or is it pigtail?) on Pound’s famous and equally problematic remark about the status of the Chinese written character. Poems can’t do it alone and never could, relying, as they so often do, not only on the kindness of strangers but the testimony of friends. Poetry is too important to be left to its own devices. Interpretation is an act; editing, a form of writing; translation, a condition of reading. There is no end to what you might need to know to read a poem and maybe no beginning either. In my textual economy, each poem is an initiation into a world of particulars both inside and outside the reader’s information data bank. The question is, “Does that which is unrecognized in the poem make the work more forbidding or more beckoning?” In the kind of poems I want, you don’t need secret “abracadabra” words or some special knowledge or even explanatory annotations to open the door of the poem. rather, all that’s needed is a willingness to jump into the middle of a flow of experience, just as you do every time you open up the door to your house to that other world we sometimes call everyday life. The fact is that as a culture we don’t share a fixed set of given, all-purpose

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cultural and historical references or, insofar as we do, there are relatively few of them and, taken as topological points, they make an inadequate map of our history, our contemporaneity, our aspirations and destinies. I don’t want my poems to impose a sense of what’s most important on the world or on those readers who care to take the journey the poems offer. But the ecology of reference does concern me: creating a mix so that everyone gets some things but no one can get everything—and counting on both. You mention the wolf in schleps’ clothing, but I remain more concerned about the schleps in wolf’s clothing the paper tigers of poetry. Or there is the one about the difference between the schlemiel and schlemazel: the schlemiel is the one who spills the soup; the schlemazel is the one who it gets spilled on. You could say that this is just the difference between the poet and the reader, in my semiotic economy. So maybe, going back again to §37, the dedication to William Cowper’s The Task is the more significant frame and I was leading you down the garden path of anecdote in my comments on David and Ian. Negative experience necessarily engages what you don’t know: the manufacture of negative experience—going on in the midst of uncertainty of reference, bearing, morality, truth—is the task of poetry. In The Task (1782-85), Cowper writes: When Winter soaks the fields, and…feet Too weak to struggle with tenacious clay, Or ford the rivulets, are best at home, The task of new discoveries falls on me. At such a season and with such a charge Once went I forth, and found, till then unknown… If the task of poetry is “new discoveries,” what is the task of criticism? Perloff: I love the aphorism “Poetry is too important to be left to its own devices.” Vintage Bernstein in that it sounds at once wholly familiar (we’re always talking about something being too important to be left to its—or his or her—own devices) and yet it

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is completely absurd. Or is it? Poetry does have “devices”—rhyme, repetition, anaphora, assonance, onomatopoeia, metaphor, metonymy, pun, simile—but device alone can’t make something poetry, as too few “poets” realize. So your little proverb is only too true, it turns out. The particular feat of your poetry, I’d say, is this doubleness or tripleness or quintupleness…Every statement looks in more than one direction, which is, of course, what poetry is all about and always has been. The reader needn’t know all the allusions. When I first read “Gertrude and Ludwig’s Bogus Adventure” (My Way), I had no idea what those Pete Hewitt “Excellent Adventure” films were. Boy films, kid films, science fiction—not at all my thing. But even without knowing what the actual films referred to, the meanings come through well enough. On the other hand, once told about the films, I became quite intrigued with looking them up, rather the way I now love reading about “the cake shops on the Nevsky” Pound writes of and which he never saw any more than I’ve seen them! That’s what makes poetry so infinitely rereadable. And poetry that has none of this thickness quickly gets boring. But there’s another point. Yes, one can do without knowing all the references, but there’s also the unavoidable fact that sooner or later, readers WILL look them up. In twenty years’ time, someone will write an essay or thesis on your poetry, and they’ll go to the Stage and the Carnegie and have a look at the pastrami! After all, in their day, Eliot and Pound, not to mention Stein or Duchamp, were felt to be hopelessly hermetic, and now students talk about the Oculist Witnesses in the Large Glass, as if it were all part of normal discourse. And in the case of Frank O’Hara, where I used to think most of the person and place names were intentionally fortuitous, now scholars are writing solemn treatises about the significance of lunching at Larré’s on 56th St. or on the meaning of Gauloises. And since younger people have no idea who Billie Holiday was, there’s much writing about her voice, cultural role, and so on. So time catches up with the poetry! And that’s OK because, in the end, nothing substitutes for “close reading,” which needn’t be arid New Critical exercise at all, but just the habit of paying

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attention to the words and sentences on the page or on a CD— whatever. I will sound like an Old Wolf in kvetch clothing when I say it’s a practice that has been largely lost. So afraid are teachers and their students of actually looking at a text, so fearful that they will be endowing that text with “autonomy,” that crucial things get missed. I was dismayed the other day in my graduate class when, in reading Stein’s “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene,” three of the eighteen seminar members thought Helen Furr was the same person as Mrs. Furr and that she had left her husband to be with Georgine Skeene because she was stifled by bourgeois capitalism or some such thing. The seven-page story does refer to Helen not liking to live “where she had always been living,” which—common sense tells us—could hardly have always been with her husband, could it? And on the next page we read explicitly that Helen Furr went home to visit “her mother and father.” Accordingly, when you get this kind of reading, you know the student hasn’t actually read through the text. Teaching poetry thus remains a challenge. And I can’t think of a more perfect comment on all this than your words in “What’s Art Got to Do With It?”: The shortest distance between two points is a digression. I hold for a wandering thought just that I may stumble upon something worthy of report. Who knows, ahead of time, what those items worthy of report, might be? Bernstein: And that goes as much for criticism as poetry, where the value, in part, comes from the searching for something not yet defined. Maybe close reading would get a better rap if we called it PSI: Poetry Scene Investigation. Of course, that would mean treating the poem as a crime, but maybe it is: a crime against mass culture. “Poetry is too important to be left to its own devices,” also means that poems can’t do all the work of poetry by themselves. For poems to come into being, we need editors, publishers, designers,

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proofreaders, booksellers, Web sites, teachers, critics, detractors, supporters, and of course, not to leave them out of the picture entirely, poets and readers. I think the phobia about explication comes from the fact that some of what calls itself that is obtuse, dishearteningly literal, or thematic, in short, deadening. But bad teaching about poetry is a comparable problem to bad writing of poetry; poetry as an art may seem to suffocate under the blankets applied in a well-meaning effort to keep it warm (as if the body of the text was growing as cold as a corpse), but poems go their merry way irrespective and irregardless. Cut ‘em up, mangle their meanings, weigh them down with unsupportable symbolism, reduce them to a sentiment, strip them to their empty cores…and they still keep coming back for more. Poems are remarkably resilient and far less likely to be injured by incursions into their autonomy or excursions into their associations than we have any reason to expect. Yet if poems are uncannily resilient, poets, alas, are not. But, there I go again, off on a tangent. (How many tangents can play the harp on the edge of a pin? Or is it pine?) That is, I don’t mean to suggest that criticism is always, or even mostly, agonistic. Your own approach to close reading is not as a contest between poem and reading but as dance, the two in tango. Moreover, without such external interventions, poetry would, indeed, be a dead art. The poem is not finished even when it is completed. Completion or publication marks not the end of the poem but rather its entry into the world through the responses to it. And that’s another dimension of the sort of close reading you encourage, for the poems we reread over time become cultural time capsules, linguistic dioramas in which each phrase is an imaginary hyperlink for our further exploration of—or reentry into—a particular time and place. In other words, crucial to any sense of the cultural details in a poem is the world they constitute, not only what the particulars are but also the economy of the particulars—how they are distributed and arranged. That’s the way poems lend themselves to, are made for, reinhabitation, why chasing down the references or the milieu the references evoke doesn’t detract from the poem but rather opens it up.

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Inspiration is not what comes before the poet writes the poem but what happens when the poem is read (or heard). A criticism is responsible to the degree it is able to respond. Criticism engages and extends the work of the poem, but criticism is not the end of poetry. Nor is the poem the final destination of a process of analysis and research. The poem is an initial point of embarkation on journeys yet to come, on earth as they are in the imaginary space between here and there, now and then, is and as. So, hey, if you have time now, let’s go together on a trip to those cake shops on the Nevsky.

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Mapping the New Interview with Rain Taxi Review of Books

Rain Taxi: Having just read Poetry On & Off the Page, one of its more invigorating features is its nonliterariness. It’s the least academic and professorial work of literary criticism I can remember reading in a long while. I’m assuming it is by conscious design—since it is already implicit in the title—that you covered work outside the province of the written word, such as Bill Viola’s videos and Christian Boltanski’s photographs. Do you feel literary criticism pays insufficient attention to cultural texts such as TV, movies, the Internet, politics, industry, sociology, fashion, etc.— that it is too grounded in academia? Marjorie Perloff: The visual arts have always been very important to me. I took a lot of Art History courses in college, and whenever I travel, I spend most of my time in museums and galleries and at architectural sites. The Futurist Moment (1986) deals with art more than with poetry, and Radical Artifice: Writing Poetry in the Age of Media (1991) reads poetry against visual works as well as cultural artifacts like license plates and billboards. So there was nothing very new about my interests in Poetry On & Off the Page; the book is made up of occasional essays, and some were

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based on lectures I gave in museums or, in the case of Boltanski’s photographs, at the Roland Barthes conference a few years back. As for Bill Viola, one day about a decade ago I was in the Museum of Modern Art in New York and happened to wander into a video room showing Reasons for Knocking at an Empty House (1982)—the narrative installation about the train wreck and how it destroyed the mind of the protagonist. What an astonishing work of art! From then on I was hooked and followed Viola’s career. It was hard to get some of the videotapes but the good news is that now much of the work is online. But my interest in various forms of visual art doesn’t transfer to pop culture. Network TV is interesting to me only as a foil to video art. Long ago, I wrote a piece for the New Republic on soap opera (I’m a closet soap opera addict), examining (playfully) how wonderfully absurd the soap plots and happenings are. After that, I got a few letters asking me to analyze this or that cultural aspect of soaps—the portrayal of the elderly, race aspects, etc. That was the very last thing I felt like doing: to me it was and is a fun diversion. But I am not a cultural analyst as such; I’m a literary critic or maybe historian. Politics is something else again. I am passionately concerned with politics and have written “closet” essays on political subjects: I have one on the Florida fiasco in the recent Exquisite Corpse. But I feel rather as George Oppen did: if you’re going to write about politics, write about that and don’t confuse politics and poetry. Rain Taxi: In “The Morphology of the Amorphous,” your essay on Bill Viola’s videoscapes, you said, “Walter Benjamin, we recall, insisted that film was inherently a more subversive form than dada or surrealist painting…but within a decade of Benjamin’s death, the films distributed for ‘simultaneous collective experience’ had become at least as commercial and commodified as the art forms they had replaced, a prime exemplar, for that matter, of what the Frankfurt School scornfully dubbed the consciousness industry.” Can you comment further on the “consciousness industry” with regard to our contemporary climate?

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Perloff: Here my response grows out of the previous one. The Frankfurt School believed that the “consciousness industry” was the direct product of Capitalism and that it was an us-versus-them thing—a rapacious “they” (e.g., movie producers, publishers) out for the fast buck who were feeding Kitsch and Junk to the masses—masses who, so Adorno held, deserved better—indeed, could participate in real Art under a Socialist system. This aspect of Frankfurt School thinking has been questioned by theorists like Baudrillard who argue that there is no them vs. us—we’re all equally co-opted, and no one is the “victim” of the system because the system is us. I tend to agree with Baudrillard here—it is dubious that citizens in, say, Communist Cuba are any more immune to the consciousness industries than we are. At the same time, Adorno and his fellow Frankfurt theorists were right about the debasement of “art” in mass society and the role money now plays. Hollywood has certainly been completely destroyed by the money game. I hardly ever go to the movies any more. Still, I’m optimistic enough to believe there will always be art that is “resistant,” and that artists themselves as well as those of us who care about poetry and the other arts must resist even if it means that our books and artworks don’t “sell.” And there are signs that young people are now coming back to a real interest in art as art (look at all the recent books on beauty!) and that they do sense there’s a difference between MTV and Stravinsky or Cage. Rain Taxi: I enjoyed, tremendously, your essay on Lyn Hejinian’s Oxota: A Short Russian Novel. I, for one, am completely willing to accept that work as a bona fide example of a new approach to the novel. But I largely suspect that if I were to find it in a bookstore, it would be in the poetry section, not the fiction section. What pressures do writers (and readers, for that matter) have to conform to standards of genre? In what ways can they be overcome? Perloff: That’s a very good question, and I’m sure you’re right. But then Lyn herself intended it to be in the poetry section; she calls Oxota a “novel in verse.” Current genre distinctions are indeed absurd, not only in bookstores but in the university. Beckett, for

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example, is never taught in poetry courses and not even often in courses on the novel; he somehow gets classified as primarily a dramatist even though his fiction is generally held to be more important than the drama. In the Stanford English department, Beckett and Pinter, among others, are hence untaught since we seem to leave “drama” to the Drama department. Gil Sorrentino, who has just retired, did teach Beckett frequently, but that was his “writerly” bias not shared by most academics. Rain Taxi: It seems the battle between avant-garde and traditional writing never goes away. What remains useful about these opposing camps, or conversely, at what cost to our culture is this opposition perpetuated? Perloff: You’re right. That battle never goes away, because “traditional writing” remains so uninteresting and so dominant. Realism, supposedly defeated by the 1950s in the US when the various avant-gardes from Europe were domesticated, always comes back so that, after decades of Grotowski or Ariane Mnouchkine in theater and Pina Bausch and Merce Cunningham in dance, we once again have realistic “problem plays” like Wendy Wasserstein’s being taken seriously by the press. In poetry, the situation is even worse. After the great Modernists, after Black Mountain, the Beats, the New York School—name your avantgarde—we once again have realistic poetry that details some petty reaction to petty events, and critics take this work seriously. At the same time, we must be careful not to support a simple binary opposition between A and B. For example, those who talk of “experimental writing” make that term sound as if we could easily distinguish between experimental and nonexperimental. But it doesn’t really work that way. And there’s a lot of bad so-called experimental writing too, isn’t there? So categories must remain fluid, and individual works must be taken on their own merit rather than merely touted as avant-garde or dismissed as mainstream. Rain Taxi: In your essay on the feud between Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov, “Poetry in Time of War,” you quoted Duncan as

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saying “poetry’s function is not to oppose evil, but to imagine it: what if Shakespeare had opposed Iago, or Dostoyevsky opposed Raskolnikov—the vital thing is that they CREATED Iago and Raskolnikov [so that] we begin to see betrayal and murder and theft in a new light.” This caused me to reflect on the current outcry against violence in the movies and video games—do you feel that such texts are mere celebrations of violence or have a much larger agenda that the powers that be would like to see effaced? Perloff: I think what Robert Duncan meant in the statement you cite is that the greatest poetic critique of evil comes from those who can imagine it like Shakespeare or Dante rather than just from those who cry out against it in the abstract. It’s a question of complicity: Duncan felt that Levertov was writing as if she herself were somehow above the fray. But the question of violence in the movies is a very different thing: it is meant to attract an audience and sell, and most of it IS gratuitous though I don’t believe in censorship. Violence and evil are not necessarily related. But, to concentrate on violence for a moment: there have been great films that HAVE been violent for artistic reasons, so the current outcry seems to me rather foolish. I think “obscenity,” for example, takes many different forms. There are “obscene” works that have no nudity or overt sex or violence at all—but it’s their hidden agenda that is obscene. Rain Taxi: In “The Music of Verbal Space,” your essay on John Cage, you remark that “Cage’s work continues to go unrecognized as poetry by those who produce books like the Norton Anthology of Poetry—as well as those who read and review them—has to do with our general inability to dissociate ‘poetry’ from the twin norms of self-expression and figuration.” The continuing—and eminently marketable—idea of the poet as a flamboyant, wounded, Byronic figure chafing against the indifference of the universe is especially apparent at literary festivals where people flock by the hordes to see an artist harangue, bellow, pontificate, rant, and rave but assiduously avoid an author who reads linguistically challenging work full of multiple, intersecting perspectives with a more neutral,

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less theatrical stance. Do you see a time when this may change? Is it possible to mix vaudeville with “radical artifice”? Perloff: Media attention does seem to be very bad for poetry, which is a solitary pursuit. Translated to the screen by Bill Moyer or to the stage at a poetry fair, naturally “poetry” attracts the lowest common denominator. The Robert Pinsky appearances on the Lehrer News Hour (PBS) are another case in point. But I think all this is fairly harmless. It doesn’t help “radical artifice,” but it doesn’t hurt much either. And “linguistically challenging,” work, as you call it, can go its own way despite these phenomena. Rain Taxi: What is your opinion of some of the other popular modes of poetry, such as slam poetry, and how should they figure into critical discourse? Perloff: Well, I’ve only been to one or two slams, but in principle I think they’re fine. I admire Bob Holman and what he is trying to do. David Antin has always said that when it comes to artists, the pyramid needs a base—and that base is what you have at slams and other huge poetry events. I participated last year in the New York Poetry Festival, and I thought it was terrific. So many people running around the lower East Side so as to hear poetry. Most of the stuff was pretty bad, but at least the people participating seemed to care enough to come out on a rainy Sunday morning to discuss varieties of poetry. I tend to like slams much better than the “genteel” media version of “popular” poetry because the latter is so hypocritical and so polite. And the worst, to me, was Maya Angelou reading her dreadful poem about the Birds and the Beasts at Clinton’s first inauguration. People have castigated George Bush for not including a poet at his Inauguration, but I was relieved he didn’t. I hate it when the audience puts on its “we’re in church” look and listens politely—with utter boredom—to the house poet. Better no poetry than this simulation of it. Rain Taxi: In his afterword to the anthology American Poetry since 1950, Eliot Weinberger remarks rather disparagingly of the

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proliferation, beginning in the 1970’s, of creative writing programs. “Poetry, almost overnight,” he says, “became a respectable middleclass career.” However, he goes on to say, it has also meant that “a sameness of lives is producing a sameness of poetry. Worst of all, it has become increasingly difficult for an individual poet to be heard in the collective racket.” Would you agree with this? Perloff: I’ve heard Eliot make this case many times and have had fun arguing with him about it! On balance, I disagree with him. Poets have to do something to make a living. Are those that work for computer companies better off? More varied? So what should poets do? At least in the academy they come into contact with some pretty bright and interesting young people. This is not to say that I like Creative Writing Programs; I always wonder what it is they teach when I hear that students spend the hour going over each other’s work and so on. Still, the Creative Writing Program brings to the campus those whose first concerns are reading and writing, and that can’t be all bad, can it? Nor can we blame the Creative Writing programs for the spate of dull writing that’s out there. And then too the Writing programs are changing! Once Buffalo began its Poetics program, organized by three brilliant poets—Susan Howe, Charles Bernstein, and Robert Creeley— other universities have followed suit. The University of Denver, for example, where Bin Ramke and Cole Swensen teach. Brown University has a very good writing program: Carole Maso is there and of course Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop and C. D. Wright. And York U in Toronto now has Steve McCaffery, and so on. So it’s a healthy situation—healthier than what goes on vis-à-vis poetry in the English Department itself, which often still treats the “creative” writer as some sort of ignorant craftsperson who doesn’t know the right lingo! I’m completing a new book right now; it’s for the Blackwell’s Manifesto Series. The editor at Blackwell’s, Andrew McNeillie, is an amazing man, himself a poet and novelist and was a Virginia Woolf scholar turned editor. He said I could do whatever I wanted on poetry, not a survey or history, and it doesn’t need “coverage.” But the book, to be called 21st-Century Modernism, is sure to

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raise hackles because I argue that the most “radical” poets today are, in fact, carrying on the modernist tradition (my exemplars of four different strains of modernism are Eliot, Stein, Duchamp, and Khlebnikov). Most of the book is devoted to these four. I pretty much omit the intervening century, but that’s because I think the power of Modernism itself was so enormous—this first great avant-garde—that we’re only now absorbing it. Well, that’s the gist at least. I no longer believe, as I once did, in the progress narrative whereby postmodernism (in the 60s) represents a great breakthrough that goes way BEYOND modernism and does something very different. The enemy of the New, as I see it, is not modernism but, as I said above, the conformist, realist, “slice of life” novel or poem or play that never goes away and that defines the poetic by sheer subject matter.

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Modernism/Postmodernism? Will the Real Avant-garde Please Stand Up! Interview with Jeffrey Side

Jeffrey Side: In your book 21st-Century Modernism you observe that what we, today, regard as experimental and avant-garde in poetics is a consequence of what you call the “embryonic phase” of early modernism. And you cite Charles Bernstein’s concept of the “artifice of absorption” as having more in common with the High Modernism of T. S. Eliot than the “true voice of feeling” or “natural speech” paradigm dominant in the 1960s and 70s. If we can accept (which I do) avant-garde poetics as, indeed, the natural heir to High Modernism, what significance do you see the term postmodernism as having with regard to experimental poetics? Is the term born out of a basic misunderstanding of High Modernism’s actual development? Marjorie Perloff: This is an excellent question! In my essay “Postmodernism: Fin de Siècle,” in Poetry On & Off The Page (Northwestern 1998), I trace the term postmodernism from the sixties to the nineties and argue that what was once a term of praise (e.g., the postmodern was more hip, more chic, more avant-garde, and radical than the modern) gradually became a

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term of opprobrium: postmodernism referred to a late capitalist decadent media glut, and no one any longer wanted to be a postmodernist. But the evolution of the term doesn’t change the fact that back in the sixties, Ihab Hassan and dozens of other critics, especially in Germany, took postmodern to mean “more than.” Hassan has the famous chart which I cite, where the items in the “Postmodern” column represent a break-through from the elitist, centered spatial form of Modernism. And I then discuss the changes brought about by Fred Jameson and the French poststructuralists. In the sixties and early seventies, then, postmodern was more or less synonymous with avant-garde and I wrote about Frank O’Hara, John Cage, and Jasper Johns as “postmodern” (e.g., avant-garde) poets/artists. What is it that changed my own sense of the term? Well, as time went on, it became clear, at least to me, that as wonderful as Frank O’Hara was and is, his poetry is not really a decisive rupture with what came before, or at least not the sort of rupture we had with Eliot’s “Prufrock” or Pound’s Cantos. O’Hara’s lyricism comes squarely out of the Romantic tradition, and certainly he is a modernist in that he believes in poetry as a high calling. The same is true of Ashbery. Meanwhile, as the century wore on, the “avant-garde” kept moving forward in time and soon became equated with Language Poetry and related experimentalisms like the book art of Johanna Drucker. But political events have taught us that progress is illusory; art is not becoming increasingly “postmodern” (or avant-garde), and as we look back, it seems that the breakthrough we all talk about and celebrate came much earlier. Accordingly, by the time I came to write 21st-Century Modernism, I was looking at the larger picture and thinking that exciting poetry today must be understood in terms of the modernist revolution, a revolution much more dramatic than that of Charles Olson in “Projective Verse” or Allen Ginsberg in “Howl.” In making this rather sweeping connection, I did neglect mid-century poets, and I want to get back to the 60s avant-garde I think was so significant: that of Cage, Cunningham, Johns, and their circle.

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Side: I share your view of O’Hara and Olson. I have always thought it odd that O’Hara is regarded in some circles as “important” innovatively, whereas his roots, as you say, come out of the Romantic tradition. The same could be said for Olson’s poetics with its concentration on perception (as manifested in “One perception must immediately and directly lead to a further perception”), something that would not have found much dissent from William Wordsworth, who wrote “The objects of the Poet’s thoughts are every where; though the eyes and the senses of man are, it is true, his favourite guides, yet he will follow wheresoever he can find an atmosphere of sensation in which to move his wings.” It is the abandonment of this concentration on perception and sensation that, it seems to me, distinguishes much of High Modernism from later schools of poetry claiming some sort of lineage with it. From what you say, it seems as if the innovativeness of High Modernism was not fully reflected in later poetic “schools” and “movements” and that only in the 60s did the vestige of High Modernism look as if it could reemerge. Given this, how do you account for the stalling of this innovativeness between the years of High Modernism and the 60s? Perloff: Charles Olson, as I argued in an essay called “Olson and the ‘Inferior Predecessors’” in ELH in 1973 or so—an essay I never reprinted in book form because it made people so mad but also convinced a lot of others of the case—took most of his “Projective Verse” essay straight from Pound and Williams. I demonstrate the “steals” in a long list. Olson had little original poetics, but he did try to expand Pound’s internationalism so as to make it less Eurocentric or Chinese-Japanese-centric. Olson wrote about the Yucatan, about African poetries, and so on. And he seemed “radical” vis-à-vis the very tame New Critical poetry of the 40s and 50s. Why was late modernism so retrograde? In the 30s, as the political picture became darker and darker, poets either turned to a more overt political poetry (on the left) or to a nonengaged poetry on the right. Left-wing poetry, with the exception of the Objectivists, was usually straightforward and didactic and hence

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hardly likely to carry on the modernist tradition. Meanwhile, in the mainstream, modernism hardened into what was often called “modrenism.” In the poetry of Archibald MacLeish or, later, Howard Nemerov, Modernism meant a heavy symbolic structure, replete with ironies and paradoxes but in fact quite assertive, unlike the poetry of Williams or Stevens, which refused the semantic closure of these modrenist poets. A good example is the verse drama of the forties—for example, Maxwell Anderson, whose plays were very popular when I was in high school. Winterset had “poetic” texture, and every speech supposedly had large symbolic resonance, often Freudian. Everything was MEANINGFUL! Think of Martha Graham or later Eugene O’Neill. So, too, the poetry of the New Critics, while ostensibly based on Eliot’s aesthetic, used tight metrical forms and contained its ironies carefully. In this context, a poem like Olson’s “The Kingfishers” seemed nothing if not revolutionary, but of course, if it were read against, say, Mallarmé or a section of Pound’s Cantos, or Apollinaire, there was nothing very revolutionary about its collage cuts and fragmentation. Meanwhile, the real innovations and ethos of modernism remained largely misunderstood; indeed, critics began to assume that Allen Tate and, later, Louis Simpson were great “modernists.” It took decades to undo the damage: the false dichotomy between “raw” and “cooked,” between Tate and Olson and so on, became a new orthodoxy, masking the reality that Olson wasn’t all that avant-garde either. Fifty years after “Projective Verse,” this is becoming apparent. Side: In your published conversation with Robert von Hallberg (“Dialogue on Evaluation in Poetry”) in Professions: Conversations on the Future of Literary and Cultural Studies (edited by Donald Hall, Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2001), you say, “Experimentation is not ipso facto a good thing. There are plenty of ‘experiments’ that are merely boring.” Can you expand on this a little?

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Perloff: I talk about this issue in the essay “After Language Poetry: Innovation and Its Theoretical Discontents” in Differentials. I suggest there—and have said so elsewhere—that sometimes we fetishize innovation, experiment, and “making it new” in ways that aren’t too useful. It was Hugh Kenner who said that the “avant-garde” can be just as boring as anything else. What he meant was that once the avant-garde has been codified and, so to speak, professionalized, it just becomes another style that poets can tap into, and we’ve seen some very boring work that pretends to be doing new and exciting things. Pound said that after the inventors come the diluters and then the imitators; this is always the case. A poem (or fiction) has to be “innovative” for a reason; there has to be a motive for doing things in “new” ways. To take an example, when Duchamp exhibited Fountain by R. Mutt at the Independents in 1917, the concept of putting a common plumbing fixture in a museum seemed amazing. But fifty years later when an artist exhibited a sink in another art show called “Avant-Garde,” it seemed merely boring. Duchamp’s Fountain involved a subtle iconography and style: it played on Renaissance and Baroque fountains, it had a sexual subtext, it was photographed by Stieglitz against the backdrop of Marsden Hartley’s painting of a Buddha, and hence this “Buddha of the Bathroom,” as it was derisively called at the time, was made “beautiful,” so that its status was quite complex. But the experiment can’t be repeated—at least not in Duchamp’s way—and so the imitations of Duchamp’s urinal—and there are hundreds—are often merely dull. Side: In general, do you think that this “experiment for experiment’s sake” has led to the overvaluing of a poem’s formal and visual properties (i.e., quirky typographical arrangements of the text, etc.) to the detriment of the poem’s semantic operation, the latter being more able to evoke a response in readers that is distinct from responses that are associated with the experience of visual artworks? I mean, of course, if a sort of visual art aesthetic underpins some “experiment for experiment’s sake” poetry. If this is so, could this be one of the reasons why these works seem uninteresting to those readers who are expecting the poems to operate semantically?

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Perloff: A good example of “experiment for experiment’s sake” may be found in the work of Richard Kostelanetz, who based his own “writings through,” alphabet games, procedural works, and concrete poems on the work of John Cage but does not have much to say, and so the forms lack a sense of urgency or purpose. Any poem must operate semantically as well as visual/sonically. Even a tiny poem like Decio Pignatari’s famous “Bebe Coca Cola” (the concrete poem) plays with the letters and words so as to create a subtle critique of modern capitalism and so on. Side: Do you think the foregrounding of form may be one of the reasons why much experimental poetry is perceived as dull? Perloff: No, not at all. Take the experiments of Frank O’Hara, which were pretty radical in the fifties. No one wrote in what seemed to be such a casual way: “It’s my lunch hour….”; “Lana Turner has collapsed!” The new manner was taken over by a generation of younger poets from Allen Kaplan to Tony Towle, and visually their poems resembled Frank’s. The difference was one of tone. They couldn’t capture Frank’s racy insouciance or real pain, and so it became just a matter of writing, “It’s 12.34 in Manhattan” or whatever, and the poem went limp. It’s the absence of semantics in the poetry of the disciples, not their formal features, that made the difference. Side: In your essay “What We Don’t Talk about When We Talk about Poetry,” you highlight the difference in scholarly standards between reviews of books about, for instance, architecture and books about poetry. The former being written by scholars knowledgeable in the field under review, the latter being reviewed by mainly mainstream practicing poets mostly ignorant of the wider issues concerning poetic discourse, especially that which is not mainstream. This ignorance helps to foster in the readers of such reviews an ill-informed and potentially damaging view of nonmainstream poetry. You illustrate this by demonstrating how a negative review, by the mainstream poet Glyn Maxwell, of Linda Reinfeld’s Language Poetry: Writing as Rescue, is negative

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precisely because of Maxwell’s ignorance of the theoretical issues underpinning Language Poetry. Is one remedy to this state of affairs to stipulate that poetry reviews should not be written by those who have not formally studied literature academically? This is not as preposterous as it sounds given what you say concerning the reviews of books on other disciplines. Indeed, most visual art reviews I read are by people who have studied the field formally. Perloff: No, I wouldn’t want to stipulate this because of course, as we both know, some poets are much better reviewers than are comparable academic critics. I love the early reviews of John Ashbery: for example, his review of Adrienne Rich’s poetry where he says that her poetry seems to be suffering from “objective correlativitis, otherwise known as Dutch Elm disease.” And sometimes an older poet introduces a younger one to a larger public, and that’s very useful. But on the whole, poets-as-reviewers are too biased; they have their agenda. To assign Charles Bernstein’s poetry to Glyn Maxwell, as the Times Literary Supplement did, is to ask for a negative review, and a snide one at that. The converse is also true: when Robert Pinsky is asked to review, say, Czeslaw Milosz, he is obviously going to treat the Polish Nobel Prize winner, with whom he worked at Berkeley, with veneration. So one hardly gets an objective view. But I wouldn’t mind the lack of objectivity so much, if the reviewer were well informed, and that’s too often not the case. The nadir of reviewing, these days, is The New York Times Book Review. A recent issue carried a review of Elias Canetti’s posthumous Party in the Blitz, the fifth installment of his autobiography, partly in note and diary form. I reviewed it for Bookforum and found it to be fascinating. The Times gave the book to the notoriously snide, clever British (originally Australian) Clive James, a “big name.” I found his review almost libelous. He called Canetti a “twerp” and made fun of him. It was a case of THE REVENGE OF THE BRITS against a book by a Central European who dared criticize some of them. What a choice for reviewer!

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Or again, take Langdon Hammer’s review, this past week in The Times, of Helen Vendler’s very slim and slight book on Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery—a set of lectures she gave fairly recently. One could tell from the review that the book was fairly slight, something of a footnote to Vendler’s other writings, but The Times gave it a whole page and chose a reviewer who was almost sure to give the book a very good review. If you know Hammer’s own writing on Allen Tate and Hart Crane and now on James Merrill, whose biography he’s writing, you would surmise that he would be sympathetic to Vendler’s position. Whereas any number of other reviewers—I am not talking about my friends but regular Times reviewers like William Logan—would have raised a few hard questions. Ideally, then, editors would choose reviewers (whether poets or academics) who are disinterested, who have nothing to gain from praising or blaming X or Y. Poetry reviews, though, are mostly just puffs. One would think each poet reviewed were a genius! Having criticized The Times Literary Supplement in the essay you cite, I want to go on the record as saying that the single best editor I know today (although I’ve never met him) is James Campbell at TLS. I’ve reviewed four to five times for him, and he really knows the poetry in question—say, Creeley or Ian Hamilton Finlay. He could write the review himself! And then his editing is exemplary; he carefully improves the piece. A brilliant editor, neither poet nor academic, but is himself a writer and anxious to see the work in question in its complexity rather than as an exemplar of the good or the bad. Side: You have said elsewhere that poetry is not “straightforward, expository discourse (as in a chemistry textbook), whose aim is to convey information.” I agree with this but am interested to know what a poem is doing when it is not doing this. Perloff: I would say that the poem holds the meanings involved in suspension. It was Yeats who said, “We make of the quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” I’ve just written an essay on Yeats’s “Easter 1916” as a political

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poem, and what’s so remarkable about this poem is that one can read it ten times and still not be sure which side Yeats was on. The fact is that the Nationalists-revolutionaries thought it supported their cause, while others thought the opposite, the oxymoron of “terrible beauty” reflecting the basic paradox of revolution. Now, does this poem convey “information”? Not exactly. It assumes that the reader will know the facts of the Easter Uprising, the takeover of the Post Office and the center of Dublin on Easter Monday 1916 in response to England’s indefinite delay of the Home Rule Bill. It helps to know who the persons mentioned like Patrick Pearse and John MacBride are! So the reader must get some “information” just to read the poem intelligently. But that’s not the same as the poem conveying information, is it? You don’t learn anything new, but the poem is full of rich meanings, ideas to think about, emotions that are conflicting. Does “too long a sacrifice” make “a stone of the heart,” and so on? Side: Tim Peterson has said that “there needs to be a way of talking about innovative poetry that allows for both stylistic inclusiveness and polemic.” By which he is referring to his rhetorical question, “If a central characteristic of avant-garde poetry is that it’s somehow politically oppositional, then what do we call ‘political poetry’ that’s not ‘avant-garde’?” His question assumes a view of avantgarde poetry as encompassing the political. How far (if at all) do you agree with his analysis? Perloff: I take up this question early in the semester when I teach “Theory of the Avant-Garde,” a graduate seminar. The first thing to understand is that in the early avant-gardes, the aesthetic and political were inseparable. Especially the Russian avant-garde was politically AND aesthetically revolutionary, marking a sharp break with the past. But as time went on, there was a split. This was already true of Zurich Dada: the Cabaret Voltaire was “against” but not really political, as Tom Stoppard shows well in his play Travesties, where Lenin, Joyce, and Tzara all find themselves in Zurich and Lenin has no use for Tzara at all or vice versa.

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It may be asked, “Well, if a movement isn’t politically radical, can it in fact be avant-garde?” The issue is complicated. The most avant-garde artist of the century, probably, Marcel Duchamp cared nothing about politics and left the country as soon as war was in the air—anything to avoid being drafted or even involved. And Gertrude Stein was actually quite reactionary politically as were many other avant-gardists like Wyndham Lewis, who was a Fascist. So the two don’t necessarily go together, and a lot of “polemic political” poetry is very traditional so far as form is concerned and not at all innovative. There is, by the twenty-first century, no necessary relationship between the two although our own avantgardists certainly tend to be on the Left! But being on the Left is not the same as a committed engagement in politics.

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(Un)Framing the other Tradition: On Ashbery and Others Interview with Grzegorz Jankowicz

Grzegorz Jankowicz: In your book called The Poetics of Indeterminacy, you have suggested that we can’t really come to terms with the major poetic experiments occurring in the twentieth century without some understanding of what you call “the other tradition.” Could you explain this general concept? How should we understand it? Is it historical, formal, or geographical? Marjorie Perloff: First, please bear in mind that I wrote The Poetics of Indeterminacy about thirty years ago! At the time, the New Criticism still dominated, and John Ashbery was dismissed as much too “difficult,” “incomprehensible,” purposely obscure. The “right” kind of poetry (e.g., Robert Lowell) was representational and communicated emotion in a comprehensible way, although poetry also had to have some obliqueness, via metaphor and symbol. Lowell’s “For the Union Dead” would be an example: the “giant finned cars” that “slide by on grease” in the final stanza symbolize the replacement of natural, organic animal life (fish) by the machines that have destroyed our industrial world, and so on. In this context, I wanted to trace the tradition that had

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produced an Ashbery or John Cage—I found that there was an other tradition, in which language was at once more literal and also more mysterious and that couldn’t be “translated” or paraphrased. My poets were Rimbaud, Stein, Pound, Williams, Beckett, leading up to David Antin, John Cage, and Ashbery. I contrasted this “other” tradition to the T. S. Eliot “Symbolist” one. In retrospect, of course this dichotomy is specious. Eliot, surely a major influence on Ashbery, could just as well have been placed in the opposite camp, and of course Mallarmé could have replaced Rimbaud. I think what I really had in mind was less the poetry itself than the way it was being read. Eliot’s New Critical heirs were read for their “symbolic” meanings, and you couldn’t do that with Ashbery. So from that point of view, the distinction was, and I hope still is, useful. Jankowicz: You took the phrase from the title of a poem by John Ashbery (the poem was published in 1977 in his book Houseboat Days). The phrase was actually introduced by our poet in his long poem titled “The System” written five years earlier. What is this curious “other tradition” described by Ashbery? Perloff: The “other tradition,” as the phrase is used in “The System,” is, I think, part serious, part parodic. On the one hand, here and later in Houseboat Days, Ashbery means that “you can’t say it that way any more,” that in the later twentieth century, there can be no way of representing the “real” outside the poem in any sort of representational way. But if you read The System, it’s also spoofing art’s promises to be revelatory, to give us a special dispensation and insight into “the other.” The “other tradition” is thus itself ambiguous, open, indeterminate—and that’s precisely Ashbery’s point, I think. Jankowicz: What fascinates me about “The Other Tradition” is that we can read it in two different ways at the same time. On the one hand, it is a pure flow of language and images. But on the other, readers are able to adapt this dream plot to fit their own set of particulars. What would you say for such a particular

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interpretation: the poem describes a poetry reading organized in 1976 (it was written that year) and held in New York. The reading was to commemorate the 10th anniversary of Frank O’Hara’s death, and “The Other Tradition” is actually O’Hara’s poetics. How far can we go with such reading? Perloff: Well, I think that’s too literal a construction of the poem. What makes it so delightful is that it relates to so many possible events: college reunions? Political rallies? Poets’ Clubs? If you restrict the meaning to the commemoration of O’Hara, why the “branches of Norfolk Island pine” or, later on, “the idea of a forest”—O’Hara, after all, was wholly urban! So I will stick to my original reading; the poem is at once literal—much particular detail—but also endlessly suggestive. Then, too, if Ashbery had wanted to write an elegy for Frank O’Hara, he would have. Why assume that the poem says X but means Y? Jankowicz: In the title of his lectures, Ashbery used plural form: we have many different traditions. What does this tiny but significant change mean? Perloff: I actually think that the Charles Eliot Norton lectures use the term in a very different sense. Here “other traditions” means quirky, offbeat, not the usual mainstream, major poets. Ashbery, as he says, wants to place himself with these Other poets rather than to claim kinship with the usual suspects. It’s a kind of statement of “difference,” oppositionality. But it’s not quite the same thing as the mysterious other tradition of The System or the poem by the title. Jankowicz: He chose six authors (five of them are English-writing individuals, and one—Raymond Roussel—is French). Ashbery says that his list contains only certifiably minor poets. What is their current position in the history of English literature? And why were they ignored by literary criticism?

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Perloff: Well, I must say that from the vantage point of the critic—at least this critic—the list is entirely eccentric. John Clare is a fine poet, and Raymond Roussel, very important to Ashbery, but the others are eccentric choices. I personally can’t stand Laura Riding’s poetry—and even Ashbery admits she has written some awful poems—and I can’t see the fuss over David Schubert or John Wheelwright. Beddoes has a historical interest; Death’s Jest Book is a fascinating quirky work. But I think Ashbery chose these poets precisely in order to be somewhat perverse. As he says, he felt he had nothing that new to say about the Big Names—Stevens, Auden, Stein, or the Romantics—but on these lesser poets, he could be quite original. The poets in question are largely “ignored by literary criticism” because they are, on the whole, minor poets. Among such minor poets, Clare and Roussel stand out as poets that have a large following of devotees. Riding has gotten her share of criticism because she is a woman poet and has an interesting place in literary history. But the rest are just not that admired. Jankowicz: I read Ashbery’s project as highly anticritical (he does like to repeat Nijinsky’s maxim that “criticism is death”). Are his essays of any interest for critics? I mean not for those who deal with Ashbery’s poetry and want to learn something from his view upon others, but those who work with poetry in general and are looking for a new perspective. Perloff: I agree with you. Ashbery’s essays are fascinating as perhaps prose poems in their own right; they teach us many things about Ashbery’s perspective. But for poetry criticism in general, I find them a little bit irrelevant. But this is true of Ashbery’s writings on painters too. He seems to prefer, say, Fairfield Porter to Mark Rothko or Jackson Pollock or Jasper Johns. That doesn’t mean we should feel that way. It is Ashbery’s poetic license to respond as he does. His readings are interesting in taking nothing on faith, in drawing their own conclusions.

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Jankowicz: Why do you think experimental poetry is less accepted by literary institutions, establishments, and regular readers than other literary forms and conventions? One can observe (always and everywhere—from Poland to the US) a specific resistance to progressive poetics that subvert our lingual and literary experience. And why does—as some critics try to convince us—this neglected poetry deserve readers’ attention? Perloff: You answer your own question in your first sentence when you mention both experimental poetry and institutions. The institution (university, publishing house, newspaper) is by definition conservative, and the attack must always be launched from outside it. It’s so much easier reading little lyric love poems or seeing conventional “problem” plays in three acts than it is to do something new. But there are always pockets of resistance. And indeed Ashbery, after all, has himself become something of an institution. He is praised by all the various camps of critics in the US and abroad. In fact, one could argue that he has been too unquestioningly accepted, and it’s not quite clear why some of the conservative critics like him. Jankowicz: Literary institutions have created another way of rejecting hermetic poetry. Instead of neglecting it, they normalize its subversiveness. In your essay “Normalizing John Ashbery,” you present how those academic critics who dismissed Ashbery’s poems as so much obscurantist double-talk have accepted its formal variety. Is there any chance for Ashbery to remain the invisible avant-gardist? Perloff: Yes, this follows from the previous question. Those critics who “normalize” Ashbery—and I think Helen Vendler is one— choose certain coherent moments and relate Ashbery, say, to Keats. But the fact is, as common sense tells us, that he is not like Keats. What I find difficult and interesting is that many Ashbery passages sound, say, like Charles Bernstein poems, and yet the same people who love Ashbery don’t usually like Bernstein. Why? Is it a preconceived reaction? One answer, perhaps, is that despite

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all his strangeness, Ashbery does still “express” selfhood—in ways different from the Language poets. But of course the Ashbery of The Tennis Court Oath or Girls on the Run or even A Wave is different—still the “invisible avant-gardist” as you put it. And that’s the Ashbery younger avant-gardists often prefer. Jankowicz: In his 1968 lecture called “The Invisible Avant-Garde,” Ashbery writes that there may be a fine distinction to be made between “the” tradition (high modernism) and “a” (or “other”) tradition, but the point is that there is no longer any doubt in anyone’s mind that vanguard and experimental writing have their own strong institution that makes them visible. Today all traditions and institutions seem to be in ruins. Do you think that it is still possible to think about literature through the perspective of “a” or “the” tradition(s)? Perloff: I actually don’t think all traditions are in ruins but that critical discourse is very weak these days and doesn’t grapple with the problems. Poetry reviewers especially deal with the present, failing to see how that present relates to, say, the 60s and 70s. I notice that the forgotten poets today are not the Modernists but the mid-century poets—in fact, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, etc., not to mention such once-important poets as W. S. Merwin, James Wright, Adrienne Rich, who came of age in the late 50s to early 60s. The question for literary critics and historians, then, is how the poetry of the early twenty-first century relates to its past. Another good question is the relation of US to other poetries—a very neglected topic. For instance, why is Ashbery so especially, popular in Poland? That’s not a rhetorical question. What is it about Polish art/culture that responds to Ashbery so fully? Poland was one of the first countries to recognize the genius of Frank O’Hara too. Why and how? Jankowicz: In your response to Harold Bloom’s refusal of cultural criticism, you wrote that Bloom’s insistence on the Romantic paradigm as the paradigm had made him curiously impervious to some of the most exciting poetry now being written. I ignore the

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whole paradox inscribed in Bloom’s argument (he refuses cultural criticism and at the same time he invests his energy in thematic reading), but I am interested in his aims. Don’t you think that by refusing linguistic analysis and taking us back to thematic motifs outside the materiality of the poetic language, Bloom focuses on those modes of criticism that enable him to establish the power of a poem over reality and other texts? Shouldn’t we all follow that path? In other words, shouldn’t we promote poetry and stress its power instead of stressing the reader with linguistic analysis? Or maybe Bloom simply can’t see any other way to “promote” his poetical object? Perloff: I think what you mean here is that Bloom goes for the big picture, “placing” Ashbery in the larger canon, and that this may be better than engaging in close “linguistic analysis.” I have actually come to like Bloom’s criticism much better than I once did because at least he deals with the literary, whereas so much of our current academic criticism is mostly a way of foregrounding minorities, women, various ethnicities. At the same time, I think Bloom made Ashbery something he wasn’t: the ultimate Last Romantic. But Ashbery has great affinities with W. H. Auden and the Eliot that Bloom dislikes! So the thematic readings are fine but, in this case, can be limited. Still, it was Bloom who put Ashbery on the poetic map to begin with, and that was all to the good. Jankowicz: What are the new trends focused on poetry in America? What are the emerging traits that define the contemporary poetical and critical scene in the US? Perloff: Well, much of the most interesting poetry being written today uses appropriation/citation in ways that we find in Ashbery himself, where every line sounds as if it were cited from somewhere! It is a poetry that plays down “originality” in the sense of Wordsworth’s “overflow of powerful feelings” in favor of framing, recasting the always already seen/read (déjà dit) as something new. In this sense, younger poets may be

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said to be in the Ashbery tradition. But the other news today is less Ashberrian. Concrete poetry is once again very important, looking ahead to the digital. Ditto sound poetry. And rules—like the Oulipo constraints—are very important. I just directed a little symposium on Conceptual Poetry and its Others at the University of Arizona (see Web site under “Arizona Poetry Center”). The poets included Caroline Bergvall, Charles Bernstein, Christian Bök, Craig Dworkin, Peter Gizzi, Kenneth Goldsmith, Susan Howe, Tracie Morris, and Cole Swensen. Of these, only Gizzi and Swensen are in any sense Ashberrian, and Kenneth Goldsmith, the advocate of “Uncreative Writing” and being “just a Word Processor,” marks a return to Futurism and Dada rather than the Ashberrian mode. Tracie Morris is a performance artist, interested in hip-hop, among other things. Susan Howe is more Poundian, creating elaborate half-lyric, half-documentary prose works. It’s a complicated poetry scene but very lively. I recommend to your readers Ubuweb (ubu.com) and PennSound (where you can hear Ashbery read). The Internet is where, currently, poetry is! And there are brilliant texts to be read, seen, and heard there!

8

Robert Lowell, Now and Then Conversation with David Wojahn

Marjorie Perloff: When the Collected Poems by Robert Lowell was published in 2003, I thought it would make a huge difference. The CP is an enormous volume, lovingly presented by Frank Bidart and David Gewanter, and the early reviews suggested that Robert Lowell was in for a big revival. Younger people, so the argument went, would now be exposed to the emotional charge and brilliant technique of this great mid-century poet and would become acolytes. I myself continue to admire Lowell’s poetry enormously, even though I also continue to dislike the sonnets in History, For Lizzie and Harriet, and The Dolphin. I feel that these volumes contain slack, self-indulgent poems that are too much like diary jottings, too local to be interesting. Acclaim from new readers seems not to have occurred. My students love Frank O’Hara: they can’t get enough of him. And they seem to find Elizabeth Bishop a better poet than Lowell, perhaps because her poems are so “finished,” so perfectly formed and rendered. But since I happen to prefer Lowell to Bishop, finding his range much larger and more apropos our lives, I

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wonder if the problem isn’t one of presentation. The Selected Poems, which contains only 100 pages of sonnets, vis-à-vis 240 pages made up of the earlier poems along with the last volume, Day by Day, should be more popular. Still, I don’t think we’re about to see a Lowell revival anytime soon. Has your experience with the younger generation of potential Lowell readers been different from mine? David Wojahn: A couple of years ago, I taught a grad course on the middle-generation poets, and my experience mirrors yours. The students found Bishop charming; they had no trouble accepting Berryman’s mannerism and tendency toward bathos, and they even warmed to poets I thought they’d resist—Weldon Kees, for example. But Lowell was difficult for them; they didn’t outright dislike him in the way they did George Oppen, but they expressed a fair amount of puzzlement, and a couple of them found it hard to believe that he was once held in such high esteem. This saddens me, but I think the students’ appraisal of Lowell is typical of readers who are newcomers to him, ones who don’t remember or care about his former stature and who find his desire to act as our social conscience a little bit quaint. (He was Official Verse Culture when it meant something.) It doesn’t help that the three most crucial Lowell books—Life Studies, For the Union Dead, Near the Ocean—are preceded by the not-very-reader-friendly modernist density of Lord Weary’s Castle and the Mills of the Kavanaughs, a book that seems to me nearly unreadable. And after the three great books comes the letdown of the sonnet trilogy. Even a judiciously made Selected Poems like this new one is not going to diminish this difficulty. Furthermore, even the three essential Lowell books cause problems for my students, and the main problems are these. They complain that Lowell is an elitist. They balk at his repeated references to his ancestry and social position. Never mind that his feelings about his background are so decidedly ambivalent. And they fail to see how cannily Lowell exploited his social standing in his poetry and in his public life. They see the Mayflower Lowell, not the “Mayflower screwball” of “Waking in the Blue.”

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Worse yet, Lowell is seen as a “Confessional” poet during a time when that word is used pejoratively or not at all. Over the past decade or so, it’s grown all too common to encounter students in MFA. workshops defending obliqueness and obscurity in their poems by saying they didn’t want them to seem “too confessional.” Sadly, the brighter students see in Lowell the beginnings of a kind of autobiographical self-indulgence that had its heyday in the ‘70s and ‘80s (the sort of writing that you once characterized as “talk show poetry,” Marjorie)—and such poetry has now fallen considerably out of fashion. But I have to say that this reaction mystifies me. Sharon Olds was not Lowell’s fault. And they forget that Lowell himself disliked being labeled a confessional poet. (I remember that brilliant line from his Paris Review interview—“a poem isn’t about an experience, it is an experience.”) I worry that the problems with Lowell’s reputation right now have less to do with the flaws in his work than with the problematic ways in which he influenced a later generation—and many of those writers didn’t read him well. Perloff: I think you put it perfectly when you say “Sharon Olds was not Lowell’s fault.” Absolutely not, and it’s true that the whole packaging of the recent Collected Poems (and now Selected) is problematic. But talk of Lowell’s reputation leads to a larger question. I’m curious how you feel about the following. When it comes to the early twentieth century, most poets/critics/ readers seem to agree on the canon: Eliot, Pound, Frost, Stevens, Williams, Crane, Moore, H. D., Stein…Now H. D. and Moore may be getting more attention than they used to, but on the whole, the canon of American poets from this period is not very different today from what it was when I graduated from Oberlin in—heaven help me—1953. But now look at the mid-century. Is the dominant group the Olson circle (Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Dorn, etc.) or the Lowell circle or the New York School or the Beats? Why has Roethke’s reputation declined so sharply? In my early teaching days, every other grad student did a dissertation on Roethke—I directed two or three.

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But it’s not a question of individuals: it’s that after WWII, consensus seems to disappear all but completely. I meet Ashbery enthusiasts who have never read Lowell. Or Ginsberg fans who can’t believe anyone cares about, say, Berryman or Merrill. And yet we are now as far away from mid-century poetry as I was in 1953 from the Modernists—indeed further. How do we handle this problem, do you think? I sometimes raise it, and students and colleagues say, “Well, it’s good that matters are so eclectic; we don’t want a single canon.” True enough, but what disturbs me are the current students who latch on to one or two contemporaries and are happy to discuss the pros and cons of Language poetry and yet have never read the poets of mid-century. Wojahn: Your observation about the modernist canon’s relative stability seems right to me. There’s a fairly strong consensus about the key figures; the recent winners and losers from that era are all on the periphery. (I’m glad that Mina Loy and the Objectivists now have a place at the table, and no one misses the likes of, say, Conrad Aiken.) But when you get to poets who began publishing around 1950 and beyond, things get rather mysterious. I have a few theories about why this is, and they’re mostly cynical. One obvious reason is that anthologies—and anthologies are still the main Poetry Delivery System for the young—are in a bad way, and they have become about as partisan as they were during the early sixties, when no one in the Donald Allen anthology appeared in the Hall/Pack/Simpson. The view of contemporary poetry that a student gets from Hoover’s Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry is radically different from the one set forth in McClatchy’s Contemporary American Poetry—you could count the number of figures represented in both books on your fingers. And permission fees have gotten outlandish, so anthologists are apt to cut corners in order to stay within their budgets, causing further distortion. I admire Adrienne Rich, but surely one of the reasons why the new two-volume Norton devotes more space to her than to some of the Big Shot modernists is that she’s a Norton poet—part of the Norton “studio system” and cheap for them to reprint. Is she really deserving of more space than Stein and Frost, and of

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the same amount as Eliot and Williams? (Twenty-three pages for the two former, and 28 for the two latter—and Rich—if you’re counting.) And, sure, Langston Hughes has been underappreciated and badly selected by anthologists—but do you solve that problem by giving him almost as much space as Eliot? If you talk to people in the poetry community, most will agree that there doesn’t seem to be any “dominant group” to have emerged during the last half-century. It’s all one big tent, you’ll be told. But the party-line affiliations remain; it’s just that people don’t fess up to adhering to them. I think this is especially the case among the poets who now run the writing programs. A student who studies at Naropa and a student who studies at Houston will learn two different dialects of contemporary poetry, and if you want to have a catholic understanding of the poetry of the last fifty years, you will have to do the reading on your own. There’s a certain snootiness we poets have about figures who aren’t members of our respective camps. Last year I was raving to my poet friends—I suppose I’d have to call myself and them members of some sort of “mainstream” camp—about Ted Berrigan’s Collected Poems. Berrigan may not be a “major” poet, but he’s inventive, heartbreaking, entrancing, and the book was addictive. Yet my enthusiasm for Berrigan was seen by most of my friends as a quaint eccentricity—I might as well have been praising rockabilly or talking about my baseball card collection. Poets seem almost hardwired to neglect figures who don’t fit into the tradition in which they’ve been trained. This makes things particularly unfortunate for writers whom we can’t closely align with one of the prevailing schools—Roethke being a good example. None of the dominant groups seems to value the poetry of spiritual crisis and interior journeying that characterizes Roethke at his best—that sort of writing is even more out of fashion than Lowell’s “confessional” verse. The Library of America just issued a Roethke Selected in that pocket-sized series they’re doing. He’s now relegated to a kind of AAA league which includes people like Kenneth Fearing, Amy Lowell, and (no kidding) Yvor Winters. Interesting writers, all, but I wouldn’t even rank them as majorminor poets. (Williams is in this series, too, which is truly bizarre.)

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I’ve gone off on a tangent, I know. To bring things sort of back to Lowell: Alice Notley’s notes to the Berrigan Collected Poems mention his enormous regard for Lowell, and Berrigan wrote a pretty good elegy for him. Nevertheless, I can’t imagine that your average reader of Berrigan will seek out Lowell because of this. Perloff: Funny that you use Ted Berrigan’s Collected Poems as an example of really liking a book outside your usual “discourse radius,” to use David Antin’s term. I have exactly the opposite reaction to Berrigan. I should love his work; most of my friends do, and of course he’s writing under the sign of Frank O’Hara, who is one of my great favorites. But I find Berrigan self-indulgent, selfimportant, and just plain irritating, and I have no interest in Alice Notley either. Second-generation New York poetry (or is this third-gen?) strikes me as a throwback to a messy confessionalism that lacks form. So this would prove your point that one must take contemporary poetry almost on a case-by-case basis. And rethink the canon every time. I agree with you about anthologies. I wonder if you saw my review of the new David Lehman Oxford Book of American Poetry in the TLS. I found it really problematic, but then I don’t like most anthologies for the reasons you mention and never use them in teaching; I try to teach the poets I like, making up my own anthology, so to speak. Still, one could argue that anthologies are an index to the ethos of the period rather than producing it. And that ethos has a lot to do with identity politics, doesn’t it? Cary Nelson’s Oxford anthology is fine for the moderns, but then the contemporary section includes mostly minorities, workingclass poets, feminist poets, etc. Jahan Ramazani in the Norton features a large number of postcolonial poets. And so on. Once “diversity” or “multiculturalism” becomes the criterion, of course all other standards go by the wayside. My friend Luigi Ballerini was recently criticized for not including enough women in his Italian anthology (with Paul Vangelisti) of San Francisco poetry. Well, until the 80s or so, there just were precious few; Ballerini couldn’t invent them, could he? But every anthologist, professor, editor, critic is now aware of the need to be “inclusive,” and that has made discourse about poetry almost impossible.

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In reading earlier criticism, it’s interesting to see how vicious people could be: John Hollander could just dismiss “Howl,” or the Lowell camp could dismiss O’Hara with impunity. But now everyone is so polite even though, as you say, they continue to have their own agendas and ignore others. How can we improve this state of affairs? This is not a rhetorical question! The only way, I suppose, would be to have very specific discussions about specific poets and try to understand the mechanism of response. In this regard, do you remember the early collection of essays on Lowell edited by Robert Boyers with Ehrenpreis’s “The Age of Lowell” and a lot of essays both positive and negative? That was a very useful thing. Critics actually discussed Lowell’s translations (Imitations) critically. Would this be possible in a current context? Wojahn: I have taken a look at your TLS piece on the Lehman anthology, and it’s certainly an accurate reading of a depressing situation. I wrote a similarly withering piece that was occasioned by the Ramazani Norton a couple of years back. Ramazani and Nelson in their critical writings have said interesting and important things about canon reformation, but once they were actually called upon to edit a major anthology, the results were lab experiments that went terribly awry; their choices are blinkered and parochial, especially when it comes to poets born after 1950 or thereabouts. Lehman is another story, known less as a critic or a poet than as a literary entrepreneur of the sort you mention in the end of your review, where you list the Oscar Williamses and Louis Untermeyers of our day. I fear that the relative power such people are perceived to wield in the world of po-biz causes many poets—and it has nothing to do with aesthetic temperament—to go easy on them. Bash Lehman and you’ll be banished forever from the pages of Best American Poetry. At any rate, I wouldn’t be disappointed to see the extinction of the Big Anthology, either. I know a fair share of professors who compile their own anthologies. The digital age is changing things, but I’m not sure it’s going to get poets from the various camps to really converse with one another. Blogs are a case in point: I was looking at Ron Silliman’s blog the other day—he posted a smart

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essay about a singer I admire, Townes Van Zandt, and I wanted to read the discussions, which turned out to be desultory and uninteresting, cliquish chatter from Silliman’s amen corner that made me wonder if your average poetry reader’s “discourse radius” is actually shrinking thanks to the odd dynamics of the Web. Later on the same day I taught Lowell in my graduate poetry workshop, and the response to his work was on the whole more positive than it had been during some of my previous efforts to teach him. Students still complained about Lowell’s elitism, still seemed baffled by the early work, but they liked the poems of Life Studies quite a bit and the selections from For the Union Dead best of all. One of the students remarked that it was only in For the Union Dead that Lowell hit upon a manner that seemed truly conversational and seemed able to abandon that famously willful approach for something that allowed for surprise, for the appearance of serendipity. That comment made sense to me: he intends to make the sonnets sound improvisational, but he rarely achieves that goal. It’s only in For the Union Dead and in Day by Day that Lowell abandons his desire for big pyrotechnical effects and shows us how his mind seems to work, with all its oddness of perception and associative strangeness. He’s not exactly moving toward surrealism, but the poems of these two books seem more intimate to me than even those of Life Studies. It’s those sorts of qualities that make the title poem of For the Union Dead seem deeply felt and personal rather than grandiose. Of course, For the Union Dead and Day by Day are the best examples of what Lowell can do with free verse. The sonnets hardly display a lot of metrical strictness, but even the ghost of a pentameter line seems to hobble them. Lowell’s always better when he keeps the lines shorter, whether it’s the free verse of For the Union Dead and Day by Day or the tetrameter he favors in Near the Ocean. Anyway, during the class we ended up looking in some detail at “Florence,” a poem that I’d never paid much attention to, and I found myself astonished by the turns it makes; it’s one of Lowell’s great political poems, the homophobia and snootiness of its opening notwithstanding. The two opening stanzas are fairly

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static—it’s travelogue lingo, really—and then there’s that sudden move to weird visceral rhapsody—it’s as if Hart Crane were trying to rewrite Beowulf: Oh Florence, Florence, patroness of the lovely tyrannicides! Where the tower of the Old Palace pierces the sky like a hypodermic needle, Perseus, David and Judith, lords and ladies of the Blood, Greek demi-gods of the Cross rise sword in hand above the unshaven, formless decapitation of the monsters, tubs of guts, mortifying chunks for the pack. Pity the monsters! Pity the monsters! Perhaps, one always took the wrong sideAh, to have known, to have loved too many Davids and Judiths! My heart bleeds black blood for the monster. I have seen the Gorgon. The erotic terror of her helpless, big-bosomed body lay like slop. Wall-eyed, staring the despot to stone, her severed head swung like a lantern in the victor’s hand. I don’t think this is the place for trying to interpret the symbolic significance of Lowell’s identification with his cast of monsters, and he was at this time in his career keen to leave what he called the “hat rack symbolism” of the New Critical method behind, but this passage has the same sort of apocalyptic dread and oddness of

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perception that animates the Lord Weary’s Castle poems. Yet it’s far less labored than the early work; it’s got the feel of improvisation but none of the slapdash quality of the later sonnets. I can’t imagine any other poet of Lowell’s generation being able to write anything quite like this. I’m wondering, Marjorie, if you found a sleeper poem like this one in your look through the new Selected—a poem you hadn’t really appreciated before. Perloff: It’s interesting that your students did like For the Union Dead so much. I tend to agree with their (and your) assessment. But I do have some problems with “Florence” that point (for me) to larger problems with Lowell’s work. You quote the second part of the poem, but let’s look a moment at the first. I find the opening a bit cute in its cataloguing of “Communists / and brothels” and the lines “everything, even the British / fairies who haunted the hills.” I don’t think I’m particularly sensitive to gay bashing, but these lines, like the reference to the “fairy decorator” in “Skunk Hour,” are needlessly nasty, and it’s interesting to me that Lowell got away with it in 1964. By this time, no one could make an anti-Semitic reference or a racist one, and these homophobic references are irritating. Still, I find, like you, the notion of taking the side of the monsters as against the monster slayers (Judith, David, Perseus) very original and powerful. No one ever thinks of the myths this way. And in the repetition of “Pity the monsters,” one senses an identification between the poet and these “losers” that is quite moving. And then, the line “Perhaps, one always took the wrong side” brings that identification out in the open. Again, though, Lowell spoils the effect just a bit with “helpless, big bosomed body,” which makes the Gorgon too realistic. A very taut, exciting poem, yes, and not so neglected since it gave Alan Williamson the title for his critical study of Lowell, Pity the Monsters. Turn the page of the Selected, and there is one of my favorite Lowell poems, “Eye and Tooth.” I don’t know about its being a “sleeper” since it has often been anthologized, but it would be a good place for students to begin:

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My whole eye was sunset red, the old cut cornea throbbed, I saw things darkly, as through an unwashed goldfish globe. The poet starts with an ordinary situation—getting something in your eye—and he makes that common nuisance metaphorical for his inability to “see.” That may be a well-worn metaphor, but Lowell makes it new, beginning with the blurred eye as “unwashed goldfish globe.” The four-line stanza is condensed and tight: look at the consonance of “red” and “throbbed” in lines 1-2—they almost hurt to pronounce. The poem continues I lay all day on my bed. I chain-smoked through the night, learning to flinch at the flash of the matchlight. Even momentary illumination hurt, and again, I love the sound structure, “light” rhyming lamely with “matchlight,” where the stress is on the first syllable, and “flinch” alliterating with “flash.” Very taut. Now stanza 3: Outside, the summer rain, a simmer of rot and renewal, fell in pinpricks. Even new life is fuel. Rot and renewal often go together in Lowell, but what’s interesting here is the way water, the pinprick of rain, far from putting the fire out, becomes so much “more fuel,” bringing back troubling memories of childhood. Lowell now modulates “eye” and “tooth” imagery, culminating in “an eye for an eye, / a tooth for a tooth,” and the recognition that he can never avoid his fate: “Young, my eyes began to fail.” Now comes the climax

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Nothing! No oil for the eye, nothing to pour on these waters or flames. I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil. I can’t think of a more effective rhyme than “oil”/ “turmoil.” The poet’s “turmoil” contains that “oil,” but he can’t channel it in any useful way. And then the self-deprecation: “I am tired. Everyone’s tired of my turmoil.” As if to say, “Enough already. Don’t take yourself so seriously.” So here are nine quatrains, irregularly rhyming, that come to the conclusion that there’s no oil for the turmoil, or again, no oil, only turmoil, turmoil nicely alliterating with “tired” used twice in the last line. The poem is personal but not confessional in an overblown way: we don’t know what it is that the poet has done and why he can’t be forgiven. It is all objectified and there are only hints and guesses. In such poems, Lowell remains the master: he generates strong emotions in the reader because his own pain is so perfectly rendered in phrase after phrase. “Of rot on the red roof” is another lovely line. So the Selected Poems does give us a chance to rethink Lowell’s poetry and its place today. Wojahn: It’s interesting that our choices represent two very distinct sides of Lowell. I suppose the ending of “Florence” typifies his almost obsessive desire to make Big Generalizing Statements, and when that desire doesn’t devolve into mere grandiosity, he can be positively majestic. “Eye and Tooth” shows a more intimate and demotic side of Lowell, shows that capacity for making the familiar strange that he so envied in Bishop. (Of course, it too ends with a statement, and one that a lot of people would say—pejoratively— epitomizes Lowell.) The two modes aren’t polarities, really, but there aren’t a lot of poems in which they effectively merge: “For the Union Dead,” surely, but not many others. I think he’s trying to find a way out of this dilemma in Day by Day—he seems more able to move toward statement without the need to signal it with a drumroll, and he also more regularly comes “‘a little nearer / the

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language of the tribe,’” as “Morning after Dining with a Friend” puts it. (He’s putting these words into the mouth of his friend William Meredith here, but this is certainly a goal he’s striving for in the last book.) He seemed on the verge of another stylistic breakthrough in the final poems, and it’s sad that we didn’t get to see the results.

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Futurism and Schism: Close Listening with Marjorie Perloff Interview with Charles Bernstein

Charles Bernstein: Welcome to Close Listening, Art International Radio’s program of readings and conversations with scholars, critics, poets, artists, presented in collaboration with PennSound. My guest today for the third of three shows is Marjorie Perloff. Marjorie Perloff is one of America’s foremost scholars of modern, modernist, and contemporary poetry and poetics. Her books include Rhyme and Meaning in the Poetry of Yeats (1970), Frank O’Hara: Poet Among Painters (1977), The Dance of the Intellect: Studies in the Poetry of the Pound Tradition (1985), The Futurist Moment: Avant-Garde, Avant Guerre and the Language of Rupture (1986), Wittgenstein’s Ladder: Poetic Language and the Strangeness of the Ordinary (1996), and a book of essays that she coedited with Craig Dworkin, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound (2009). She lives in Los Angeles, California. My name is Charles Bernstein. Marjorie, welcome back one more time to Close Listening. Marjorie Perloff: Thank you, Charles.

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Bernstein: Literary or poetry history of the past 100 years is often thought to be divided into sides or warring camps. Over the course of your books, you have written about poets and poetry that would seem to be deeply at odds: Yeats versus the Futurists, or Robert Lowell versus Frank O’Hara. In one of your most influential essays you ask the questions yourself: “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” I’d even throw in the Stein/Pound, along with Stevens/Pound, in terms of the way in which we tend to pit one approach or one constellation of poetry against another. What do you think? Perloff: Well, surprisingly, I just gave in Hartford, Connecticut, the annual Wallace Stevens Birthday Address, sponsored by a group called “Friends and Enemies of Wallace Stevens,” but of course none of the members are really “enemies.” I think the name was designed to bring in as many Hartford citizens as possible. At any rate, in my lecture, I’m not totally favorable to Stevens. I argue that his aphorisms, brilliant as they are, are also a limitation and that the best Stevens embeds aphorisms in a larger structure. And I suppose, much as I admire Stevens, I still hold to the view of “Pound/Stevens: Whose Era?” that Pound is the more interesting of the two. My reservation has always had to do with the fact that there are no people in Wallace Stevens. As he says, “life for me is a matter of places, not of people, and that is the difficulty.” And I think it is a difficulty. Pound, in contrast, is always alive to human interaction, which makes for a very exciting poetry, however nefarious many of Pound’s ideas. So, I haven’t really changed my mind much. Bernstein: How about let me shift it to Stein/Pound, who are so different, and yet you’ve obviously written a lot about and are a champion of both. Perloff: Well, of course they are very different, but in the end, they share an emphasis on language—on le mot juste—that makes them complementary. They are more like one another than, say, either is like Marianne Moore. There is a self-consciousness in Moore I find in neither Pound nor Stein, and in her lesser work, a

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certain cuteness and straining for effect. I know it’s heresy today to say that, and one is supposed to like every poet equally, but— Bernstein: Was there some time in your life where you did feel like you had to like everybody? I can’t imagine that. Perloff: Well, yes. Yes, certainly I did when I was a student. You had to write about whatever you were assigned to write about. Bernstein: Sure, but like everybody? Perloff: Not like everybody so much, but one had to acknowledge them. In my own case, though, the question of Pound versus Stevens or Pound versus Stein is not nearly as interesting as that of all of the above in comparison to Baudelaire, who is, for me, the great Modernist poet, with Rimbaud a very close second and of course Mallarmé as well. Bernstein: Are you saying the Americans are not so good as the Europeans, Marjorie!? Perloff: Not as a generalization at all; in the second half of the twentieth century, the Americans predominate. But Baudelaire has a range and depth you don’t find in his British or American successors. Still, I don’t want to get caught up in rankings. Once I accepted the assignment to write on Wallace Stevens, I was happy to do so. I did my best to read the new Stevens scholarship. I am a scholar, and my habit is to go back and read what everybody else says and then come to my own conclusions. What do you think? Bernstein: Unlike in our typical conversations, I’m not going to give my point of view on this, because I want to hear what you— Perloff: Oh, I wish you would. Bernstein: After we go off the air, but for now I want to ask you about the Stein moment. Stein remains a vexed figure, even now

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in the twenty-first century. I have an understanding of why that is, to some degree. Still, it’s still a little bit surprising that she could be controversial now… Perloff: I think she’s at least as controversial as she was fifty years ago and will become more so. Stein is such a special case; she is so uncompromising, and she will never be widely popular. I have to be honest and say there are moods where I myself don’t feel like reading Gertrude Stein. Her prose makes enormous demands on the reader, and so, although I love to write about Gertrude Stein, I don’t always like to read her. When Benjamin Friedlander recently said on his blog that Stein is excessively abstract, I saw what he meant. On the other hand, I’ve always adored teaching Gertrude Stein because the students come up with such wonderful readings. Teaching Tender Buttons or “Miss Furr and Miss Skeene” or, for that matter, the plays is a wonderful experience. I did a whole seminar on Gertrude Stein for sophomores at Stanford, and the more we read Stein, the more intriguing she became, the more interesting. But the rigor of the long prose works of the 1920s like A Long Gay Book can be off-putting. One isn’t always in the mood for that particular kind of rigor. And so, I do think that, as the late great Guy Davenport said in a review of Ulla Dydo’s Stein Reader, she will always be considered marginal. Did you read Elaine Showalter’s recent dismissal of Stein? Bernstein: No. Perloff: It was in the Chronicle for Higher Education. Elaine Showalter has written a new literary history of American women writers. And she covers the most minor of writers. But when she is asked whether there is any writer covered that she doesn’t herself like, she responds, “Yes, Gertrude Stein.” Stein, Showalter suggests, is the most overrated of writers. She is boring! Bernstein: That’s what I mean by her continued controversy, because around visual artists and other radical artists of that time,

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a hundred years ago, you just sort of accept; they’re accepted just as being what they are. They don’t remain controversial. You might not like them. You might not go back to them. But they don’t quite have the volatility that Stein has. Perloff: You mean that she would make people that mad. Bernstein: Right. Perloff: As she made Elaine Showalter. Bernstein: A hundred years after she did some of her most important work. Perloff: Well, I’m not sure critical views progress that way. Ironically, Stein was appreciated early on by writers like Edmund Wilson, and she did have many other early admirers. But don’t forget that most critics, early and late, focus on thematic issues in literature. They are concerned with meaning, plot, character. In this respect, Stein can be very frustrating. She is a poet’s poet. There was a pro-Stein blip on the radar screen in the eighties, thanks to the Language poets, but then criticism soon turned to Stein’s role as lesbian, expatriate, feminist, Jew, and so on, rather than concentrating on her actual writing. Once this “outsider” interest wanes, she will be neglected again. And then there’s also her politics, which is quite problematic. What I am trying to say is that the larger public, even for, say, Kafka or Joyce, is not going to appreciate the radical innovations of Stein. Bernstein: So, a hundred years ago, give or take a few years, there began to emerge the range of works that you write about in The Futurist Moment, including Marinetti’s publication The Futurist Manifesto in 1909. Can you talk a bit about the relevance of The Futurist Moment? First of all, what do you see as its significance? And do you see or think Stein could be more thought of as more a part of that, a context that would therefore make her seem a little bit less extreme?

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Perloff: Absolutely. Bernstein: As opposed to the context of Robert Frost. Perloff: I say in the lecture, which I am giving at Yale this week, which is called “The Two Futurisms,” that it is still “the Futurist Moment,” not the Futurist movement, that interests me most. Concern for the Italian Futurist movement leads to studies that follow the artists and poets right into the 1930s and beyond, whereas for me the great innovations were all over by the end of World War I. The only one who survived the war was Marinetti himself. The others either died—the two great artists, Boccioni and Sant’Elia, were killed in the war in 1916 before Fascism came into being, and these artists were socialists really or anarchists— or they left the movement because they really disliked its coming association with fascism. And the notable survivor was Marinetti, who did become a fascist. There’s absolutely no doubt about it. And he also became much less interesting. Remember that Marinetti was never an especially notable poet or fiction writer. He was a great polemicist, a great manifesto writer, but his poetry and his fiction were not that successful. Bernstein: Although the visual work— Perloff: The visual work is wonderful. The parole in libertà certainly. But the great futurism, for me, is the Russian “cubofuturist” variant, which we are just beginning to study now. And, to me, the Russian avant-garde is the great one, more important than Dada, certainly, and more important than surrealism. But Russian Futurism was also short-lived. Bernstein: Well, it was wiped out. Perloff: It was wiped out, and what’s so poignant is that they were all revolutionaries. They really were revolutionaries, and I mean they believed in the political revolution, too. They were all for it, even after it occurred, but they were soon to be destroyed. It was

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a great moment in literary history, and in an odd way, it includes Gertrude Stein, to come back to her. Stein was already creating incredible work by 1910, 1912, 1914—for example, the portraits like “Marry Nettie,” which I’ve written about in relation to Marinetti. So, although Stein disliked the Futurists and thought Marinetti was a windbag, she belongs with Khlebnikov in the Futurist moment, when you think about it. Bernstein: And I do. Perloff: What? Bernstein: And I do think of Khlebnikov and Gertrude Stein. Perloff: They have a lot in common in their awareness in the smallest particles of language and that it makes a difference whether you use a present tense or a past tense and that the way words relate really matter. Bernstein: I think of Khlebnikov’s “The Word as Such” in relationship to Stein’s “Composition as Explanation.” Perloff: Absolutely, “Composition as Explanation.” And How to Write, one of my favorite Stein books. How to Write, which contains the piece “Arthur a Grammar.” All these things are directly related to the whole concern with language that you have in Russian Futurism and, to some extent, in Marinetti too. There are writings by Marinetti that aren’t as well known that are absolutely brilliant, prescient in foreseeing the digital world. He has a long amazing piece reprinted in Lawrence Rainey’s Futurist anthology called “The Electrical War,” in which he says, among other things, that soon we’ll have chairs that are lightweight, made out of metal and that we can carry around. And lo and behold, we do! Bernstein: How about the relation of the poets to the visual artists in that period that you write about in your book? What made that

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possible, and have we ever had such an intense interconnection between those often very different kinds of work? Perloff: It’s a good question of how it was possible. I think the revolution first occurred in the visual arts, where antirepresentational work was considered more acceptable than it is in poetry. And in the 1910s, thanks to the rapidity of industrialization and cultural change, theater, film, all the different forms are revolutionized, and it’s a truly interdisciplinary period. We certainly don’t have anything like it today. You have a curious separation between the arts today, and people in one area not knowing the other. People in the visual arts, great critics of the visual arts, knowing nothing about poetry, and vice versa…So, I guess there was the feeling that anything could be done. I really like the utopianism of these prewar years. Bernstein: Of immediately before the First World War… Perloff: That’s right. Utopianism is inspiring, even though it was defeated by the events of the time. Utopianism is a healthy thing. For artists must believe that things could change, and that art can change, that literature could change, that it is possible to do something new. And in the early 1910s, you had all these people converging on Paris, like Picasso from Spain, Blaise Cendrars from Switzerland, Apollinaire from Italy: the avant-garde, let’s remember, largely came from marginalized cultures. I mean, Italy was certainly a marginalized country at the time. Just go back and read in, let’s say, Howard’s End or other novels by E. M. Forster how the Italians at the time were regarded by the Brits as just rather dirty little people. Bernstein: And the Russians, of course, as well. Perloff: And the Russians were considered wild people. Tourists certainly didn’t go to Russia, where the people were held to be “wild,” somehow inferior. To understand futurism, you must understand that the Italians were considered quite inferior to

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the English and French and Germans. They were regarded as oversexed “primitive” people who weren’t quite civilized. Bernstein: So, how about Yeats in respect to that period? That also seems like such a different world, right? And yet, obviously I don’t think it needs to be explained why one would like different things, but nonetheless— Perloff: But you’re right that it’s a very strange thing. Obviously part of it is just autobiographical: when I was going to graduate school, Yeats was the great poet. Bernstein: And you still think Yeats is a great poet. Perloff: I still think he is a great poet, but I was certainly influenced by the culture of my university years. In the 60s, Yeats was a hot dissertation topic. Gayatri Spivak, for example, wrote her dissertation on Yeats. All kinds of people who you wouldn’t expect worked on Yeats because there was so much to do. On Blake as well. You could explicate Blake’s late prophetic books like Jerusalem. The same thing was true of Yeats, and it just seemed very exciting. But don’t forget that I wrote my dissertation on rhyme: it was the formal aspect of Yeats’s poetry that interested me, and with respect to sound. I still think Yeats, is an absolutely extraordinary poet, however different he may be from, say, Gertrude Stein. Yeats’s work is so rich and complex. I’m directing a dissertation on Yeats at USC right now by a wonderful student who is interested in Yeats’s philosophy and theosophy, and he’s working on Yeats and Wittgenstein. There’s one for you. Bernstein: Your most recent edited collection, The Sound of Poetry/The Poetry of Sound, continues your emphasis on sound patterning, to use the most generalized term for it. And you continue to write about sound, even in work that often isn’t viewed from the point of view of its sound patterning. So, over the course of your work, you move from a metrical, perhaps, to a postmetrical or nonmetrical environment for rhythm and sound. But remain focused on poetry’s sound.

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Perloff: I do, I do. Bernstein: So, let me ask you another question, autobiographical in part, but also going back those binary divisions within the poetry of the Cold War period: Robert Lowell, Frank O’Hara. In many ways, they come to stand for such a different…almost like in the Frost sense, “Two roads diverged…and I / I took the one less traveled…” O’Hara’s and Lowell’s are often viewed as being two roads that have diverged within American poetry. That divergence structures a lot of our thinking about postwar poetry, not because people don’t like one or the other, but just the way in which we associate poetic practices around those two proper names. Perloff: Yes, but again you have to historicize this a little bit. I don’t read much Lowell anymore, and of all my books the one I probably like least is The Poetic Art of Robert Lowell (1973). On the other hand, I do remember how thrilling those lines from Life Studies seemed back then: “Tamed by Miltown we lie on mother’s bed; / the rising sun in war paint dyes us red” (Lowell, “Man and Wife,” stanza 1). The famous poet of that moment was Richard Wilbur. And compared to Richard Wilbur, Lowell was direct, immediate, and the choice of words seemed powerful in that particular book. But by the time Lowell published Notebook and History, I wasn’t nearly as interested. I still love Sylvia Plath, by the way, even though her poetry is so different from most of the work I have championed. “Viciousness in the kitchen: the potatoes hiss.” A great opening (“Lesbos”). But here let me go back to Yeats a minute and explain something. What Yeats and Stein and Pound have in common is that all three believe, as Yeats puts it, that “Our words must seem to be inevitable.” That to me is the key to poetry. Our words must seem inevitable, as he wrote to Dorothy Wellesley in that wonderful correspondence, which every student of poetry should read, The Letters of Yeats to Dorothy Wellesley. Never use a different word when the same word will do again. His example is “harlot”; if you mean “harlot,” he tells Wellesley, then repeat that word. And the idea of the inevitability of language, even more than just the sound, was central to Yeats. He revised endlessly

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in order to get words absolutely right. Take the poem I mention in my preface to The Sound of Poetry, which begins, “Others, because you did not keep / That deep-sworn vow have been friends of mine.” Language is used very brilliantly as it is by Stein, as it is by Pound, and what I have a real resistance to, especially in much poetry written today, which seems to me in the vein of 1909 before Eliot and Pound came on the scene, is that it’s just slack. There are too many words used. There are endless extra prepositions and verb forms that you don’t need, and it just goes along like prose. That really bothers me. Now, to return to Lowell. At his best, even though he was a Boston Brahmin, seemingly the opposite of Frank O’Hara, he broke down the wall that existed at the time—the wall of poetic diction, à la Allen Tate. In the poetry of the time, there was much gratuitous figuration, elaborate metaphor, circumlocution. Lowell’s poetry had a new immediacy and intimacy. But even in that book, by the way, in the chapter on the Imitations, I say how problematic his translations are and I criticize the later work. So, my book was by no means all praise of Lowell even back then. Bernstein: But don’t you think that Lowell’s poetry diverges from the Don Allen New American Poetry context, that most basic “raw and cooked” binary? Perloff: Yes and no, but don’t forget that I don’t like all the work in the Don Allen book either. I’ve never been an Olsonite. I’ve never had the taste for Robert Duncan. The latter is my dirty little secret: Steve Fredman once said to me, “Your weakness, Marjorie, is that you don’t appreciate Robert Duncan.” My friends Al Gelpi and Peter Quartermain have said this to me too. But my problem, as I was saying of others before, is that Robert Duncan’s poetry strikes me as often quite slack, so far as sound goes, and the references are often quite vague. For me, language has to resonate. The words have to, so to speak, explode in your face. Bernstein: And yet you’re interested in contemporary poetry, some of which is not about sound resonating, if it’s found—

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Perloff: Well, if not the sound resonating, then a resonant, complex meaning. Bernstein: But the meaning resonating…Even within a conceptual context meaning can resonate, from your point of view? Perloff: Absolutely, so that you have reread it. Presumably the language was “found” for a reason, so you have to look at it closely. But so far as the big debate prompted by the Allen anthology goes—the debate between the raw and the cooked—let me say that if I had to choose between Robert Lowell and Denise Levertov, I’d pick Robert Lowell. And although Don Allen was a good friend of mine and I admire his book enormously, I think there are plenty of poets in that anthology that aren’t very good. Just because they had the right poetics, you see, doesn’t make them good; that issue has always been a problem for me. I can’t admire poets just because they have the right poetics. Bernstein: And do you see that as a problem as well in 2009? Perloff: Absolutely. Bernstein: How do you compare that to the era of Eliot? I know that you’re about to give a talk on, is it? Eliot and the poetry of today. Perloff: No, but I’ve been invited to the Eliot summer school in London. But I have written on Eliot and the earlier avant-garde. Bernstein: Is there an avant-garde today? Can there be innovation after the radical innovations of the modernist period? That’s the generic version of my next question for you. Perloff: Sure. I think there will always be an avant-garde. You’re certainly avant-garde! Bernstein: But many people would dispute that, as you know so very well. But whatever anyone wants to call it. Innovation. Certainly that’s my view: there has to be invention just to stay current.

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Perloff: There has to be. There always is. Bernstein: But a lot of people don’t think that. So, I’m putting my question from that point of view. Perloff: I don’t think today’s avant-garde is as dramatic as that of the early century. I do think the real revolution occurred, as I said, before World War I. It was all over after the war. I mean, revolution of the sense that one could do something entirely new and different. When I was recently working on the Russian avantgarde, I went on YouTube—this is an interesting exercise—I wanted to know what Moscow or Petersburg really looks like in 1910. There was no transportation yet except horses and sleds. Bernstein: That’s why they were so thrilled by the motorcar. Perloff: Not in Russia, they were not so thrilled about the motorcar— Bernstein: I’m thinking of Marinetti— Perloff: But I’m thinking of the airplane. The airplane. Malevich never went in an airplane. He loved the idea of flying. He loved defying gravity. It’s all very mystical, but he never went in any plane at all. And yet he could envision the “fourth dimension.” I do feel, always feel that poetry has to be very much of its time and the kinds of innovations and things we have today. Of course it has to be innovative, but it is also true, as Hugh Kenner said, that the avant-garde can be just as boring as anything else. Avantgarde allegiance alone, in other words, isn’t enough. And much work today has become very predictable. Bernstein: When people first come to radical modernist and contemporary poetry, European or American, they sometimes rub up against what feel is its elitism. I’ve written about this in terms of “the difficult poem.” In the few moments I have left, I thought I would ask you how you respond as a teacher. It must come up all

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the time, because it does for me—that this poetry is elitist. It’s a very American question. Perloff: I think poetry is by its very definition elitist. I think that that whole discussion of elitism is so silly. I just heard, the other night at a discussion in New Haven, someone say “then isn’t Bob Dylan really then the best poet because he’s not elitist?” Everybody loves Bob Dylan and knows those lyrics. And so he’s the great poet of the period. But the truth is that, so far as the “public” is concerned, the real action is not in a Bob Dylan song but the ball game. The public doesn’t like Billy Collins any more than they like Charles Bernstein or Susan Howe. Most of the people I know in my day-to-day life never read any poetry. They might read some novels. By literature, they mean novels. And they might read novels, new novels, or even classical novels, but they don’t read poetry. So, poetry has always been elitist and, after all, if you think of the Metaphysical poets living in a manuscript culture, or you think of even Wordsworth or the Romantic poets, it was always elitist. I think it’s fine that it’s elitist because the audience is, in fact, very big. The criticism in England is that in the United States poetry only has a university audience. Well, let’s remember that the university audience is huge, as you well know. There are lots of people at universities all over the United States. This very evening there will be poetry readings in every city throughout the country. You know, there will be readings, and there is interest, and that’s enough for me. I agree with Frank O’Hara: if they don’t like poetry, bully for them. The movies are good too. And the ball game is good too, I guess, although I must confess I never go to one! Bernstein: You’ve been listening to Marjorie Perloff hitting home runs here on Close Listening. The program was recorded on November 9, 2009, at the Clocktower Studios in New York. Close Listening is a production of PennSound, in collaboration with Art International Radio operating at artonair.org. For more information on this show, visit writing.upenn.edu/pennsound. I’m Charles Bernstein, close listening even when it hurts.

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The Challenge of Language Interview with Enrique Mallen

Enrique Mallen: What is your opinion of contemporary “experimental poetry”? Marjorie Perloff: To begin with, I don’t especially care for the word “experimental,” which implies that the poetry in question is just an experiment, that it may well fail. Imagine Baudelaire being called an “experimental” poet. Or Rimbaud. I prefer the adjective “radical” or “oppositional” or even the familiar epithet “avant-garde.” Mallen: But you did suggest that contemporary poetry should be “an experimental constructivist poetry” that criticizes cultural linguistic practices through a Wittgensteinian “distrust of grammar,” “a poetics that directs its inquiry to textuality.” Can you elaborate on this?

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Perloff: Yes. I really do think that today it would be impossible to write poetry in the straightforward, consecutive sentences of the contemporary print world. We have so much language all around us—indeed, we’re bombarded by it—so that I think the role of poetry is to deconstruct dominant language practices, to call them into question, to provide cultural critique. On the other hand, the mere fact of disjunction or asyntacticality doesn’t mean much. It was the great critic Hugh Kenner who quipped that the avant-garde could be just as boring as anything else. That’s always a good thing to remember. There are poets today who think all you have to do is leave out grammatical connectives and fragment words and then you’ve got interesting poetry. And conversely, one thing that Wittgenstein certainly taught me is that the seemingly simplest phrase or sentence, one that does seem grammatical, can be incredibly interesting, depending on the context. One of my idols is certainly Samuel Beckett, and you have, say, in Beckett’s Watt, sentences as simple as: “Mr. Knott dropped his arms.” But what does that mean, to drop your arms? How do we talk about it? Mallen: One must pay attention to a particular expression? Perloff: Well, primarily it’s a question of context. I think context is the crucial thing. How do we contextualize something? What does a term mean in one context and what would it mean in another? In one context it might make perfectly good sense, but in another, not. Wittgenstein gives wonderful examples of the pain calculus. He suggests that when I say “I have a pain,” how can you tell what I really mean? Could I be faking pain? There’s no way you can fully know how severe my pain is or indeed whether I am just pretending to have pain. The word “read” is similar. If I say, “I’m going to read you this story,” perhaps I have simply memorized it and am reciting it. What does “reading” really mean? So the simplest words and sentences can be the most complicated.

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Mallen: One of the things that I have found fascinating in Eduardo Espina’s poetry is its apparent ungrammaticality. When reading it at first, one gets a sense of something that somehow broke the rules of grammar, but then what I discovered when I started analyzing it is that there was no ungrammaticality whatsoever. It was simply a question of decontextualizing words. Perloff: Yes, that was my point. Mallen: Another question I have concerns Gertrude Stein and what you refer to as the “grammatical movement.” You have stated that Stein’s innovation in Tender Buttons was “to foreground in words the compositional arrangement of things seen.” Has any other poet followed these steps? Perloff: Certainly, one finds Steinian agrammaticality in George Oppen or Louis Zukofsky or Charles Bernstein. But Stein is sui generis. You know, she has one “Tender Button” called “Roast Potatoes” that has just three words: “Roast potatoes for.” For what or whom? Roast potatoes for dinner? Roast potatoes for me? Roast potatoes for, as a pun on four, meaning “oven” in French, so pommes au four: roast potatoes? There are amazing verbal constructions in Stein. But again, they’re not all ungrammatical. There’s Gertrude Stein’s famous enigmatic phrase. And nobody knows what that means. Readers originally thought, “Is she talking about Hemingway?” Or whom? Well, just the other day my 16-year-old granddaughter was telling me about her trip to Oaxaca with her father and her aunt, and she said, “Daddy’s driving me crazy. He wears this huge hat, and it’s not the right thing to wear when you go to the ruins.” She’s at the age where [she has] a love/hate relationship with her father. And she said, “He’s driving me crazy.” And I wrote back to her, “You know, your sentence finally explains to me Gertrude Stein’s ‘A white hunter is nearly crazy.’ That’s what your father is looking like right now.” Stein’s are just very suggestive sentences; their enigmas haunt us. We could also talk about the whole issue of precision, of accuracy in Poundian terms. You’re a linguist, so this must

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interest you a lot, namely, Ezra Pound’s idea that even in the most ungrammatical and disjunctive poetry, there has to be such a thing as precision, and by that I mean le mot juste. If you use a word, there has to be a reason for using it. You don’t just use any old word. I recently read a poem in American Poetry Review about the sorrows of old age, the difficulties of turning seventy. The poet wrote, “And, you know, your memory goes,” and so on. And she added, “But after all, the sun disappears everyday and comes up the next day.” But the sun doesn’t in fact disappear: it just isn’t seen any more by the observer in a particular place. “Disappear” is not the mot juste here. Mallen: You have identified the literary lineage of Language poets like Stein, Williams, Zukofsky, and the avant-garde traditions of Futurism and Dada, in the post-structuralist theory of Derrida, Lyotard, and Deleuze. All of these writers examined dominant as well as marginalized language practices. Is this also a characteristic feature of poetry nowadays? Perloff: To examine marginalized language practices? Yes, I think so. We are now studying the languages of post-colonial cultures and ethnic groups much more closely. Mallen: You have also mentioned that a common practice of the new poetics is the appropriation of words and sentences from other sources. Is this important? Perloff: Oh yes. Take Charles Bernstein’s libretto Shadowtime, which is the libretto for an opera that he wrote last year with Brian Ferneyhough. But the libretto can be read independently, and it’s about the life and work—beginning with the last days—of Walter Benjamin. But in no way is it an “historical drama” in the traditional sense. What Charles does here is to use Benjamin’s actual words and insert them into his text. So for instance, there’s a little section that cites Benjamin’s famous essay “Hashish in Marseilles”; Charles takes about ten sentences out of the essay and modulates them, rephrasing them with a lot of onomatopoeia

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so as to create what sounds like a drug fantasy. Writing today is heavily citational and intertextual. Mallen: In this context what comes to mind are the frequent accusations against Picasso of plagiarism, of taking ideas from other painters. But isn’t it the case—and this is true certainly of painting—that when you take elements from numerous artists and recombine them in a creative manner, this constitutes a new creation? Perloff: That’s very interesting. Actually I think it’s gone even much further. I mean, you can argue that poets and painters always cited other works and recreated them in new ways, but today you have works in which the whole composition is a found text or at least an appropriated text framed in a new way. Well, it’s what Borges did, you know, so it’s nothing so new. Of course many readers disapprove of such texts. I’ve heard people say; “Well, X doesn’t use any original words,” but it’s not so easy to replicate a source text. One of the revelations for me was hearing John Cage perform his various “writings through,” for example, Roaratorio, which is a “writing through” Finnegans Wake, or Empty Words (Thoreau). Cage used elaborate rules to “write through” his parent texts, and they emerge as very different poems. I am writing a book on this process to be called Unoriginal Genius. Mallen: To return to Stein, it used to be assumed that Gertrude Stein was influenced by Picasso, that she took some of the ideas from Cubism and applied them to literature, but now it has been argued that maybe that was not going in one direction only, that she might have equally influenced Picasso, even though he could not read English. Perloff: Exactly, and she certainly had a lot of influence, say on Duchamp. Actually, in my Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), I wrote about Stein’s “cubism” à la Picasso, but I am no longer so sure the term is apt for her work. Picasso was obviously Stein’s idol, there’s no question about that, but his example was less

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important than that of Marcel Duchamp. Duchamp actually read—and appreciated—some of her work, whereas Picasso paid no attention to it at all. He thought of her as a great patroness; he loved her salon, and she bought his paintings. But Duchamp understood because his own aesthetic was so similar. Like the Stein of Tender Buttons, he took totally ordinary objects, like a bottle rack or a clothes hanger, out of their contexts. And that was indeed an aesthetic revolution. Mallen: You have often referred to “the really great sixties aesthetic,” that of John Cage, Merce Cunningham, Jasper Johns, Morton Feldman, Jackson Mac Low, Frank O’Hara, and John Ashbery. What do you think makes this group genuinely avantgarde? Perloff: Well, the dominant poets in the 60s were, on the one hand, Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, and their circle, and, on the other, Allen Ginsberg and the Beats. I am very fond of Ginsberg, but one can’t quite call him avant-garde, since his concepts of the lyric and of poetic language were not especially innovative. And I’m not even sure one could call O’Hara avant-garde if by that term we mean some sort of major breakthrough and reconception of what poetry is. Mallen: Is that because O’Hara does not pay particular attention to language? Perloff: No, no. O’Hara’s language is brilliant. But his conception of the lyric is quite traditional. In many ways, O’Hara is an American Romantic in the tradition of Whitman and Hart Crane. His very open treatment of gay culture is certainly new as is his wonderful campy humor, but formally he is writing odes, elegies, autobiographical poems. It was Cage who introduced both O’Hara and Ashbery to new “abstract” possibilities. Just think of Cage’s deployment of the tape recorder. And it was Cage who understood—Steve McCaffery has a very good essay on this subject in Dee Morris’s collection Sound States—that

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what the tape recorder allowed poets to do is to splice voices and superimpose one voice on top of another so that you get not just collage but a new kind of layering, quite unlike anything Lowell or Ginsberg had done. Ginsberg’s poetry is still linear: from “I saw the best minds of my generation” to “Moloch!” and beyond. Mallen: Now, you have also said that some of the most interesting poetry being written today is conceptual: you mentioned Craig Dworkin, Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall, and other poets. Can you explain? Perloff: Let’s begin with Robert Smithson, who has used specific sites to rethink some problem completely. What is a monument? A lagoon? How can changing the earth itself change our perceptions? Another important conceptual artist in the Wittgenstein tradition was Joseph Kosuth, whom I talk about in Wittgenstein’s Ladder. But again, the first great conceptual artist was surely Duchamp. Conceptual poetry is harder to define because, whereas visual conceptual artists shift to language, poets are already using language, by definition. But in his new book The Weather, Kenneth Goldsmith recycles a year’s worth of actual radio weather reports. It may seem to be mere copying, but the seasonal narrative is very interesting. When you come to the spring, the mood and set of referents shift because the Iraqi war has begun: suddenly all the weather reports are coming in from Iraq, and so we read, “120 degrees today in the desert,” and so on. What makes it poetry rather than just a replica of the news is its defamiliarization of words we hear every day. In leaving out holidays and certain other days, the daily bulletin loses its continuity, emphasizing how inaccurate weather reports actually are. That is, we read, “Snow this afternoon, starting early and then becoming thick by nightfall,” but then it doesn’t snow, perhaps because the book skips a day or because it didn’t snow after all! It’s very tantalizing. Another very interesting conceptual poet I just wrote about for the journal Parkett—an earlier figure—was Vito Acconci, who then became an artist but started out as a poet at the University of Iowa and created a strange mix of “reality”

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effects. A third would be David Antin, whose “talk pieces,” framed as “lectures,” are really conceptual artworks, dependent on metonymic structuring. Mallen: What is your opinion of “slam poetry”? Do you not think that this presents an interesting “aural poetry” that is lost on the page? Perloff: Sometimes, yes. Two things have happened lately. At the MLA convention, my Presidential Forum and related workshops had as their theme sound in poetry; I felt this to be important since sound is currently the neglected element in discussions of poetry. Our own North American poetry has become so prosaic that it doesn’t look or sound like poetry at all. It’s just a sort of chopped up prose. In foregrounding sound, we are coming back to the spoken voice, but I would want to distinguish between the typical poetry reading and performative poetry. Most poetry readings don’t come alive; they are not really performances. On the other hand, the late Jackson Mac Low, a difficult poet who was never very popular on the page, can now be heard on CD and is beginning to be understood as a major figure. Caroline Bergvall is a great performance artist. I’ve just been listening in my car to some of her CD’s and they are quite amazing. She has also made superb videos like “Ambient Fish.” Mallen: Now, you may have already hinted at this already, but isn’t there a certain danger that concentrating on the sound might detract from the textual nature of the poem? Perloff: No, I think hearing poetry is a necessary corrective to its classroom presentation as silent text. There are now wonderful sites online like PennSound where you can hear the leading poets read their work. Of course you want to look closely at poems as well, but the two go hand in hand. Mallen: Is the poet the best performer of his or her work?

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Perloff: Not necessarily. But it’s always interesting to know how X or Y conceives of their poems. Charles Bernstein has made this case convincingly. For example, John Ashbery is not a very “good” reader. He has a particular Rochester, New York, twang that sounds purposely flat and neutral, and sometimes I think I would prefer to hear someone else read his poetry, but then again, his self-interpretation really matters. I don’t think Frank O’Hara was an especially good reader; his New England accent was nasal and sometimes monotonous. Was Gertrude Stein such a good reader of her work? No, not especially. Eliot read in a pompous voice, in carefully assumed King’s English, and that can be irritating. On the other hand, do we want actors to read poetry? You know, we have recordings of great actresses reading Yeats or reading Beckett, and they usually overdo it. Billie Whitelaw has given marvelous renditions of Beckett; even so, I’d rather hear Beckett read his own work! I do have problems, though, with the poetry reading as a genre. I can’t stand those group poetry readings (at MLA and elsewhere), where each poet gets five or ten minutes. After a while, everyone sounds the same. And even when someone stands out, it’s difficult to absorb any sort of difficult poetry at a reading. Do you agree? Mallen: I share the same opinion. I think the same can be said of painting, the manner in which people visit museums. One gets overwhelmed after a while and does not pay attention to the work in front of their eyes. Perloff: Yes, but at least in the museum you can go at your own pace. At a poetry reading you can’t. I suppose readings have become primarily social events and that has some value, but…. Mallen: How would you diagnose “the new” poetry that is being written at the present time, when everything seems to have already been done? In what area of poetry can you still search for the “new” or the possibility of “originality”?

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Perloff: Well, the interesting thing is that “everything” has not already been done! The main point is that poetry has to be of its time even as it has to transcend that time. There are currently endless nature poems that seem to be built on the assumption that nothing has changed since Wordsworth’s time. Poetry is poetry. But if you believe the world changes then the more stringent poetry is going to change too. Take the Language Poetry theorem, derived from post-Structuralism, that there’s no full presence, nobody has their “own” voice, and there are no truth statements. Oddly, the events of 9/11 changed all that. The idea that language is only a trace structure no longer seemed as convincing. Wittgenstein, incidentally, never questioned meaning making as Derrida did. Wittgenstein recognized that if I say to you, a native English speaker, “Pass that bottle of water,” you know exactly what I mean; there’s no difficulty at all. Derrida, by contrast, would say that even this simple command has a subtext. So the questions we ask inevitably change. Christian Bök, who writes sound poetry, is doing things with digital sounds and with experiments in DNA, using a lot of scientific material that wasn’t around ten years ago, and he is creating sound networks out of those or out of video games. I’ve been in the audience when he’s performed this new work for a group of engineers at UCLA, and the audience adored it. Bök presents them with a heightened image of a world they understand. Mallen: Do you think that the gap between “innovation” and poetry readers is wider, or are there new readers who are now open to all kinds of formal experience? Perloff: This is a tricky issue! John Cage once told me, “I can get a better audience at the University of Kansas or at Knox College in Tennessee than at Harvard where, when I gave the Charles Eliot Norton lectures, most of the people walked out.” What John meant is that the audience at Kansas had fewer preconceptions and could come to the work with a more open mind than is found in the Ivy League. I’ve always had the same experience. At Stanford, the earlier literary periods are beautifully taught, but

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the present is troublesome. The New is regarded with suspicion. But it was always thus: James Laughlin, the great publisher of New Directions, gave many accounts of his Harvard days in the thirties: he couldn’t convince anyone that Pound might be a great poet. Or William Carlos Williams. Susan Howe lives in Guilford, CT; her husband was in the art department at Yale, twenty minutes away, but Susan was ignored there completely until very recently. Mallen: What is the current situation of poetry criticism in the USA? Perloff: I think it’s pretty disheartening. I think part of the problem is that, unlike the 50s and 60s, when the division was between the “raw” and the “cooked,” between the mainstream and the opposition, today there is no clear distinction, and so everyone tries to be “fair” to every kind of poetry, with the result that the discourse is careless and wholly uncritical. Again, the theorists don’t want to talk about poetry at all, or at least not contemporary poetry. People are afraid of adjudicating the work of the present. They are especially afraid—we all are— of criticizing a minority poet. I think this is really a shame, and especially from the point of view of a conference like this one, committed to the idea that great work is being done in Latin America, that we feel we have to think approvingly of all the poetry “made in America” and yet don’t even know the poetry made in the other America, south of our border. Mallen: This connects to my next question. What do you think of cultural studies? Perloff: Yeah. I think it has done incredible harm. Mallen: Do you think it is on its way out? Perloff: I hope so, but it hasn’t happened yet. And what I really don’t like is what’s now called “globalism-transnationalism.”

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Transnationalism is really Comparative Literature without any foreign languages. I want to restore the study of language. And even when, as in my case with Portuguese, one doesn’t know the language in question well, one can try, with bilingual texts, to understand it. It’s a wonderful feeling when one does! Mallen: And we are talking about one of the major languages of the world, Spanish? Perloff: And even a lot of the Latino students I teach don’t really know enough Spanish to read poetry. What’s really needed today to change this situation is much more exchange between North and South America than there is. US Imperialism dies hard! But a new interest in Latin American poetry IS developing, for instance right here in Texas. Mallen: I wrote a few years back a book on Espina called Con/ Figuraciόn Sintáctica: Poesía de Des/Lenguaje, and I wonder if I should have written it in English because it would have had a wider audience. The same applies to the one which I have just finished called Poesía del Lenguaje: De T. S. Eliot a Eduardo Espina. Perloff: This is what we desperately need. You see? There are language departments in the US where a scholarly book written in the language in question (say, Spanish) doesn’t count for tenure, because external committees can’t read it. I know, for example, of a German department that would not accept a study of Fritz Lang, the great filmmaker, because it was in German! One solution to our parochialism would be for you, Enrique, to send an article to a mainstream journal like Modernism/Modernity. After all, such journals are supposed to be devoted to Modernism in general. At this writing, the ACLA (American Comparative Literature Association) is meeting in Puebla, but the program is entirely in English, and it includes little poetry anyway.

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Conceptual Writing: A Modernist Issue Interview with Peter Nicholls

Peter Nicholls: Your new book, Unoriginal Genius, is likely to annoy some readers of poetry by its enthusiastic embrace of writing which is “citational and often constraint-based” and which quite candidly takes as its primary material “other people’s words.” What’s really at stake in the claim to “unoriginality”? We may recall Eliot’s dictum that “The poem which is absolutely original is absolutely bad,” but he would never have thought of a poem as straightforwardly a transcription of another text… Marjorie Perloff: A few days ago, on the McNeill-Lehrer News Hour, a poet was featured (I can’t remember his name but had never heard of him), who was trained in Creative Writing Programs and then found one fine day that he had “no words” of his own, but next thing you know, he began circling items in newspapers and assembling these words and phrases, rather like Tom Phillips in A Humument, and now he is considered an “interesting” new poet and on national TV. This is a kind of reductio ad absurdum, but it points to the problem poets

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are experiencing in the early twenty-first century. The media world has created an atmosphere where everything one wants to say has already been said, where the display of unique private emotions seems gratuitous, and originality of utterance hence all but impossible. But it is also the case that no work of art is “pure” transcription: current poetry, as I describe it, is no more than the logical fulfillment of Duchamp’s decision to purchase a urinal from the JL Mott plumbing fixtures store and then to turn it upside down and give it the name Fountain by R. Mutt. As the “anonymous” commentator in The Blind Man remarked, “He [the artist] chose it.” Such choice is very difficult, and ever since 1917, when Fountain was rejected by the Society of Independents and then photographed (and hence aestheticized) by Stieglitz in front of a Marsden Hartley painting, artists and poets have been trying to match Duchamp. So “unoriginal genius” was already a Modernist issue, but it has taken the better part of the century for a Duchampian aesthetic to come fully into its own. Nicholls: And, of course, we’ve started by talking about “poems” though many of the key texts of what’s now called “conceptual writing” are actually exercises in prose. Perloff: Touché! This is a tricky issue. Many of the works in question certainly don’t look like “poems” in the usual sense. But if you define the poet in Aristotelian terms, as a maker, POETES, then the long “prose” or hybrid works in question are certainly poems in that they are highly structured and rely on repetition in ways not found in, say, prose fiction. The word verse comes, of course, from versus, and refers to the return that characterizes lineated poetry. A long conceptual poem like Craig Dworkin’s Dure is certainly structured around points of return in this sense. Nicholls: In an early chapter of the book, you give a wonderful quotation from Walter Benjamin: “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 up by the text.” Why is copying such a vital process? Kenneth Goldsmith

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has spoken about his own work in rather similar ways, but what’s involved is something quite different from, say, eighteenth-century “imitation” or modernist “translation.” Perloff: When you copy a text, you really come to know it in a unique way. You can’t just focus on one word or sentence but take in the whole thing. You become someone else. But it’s also the case, and I’ll take this up in my next answer, that all the talk of “pure” copying is itself a performance; there is always some element of transformation; if a given work is really just copied wholesale, it’s not going to be very interesting. Nicholls: You give a fascinating, quite gripping account of Goldsmith’s Traffic, though aren’t you actually animating, making readable, a text which seems to prize its own inertness and unreadability? Goldsmith, after all, claims that “Readability is the last thing on this poetry’s mind.” Perloff: Goldsmith’s claim for unreadability must be taken with a large grain of salt. It’s comparable to Cage claiming that his music is just a matter of “opening one’s ears” to what sounds are out there and not interfering with them at all. Yet no one was more controlling than Cage: every detail has been planned and executed with the greatest care. The resulting work is supposed to look improvisatory and arbitrary and hence to raise issues about the nature of art, but of course that doesn’t mean it really is arbitrary. In the same light, Goldsmith keeps insisting one can’t “read” his work, thus throwing a challenge to the reader, and many readers have now discovered that he has arranged his citations with great care. I was trying to show this in Traffic. As in the case of Duchamp, “he chose it.” You don’t know how many weather forecasts or traffic reports he did NOT include or which ones he spliced together. Nicholls: I’ve personally found the idea of “conceptual writing” quite confusing, with, say, Goldsmith arguing that the original “idea”—“origin” returns!—is much more important than the

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resulting text, and Vanessa Place and Rob Fitterman labeling such work as “allegorical” for pretty much the same reason (Notes on Conceptualisms). The sense you give of Traffic is, however, much more clearly text based, perhaps because there isn’t really much to be said after all about the instantiating “idea”? Perloff: My own view here is that Vanessa Place and Robert Fitterman are being playful and parodic. The term allegory must always apply to two levels of meaning, and theirs doesn’t work that way. And indeed in Goldsmith’s case, the term doesn’t come up at all. What Goldsmith wants us to see is what the world we live in is actually like. Poets have always done this, haven’t they? Just yesterday, the Huffington Post had a headline, “One out of 7 Americans lives in poverty,” and right beneath this article was a report that after her victory for the Republican senate nomination in Delaware, Christine McConnell raised a million dollars in one day. Someone out there is giving all this money for an ignorant and inexperienced Tea Party candidate even as the poverty rate climbs. Now, one could write a poem generalizing from such frightening realities, but it would probably be quite tendentious. Compare Rita Dove’s treatment of the Trujillo massacre of the Haitians to Caroline Bergvall’s “Say Parsley” in my fifth chapter. Bergvall treats the material very obliquely and gives a devastating picture of a linguistic shibboleth; Dove just recounts the “story” and tries to get into the mind of the general, and it is quite unconvincing. In all fairness, her poem was written in the early 80s. But even then, I don’t think one could write meaningful historical poetry or drama in a realistic way. Charles Bernstein’s Shadowtime is a great example of this: one witnesses history being reenacted, but not by talking about it; Bernstein uses Benjamin’s own words, which is much more poignant. Nicholls: I recently included a brief discussion of “conceptual writing” in a piece I’d written on poetry and rhetoric. A friend who is both a poet and critic suggested that I excise this passage since it had nothing at all to do with poetry. I wonder how this body of writing will settle down in the larger historical frame of things.

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Shall we, do you think, be reading a text like Craig Dworkin’s Parse twenty years from now, or is “conceptual writing” and its commitment to unoriginality simply a fashionable fad we’re working through? Perloff: I certainly don’t think the best conceptual writing today is a fashionable fad! For one thing, it’s hardly fashionable; Poetry goes on its merry way: just read the TLS or LRB or New Yorker and you’ll see that the Establishment criteria haven’t changed since 1940 or so: short little lyric poems in (mostly flat) free verse detailing some little insight or response to X or Y. And I think you have to understand the new conceptualism in that context. Never in my own lifetime, I feel, has “poetry” been quite as badly written as it is today; never have there been so many “poets” who are literally talentless and yet win all sorts of prizes and awards and get professorships in good universities. The poetry that interests me today represents a mise en question of this state of affairs. IT MUST CHANGE, so to speak. Will Parse be read twenty years from now? I think it’s likelier than that John Hollander’s or Edward Hirsch’s poetry will be read twenty years from now. And here an anecdote may be apposite. I currently have a student in my graduate seminar on the avant-garde who received his MFA at your university, NYU, where his teachers were Charles Simic, Sharon Olds, etc. He came to my office to ask whether he could write his term paper on David Antin’s Talking at the Boundaries (not on our syllabus this term). Now you know that I don’t write about Antin in Unoriginal Genius: he is certainly NOT a citational poet. And yet almost 40 years after he devised his talk poems, which, as you know, I’ve written about a number of times, here is a student, brought up on conventional lyric, longing to learn more about Antin. And come to think of it, the talk model does look ahead to Goldsmith’s model in, say, Soliloquy. But I don’t want to end on a Pollyannaish note. Do I think the poets I discuss in Unoriginal Genius can match the great Modernists—say, Yeats and Eliot, Pound and Stein? Certainly not—not even Ashbery, I’d say, can match them. I’ve been teaching

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Baudelaire, and he surpasses them all. Perhaps Benjamin was right when he said lyric poetry can no longer play the same role in the culture after Baudelaire. So I make no claim for the poets in Unoriginal Genius being “great” in that sense. The first decades of the twentieth century were simply unique. On the other hand, compared to their peers, yes, the “language” poets like Bernstein or Howe (or Hejinian or Armantrout) and their “conceptual” successors are the interesting ones. Teaching Baudelaire’s prose poems, whose depictions of urban life display a viciousness that takes my breath away, I felt that Vanessa Place’s new Statement of Fact, with her “documentary” police and court reports of rape cases, recalls this tradition in a surprising way: it is a portrait of contemporary abjection that is certainly more compelling than the comparable elegiac poems about “victims” that are being produced by mainstream poets like so much confetti.

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Still Making It New: Marjorie Perloff in Manifesto Mode Interview with Ellef Prestsæter

Enough vague people on this emerald traffic-island. — John Ashbery

Ellef Prestsæter: “I wanted to become a different kind of Modernist: no longer a student of Robert Lowell, but of the larger earlytwentieth-century world called the Avant-Garde.” In your memoir (The Vienna Paradox), this is how you describe your reaction to your thesis advisor’s suggestion that you might apply the analysis of rhyme structures in Yeats (your PhD dissertation) to poets such as Byron. When The Vienna Paradox was published eight years ago, Ron Silliman speculated that there might be an entire volume hidden in that sentence. Was he right?

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Marjorie Perloff: It’s funny you should ask, because I’m writing that book about the avant-garde now! It deals with what I call Austro-Modernism. I got the idea when Bookforum asked me to review Gregor Rezzori’s Confessions of an Anti-Semite. Rezzori was born in the hinterlands of Austria near Czernowitz, which is also where Paul Celan was from. Rezzori writes openly about what his family was like, what the attitudes toward the Jews were like, about modernism and all the problems of the Austro-Hungarian Empire. For me it became the threshold to a story that hasn’t been told. A lot has been written on fin de siècle and the prewar period in Vienna but there’s not much about what happens in the interwar period, which was dominated by writers who were not from Vienna but from places that now are in Ukraine, Poland, Romania, Hungary, Serbia, the Czech Republic—the far reaches of the empire in other words. We’re talking about some of the greatest writers of the early twentieth century: Elias Canetti, Joseph Roth, Karl Kraus, Franz Kafka…They’re often called European or even German writers, but they had an altogether different sensibility from the Germans. They were far more Eastern, exotic, pleasure loving, and ironic. The extent to which the Austro-Hungarian Empire was the cradle of modernism and the avant-garde hasn’t been duly recognized. Instead, the emphasis is always on France or on the Weimar Republic, and so on. But perhaps that’s not what you had in mind? Prestsæter: I was thinking more specifically about why you decided to devote yourself to the study of the most progressive poets of your time, but given your background, Austro-Modernism is perhaps part of that picture? Perloff: I think I’ve always reacted against my background. Being a refugee, I didn’t want to work on German-language material. For instance, I was never that interested in Freud, a number of whose disciples were relatives of mine! But then Wittgenstein brought me back, and as I get older, I’ve wondered why I hadn’t been interested in, say, Karl Kraus’s play The Last Days of Mankind. That’s an extraordinary play, completely avant-garde and entirely

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based on quotation. It really looks right ahead to some of the citational works I talk about in Unoriginal Genius. The play gives us the most devastating picture of war without inventing much. People always say I am more skeptical or more ironic than most, that I don’t take things on faith. I don’t trust the basic genres, for instance. Even though I wrote my master’s thesis on Virginia Woolf, I never loved Bloomsbury. Today I don’t read the Bloomsburies anymore; they seem too self-centered. I always liked the very strange area where the texts aren’t fully novels or fully poems or whatever they are. I think that’s where progressive writers want to go, whether they know so or not. Prestsæter: How do you understand the term avant-garde? Perloff: The literal meaning is military: the front flank of an army. For me the basic definition is being ahead of one’s time. But is it a political or literary and artistic term? The greatest avant-garde group was probably the Russians in the early twentieth century. They really were distinguished artists and writers and often politically radical as well. But it’s not always like that. In fact, left-wing political movements usually stick to very conservative poetry. The poetry published in The Nation, for example, is quite old-fashioned. And when I taught at Stanford I discovered how the political left often downgrades art. My colleagues thought they were really liberal, but when it came to hiring poets, they preferred people who were in The New Yorker. Contemporary Literature was regarded as something you read in your spare time, when you’re tired at the end of the day. Some people claim that there is no avant-garde anymore, that in the age of consumerism, everything has been coopted. You know the argument…I don’t think that is true: the avant-garde is just as avant-garde as ever. On the other hand, a lot of things are called avant-garde without being so. Some people say the Beats were the avant-garde of the 60s. But we can now see that they were more properly neo-romantics; there isn’t much in, say, Allen Ginsberg that is avant-garde. I think the great avant-garde of the 60s in the US was that of the John Cage, Merce Cunningham,

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Jasper Johns circle, which overlapped to some extent with the circle around Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery. Later, the Language Poets were certainly a kind of avant-garde, although that moment is over now. Today the fuss is about conceptualism. Right now there’s an argument raging because of an article I wrote on contemporary poetry for the Boston Review. Prestsæter: I know! For me it’s a bit hard to understand the temperature of the argument. Perloff: The conceptualists make people furious! That makes me think they actually are an avant-garde. Avant-gardes are always trying to find a place for themselves vis-à-vis the establishment of their time. Language Poetry had become so dominant, an orthodoxy which new people like the conceptualists had to oppose. I still remember when Language Poetry first came along. The poets who really mistrusted it were those of the prior generation like Jerome Rothenberg and David Antin. They would say, “We did all that already! There’s nothing new.” Today a poet such as Steve McCaffery is saying exactly this about the conceptualists. Obviously he’s not quite right. People wouldn’t get so angry if the conceptualists weren’t doing something different. Prestsæter: I first got in touch with you when I got interested in the manifesto genre. Perloff: In connection with the manifesto issue of Rett Kopi? Prestsæter: Yes. You wrote an essay on the first futurist manifesto for Rett Kopi. Now I wonder if you could outline your own manifesto as a critic? Perloff: That’s funny because I was just asked by Poetry magazine to do a “Few Don’ts”! I can send you that. Prestsæter: Wonderful!

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Perloff: Otherwise I don’t think I could invent a manifesto off the cuff. One of my main tenets, though, would be that art must be of its own time, that however wonderful Wordsworth was, you can’t write the way Wordsworth did today. Foolishly, people say, “Oh, she doesn’t like the romantics!” Now, I love the romantics, but we’re not living in the early nineteenth century. No one thinks we should wear the clothes people wore in the 1890s, but for some reason a lot of people believe that art, and especially poetry which is the most traditional art form in some ways, doesn’t have to change. Prestsæter: What do you see as the task of the critic in this regard? Perloff: Showing how a particular work is of its time, while relating it to earlier material. Take Charles Bernstein’s important play Shadowtime, the one based on Walter Benjamin. I would suggest that you can’t write a historical drama à la Brecht’s Galileo today. Brecht could invent realistic dialogue like “Come in, I’m so happy to meet you!” But today the media has created a situation where that kind of realism no longer rings true; they do that so much better on television. So I think you have to recreate historical material in an oblique way, as Bernstein did by taking Benjamin’s own words and then creating this strange, wonderful—and not only favorable!—image of him. Another slogan of my manifesto would be against realism. Prestsæter: The Italian futurist F. T. Marinetti, who almost singlehandedly established the manifesto as a literary genre, defined the manifesto as “the precise accusation and the well-defined insult.” Now that you’re in a manifesto mode, I feel I have to ask you about your antipathies. Considering how much time you’ve devoted to the study of avant-garde movements, you’ve written surprisingly little on surrealism… Perloff: For some critics, Surrealism is the greatest avant-garde movement, but to me, it never was. I see it as a throwback to romanticism, and I am also uncomfortable with the surrealists’ treatment of women. Obviously there are surrealist works I like,

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such as Nadja and some of Breton’s poetry, but I guess what I don’t like—and in this I’m a John Cagean—is the whole idea of tapping into the unconscious, revealing hidden meanings and motives. Surrealism is far too focused on the self, I think. And I certainly dislike their politics, a form of limousine communism. You may say I should love the surrealists because I say I’m against realism, but by that I mean only a kind of naïve, photographic realism. Texts that jump off to a complete fantasy realm I find a little uninteresting. I follow Pound in believing in accuracy. You can’t just say anything you want in order to create a metaphor. If the starting point is inaccurate, it’s impossible to get anything out of it. The legacy of surrealism has been especially problematic. I recently met a woman who started writing poetry when she was 70. She produced a poem about a motel where “businessmen clinch their mergers and lovers clinch and merge.” What a dreadful line! Lovers don’t clinch. And then in the next line, room service comes silently through an open door. But in fact, room service makes a lot of noise when it arrives at the door, and in a motel, they don’t have any room service anyway! Of course the surrealists never did anything as silly as this. Neither did Ashbery, but the surrealist side of him, when he gets completely fanciful, is the part I like the least. The great Ashbery poems always have a root in something real, an opera, a cartoon, Daffy Duck…I love the words “emerald traffic-island.” Whenever I ride through Hollywood—I live nearby—I think, “There are the emerald traffic-islands!” That’s just what they are! Anyhow, I don’t think Surrealism has had much influence in the United States. Few people today read the Surrealist poets. Prestsæter: What does influence new American poetry? Perloff: Often theory! It used to be Derrida and Foucault. Now it’s Agamben and Badiou. Someone should write a study on what happened when poets entered the university and started to feel that they had to know the latest hot theory. It has had a detrimental impact on the poetry.

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Prestsæter: Does that imply that you regard the poetic strategies you explored in Wittgenstein’s Ladder—such as Rosmarie Waldrop’s use of Wittgenstein in her poems—as exhausted today? Perloff: No, not exhausted, but whereas Waldrop knows her Wittgenstein inside out, most of the younger poets just don’t know enough. They cite Hegel or Agamben or Adorno but don’t really know what these philosophers actually wrote. Prestsæter: How would you describe your own relationship to theory? Perloff: You can’t have a criticism that is completely undertheorized. I think for poetry, the most useful theory came early, from Russian formalism to phenomenology, in addition to Wittgenstein and certain others. Continental philosophy from Derrida and onwards doesn’t really help much, because in many ways, Derrida was doing exactly what the poets had already done. I recently wrote on the New Critics, who have been declared anathema for decades. But they were brilliant readers of poetry! I urged Vanessa [Place] to buy a copy W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon. She loved it! Prestsæter: Conceptualists and New Critics? Unlikely bedfellows! Perloff: I hope some of what they did will return. Wimsatt, Cleanth Brooks, Northrop Frye—these are the critics I grew up with, and they were brilliant. Hugh Kenner is my all-time favorite, but because he wasn’t a “theorist,” he’s never included in those anthologies of theory. Kenner was a fabulous philologist—a close reader who didn’t miss a trick, and he was also very well-versed in history and geography so that he understood what, say, Joyce was doing. He more or less invented Modernism as we know it today. True, he had his difficult sides—there was a homophobic and even misogynist streak in his criticism—but he understood, as no other critic did, what making it new meant.

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Prestsæter: Your own criticism is characterized by a distinctively comparativist approach. To what degree do you think of yourself as an American critic? Perloff: I’m certainly very interested in the American situation, which is my own. On the other hand, I think it’s problematic when Americans never read anything done in other countries and always assume that poetry quite simply means American poetry. That’s a pretty chauvinistic and imperialistic attitude. This year I’ve been twice to Brazil, and I just can’t get over it: nobody is embarrassed about being interested in the arts. In comparison the US is in many ways a puritanical country, with people afflicted with feelings of guilt. Men in particular feel that art must somehow be justified by claiming it is some form of work. I don’t think Europeans have that in the same way, and they certainly don’t in Latin America. I feel very American, but I’m not very happy about the US right now. It’s a bad time economically, politically, and artistically. This year there has been an argument about whether health plans should cover birth control pills. I really don’t understand why that should become a major issue, but now you can read all about an alleged war on women. Seriously, there is no war on women in the US. But Americans are obsessed by these kinds of issues that are distracting them from anything that would be meaningful, like leading a better life or having a transformative art. We’re not in a very good phase now. Prestsæter: How does that play out on the art and poetry scene? Perloff: I’ll give you a concrete example. I recently gave a keynote at the National Poetry Foundation’s conference on the 80s. I talked about the significance of two books that were published in the mid-1980s: Charles Bernstein’s Content’s Dream and Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. Both Charles and Susan were there and gave wonderful readings, but there was relatively little discussion afterward of their work. No, the heart of the conference turned out to be the “new narrative” in San Francisco—narrative

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which allegedly was the real avant-garde of the 80s. New narrative authors include Bruce Boone, Robert Gluck, Kevin Killian, Dodie Bellamy, Rob Halpern, etc. Technically, these writers are hardly doing anything Joyce didn’t do—what’s new about their writing is that it deals with “erotica”—especially gay erotica. Much of it is openly pornographic. Since the 80s was the decade of AIDS, the conference turned into a kind of elegy for those who died from AIDS. There were standing ovations for those who told sad stories about lost friends. Now, this is all very well, but it is, after all, subject matter rather than form and materiality. The really new movement of the 80s, to my mind, was Language Poetry, but no one wanted to hear about it. Rather, confessionalism is once again dominating the scene! All you have to do is tell your story. The irony is that the horror of AIDS didn’t in fact produce much good poetry. The subject matter criterion just won’t work. I believe in Yeats’ dictum: “We make out of our quarrels with others, rhetoric, but of the quarrel with ourselves, poetry.” There has to be some sort self-conflict in lyric poetry; otherwise, it’s all just the expression of victimization and feeling sorry for oneself. Once I was asked to review a manuscript somebody wrote on the poetics of chemotherapy…Are we coming to this now? There’s a special literature for people who have had chemotherapy? I can’t stand victim literature. The emphasis on minority poets and victimization has also meant that readers have not discriminated between the really talented minority poets and the others. Or why, say, Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe were so notable. Difficulty has become a bad word, and tell-it-all poetry books have become very popular. It’s time for some sort of poetic revolution, as in 1912. Prestsæter: This brings us to T. S. Eliot. You’re in Norway to participate at the Audiatur festival for new poetry, which is taking The Waste Land as its point of departure this year. Both your most recent book and 21st-Century Modernism open with returns to Eliot, as a writer of quotation works and as an avantgardist, respectively. Both flashbacks seem motivated by the desire to rethink the possibilities of poetry today.

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Perloff: I reread The Waste Land on the plane on this trip. I still think it’s the great poem of the twentieth century. Eliot became not such a nice person in later life, and I don’t like the later work so much, but the poetry he wrote as a young man was just extraordinary. I hope we’ll have that kind of revolution again. When Eliot started writing poetry, poetry was about as bad as it could be both in the US and in England. If you pick up any anthology of that period, the best poets you had were people like Edgar Lee Masters and Edward Arlington Robinson. It wasn’t very exciting, and everyone knew it wasn’t exciting. Imagine that you’ve been reading all these dull poems—da-dum-da-dum-dadum-da-dum–and then you suddenly come across the opening of “The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock”: “Lét ûs gó thên || yóu ând I / Whên the évenîng ís spreád oút agaínst the sky / Líke a pátient étherízed upón a táble”! It’s just very shocking, and Eliot was considered crazy. What does “patient etherized upon a table” mean? Nobody had ever done anything like that. Together with Pound, he created a real revolution in poetry. That’s what we need now, if poetry is going to be viable at all. Is conceptualism the solution? Well, it may not be that…I don’t know what’s going to happen. That’s the whole point about revolutions! Prestsæter: Among critics that have engaged with avant-garde forms, there seems to be a tendency as they grow older to generalize from the insight that the avant-garde of their own youth is over to the idea that the avant-garde as such belongs to the past. You, however, seem always to strive to bring forth whatever is new on the contemporary scene. Perloff: Yes, and that’s why I hate saying that today is a bad time. I want there to be an avant-garde. Something has to happen so you don’t just have poetry about chemotherapy! That’s just too depressing, right? Like, “Here’s my chemotherapy poem…”

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What Is Poetry? Interview with Fulcrum

Fulcrum: What is and what isn’t poetry? What is poetry’s essential nature (if any)? Marjorie Perloff: For me, the key sentence is Wittgenstein’s, “Do not forget that although poetry is written in the language of information, it is not written in the language game of giving information.” Or, in a similar vein, Pound’s famous aphorism, “Poetry is news that stays news,” is the key. Or Roman Jakobson’s “Poetry is language that is somehow extraordinary.” It is always a “making strange,” a “removal of the saying from the zone of things said” (Hugh Kenner). Often I come across a “poem” in a magazine that is just a straightforward statement cut into line lengths, and I think, “That’s not poetry at all.” Others would say “That’s a bad poem,” which is another way of putting it, but for me, if nothing is done with language, no matter how lofty or apropos “the theme,” it isn’t poetry. “Remarks,” as Gertrude Stein said, “are not literature.” Neither are polemics. Fulcrum: What is the most important poetry? Who are the greatest poets? What do they accomplish?

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Perloff: So far, I’ve been talking about what is or isn’t poetry. But when you ask about “important” poetry, then factors beyond language come into play. The greatest poets—from Homer and Dante to Goethe, and on down—are ambitious and wideranging: they tell a large story or, in the case of lyric poetry, produce a body of work that is comprehensive, complex, intense, and usually wide-ranging in mood and emotion. Again, the greatest poets develop and change so that the oeuvre becomes a world unto itself. In the case of Goethe, you have a poetry that begins with near-perfect brief love lyric and nature poetry, and then moves outward to long philosophical poems, elegies, satire, and in late life, the “West-Oestlicher Divan,” where the love poetry of the early years is transformed into a much more erotic, ironic, passionate syntax. A great poet creates his/her own poetic universe, where certain images, structures, sound patterns are immediately a signature of that poet and no other. Fulcrum: What is the relationship between poetry and truth? Is there such a thing as poetic truth? Perloff: This is too large a question for a questionnaire or even a book. Poetry has its own truth. It needn’t be a truth we, as readers, can adhere to, but it must be presented coherently, complexly, and seriously so that we can give it credence. If the poem in question is self-consistent and has worked its way through a complex elucidation of “truth,” it will be impressive even if we don’t accept its validity. Fulcrum: How does poetry relate to the human condition? Perloff: It is always based in the human condition and cannot get too far away from “reality,” as Wallace Stevens insisted. But in practice, the human condition can mean anything from rumination to facts of daily life as in Frank O’Hara. The human condition can be very personal or the condition of a people, a culture.

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Fulcrum: Is there (or can there be) a meaningful philosophy of poetry? Perloff: All poetry has, of course, some philosophical perspective, but that perspective can be more or less overt or consciously thought through. We think of Stevens as a “philosophical” poet because his poems meditate on large ideas, as in “Esthétique du mal.” William Carlos Williams seems much more “down to earth,” but of course if you probe the poetry, there is a philosophical perspective there too—a very different one from Stevens. Overtly philosophical poetry can be very boring, because poetry is always based in experience and one doesn’t experience “ideas” as something abstracted from their context. Fulcrum: Does the fundamental nature of poetry change over time? Perloff: No, I don’t think so, but that “fundamental nature” appears in very different guises over time. It’s always been my belief that poetry must be of its time. Just as we don’t wear hoopskirts today or drive about in a barouche landau like Jane Austen’s Mrs. Elton, poetry must have different manners. Verse form changes dramatically, as do the look on the page and the sound in performance. Language shifts from formal, aristocratic to colloquial, slangy and then perhaps back again in a different way. But as Pound said, “No good poetry is written in a manner 20 years old.” One problem with the “New Critical” poetry of the American 1950s was that it was a throwback, not to the Modernism it claimed to carry on, but to a pre-Modern, let’s say Edwardian mode—rigid, tightly circumscribed, gently “ironic.” When a poet like Allen Ginsberg came along and wrote “Howl,” it therefore seemed to be a total aberration whereas it was, we can now see, carrying on the Modernist tradition. Fulcrum: Is there one “poetry” or are there “poetries”? Perloff: In one sense, there is one poetry with respect to the definitions I gave for #1, but concretely, there are only poetries,

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which is to say very different poetic solutions in different cultures and at different times. I like the plural because it allows for a great deal of diversity and openness. Fulcrum: What makes a genuinely great poem? Perloff: Let me given an example. Rimbaud’s “Bateau ivre,” most people would agree, is a great poem. Why? The basic metaphor, boat = poet, is carried out with brilliant variations from stanza to stanza, as an ecstatic journey into otherness (“je est un autre”). The imagery is at once very specific, graphic, concrete, sensuous, and yet the larger journey that structures the poem can be construed in very general terms: journey of life? Bad drug trip? Journey out of the West in to the exotic East? Journey out of one’s old self into a more mature awareness? Throughout, every word counts, every alexandrine is perfectly structured, and by the time the poem reaches its conclusion, “Mais vrai, j’ai trop pleuré,” and the boat metaphor is discarded, the “I” now being the poet himself, remembering his dark childhood games, the reader has been totally absorbed into the poem. The key to this or any other great poem is what Aristotle called to prepon, fitness, that is, relationship of part to part and part to whole. Once one grants Rimbaud his donnée (“Comme je descendais...”), the rest follows. Fulcrum: What is the relationship between tradition and innovation in poetry? Perloff: Obviously, both count. Any good poet is aware of her/ his tradition and plays off against it, whether in Harold Bloomian “anxiety of influence” terms or otherwise. But if there is no innovation—just more of same—the reader loses interest. Fulcrum: Is a particular poetic method (e.g., the “lyricist,” “formalist,” “free verse,” “experimental,” or any other approach) preferable? Perloff: Preferable in what sense? I think the form (free verse vs.

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formalist, etc.) always depends upon cultural determination in large part. The twentieth century was the great free-verse century, but free verse has now become as conventional and boring as heroic couplets were by the end of the eighteenth century. But that doesn’t mean that the free verse of the twentieth century was “preferable” to formalist alternatives. It was just natural, the way things were. I don’t go along with the current wisdom that the poet can just use any form: sonnet on Monday, Williamsesque free verse on Tuesday, etc. There are reasons for formal choices—reasons why, say, Susan Howe uses a mix of prose—often documentary prose—and a very densely sounded verse, collaging in treated photographs as well, in The Midnight, or why Jacques Roubaud uses elaborate mathematical rules in his lyric. As the Oulipo rule puts it, “a text written according to a constraint describes the constraint.” Thus the “loss” of e’s in the lipogram of La Disparition points to the loss of human lives during the occupation of France, which is the novel’s subject. And so on. Fulcrum: Are there deep associations between poetics and politics? Please give some evidence. Perloff: Very deep. Again, all good poetry is at some level political. But the best political poems are those, not overtly political or polemic, that have internalized the issues. Yeats is a great political poet in that sense: he can see both sides of any given political situation in his poetry. In life, his politics were very problematic, however. Among current poets, I think Charles Bernstein is a marvelous “political” poet—he lays out the landscape for us to see, and we can draw our own conclusions. Susan Howe is another important political poet, whose concern is history and the way we understand the past and who takes up the tensions in her own past vis-à-vis the present. But I also like the politics of Kenneth Goldsmith’s The Weather, where in the course of a year’s weather reports, transcribed from radio, we begin to get, suddenly in spring, the Baghdad weather. That says it all!

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Fulcrum: What fundamental misconceptions about poetry annoy you most, and how would you correct or refute them? Perloff: There are a number: here just the most immediate ones. (1) That poetry has a “message,” as my students like to say. If you want a message, read the papers or read history, politics, etc. Poetry is not in the message-making business. (2) That poets write “out of the heart”—just getting those important feelings out there. Any language use is always already conventionalized, formed, shaped by tradition, etc. There is no such thing as “spontaneous” poetry. (3) That the more “profound” the emotions or “ideas” expressed and the more “sensitive” the poet, the better the poetry will be. Nonsense. Great poetry can be made out of daily trivia if it is well handled and composed. (4) That we “know more” than earlier poets and their critics and that hence we should be in the business of “correcting” our precursors. There is no progress when it comes to the literary field; there’s only difference. I dislike the current condescension to the Moderns who had the “wrong” attitudes toward this and that, whereas we know! By the same token, I dislike identity politics and the foregrounding of poets based on identity alone. It has no staying power because, sooner or later, a much more interesting poet with the same identity comes along and shows the limitations of the first. So I’m very wary of “Asian-American” poetry, Chicano poetry, Jewish-American poetry, etc. etc. I know this is heresy but... I’m always more interested in seeing how, say, a recent poem by an Asian-American poet has echoes of principles taught in the Iowa Workshop or in the Buffalo Poetics Program. Now that is really interesting—to see the interplay: we all have many identities and allegiances to varying groups!

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On Evaluation in Poetry Dialogue with Robert von Hallberg

Robert von Hallberg: I thought we would pursue our dialogue by assessing various evaluative criteria that are in play now among poet-critics, since they are the writers who most forthrightly make evaluative arguments. Readers find all sorts of reasons to admire a particular poem, poet, or even school of poets, but critics of poetry are often asked to state their standards abstractly, exactly because they traditionally assert on principle that poetry is not just another discourse but a specially authoritative use of language. I know we can both speak abstractly about particular criteria; probably neither of us has the old aspiration of advocating some universal or even just permanent criterion for assessing poetry. I want to leave open the possibility of invoking different criteria for different poems and even of invoking different criteria at different moments. You probably want the same latitude, so focusing on particular critical arguments now current makes sense to me. Marjorie Perloff: Well, no, actually I guess I do still have that “old aspiration.” And in a way my definition of poetry is quite conventional and classical. I believe a poem differs from routine or normal discourse (like this statement, for instance) by being the

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art form that foregrounds language, in its complexity, intensity, and, especially, relatedness. My criterion here is what Aristotle called to prepon or fitness. In the poetic text, everything is related to everything else—or should be—the whole being a construct of sameness and difference in pleasing proportions. What makes something “pleasing” can of course not be said outright and depends on the reader, the historical moment, and the cultural milieu. But we can say what poetry isn’t: it is not straightforward, expository discourse (as in a chemistry textbook), whose aim is to convey information. I go back to Wittgenstein’s proposition (#160) in Zettel, “Do not forget that a poem, even though it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information.” Poetry must meet the criterion of rereadability. If a poem can be absorbed at one reading (as the typical poetry reading demands—i.e., at one hearing), then it’s not much of a poem. Poetry is news that stays news; it is “language charged with meaning” (Ezra Pound). And here Pound’s aphorisms accord with Russian Formalism and the notion of defamiliarization, making strange, the orientation toward the neighboring word. But neither Pound’s nor the Russian Formalist notion is new: one finds the same formula in Sidney’s Defense of Poetry or in Johnson’s Preface to Shakespeare, where we read, “Nothing can please many, and please long, but just representations of general nature.” I take Johnson’s “just” to mean the Aristotelian “fitting” (the prepon again), the implication being that representations (whether in lyric, drama, or fiction) must strike us not just as plausible according to some outside norm but internally consistent and coherent. “Language charged with meaning” suggests that poetry can never be a matter of “lovely” or “elegant” language but that it must be meaningful; on the other hand, “meaning” that is external to or prior to language, as in much of contemporary writing that passes for “poetry,” is not poetry either. Von Hallberg: You have surprised me already. When you say that “everything is related to everything else” in the poetic text,

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I wonder how you experience the reading of Pound’s Cantos or Susan Howe’s Articulation of Sound Forms in Time. No one sees how all words, phrases, and sentences in these texts are related to all the others there; no poem is all coherence. When the sounds of adjacent syllables or the feel of proximate rhythms leads one to sense a relatedness beyond what can be fully articulated, that is the deep charm of poetry that underwrites the sense that poetry and religion are somehow neighbors—as well as the suspicion that poetry is a game of smoke and mirrors, of illusory relatedness. As critics we tell all about the relatedness we can explicate and frequently imply that we might tell more, had we world enough and time. But much of the contemporary poetry I love is frankly mysterious to me, which means that I cannot go very far with the coherence criterion. Coherence, as you describe it, is bound implicitly to a notion of economy: your point is not the simple one that there is much coherence in poetry but that there is no incoherence in poetry. I constantly try to read past incoherence in poetry, but I accept this effort as my lot. You seem to want a poetry that appears to be very highly coherent, which means highly economical. The poets I admire most are those who, on the one hand, condense their work so that its coherence is palpable, stony; Turner Cassity and Philip Larkin might be useful examples because their formality expresses that condensation so boldly, but Louise Glück and her onetime mentor George Oppen can also serve as examples, and they are not metrical poets. Reading these poets, one knows that one cannot account for each word and syntactic turn in terms of relatedness to other words and turns, but one does feel, line by line, that a strenuous process of selection for coherence has pruned the words down to remarkably few. On the other hand are those poets, whom I also admire, like Pound, Olson, and Ashbery who accept the inevitability of incoherence and let economy be damned. For these writers, a principle of coherence is negatively involved; one admires their work despite its moments of apparent incoherence, despite its lack of economy. In fact, incoherence and extravagance are signs that a poem is working at the edges of convention, straining for beauty and meaning that come without coherence. I expected you

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to speak more for the avant-garde range of the latter, capacious, Whitmanesque approach to poetry. So, as I said, you surprise me. Perloff: I think we’re talking about two different kinds of “coherence” or “relatedness” here. The Cantos, to take one of your examples, exhibit precisely the rereadability I was talking about. I opened at random to this passage in Canto LXXIV: One day were clouds banked on Taishan Or in glory of sunset And tovarish blessed without aim Wept in the rainditch at evening Sunt lumina That the drama is wholly subjective Stone knowing the form which the carver imparts it The stone knows the form Sia Cythera, sia Ixotta, sia in Santa Maria dei Miracoli Where Pietro Romano had fashioned the bases OU TIS A man on whom the sun has gone down (p. 450) Here in the first of the Pisan Cantos is a recharging of the sacred images we know from the earlier Cantos: Mount Taishan, the light from the great crystal, Cythera (Venus), Ixotta delgi Atti (Malatesta’s adored mistress), the church of Santa Maria dei Miracoli, the reference to “OU TIS” (Odysseus in the Cyclops’ cave calling himself “no man”), a “man on whom the sun has gone down” who is obviously the poet himself. The reference to himself as “tovarish” (“comrade”), on the other hand, reminds us of the actual political situation in 1945, a situation tragically at odds with those images of Mount Taishan and Cythera. And the wonderful chiming of “tovarish”/“rainditch” reenforces that harsh note. And yet another kind of relatedness is that of linguistic registers: we shift from the “glory of sunset” (line 1) to “sunt lumina” (line 5), so that light itself is refracted in complex ways, “sunt lumina,” taken from Ovid, having been used earlier in the poem.

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So I would say that here everything is “related” with great finesse, both to neighboring words and images and to Cantos written thirty years earlier. True, there are places in the Cantos where Pound rants on and on in his didactic, Douglasite, paranoid, anti-Semitic way, and clearly those parts are not as effective poetically, quite aside from the noxious “ideas” conveyed. So far I’ve been focusing on universals. But now, if certain basic poetic principles remain intact across time, clearly other features change. Metrical and generic forms, for example, are often historically and culturally generated and conditioned. The Petrarchan sonnet, we know, originated in a particular court culture in fourteenth-century Italy; there are no Roman sonnets. The Pindaric Ode, originally a war poem and adapted in various ways by Renaissance and eighteenth-century poets, no longer plays a significant role in poetry. Yet many critics persist in arguing, as has Helen Vendler, that the poet at any time has the choice of using any verse form he or she likes. What do you think of this argument? Von Hallberg: Well, certainly contemporary poetry presents a special case, exactly because contemporaneity is one widely used evaluative criterion. It may be a mistake, as many critics have claimed, to evaluate art in terms of its special purchase on a historical moment. But the pressure to evaluate the art of our own moment in terms of its responsiveness to the immediate energies we recognize is very great. Eliot said that the poetry of our contemporaries has special pleasure for us, and this is what I mean. Contemporary poetry engages with this special moment of community, and this is where the accumulated interpretation of our predecessors is minimal. The burden of the past is negligible, and the future is open. A critic of the present feels that this or that quality in the art is in short supply, a little more of something or other seems the prescription for the art just now. Perloff: Now it’s my turn to be surprised. I would have thought you believed that the “burden of the past” is never negligible, that it’s always there. We can discuss this a bit later with respect to Susan Howe, perhaps beginning with The Birth-mark.

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Von Hallberg: You proposed that we begin with Susan Howe’s recent critical book, The Birth-mark (1993); her work rightly enjoys a great deal of currency among writers and readers committed to experimental poetry. My Emily Dickinson (1985) and The Birthmark raise issues that pertain particularly but not exclusively to current avant-garde writing. She is not concerned in her critical prose, though, with contemporary writing, so our construal of her criticism in relation to contemporary poetry may become a little unfair. The evaluative criteria at work in these prose books may not be quite the ones she would invoke in assessing contemporary poetry. All the same, the authority of her very engaging criticism does bring into prominence among her readers certain ways of assessing poetry that I want to discuss with you. Generally, she has an ambitious anti-formal understanding of poetry—ambitious because she asks anti-formality to do a lot of work. Dickinson’s “formlessness”—her syntactic and orthographical idiosyncrasies—has been understood by her editors as a “lawlessness” that has to be disciplined into regularity, conformity (Birth-mark, 1), and Howe accepts this view of Dickinson as anarchist transgressor. The opening of My Emily Dickinson says that “In prose and in poetry she explored the implications of breaking the law just short of breaking off communication with a reader” (My Emily, 11). Howe charts the American antinomian tradition as a subterranean vein of wildness. She cites Thoreau, you remember, to the effect that “in literature it is only the wild that attracts us” (Birth-mark, 18). This recent book suggests not that such wildness is one among many resources for American writers, but rather that the best writers, like Dickinson, set themselves completely apart from the normative social institutions that attempt to govern the art and imaginative life of America. She cites Pierre Macherey with approval when he says, arguing for a kind of autonomy of literary texts, that “the work has its beginnings in a break from the usual ways of speaking and writing—a break which sets it apart from all other forms of ideological expression” (Birth-mark, 46). What she prizes in Dickinson and American literature generally is a standing apart from the dominant social institutions whose authority is implied by conventions of spelling,

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syntax, prosody, and publication. For W. S. Merwin, Philip Levine, and any number of her contemporaries, free verse has no such grand significance, and few of her contemporaries are seriously engaged in syntactic experimentation. Howe’s anti-formality is a throwback to that of Williams, Pound, and other modernists, who strove to discover new systems of order—the variable foot, the ideogrammic method. More than once she speaks of Dickinson asserting “a new grammar”—of the heart, of humility (My Emily, 13, 21). Howe, after Derrida, sees the slippage of signification as systemic to language (My Emily, 13), but it is the systemic orders of language that structure her expectations of meaning in matters. Perloff: First of all, I don’t agree that My Emily Dickinson and Birth-mark are “not concerned…with contemporary writing.” They are contemporary writing, and most readers, I would guess, are much more interested in what Howe’s take on Dickinson tells us about Howe’s own poetry rather than what it can teach us about Dickinson. Also both books have poetic passages, and she is consciously trying to produce a new genre, loosely based on Charles Olson’s Call Me Ishmael, Williams’s In the American Grain, and so on. These books are, so to speak, border works— part poetry, part critique, part autobiography. As for specifics, although I don’t care much for Macherey and for Howe’s habit of throwing in “big name” critics—a sign of her insecurity, I would say, since she was, for so long, a marginalized poet—I think this particular Macherey quote serves Howe well. For her, poetry is always oppositional, always a form of calling into question the dominant culture. As for “wildness,” by the way, I don’t think Howe means free verse. Free verse, after all, is now the norm, the staple especially of the poetry of the sixties and seventies like Merwin’s and Levine’s. Her deconstructions of linearity are more radical than theirs. But let’s turn to the larger question of poetry/theory. Howe and such poets as Charles Bernstein have been accused of being “too theoretical,” too programmatic rather than naturally lyrical. Yet surely Louise Glück or Frank Bidart or Robert Pinsky also have a “theory,” a poetics that informs their work, even if

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they don’t write the sort of essays or manifestos one finds in Bernstein’s Content’s Dream or Howe’s Birth-mark. Can poetry ignore theory? (We know theory can ignore poetry, don’t we?) Von Hallberg: You ask whether poetry can ignore theory. The answer is plainly yes, and that is disturbing. The fact seems to be that many estimable contemporary poets do not attend closely to the discourse known as literary theory. I tried in 1990 to assemble a collection of essays on this subject. I gave up the project because so few poets I asked wished to address the issue at all. Literary theory in the United States is a professional academic discourse that competes for readers, authority, and prestige with the traditional genres of literary production. My colleague W. J. T. Mitchell said that we live in a golden age of theory and that the traditional literary genres are not so distinguished now. The academic discipline of literary studies is hierarchically structured, and this is the view from the upper regions of the structure. The yield of literary theory for what I recognize as literary issues is often so slender that the principal significance of the field seems to be the construction and distribution of professional authority. When theorists engage with contemporary poetry, as Jameson does with Bob Perelman’s “China,” the results are unimpressive. Poetry seems to resist theory. Perloff: I would argue slightly differently. It’s true that, within the academe and its leading journals, poetry plays a slight role, but then so do fiction and drama. The most egregious instance of this is American Literary History, where poetry seems all but nonexistent, unless it can be construed as a cultural symptom. But ALH does not focus on theory either and neither does Critical Inquiry in its recent incarnation. These journals focus on Cultural Studies, and the articles printed recall the pre-New Critical 1930s in their zeal to establish “context” and cultural discourse, never mind the poem or novel in question. At the same time—and here’s the irony—poet-theorists like Howe, Bernstein, and Steve McCaffery have found that their essays are in great demand in these journals: Critical Inquiry publishes work by Susan Stewart, ALH published Bernstein, and so on. And I notice these essays

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are not written in conventional academic prose; Stewart, for example, writes very personally and collages things together. It’s as if the editors have no “use” for poetry as such but are genuinely interested in larger discussions of the poetic and its place among other discourses and so on. So when you say that “poetry” is of no interest to theory, I’d respond true if you’re talking about conventional poetry à la Pinsky and Hass but not true where the poetry itself is a little more challenging. Von Hallberg: Well, I have to admit that I resist Howe’s antiformality partly because it’s so much the poetic doctrine of the 1960s—long since discredited for me—fortified by later academic literary theory, and yet I very much share her commitment to a concept of literary autonomy. The academic understanding of autonomy that Macherey goes on to argue for, beyond the passage Howe cites, is not, however, independence as I would have it, because the literary text, for him, is always secondary to other ideological uses of language. Literary language parodies ordinary language (Macherey 53). This is a common way of seeing literary language once formality has become a sign for social conformity. I’ve learned from East German writers that the concept of literary autonomy, despite the critiques of Western writers and scholars, is a precious and powerful thing. As Ernst Bloch suggests, poems express a wish to speak and live otherwise. It is not just that a communist poet, like Tom McGrath, adheres to a mirror image of a capitalist economy and society, and surely not that East German poets meant to articulate some capitalist imaginary in a communist society. A long aesthetic tradition, however compromised and maligned, holds out the possibility, as anarchism does too, of unaffiliated opposition, a rare and indefinite alternative. “Mystery is the content,” Howe says. “Intractable expression” (Birth-mark, 143). “Poems and poets of the first rank,” she had earlier said, “remain mysterious” (My Emily, 27). Howe is less politically predictable than Macherey in this regard, because she will not restrict the literary text to a parodic, secondary relation to ordinary language.

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Perloff: I like that Ernst Bloch quote very much and I agree with what you say about autonomy. And Macherey’s old-line Marxism now seems quite beside the point. Von Hallberg: One problem with Howe’s advocacy, however, is that it settles too patly on the side of so-called formlessness, or mutilation, glaring across at the stodgy repressive patriarchs of Order. The unacceptable axiom is that conventional forms of syntax and prosody stand for established social orders. I join Howe in insisting on the literary and political resources of a tradition of poetic autonomy, but without wanting always to read those resources simplified by some inversion of conventional form. Rigorously formal poets like Turner Cassity and Philip Larkin are staunchly resistant to the norms of literary and social institutions, despite the familiar analogies drawn between metrical order and political authority. Howe tends to describe conventional form as merely shallow or referential in a stable way to societal order. When she speaks of Anne Bradstreet’s poems wearing “a mask of civility, domesticity, and perfect submission to contemporary dogmatism,” I remember that the civility of art often implies a critique of the brutality of the society outside the poem (Birthmark, 113). Resistance to the symmetries of conventional forms is commonly thought of as particularly honest, and formality, as duplicitous. I have been reading a lot of Paul Celan lately and see in him too a commitment to an art that indicates formally— principally in terms of diction—a historical rupture or wound in postwar poetry. Celan lost his family, as you know, to the Nazis and his native culture to Stalinism. In a sense, his historical experience is everyone’s; the significance of the holocaust and of Stalinism is global, and for that reason the case for imitative form here seems especially strong. But most American readers of poetry witness that rupture in Celan from a historical distance. The familiar argument that contemporaneity is post-prosody (a development of the axiomatic equation of conventional form and established social order that Howe does not pursue)—that there can be no lyricism after Auschwitz, to modify Adorno—finds support here because of an American willingness to borrow trouble. I feel no right to

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claim that my culture, which has shown remarkable coherence in the past half-century, needs to display a relation to cataclysms of any kind, nor do I see that an attack on syntax or prosody is a particularly acute way of criticizing social orders. Although I can be persuaded by Howe that Dickinson’s resistance to political and social order shows up in her orthography, my generation cannot be so easily charmed by assertions of necessary relations between form and political allegiance. Perloff: Now here is where we really do disagree. If you believe, as I do, that form can never be separated from something called “content,” then of course the choice of form is itself a statement. Take the heroic couplet. It was a marvelous form for Pope and Swift and they did wonders with it. But today, the very appearance of heroic couplets, say, in the TLS, is a signifier of “light verse,” something fun and parodic, not meant to be taken too seriously. In France, as Jacques Roubaud argues in The Death of Alexander, the alexandrine was the straightjacket that controlled all verse till the mid-nineteenth century when Baudelaire wrote Les petits poèmes en prose and Rimbaud tried both prose poetry and “free verse.” And now there’s no going back. You won’t find a single French poet, I don’t think, writing regularly in alexandrines. And if they did, there would have to be a good reason, the desire to deconstruct some other form, for example. In the case of Larkin, it occurs to me that actually his “form” is appropriate to his meanings: both are quite retrograde. One thing his form “says” is that English poetry took the wrong turn when it welcomed Pound and Eliot and Williams and that it’s time to return to the good old stanzas of Hardy and Houseman. And that goes nicely with his dislike of strangers, immigrants, Americans, Jews, new social measures, etc. It’s true that, say, John Ashbery experiments with pantoums, villanelles, and other obscure forms. But he is playing with those forms, and his standard rhythmic contour, as many critics have pointed out, is the purposely unmusical, ungainly, “scratchy” rhythm we find in “Houseboat Days” as well as in his so-called pantoums. These are gaming frameworks.

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Two further points. I am confused by your reference to the sixties—hardly a very “experimental” time in poetry when you scratch the surface. Allen Ginsberg didn’t write especially “experimental” poetry; he adapted the Whitman line to a wonderfully exuberant, baroque performance mode. The poetry is often very good but no more radical than his ideas and sentiments. But I also want to say—and this is my second point—that experimentation is not ipso facto a good thing. There are plenty of “experiments” that are merely boring: for example, Richard Kostelanetz’s many texts using generative structures. But I’m saying that real poets inevitably and even unconsciously will create new forms so as to represent the world they live in. John Cage is the great example of this. He doesn’t set out to “experiment”; he’s really quite empirical—trying to capture the noises and images we actually live with. Von Hallberg: I do not mean to be enforcing a content/form bifurcation. My claim is that Cassity and Larkin are formally and thematically resistant to the literary culture in which their books circulate. My understanding is that the Anglo-American literary culture is predominantly academic and liberal or left-center in its political affiliations. These two poets often express frankly illiberal views, and they do so in strenuously metrical verse that violates the dominant literary taste for free verse. My point is less that Larkin and Cassity attack certain social institutions than that they demonstrate by their work that fine art is producible from their point of view, from their position, politically and poetically. The quality of their poems underwrites their ideological and aesthetic views. This is what Eliot called an “aesthetic sanction.” Too often resistance in the literary culture is understood as being something that comes from the left, that seeks freedom from convention, but there is no reason to think of the center of American literary opinion as that of the Republican Party. Larkin and Cassity are oppositional poets in that they oppose not the rightist drift of the state’s political center but instead the center of the literary culture that actually reads them. In this sense, they are confrontational. Most of the poets spoken of as oppositional are

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actually not terribly far from the left-liberal center of the academic literary culture, however far they are from the right-center of American politics, i.e., from the audiences that are indifferent to poetry. Perloff: Here you have a good point—but I think it proves my point. Cassity and Larkin, as you note, return to strict metrical forms that accord with their opposition to the dominant leftliberal orthodoxy of the Academy. But another way of saying this would be that they’re retrograde both formally and thematically! I am hardly the advocate of the flaccid “liberal” free verse of the sixties/seventies (Bly, Kinnell), but do you really believe one can go back to a pre-World War II mode so readily? Then, too, Cassity and Larkin represent different things. Cassity may be positioning himself against the left-wing academic orthodoxy, as you note, but that in itself seems like a fairly trivial pursuit (i.e., taking on the left-wing English Department!), and perhaps it accounts for Cassity’s near-total obscurity. I doubt whether ten people reading this dialogue have ever heard of him. The case of Larkin is more complicated because he was hardly writing with an eye to the Left-literary culture of the British universities but for what was still a literary culture—of the TLS, New Statesman, etc., where in fact he was immediately successful. In the Britain of his time, where only 7% of 18-year-olds went to university, it was hardly the university that valorized (or rejected) new poetry. No, Larkin was picked up by middle-brow culture, and the professors came on board only afterward. Von Hallberg: Well, let’s agree to disagree there and return to the issue of formalism in contemporary poetic evaluation. It seems odd to me that Howe expresses so little appreciation for the pleasures of formal fulfillment, because her own writing is exceptional among avant-gardists particularly because she has an extraordinary ear for the recurrences of sound and stress that fortify sense. She says, in Hopkins-like prose, that “A lyric poet hunts after some still unmutilated musical wild of the Mind’s world” (My Emily, 105). Her access to the traditional lushness of language distinguishes her

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writing from that of most other avant-gardists. Here I don’t mean those tight, tough passages that conform to her expressed poetics but rather passages like the one that closes the first section of The Nonconformist’s Memorial (1993): Half thought thought otherwise loveless and sleepless the sea where you are where I would be half thought thought otherwise Loveless and sleepless the sea This little strophe formally concludes a lyric of twelve additional lines that I won’t quote, because here I want only to show that Howe uses the resources of formal symmetry to resolve matters that arise in her less formal explorations. There are the echoes of syllables such as “thought,” “-less,” and “where” that give shape to these lines, and the syntactic structures too echo each other. But the prosody of the strophe is especially worth remarking. The first line has a rhythmic structure—two dactyls—that does not quite conform to the syntactic structure, with its pause after the first two syllables. The second line adheres to a dactylic rhythm but with an extra stress concluding the line. The third line gives up on the falling rhythm altogether but builds on the pattern in the previous line of two trisyllabic feet plus a concluding stress: x/x x/x /. And the third line resembles the first in exemplifying a shift of pace after the caesura: both lines effectively speed up after their pauses, as though fitting more syllables into their second “halves.” It is remarkable that a poet who insists vigorously on the mutilation of form is so drawn to pastiche of the narcotic lyricism of nineteenth-century British poetry. I always feel the allure of such an ear’s working, line by line, but after hearing such song, I obviously listen skeptically to the anti-formal rhetoric of her prose. The best objection to imitative form is strengthened by the example of passages like this one from Howe: conventional forms do much else beyond imitating social structures; a too reductive allegorization of form reduces the resources of the art.

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Although resistance to conventional form is a prominent feature of the literature that she esteems, Howe’s more interesting evaluative criterion is intensity. Much of The Birth-mark is devoted to writing about forceful experiences and feelings. In My Emily she doubts that before World War II “any work of European imagining” exceeded “the rough-hewn intensity” of Mary Rowlandson’s narrative. (The Iliad, Medea, and Lear are presumably not roughhewn; it took fascism and the holocaust to roughen up European literature.) The frontier experience itself obviously provided writers a highly charged subject matter, and that is a large part of the intensity Howe admires. Yet at the heart of her sense of poetic intensity are not just the deprivations and brutality of the frontier but the rivalry of poetry and religion. American poets, to their credit, are drawn to “Divinity’s sovereign source” (My Emily, 55). The particular poetic intensity she analyzes is inconceivable in strictly secular poetry. Her own poems, and those of Michael Palmer too, draw often on Christian aspirations to a language comprehending divinity. Is contemporary academic criticism ready to return to the connections between poetry and faith that engaged American critics from the 1920s to the 1950s? Probably not: our academic intellectual climate is insistently secular and ironic. On the evidence of Howe’s project, though, the modernist view that secularization diminishes poetic resources is far from passé. But beyond the resources of particular subject matter, she treasures still more intellectual intensity. Her account of American literature might be extended to explain the Americanness of writers like Louise Glück and Frank Bidart, as well as Dickinson and Rowlandson; the scope of her assessment is grand beyond the immediate terms of her narrative. The assessment of poetry in terms of intensity is uncontroversial insofar as strong feeling is what is most commonly expected of poetry, but even a veteran reader of poetry feels the appeal of a prophylactic against the mediocrity one witnesses inevitably as one follows an art season by season. The worst charge against contemporary poetry is that it is merely industrial product.

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There is of course a hazard in the ardent pursuit of intensity: it has been too easy for critics of the last thirty-five years to mistake forceful subject matter for emotional, intellectual, or linguistic intensity. There are some poems, like Bishop’s villanelle “One Art,” in which the intensity of the language seems to derive from the force of the subject—in this case, loss. The formal resources of the villanelle concentrate her force and dramatize the speaker’s willfulness, which is the poem’s subject too. In a poem like “One Art,” the distinction between subject and treatment seems tenuous. But James Merrill’s work, for example, rarely has patently forceful subject matter, though the pressure he puts on his syntax and prosody in some poems produces an intensity less obvious than that of, say, Anne Sexton’s poems. One can distinguish clearly between form and content in Merrill’s and Sexton’s poems. And for one, the intensity is all in the style, and for the other, in the content. Howe herself is drawn to extreme scenes, i.e., to the power of subject matter itself, such as the eating of raw horse liver (Birth-mark, 125-26), and she recognizes this as a problem: “I am concerned that so much of my work carries violence in it. I don’t want to be of Ahab’s party. I want to find peace. Anyway, you balance on the edge in poetry” (Birth-mark, 177). But her work gets its more important intensity from the pressure on her style. Her diction, syntactic patterns, and sound structures forge a “terse, tense, sometimes violent” style— “Chaos cast cold intellect back” (Singularities, 34)—suitable to the intellectual ambitions she most admires (My Emily, 84). In many of her poems, an austere refusal of eloquence, fluency, or formality acts as a structure of concentration comparable to that of the villanelle for Bishop. It is important when reading with Howe for intensity to remember that extreme subject matter is only one part of the intensity that matters most in poetry; often it only feeds a prurient appetite for violence. Although I do often read as Howe does, looking for nodes of intensity, a line or a poem, this evaluative criterion is for me dialectically involved with its contrary: range. I cannot imagine a steady diet of Plath’s “Lady Lazarus,” “Daddy,” and Bidart’s “Ellen West,” though these are exceptional poems that belong in any anthology of postwar poetry. To some extent the issue is

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whether one assesses poems one by one, in which case intensity counts a great deal, or whether poets are measured by their overall work. Eliot argued that minor poets are adequately represented by a small number of poems but major poets must be understood in terms of their entire work. Coleridge similarly says that “Our genuine admiration of a great poet is a continuous under-current of feeling; it is everywhere present, but seldom anywhere as a separate excitement” (Biographia Literaria, ed. Engell, vol. 1, 23). Coleridge does not stipulate the quality of that feeling, but if among the qualities one seeks are flexibility, proportion, judgment, variety, one is unlikely to be at peace with the results of an assessment in terms of intensity alone. Much of the poetry I appreciate is not of the first intensity in terms of subject or style, and most of Bishop’s is not either. There are pleasures to be had from the fluency and elegance of poems that deliberately avoid extremity and intensity. How can we justly account for the Horatian pleasures of, say, Robert Pinsky’s recent poem “Impossible to Tell”? Not with Howe’s evaluative criteria alone. I use an intensity criterion often in sorting out the poems to read to friends, to study with students, or to discuss in an essay. But I long for ways of talking about the humaneness of poetry that moves away from the strains of intensity and force in order to express an appreciation for a more normal or ordinary life. Howe cites Thoreau as saying that poetry is “exaggerated history” (Birth-mark, 96). Exaggeration isn’t satisfying in the long run. Perloff: Your commentary on intensity interests me a great deal because I almost wrote my PhD dissertation on the history of the meaning of “intensity” as poetic criterion. Before the nineteenth century, “intensity” was NOT especially valued; it’s very much a Romantic invention (Blake, Keats, Baudelaire, Poe) and often comes down to the Moderns in the form of the privileged moment, the epiphany. “Can you recommend some novels of the first intensity?” Yeats wrote to Dorothy Wellesley. In this sense Howe is most certainly a Romantic. But intensity needn’t mean “strong feeling”—it can mean, as for Eliot, “intensity” of the poetic process, the making. I think this is also what Keats meant when he said “The excellence of every art is in its intensity” or

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what Poe had in mind when he declared that one should excise those parts of Paradise Lost that lacked intensity. It’s not a matter of feeling but a matter of language. And here I can’t see how you can invoke Frank Bidart. To me his language is generally quite slack as is Pinsky’s—I’ll return to this. As for Louise Glück, that’s “intensity” on the surface level—a breathless invocatory lyric that doesn’t seem to have much substance. Not enough difference, always the same note of High Seriousness. Also I would never describe Bishop’s “One Art” as having “intensity of language.” It’s too reasonable, rational, crafted, and willed. Von Hallberg: Even after we have agreed that intensity of language or style is the proper goal of poetry, we are going to disagree greatly as to what constitutes intensity of language in particular poems. In many poems we recognize intense language by its appearance of being worked by the poet; Lowell’s style in Lord Weary’s Castle might be an instance of this. The intensity of language characteristic of seventeenth-century English poetry is reasonable, rational, crafted, and willed, isn’t it? I don’t sense any necessary conflict between these qualities and what I recognize as intensity of language. But in other sorts of poems, intensity seems the result of strenuous selection, of an austerity that was not part of Lowell’s, Donne’s, or Marvell’s intention; Bidart’s poems seem intense to me in just this way. Perhaps, though, we can agree that the common notion that language becomes intense when its style imitates its sense is mistaken. Perloff: Well, here I’d like to come back to the notion of relatedness, fitness, making every word count—which is, of course, another form of “intensity.” One of my favorite seventeenth-century poems is George Herbert’s “The Windows,” which begins: Lord, how can Man preach thy eternall word? He is a brittle crazie glasse; Yet in thy temple thou dost him afford This glorious and transcendent place, To be a window through thy grace.

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And the poem then develops the metaphor of priest = stained glass window, both worthless unless “illuminated” by “light” (the grace of God). One of the great feats of this poem is that when the tenor and vehicle of the metaphor fuse in the last stanza, they do so phonemically as well as semantically, with the words “in,” “Mingle,” “bring,” “flaring,” with the final rhyme “flaring thing”/“ring” bringing the point home with great finesse. It’s the sort of effect Robert Lowell can only strain for in Lord Weary’s Castle because—and here is a topic we have barely touched on— the sort of correspondence between the natural and the spiritual (“Doctrine and life, colours and light, in one”) Herbert took as a given can’t be willed by a secular poet of Lowell’s day without a good deal of strain. Von Hallberg: Well, certainly Pope’s principle (“The sound must seem an echo to the sense”) presides over most critical discussion of poetic style: prosody is appreciated most often as an imitation of sense. But this is a way of rendering the sound of poetry servile to the ideas that critics specialize in explicating. It is consoling to a reader to find some neat parallel between the sound structure of a poem and what one wants to think of as its point. But sounds provide other pleasures that do not fall into line so obediently. Sound is a sense experience, and it has its own being beyond its instrumentality. The sensuality of poetry, generally speaking, is greater than that of prose. This is often part of the mysteriousness of poems: their sensual shapeliness, altogether aside from their paraphrasable sense. This side of poetry sometimes seems just unknowable, in the sense that it can’t be reduced to paraphrase. Perloff: I agree, but do you really think most critics today talk about sound at all? Or about syntax and diction? The typical discussion of, say, Ashbery (where there has been a great deal of criticism) is about meaning, voice, larger structure (or lack thereof) of specific poems, and so on, but critics (Harold Bloom is a case in point) rarely stop to so much as mention that Three Poems is in prose, not verse, or to ask what that might mean. So we have to look more closely at the materiality of poetry, and here

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I want to have a closer look at a poet you’ve praised as especially “humane”—Robert Pinsky. Pinsky’s poems are barely poems at all. Or at best, to use Coleridge’s distinction, works of fancy, not imagination. Take the celebrated “History of My Heart”: One Christmastime Fats Waller in a fur coat Rolled beaming from a taxicab with two pretty girls Each at an arm as he led them in a thick downy snowfall Across Thirty-Fourth Street into the busy crowd Shopping at Macy’s: perfume, holly, snowflake displays. Chimes rang for change. In Toys, where my mother worked Over her school vacation, the crowd swelled and stood Filling the aisles, whispered at the fringes… “Do not retell in mediocre verse,” Pound said, “what has already been done in good prose.” Let’s first of all transfer Pinsky’s loose blank verse into prose: One Christmastime Fats Waller in a fur coat rolled beaming from a taxicab with two pretty girls each at an arm as he led them in a thick downy snowfall across Thirty-Fourth Street into the busy crowd shopping at Macy’s, with its perfume, holly and snowflake displays. Chimes rang for change. In Toys, where my mother worked over her school vacation, the crowd swelled and stood filling the aisles and whispered at the fringes… What have I lost here? I’ve added nothing except that in line 5 I got rid of the colon and made it syntactically smooth with “with its” and in the case of line 8 I added an “and.” I wouldn’t even have had to do that. So, what does Pinsky gain by lineating his text and by using tercets? I can’t imagine. Now, my objection to Pinsky is not at all that he uses traditional “form” but that he doesn’t

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do anything with the form. Just as, say, Ferlinghetti doesn’t do anything with the “formlessness.” I think—forgive me for being cynical—that what he does gain is that his reader processes the work as a “poem,” which is to say that the tercet form is meant as a signpost whereby the reader is prompted to relate “History of My Heart” to great poems of the past. But I actually think the cited text looks/sounds/reads better as prose because that’s what it is internally. If Pinsky were writing short stories, though, the audience would be more stringent. I honestly believe that he couldn’t get away with a lot of his flatness if he admitted he were writing prose. Short-story audiences are, in fact, more demanding than poetry audiences even if they’re bigger. Let me specify: “One Christmastime”—why not “One Christmas”? The “Once upon a time” note is merely cute. Fats Waller “rolled beaming…”: no defamiliarization here. Wouldn’t it have been interesting if Fats Waller were scowling? Or something else that might arrest our attention? “Thick downy snowfall”— what else? What do you now know about December on 34th St. you didn’t know before? “The busy crowd.” Are crowds usually “unbusy”? If not, why not just “crowd,” as Hemingway might have put it? “The crowd swelled and stood / Filling the aisles”—again, what else? All this is, of course, part of Mother’s Tales for Young Bob, “romance of Joy, / Co-authored by her and the movies, like her others.” But you know what? It’s not credible because if it were really a scene coauthored with the movies, it would be more graphic, more striking—more interesting. And the words do nothing to character their purported speaker. I think immediately of Frank O’Hara’s great New York poems like “A Step Away from Them”—poems that make us “see” Times Square (same locale!) as if for the first time, what with the blonde chorus girl clicking and the “Negro” who is “languorously agitating.” So when you and others tell me Pinsky is “humane,” I honestly don’t know what this means. He just seems like everyone else—a very nice guy, maybe a little more sensitive and articulate than other nice guys, but why should I be interested in this story about his mother, a story that is not much more than a New Yorker profile? What Pinsky lacks here is “le mot juste”—I don’t mean language per se but language that is memorable, graphic, precise.

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Von Hallberg: Your questions about the opening of “History of My Heart” revolve around the issue of ordinary language: what is the function of ordinary diction and syntax in poetry? Some poets invest highly in striking diction and surprising syntax, but Pinsky puts more in story than many of his contemporaries do. In order to carry stories, I think, his style is well suited to a plausible narrator who speaks in sentences—not just syllables—that can be articulated easily. One recognizes such a style as familiar, more fluent than intense or startling. Only in the sixth line, beginning with the second sentence—“Chimes rang for change. In Toys, where my mother worked…”—does the diction indicate any flight. “Change” might be capitalized to indicate a season of transformation, and “toys” might be lowercased to suggest Mother Hubbard more than Mother Pinsky. That is, when the diction becomes most obviously a mouthful, with the “Chi”/“cha” echo, the fantastic quality of even ordinary discourse surfaces for a moment. The poet is not taking credit for the figurative potentiality of the language here, as Merrill often does; ordinary life at Macy’s every Christmas season is about transformation and play. But the syntax moves one’s mouth and attention through an abrupt change, with a crisp four-word sentence following the forty-four word opening sentence. Pinsky is not displaying virtuosity, but the form of the poem is giving sensual shape to the movement of attention through the story. As for Fats Waller, he is the black man bringing sumptuous, sexy excess to the white world. Part of your objection to Pinsky’s language, I take it, is its conventionality, which truly is a prominent feature of the style here, and this has everything to do with the claim that his work exhibits an unusual degree of what I called humaneness. He does not try to make everything graphic or particular. The “two pretty girls,” say, are adequately represented, it seems, by this abstract, conventional phrase. And similarly he tells of his father punching “the enraged gambler,” in a corny scene fit for the movies, as he suggests. The poem affirms the occasional adequacy of conventional categories of expression and representation: “Shepherds and shepherdesses in the grass”; “the back room of Carly’s parents’ shop.” That’s a fit. He presents this conformity with some amusement or irony—“To see

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eyes ‘melting’ so I could think This is it, / They’re melting! Mutual arousal of suddenly feeling / Desired: This is it: ‘desire’!”—but it is nonetheless a match: conventional language will serve in some instances. And in just these moments, the ordinary, conventional structures in which speakers of this language live are affirmed. The implication of the poems then is that the ways that we have found as groups to live together are significantly humane. And not just any groups. The term humane is obviously slippery, exactly because it is meant to be inclusive above all; hence the continuing currency of the Latin tag from Terence—“nothing human is alien to me.” The relevant counter-term is less “inhumane” than “partisan.” Poets like Whitman and Williams attempt to elude the exclusions of partisan analysis, though of course they do not always avoid partisanship: they represent themselves as poets who wish to refuse certain kinds of partisanship; they claim a measure of inclusiveness that runs against the dividing lines of camps that their readers are expected to recognize. This is not a strictly thematic issue. The refusal of encampment that I am talking about can certainly be expressed through features of style or theme; the important thing is the aspiration toward some inclusive ground of affiliation—humanness, which can mean an attitude toward a political issue or a style that is not devoted to a narrow range of effect. The esteem for the humaneness of certain poetry rests ultimately on rhetorical properties, not on a claim about the nature of a particular poet as person. You say that Pinsky just isn’t sufficiently interesting, but I think this poem is quite rich. The richness I appreciate is not in the graphic language of the poem (and you would surely agree that elsewhere in the poem there are teeth marks on the railing, etc.—enough graphic particularity to satisfy me) but rather in the overlap of various representations of the production of desire, the elaboration of some ornament, and the communication of a sense of identity. Is there another poet who can so nicely account for the mix of selfishness and mother love?

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She wanted to have made the whole world up, So that it could be hers to give. So she opened A letter I wrote to my sister, who was having trouble Getting on with her, and read some things about herself That made her go to the telephone and call me up: “You shouldn’t open other people’s letters,” I said And she said “Yes—who taught you that?” —As if she owned the copyright on good and bad, Or having followed pain inside she owned her children From the inside out, or made us when she named us, III Made me Robert. I think it is quite interesting that a predictable, ordinary moment can be transformed by someone like Fats Waller emerging out of nowhere. Why should he wish to transform the moment for a crowd of strangers, since he has surely had lots of adulation already? The answer suggested by the poem is that it pleases one to give gifts, to make someone else feel lucky. It is erotic to give pleasure, to make someone else feel desire. And yes, it is selfish too to want to see oneself desired in the eyes of others, to read one’s name everywhere in the world. What we commonly take to be the type of selfless devotion is a mother’s love. Pinsky relates how his mother’s intelligence is bent to pursuing her claim on the identity of her children. Perloff: Bob, you make the most eloquent case possible for Pinsky’s “History of My Heart,” but it does leave me with some questions. First, “ordinary language.” I’ve just written a whole book (Wittgenstein’s Ladder) on Wittgenstein’s theory that “ordinary language is alright,” showing how “poetic” ordinary language

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can be. But Pinsky’s is patently not ordinary language—that is the language that we actually use—but calculated to “seem” ordinary. In ordinary conversation we don’t in fact talk about people “beaming from a taxicab” or “the crowd…whispered at the fringes.” It’s not at all what Wittgenstein had in mind when he cautioned us to see how fascinating OUR ordinary sentences (e.g., “The rose is red”) can be when we try to understand their uses. You then say Pinsky’s language is conventional, and intentionally so. Well, which is it: ordinary or conventional? Because once something is conventionalized, it’s not really ordinary. But, finally, a few words about your discussion of the passage about mother love, a passage you obviously admire. Evidently, if I understand you correctly, you find the passage effective because you feel that this is what mother love is like, that it nicely embodies the tension between a mother’s “selfless devotion” and her urge to pursue “her claim on the identity of her children.” Your argument here is, as you surely know yourself, extraliterary: you are praising Pinsky for presenting what you take to be a psychological truth about motherhood. But suppose I don’t agree that this is a “just” representation of what you call “the mix of selfishness and mother-love”? Perhaps our difference here is gendered. From my perspective (and since we’re being extraliterary, I write as myself a mother and grandmother), Pinsky’s representation is that of the slightly patronizing successful poet-son, who is here imputing motives to his middle-class nonprofessional mother. The lines “She wanted to have made the whole world up, / So that it could be hers to give” imply that she really has nothing of her own to give anyone, that she lives vicariously through her children (the Jewish Mother cliché)—a statement that may or may not have been true of the poet’s mother but that doesn’t quite ring true poetically (fictionally) because the reader senses that there’s more involved here than the poet admits, that he is casting his mother in a role. Then, too, I find the passage irritating because the poet claims to know what it is that makes his mother tic, knows that she wanted “copyright on good and bad,” wanted “to own her children / From the inside out.” But the reader is given no alternative: we

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have to take Pinsky’s representation on faith, even though, for all we know, the real Mrs. Pinsky had a secret lover and a rich sex life in middle age! But, isn’t this by definition what lyric is: a subjective representation of events, the expression of the first person? Romantic lyric, yes, but not all lyric, and the voice is the problem here. For even if we don’t subscribe, as I don’t, to the current orthodoxy about the cultural construction of the subject, with its concomitant axioms about the end of individualism the “waning of affect” and “new depthlessness” (Fredric Jameson), it seems problematic, at the end of the twentieth century, to give the individual voice so much authority, so much knowingness. The facility of interpretation (“Or having followed pain inside, she owned her children / From the inside out”) flies in the face of the ethos of the late twentieth century, however one chooses to construct it. I don’t mean to beat up on Pinsky: God knows he is a much more accomplished poet than many now writing, and he is a sensitive and interesting essayist and commentator. But I would conclude—and here I do think we differ—by suggesting that if one takes Pinsky as a paradigmatic contemporary poet, one is bound to have the feeling, which you said you have, that poetry just isn’t a very vital part of the culture any more. I think the reason you feel this way is that what you suggest Pinsky does “well” is really done equally well in essays, short stories, and especially in film! So to come back to Pound’s caveat: “Do not retell in mediocre verse what has already been done in good prose!” And here I come back to my original proposition that poetry is the language art. Readers continue to come to poetry because, unlike film, or the personal essay, or video, or even the novel, it contains language charged with meaning. The pleasure of the text, in, say, Susan Howe’s Frame Structures, is that the word “mark,” which appears and reappears in the first of Howe’s four books in that collection, “History of the Dividing Line,” without registering fully on the reader’s consciousness, is now charged by the knowledge provided in the new title piece, the autobiographical memoir “Frame Structures,” that “Mark” is

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the name of Howe’s father as well as of her son. Mark deWolfe Howe is central to her story, for the quest for paternity stands behind the poet’s obsession with the New England and Ireland of her parents, her documentary history of Buffalo and Boston, her vignettes of Beacon Hill ancestors and friends. After a while, every “mark” provided begins to fit into the puzzle. I find that students are thrilled when they begin to “see” these connections, not because Howe has anything unique to “say” about paternity or ancestry, but because her poems enact such amazing labyrinthine paths that allow for exploration of the issue. On the “flat” documentary surface, the poet’s very real pain appears at the interstices of the text, and the reader experiences what Aristotle called the pleasure of recognition. It’s a pleasure, in any case, that is currently very widespread as a large alternate poetry culture is making itself heard through reading series, internet projects, Web sites, conferences, festivals, etc. A poetry world literally humming and with which I can hardly keep up!

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Teaching Poetry in Translation: The Case for Bilingualism Marjorie Perloff

In my seminars on the historical avant-garde, I regularly include a unit on Russian poetry and the visual arts because I take these to be among the signal accomplishments of the early twentieth century. My own knowledge of Russian is limited: some twenty years ago, in preparation for the writing of my book The Futurist Moment, I enrolled in a summer crash course in Russian at UC-Irvine; I lived in the dorm as “Masha,” was not allowed to speak English (a rule that kept me very silent!), and, after a six-week period, could read short passages with the help of a dictionary. And of course I had mastered the Cyrillic alphabet so that I could make my way through the Russian section of the stacks and look up Russian bibliography. Avant-garde manifestos—for example, those of Velimir Khlebnikov and Kasimir Malevich—do not suffer too much in translation; the poetry itself is another matter. Even the best translations, after all, cannot convey the structure, much less the sound of a Khlebnikov or Mayakovsky poem. Bilingual editions, especially those with texts on facing pages, are useful, but they are also very expensive to produce, and so it is a blessing that we now

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have, readily available and free of charge, a number of excellent Web sites where we can hear and read the poetry in question and study its relationship to the artist’s books in which much of it was originally published. What is required of the student—and can be accomplished—is a minimum knowledge of Cyrillic: there are now many sites on the internet that the student can use in identifying translations of titles or captions. Consider the case of Mayakovsky’s famous early poem “A vy mogli by? (And You, Could You?),” which first appeared in the artist’s book Trebnik troikh (The Missal of the Three) in 1913. It was “A vy mogli by?” that Mayakovsky recited at what turned out to be the last reading he gave before his suicide on 14 April 1930: in response to a student heckler at the Institute of National Economy in Moscow, he declared, “Any proletarian ought to understand this poem. If he doesn’t he’s simply illiterate. You should study. I really want you to understand my things.” But the audience, increasingly cool to anything other than Socialist Realism, remained skeptical (Brown 21-22; Seldes 138-39). A recording of Mayakovsky’s own reading of “And You, Could You?” is available, together with an English translation, at PennSound (http://media.sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/ Mayakovsky/Mayakovsky-Vladimir_And-Could-You.mp3). And on the Russian Web site Poeziia avangarda (http://avantgarde. narod.ru/voices/index.html); this recording—inevitably rather scratchy—is followed by two others: Valery Sherstyanoy (2000), and Sergei Biryukov (2003), both MP3s produced in Germany. When we study the poem in class, I play all three versions, while putting on the screen the written text, both in the Cyrillic of the original (Mayakovsky 41) and then in transliteration based on the US Library of Congress system:

When we study the poem in class, I play all three versions, while putting on the screen the written text, in the Cyrillic of the original (Mayakovsky 41)inantransliteration based on the US Library of both in theboth Cyrillic of the original (Mayakovsky 41) and then Congress system: Congress system:

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Я срaзу смазал карту будня, Я срaзу смазал карту будня,

Ia srázu smázal kártu búdnia Ia srázu smázal kártu búdnia

из стакана; плеснувшиплеснувши краску из краску стакана;

krásku íz stakána PlesnúvshiPlesnúvshi krásku íz stakána

показал блюде студня я показаляна блюде на студня

na bliúde stúdnia Ia pókazálIanapókazál bliúde stúdnia

косые скулы океана. косые скулы океана.

skúly ókeána Kosýe skúlyKosýe ókeána

чешуе жестяной На чешуе На жестяной рыбы рыбы

chéshué zhestiánoi rýbi na chéshuénazhestiánoi rýbi

прочел я зовы прочел я зовы новых губ.новых губ.

ia zóvy prochél ia prochél zóvy nóvykh gúbnóvykh gúb

А вы

А вы

A vý

A vý

ноктюрн ноктюрн сыграть сыграть

noktiúrn spigrát’ noktiúrn spigrát’

могли бы могли бы

moglí by moglí by

наводосточных флейте водосточных труб на флейте труб

na fléite vódostóchnykh trúb na fléite vódostóchnykh trúb

I have added accent marks to the transliteration because, as we shall see, the poem’s metrics are so central to its meaning. Here are I have added accent marks tothe thefirst, transliteration because, we shallpoem’s see, th I have two added accent marks to the transliteration because, as we shallassee, the metrics are so English translations: Edward Brown’s literal one (21second, Peter France’s, the version used the beautiful to its Here meaning. Here are two English translations: theinfirst, central22), to central itsthe meaning. are two English translations: the first, Edward Brown’s literal one (21-22), facsimile edition of El Lissitsky’s For the Voice (41):

thePeter second, Peterthe France’s, version in thefacsimile beautifuledition facsimile of El Lissitsky’s the second, France’s, versionthe used in theused beautiful of edition El Lissitsky’s For the

But Could You? Voice (41):Voice (41): I color-smeared the chart of everyday splashing paints on it from a drinking glass; on a dish of fish aspic I showed slanted of the ocean. Ithe color-smeared theeveryday chart of everyday I color-smeared the chartcheekbones of On the scale of a tin fish splashing on it from drinkinglips. glass; splashing paints itpaints from a drinking I readonthe message ofaglass; fresh And you— on a dish of Ifish aspic I showed on a dish of fish aspic showed Could you play a nocturne slanted cheekbones of the ocean. the slantedthe cheekbones of the ocean. On a downspout flute? But Could But You?Could You?

2

2

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& YOU COULD YOU? I have blurred the map of every day, set paint out of the paint-pot splashing, I have shown in aspic on a plate the slanting cheekbones of the ocean. In a metallic fish’s scales I have read the call of future lips. And you. could you a nocturne play on the flute of waterpipes? At one level, Mayakovsky’s is, as he told the suspicious student, a fairly straightforward lyric. The poet announces his power to transform the everyday into art, to transform so humdrum a thing as a dish of fish aspic into the slanted cheekbones of the ocean, to see metallic fish scales (a logo used on shop signposts) as a woman’s lips. And now, turning suddenly to the audience, he asks, “And what about you? Can you play a nocturne on a downspout flute? Can you make music on an ordinary drainpipe?” As such, Mayakovsky’s miniature Futurist manifesto hardly seems remarkable: it insists that the urban landscape with its drainpipes and street signs can become the stuff of the new poetry. Scholars have searched for visual analogues to the specific images: Juliette Stapanian-Apkarian (106-07), for example, insists that the poem is based on Cubist still lifes that have the same elements—a pot, a glass, a plate of fish, and a musical instrument—as in Georges Braque’s Still Life with Herring (190911) or his Still Life with Violin and Jug (1909-1910). But the image of the plate of fish aspic as the slanting cheekbones of the ocean is surely more surrealist than cubist; indeed the whole poem is proto-surrealist: the fish-scale lips, for example, anticipate Man Ray’s image of Lee Miller’s giant lips floating in an empty blue sky in his 1934 painting Observatory Time: The Lovers. But the visual analogy is finally less important to an understanding of the poem than is its brilliant use of metrics. The

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Russian poem, we see in the transliteration, begins as a regular iambic tetrameter quatrain rhyming abab—a stanza Pushkin might have written. But no sooner does the poem establish its verse parameters than it defies them. The second quatrain begins normally (lines 5-6), but the next three lines look on the page like free verse, the norm not reasserting itself until the final line. But this description is not, in fact, accurate: listen again to the recitation, whether by Mayakovsky or the other two readers, and it becomes clear that lines 7-9 constitute a single iambic tetrameter line, broken into three parts— A vý / noktiúrn spigrát’ / moglí by And you / a nocturne play / could you Read this way, the lines constitute the second rhyming quatrain (rubi, gub, vi, trub), and the poem’s ten lines count as eight. But why the broken line with its semblance of free verse? Uncannily, Mayakovsky’s poem enacts structurally what is being said; it presents its lyric subject as capable of transforming the “plumbing” of traditional verse and make it sing. The aggressive challenge to those in the poet’s audience (And you—what can you do?) is presented prosodically as well as semantically. Then, too, “A vi mogli by” is very tightly structured phonemically: consider the intricate sounding of “Ia srazu smazal kartu…mrasku iz stakana” as well as the witty rhyming of budnia (weekday, humdrum) with studnia (aspic) and further along of gub (lips) with trub (pipes). No English translation can, of course, render this complex sound play. The versions above are unrhymed, as is the translation “And Could You?” by Ilya Kutik and Andrew Wachtel, on their excellent Northwestern University Web Anthology (http://web. mmlc.northwestern.edu) : I suddenly smeared the weekday map splashing paint from a glass; On a plate of aspic I revealed the ocean’s slanted cheek.

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On the scales of a tin fish I read the summons of new lips. And you could you perform a nocturne on a drainpipe flute? This translation has the virtue of stressing the “suddenness” and spontaneity of the poetic act: the word srazu (suddenly, at once) is simply left out in the Brown and France versions. But there are also attempts to render Mayakovsky’s quatrains in rhymed verse. Here are two anonymous exemplars randomly culled from the internet (http://nethelper.com/article/Vladimir_Mayakovsky): But Could You? I blurred at once the map of humdrum, by splashing colours like a potion; I showed upon the dish of jelly the slanted cheekbones of the ocean. Upon the scales of metal fishes I read the new lips’ attitude. But could you nowperform a nocturne Just playing on a drainpipe flute? So Could You? At once I smeared all routine by spilling paint in my place; I took a plate of gelatin and formed an ocean’s jagged face. I picked the summons of fresh youth off rusty glint of fish scale tin. So could you take a drainpipe flute and play a nocturne on a whim?

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Superficially, these quatrain poems sound closer to the original, but the need for rhyme forces the translator to add unnecessary words, as in the case of “the new lips’ attitude,” or to invent such flaccid alternatives for new lips as “the summons of fresh youth.” The “map of humdrum,” “splashing colors like a potion,” “ocean’s jagged face”: these are not really accurate or even suggestive translations of Mayakovsky’s phrasing. Notice, moreover, that the aggressive challenge of “And you” in line 7 is totally lost in both rhymed versions. To translate Mayakovsky’s stanzas from a Russian rich in rhymes into a much less inflected and hence difficult-to-rhyme English is therefore all but impossible. What bilingual study does is precisely to expose the gap between the original and the translation—a gap that testifies to the poet’s subtlety and skill. Indeed, the very best English translation of “A vy mogli by” I’ve come across is by the Scottish poet Edwin Morgan, who has translated many Russian poets, and here renders Mayakovsky in Scottish: “Ay, but can ye” Wi a jaup the darg-day map’s owre-pentit I jibbled colour fae a tea-gless; ashets o jellyteen presentit to me the great sea’s camshach cheek-bleds. A tin fish ilka scale a mou I’ve read the cries a new warld through’t. But you wi denty thrapple can ye wheeple nocturnes fae a rone-pipe flute? Read aloud, Morgan’s version should not offer many difficulties to the Anglophone reader: “fae” (lines 2, 10) means “from”; “ashets” (line 3) is an adaptation of French assiette, meaning “plate”; “camshach” (line 4) is “crooked”; “mou” in line 5 is short for “mouth.” This poem’s guttural, alliterative, and consonantal

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Scottish, in any case, is much closer to the Russian than is standard English, and Morgan is sensitive to the important break in line 7 (“But you”) as well as to Mayakovsky’s rhymes. Indeed, Morgan’s version is the only one of the six cited here that really gives the feel of the original. To compare the various translation alternatives of “A vy mogli by” thus provides an entrance into Mayakovsky’s poetics. To examine what can and does go wrong in translation practice and to see how wanting even the best translation will be is to enlarge one’s sense, not only of one little Russian poem, but of poetry in general. Let me conclude with another form of “translation” available to us in the case of Mayakovsky—the visual translation performed by El Lissitsky I mentioned earlier. In the late autumn of 1922, when Mayakovsky was in Berlin, he collaborated with the visual artist El Lissitsky on a book called Dlia golosa (For the Voice), which submits thirteen of Mayakovsky’s best known poems to Lissitsky’s brilliant graphic design. Mayakovsky later praised this little (7.5 x 5.25”) book as “technically a perfect example of typographic art” (Railing 12-14). In 2000, the British Library in conjunction with the MIT Press made a boxed facsimile of For the Voice, containing the Russian book, an English translation, and a book of scholarly essays providing commentary on the poems and visual prints. These three books are listed separately in the bibliography. The little book (both the Russian and English versions) has a thumb index with visual symbols and shortened titles. On the lefthand page, in image of typecase elements relates to the subject of the poem, whereas the right-hand side contains the poem itself, rendered expressively in large letters, using heavy bars between lines of type or at an angle to the type. The sans serif typeface is black and red on white ground. The layout looks like this:

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Lissitsky’s “translation” of Mayakovsky’s poem is extremely interesting. The left page is a grid structure filled with question marks and, in the lower boxes, letters for the alternate letter forms for the b of by (would) and the v of vy (you). The red question grid is overprinted by a monumental A and an equally large ?. While a in Russian is usually translated as but, it also means and. The ampersand is Lissitsky’s own choice as are the bold letters. The resulting ideogram is Lissitsky’s own conception of the poem. He begins with an empty grid, in keeping with Mayakovsky’s map of the everyday, and produces his own order—an order then violated by the entrance of question marks. A visual translation of a verbal text as remarkable as Lissitsky’s is of course quite rare. In most instances of teaching poetry in translation, there are hardly likely to be as many available translations or visual counterparts. Still, Mayakovsky’s poem can provide a useful paradigm. To summarize, ideally, any poem should be read in its language of composition, poetry being, as Robert Frost so famously quipped, what is lost in translation. But since, practically speaking, many of the world’s great poetries are now available to our students only in translation, we must rise to

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the occasion by never pretending that a translation is more than a good reproduction of a painting; it is not the painting itself. True, as translators often tell us, a translation of poem X by poet Y may well be a new poem in its own right; indeed, it may be an improvement on the original. But if our first concern as teachers is to introduce our students to poetry outside the Anglophone box, then let us hear and look at the original. The materiality of the poem in question is always central, even in translation. And the internet has, surprisingly, become a great facilitator for translation studies.

Works Cited Brown, Edward J. Mayakovsky: A Poet in the Revolution. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1973. Kutik, Ilya and Andrew Wachtel, eds. From The Ends to the Beginning: A Bilingual Anthology of Russian Verse, ed. Ilya Kutik and Andrew Wachtel, http://web.mmlc.northwestern.edu/. Mayakovsky, Vladimir. El Lissitsky (Book Constructor), Dlia Golosa (For the Voice). Facsimile of the 1923 Russian Edition. London: The British Library, 2000. Mayakovsky, Vladimir. El Lissitsky, For The Voice, trans. Peter France, visual translation by Martha Scotford. London: The British Library, 2000. Mayakovsky, Vladimir, “And Could You?” PennSound (http://media. sas.upenn.edu/pennsound/authors/Mayakovsky/MayakovskyVladimir_And-Could-You.mp3). Mayakovsky, Vladimir, Net Helper (http://nethelper.com/article/ Vladimir_Mayakovsky). Morgan, Edwin M. Collected Translations. Glasgow: Carcanet, 1996. Poeziia avangarda (http://avantgarde.narod.ru/voices/index. html). Railing, Patricia, ed. Voices of the Revolution: Collected Essays. London: The British Library, 2000. Seldes, Barry. “Sensibilities for the New Man. Politics, Poetics & Graphics,” in Railing, Voices of the Revolution, 138-58 Stapanian-Apkarian, Juliette, “Modernist ‘Vision’ in the Poems of Mayakovsky,” in Railing, Voices of the Revolution, 72-129.

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The Internet Moment in the Life of Publishing Interview with Front Porch Magazine

Front Porch: What is the future of publishing? Will we see more and more electronic journals and books? Will the book, as we know it, change? Marjorie Perloff: There is no doubt that the internet has revolutionized publishing. I agree with Kenneth Goldsmith’s axiom that “If it isn’t on the internet, it doesn’t exist.” But that doesn’t spell the end of the printed book. On the contrary! Surfers of the internet, discovering an electronic journal or Web site, then often want to own the book in question. I know in my own case, my book Wittgenstein’s Ladder (University of Chicago Press, 1996) has sold especially well (some 6,000 copies, in both hard- and paperback, which is very good for a scholarly book), and at least three of its six chapters are available on my Web site and the Chicago Web site. But I do think the electronic journals will replace the print ones. Print journals are very expensive, and people don’t always keep them, as they keep books. Electronic journals have the advantage of being much timelier. Books can be

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reviewed immediately; lectures can go online right away. I want especially to mention John Tranter’s Jacket, with its astonishing variety of poems, essays, reviews, and verbal-visual works. Then, too, the Web sites of Salt Books or Ugly Duckling Presse and other such small presses have served to disseminate the work of these presses and gain the books a much bigger audience! So it’s a reciprocal project. I do, however, worry about the sheer information glut. Too many poets, fiction writers, reviewers, critics—it’s too easy to get published somehow. Front Porch: It seems with the advent of online journals, everyone and anyone can be published somewhere. In your opinion, how is the literary world damaged by this? Perloff: Having a book of poems published used to mean something. But what with small press and desktop publishing, anyone who wants to can have dozens of books. What does it all mean? Who vets these books? More important, who edits and improves them and helps the author take out the slack? Front Porch: If electronic journals replace print journals, as you say they will, how can e-journals rise to the occasion? That is, should e-journals simply be print journals online, or should they take advantage of all the opportunities that an electronic space can provide? Perloff: The latter. An e-journal like Jacket does things a print journal can’t do; it contains much more material, many images, a wider variety of kinds of material, and so on. Also the turnaround time is much faster, and so reviews of books are published almost immediately and have relevance whereas in the old print days, the process could take two to three years! Front Porch: Writers still seem to want a book published. We still feel that print is better than online. How can we change this perception? Should we? Can we?

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Perloff: I think this is changing now that some electronic publishers do use peer review. The objection to electronic publication, and especially to blogs, is that there is no editorial control. Hence the essays and even electronic books don’t seem to count. But there is no reason why electronic publishers can’t use peer review and be just as stringent as are print journals. But as for books, yes, the actual book one can hold in one’s hands still counts for more for most people. It’s an object that can be touched and looked at rather than accessed electronically. The best way to gain academic acceptance is for electronic journals (and book publishers) to have stringent review, demand stylistic changes, and choose their editorial boards carefully. Articles should be rejected when they do not measure up to standards. Once this has happened, there is no reason why electronic publishing should not be respected. Front Porch: What trends are you seeing in the literary work that has crossed your path lately? Perloff: Well, I think there’s a great deal of energy in the new poetry that comes across my desk (or screen), but much of it isn’t quite “finished” and could have used a few rewrites. Writers turn out books too quickly and publish any old thing. And unfortunately it disappears again just as quickly! I look back with some nostalgia at the great modernists and what an event it was when a book came out. And how sparingly they produced books. Think of Wallace Stevens or, in the art world, Marcel Duchamp. I also think there are too many readings. One can spend one’s life going to readings—most of them substandard. It’s a form of social life and a way of having fun and being part of a community, and that’s all to the good, but it does little to make poetry better. And the poetry (or fiction) glut goes hand in hand with a new eclecticism. One can attend a reading by Michael Palmer on Monday and Billy Collins on Tuesday. Not much discrimination. Front Porch: What is it about “readings” that fails poetry?

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Perloff: In New York and on many university campuses, one can now go to a poetry reading almost every afternoon or evening. It’s a nice social occasion: short readings and then a glass of wine or whatever. But the habit of going to constant readings can interfere with the actual practice of writing poetry, which is, after all, a solitary practice. The social situation takes over, and I also find the pairings increasingly meaningless, as readings pair people whose aesthetic is diametrically opposed. Front Porch: What writers should we keep an eye on? Perloff: Some of the most interesting poetry being written is conceptual. I refer you to Craig Dworkin’s Anthology of Conceptual Poetry on ubuweb.com. Dworkin is himself a very interesting young poet, and his work is closely related to that of Christian Bök, Kenneth Goldsmith, Caroline Bergvall, and other poets who have been influenced by Oulipo, performance, and concrete poetry. I am a great fan of Oulipo and related movements that use procedural devices, because it provides a form of discipline.

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The Intellectual in the Twenty-First Century Marjorie Perloff

The assignment from PMLA was to write a 1000-word letter on “the notion of the intellectual in the twenty-first century”—a letter that should be “double spaced and…avoid using the universal ungrounded ‘we’.” That says it all, doesn’t it? For what function can the intellectual have in a world that prescribes double-spacing but doesn’t permit the use of the first-person plural? “We are aiming,” wrote Antonio Gramsci in “The Problem of the School” (1919), “to stimulate a mentality of construction, of comrades…Today, after the positive experiences of our Russian comrades, it can and must be otherwise if we want to ensure that their experiences have not been in vain for us.” This “us” is the new Italian intellectual class for which and to which Gramsci assumed that he was speaking. Or take Edmund Wilson, in his epilogue for To the Finland Station (1940): “Let us begin by asking ourselves what we mean, whether we really mean anything definite and fixed, when we casually use the word ‘Marxism’.” Here the dreaded “we” is used five times in a twentyfour word sentence. In his Sincerity and Authenticity (1972), the noted “New York intellectual” Lionel Trilling declares that “As

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readers, as participants in the conscious, formulating part of our life in society, we incline to the antagonistic position.” And more recently, in The Senses of Walden, Stanley Cavell, addressing fellow thinkers, whether within the university or without, observes, “We ought no longer to be as sure as [Matthew] Arnold was that the great philosophical writer is one who builds a system…We are more prepared to understand as philosophy a mode of thought that undertakes to bring philosophy to an end.” The loss of this “we” is the sign that there is no longer a generic intellectual class to which “you” or “I” or “one” might belong. The causes of this large-scale transformation are manifold: the end of the Cold War and, with it, of an effective international Left, the dominance of money over the old class formations coupled with an often militant identity politics that creates smaller and smaller microunits defining the individual’s place, and the increasing commodification and media-ization of society, which prompts even a scholarly journal like PMLA to resort to sound bytes like the one I am writing. But perhaps the greatest threat to the intellectual life is that of the institution, whether the university, the foundation, the professional organization, or the government arts agency, that supposedly fosters it. In “The Intellectual Field: A World Apart” (1985), Pierre Bourdieu characterizes intellectuals as “a dominated fraction of the dominant class. They are dominant in so far as they hold the power and privileges conferred by the possession of cultural capital…but…dominated in their relations with those who hold political and economic power.” Intellectuals “remain loyal to the bourgeois order,” because it is, after all, the bourgeois order that confers upon them whatever power they have. What this means in practice is that, in late twentieth-century culture, institutional intellectuals may profess any number of “radical” ideas but are curiously passive vis-à-vis the system itself—that is, the basic university structure with its conferral of advanced degrees, grading and certification of students, and “peer review” of scholarly materials for the purpose of tenure or promotion decisions. In adhering to “professional” norms, those who profess to be intellectuals are naturally reluctant to criticize the

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discipline they practice, reluctant to ask themselves, for example, why students who have never read Dante do need to “know” the Victorian novel or why one needs to master a second language or a particular cultural theory. Such hard questions regularly take a back seat to procedural ones like “How can our department get more budget lines?” or “How can we convince the Provost we need a medievalist?” Note that when it comes to such practical questions, the first-person plural is very much alive. Intellectuals, I would posit, cannot function without at least a degree of independence from this self-perpetuating power structure—a structure that merely replicates the larger system of economic and political power of which it is a part. Are intellectuals after Trilling, after Cavell, therefore becoming an obsolete species? As public voices, probably yes, for no sooner do late twentieth-century intellectuals enter the arena of TV talk shows or journalism than they find their discourse being trivialized and coopted. But if intellectual refers to the invention of original, oppositional, and productive habits of thinking, then I would posit that intellectuals are alive and well—primarily (and paradoxically) among a new breed of artists and poets on the boundaries. Indeed, when I try to apply the adjective “intellectual” to, say, the countless conference papers I have heard over the past decade, I immediately think of David Antin’s “talk poem” on Wittgenstein, delivered at the West Coast Humanities Institute; of Charles Bernstein’s rich and enigmatic “Blood on the Cutting Room Floor,” presented at the 1984 Alabama Poetry Conference; and of Steve McCaffery’s send-up of theory dogma in his “Nietzschean Pataphysics,” “performed” at the annual ACLA convention in Georgia in 1995. Or I think of two particularly striking MLA lectures: Susan Howe’s scholarly and passionate examination of Emily Dickinson’s compositional habits and Joan Retallack’s “G'L'A'N'C'E'S': A Poetic Essay into Space, Time, Motion,” a complex verbal-visual meditation prompted by the single word “blue.” But don’t artists and writers also occupy positions within the dominant class and thus find themselves subject to the same constraints as intellectuals? Bourdieu makes this case, but

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contemporary culture, at least in the US, puts so little premium on artistic accomplishment that poets and artists, especially those on the fringe or working in hybrid modes and genres, can afford to be much more exploratory than their overspecialized scholarly (and often scholastic) counterparts. For one thing, they are prompted to read theory or cultural history by nothing more than intellectual curiosity. More important, not having to pay lip service to the latest fashion, they can produce writings that might not contain a single reference to Judith Butler or Homi Bhabha. True, their essays are not likely to be accepted by PMLA, with its standardized format and its policy of anonymous submission, but in recent years, these often unaffiliated poet-intellectuals have begun to be visible at MLA and related conventions. And current MLA job lists are actually advertising positions calling for a “poet-theorist” or “poet-critic.” Something is happening here which is not yet fully understood. How could those once antithetical categories, “Art” and “Intellect,” come together? Why has “conceptual art” become so important to a younger generation? I don’t have the answers to these difficult questions, but it is my conviction that whatever intellectual renewal is in the offing will come from the radical poetic/art community—a community in which “I” replaces “anonymous” and addresses a “you” that is in sync or at least in sympathy. In other words, a newly constituted “we.”

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Afterword Via Marjorie Perloff: Sideroads along a Critical Highway David Jonathan Y. Bayot

“In the actual use of expressions we make detours, we go by sideroads. We see the straight highway before us, but of course we cannot use it, because it is permanently closed.” Ludwig Wittgenstein

Marjorie Perloff was already a signature critic, so to speak, when I first encountered her name in 1994. I found that she had signed off on a 1976 University of Maryland dissertation titled “The Paradox of Cleanth Brooks: Inside and Outside the Work Itself.” The author of that dissertation and Perloff’s advisee was Isagani R. Cruz, who would go on to become an influential Philippine critic (positioned sharply against the New Critics, as it happens) and the subject of my own master’s thesis, “Isagani R. Cruz and the Other Other: Textual Interventions in Philippine Kritika” (1995). The eventual publication of my thesis as a monograph in 1996 set the trajectory of my career as a “Philippine critic”—that is, in the footsteps of Cruz. Cruz and I were proud witnesses to how the empire could finally write back and how the subaltern could speak not only in theory but could be bold and sly enough to engage the colonial contract (in the sense Vicente Rafael

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developed in Contracting Colonialism). During those exciting times, Cruz and I felt like fervent subjects of a vocation, ready to unshackle Philippine literature from hegemonic chains forged by more than three centuries of colonialism. Cruz came to be my PhD dissertation adviser, and I became the editor and expounder of his work: The Alfredo E. Litiatco Lectures of Isagani R. Cruz (1996), Bukod na Bukod (2003), and The Other Other (2010). During the years I was so preoccupied with following Cruz’s example, the name Marjorie Perloff had been on and off the pages of my mind, although still very much as a signature: that of my mentor’s mentor! As far back as the early 1990s, I was aware of her Poetics of Indeterminacy: Rimbaud to Cage (1981). But I was reading the book with an attention sustained by hopes that it would give me perspectives on Cruz different from those already in circulation. As a young instructor preoccupied with building his career as a Philippine critic, I’m afraid that I also read the book with a bigoted disposition, viewing the “language-games” engaged by her “Western” writers as irrelevant to a praxis consistent with the Philippine “national character.” I hardly considered the potential danger lurking in the idea of “national character,” for which I had such a penchant. I was terribly in a rush to join Cruz’s national pursuit, which entailed a heroic break with the poetic indeterminacies and formalist virtuosity of “masters” like Perloff. Formalism (of which Perloff was my chosen archetype) was, by our dogmatic lights, an act of colonial containment and appropriation. I saw Perloff’s poetics of indeterminacy as the offer of a costly ticket that Philippine critics could not afford to purchase if they were serious about reaching the end of their national march in good faith. At some point in my race along the Philippine track, my fascination with the subjectivity of the Other made an unexpected turn to metaphysics. Around 2005, I began to read more Emmanuel Levinas (than, say, Edward Said or Homi Bhabha). I was drawn to Levinas’s preoccupation with the face of the Other and his question (in reaction to Martin Heidegger): “Is it righteous to be?” The question resonated within me in a way that was more personal than professional. I was exhausted by

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the incessant repetitions of the “progressive” theme of Othering and by invocations of the Philippines’ unrelenting agon with the West and its representations. I began to miss those days when Philippine Studies looked with excitement to “new” albeit “rugged terrains” (as the Philippine artist Bienvenido L. Lumbera would call them)—evolving terrains that are indelibly national but do not have the predictability and inalterability of the Otherness of the “Philippine-nation.” In 2008, in the midst of these changes, I began preparing a festschrift for Isagani R. Cruz. Among Cruz’s friends, Marjorie Perloff was the first to respond to my invitation. Her piece for the collection, on “Beckett the Poet,” sounded to me like a phenomenological call to return to that old passion for the linguistic art called “literature.” Perloff introduced me to statements by Beckett that were charged with a grandeur of meaning(lessness) that defamiliarizes: “More and more my own language appears to me like a veil that must be torn apart in order to get at the things (or the Nothingness) behind it. . . . A mask. Let us hope the time will come . . . when language is most efficiently used where it is being most efficiently misused. . . . To bore one hole after another in it, until what lurks behind it— be it something or nothing—begins to seep through. . . . Or is literature alone to remain behind in the old lazy ways that have been so long ago abandoned by music and painting?” Those powerful lines compelled me to revisit Perloff’s prodigious work. It was a gift of chance when a friend from whom I had sought a copy of The Levinas Reader also sent me, unbidden, Perloff’s Wittgenstein’s Ladder (1996). Among other things, that book confronted me with Wittgenstein’s skepticism toward “dangerous phrases” such as “national character.” During this period of my re-encounters with Perloff, I recalled a sentence from Roland Barthes’s Mythologies, which earlier appeared to me like mere word play but now cut into my otherwise settled paradigm of textual understanding: “I shall say that a little formalism turns one away from History, and that a lot of it brings one back to it.” Reading Perloff at this juncture led me to what I would call a poetics ad verbum: an “adverbial poetics” that foregrounds

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literature and its materiality before the eventual possibilities of its immateriality, whether occasioned by the dissolution of the canon or prompted by literature’s categorical indeterminacy as one of “shifting dominant.” It is a poetics that understands literature as being primarily language (verbum)—in language, a language, and to language—that simultaneously exists as a “verb” (verbum), a movement or action that inhabits a specific time and place and thus exhibits a modality inextricable from its historicity and its contextuality. If there is one dictum that Perloff subscribes to, it is Pound’s statement that “poetry must be of its own time.” Literature, in other words, is an ad-verbial practice—a practice whose modality of existence is not an aside from its time and place, but a signifying practice, a text, and a textuality in a world that is indelibly intertextual—whether the attribution of such intertextuality is to post-structuralists like Jacques Derrida or Michel Foucault, or to the “Copernican” thinkers like Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Ferdinand de Saussure. As it has been in the case of literature, critical disposition simply cannot exist as a “fixture.” As my mentor Cruz learned from Perloff that literary discourse in its broadest sense must be of its own time, as he appropriated a critical discourse from “formalisms” for his Philippine race, I have grown to realize that Cruz’s critical disposition as a Philippine critic (which I used to understand in a certain way) is far from a prescription of how a Philippine track should be contoured. Rather, Cruz understood too well the value of what it means to be auto-critical, which is the élan vital of the theory revolution in Philippine literary studies as it has been of any paradigm shift across disciplines. Now—via Marjorie Perloff—I recognize an arrival (no matter how tentative it is), after these critical detours and sideways. I do not know if this recognition deserves an analogy to Roland Barthes’s depiction, in his inaugural lecture at the Collège de France, of his vita nuova, “a new work, a new love” as well as by “this new place, this new hospitality.” But this recognition certainly carries significant traces of the way I had come as a Philippine critic. Now and on this site of recognition or, shall

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I say (as Barthes would), of “unlearning,” I see myself savoring the promise of Barthes’s vita nuova and the sapientia that stands by the side of this new life. I see myself willingly “yielding to the unforeseeable change which forgetting imposes on the sedimentation of the knowledges, cultures, and beliefs we [and I] have traversed.” Here, I am reminded of a poem by John Ashbery, “As We Know,” which closes with these lines: “The way we had come was all we could see / And it crept up on us, embarrassed / That there is so much to tell now, really now.” Really now! Marjorie Perloff! Let her words tell it here!

Interviewers

Hélène Aji is Professor of American Literature at the Université Pari Ouest Nanterre La Défense (France). She specializes in modernist and contemporary American poetry. Charles Bernstein is Donald T. Regan Professor of English and Comparative Literature at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) and is a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts & Sciences. Antoine Cazé is Professor of American Literature at the Université Paris Diderot (France). He specializes in poetry and is the editor of the French Review for American Studies. Front Porch Magazine publishes two editions annually, with a focus on history, faith, nutrition, human interest, and humor. It has been in circulation since 2000. Fulcrum is an international literary journal published annually by Fulcrum Poetry Press. It features poetry, critical and philosophical essays on poetry, debates, and visual art. Its key aim is “to offer an evolving map of what is most important and vibrant in the current poetic process throughout the English-speaking world.” Grzegorz Jankowicz is currently affiliated with the Centre for Advanced Studies in the Humanities at the Jagiellonian University (Poland). He specializes in contemporary critical theory and literary philosophy. Enrique Mallen is Professor of Linguistics and Art History at Sam Houston State University. He is the Director-General Editor of the On-Line Picasso Project.

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Peter Nicholls is Professor of English at New York University (USA). He specializes in twentieth-century British and American literature, as well as in modern and contemporary poetry and poetics. Ellef Prestsæter is the editor of Rett Kopi and teaches Art History at the University of Oslo (Norway). Rain Taxi Review of Books is a quarterly publication which reviews literary fiction, poetry, and nonfiction. Its mission is “to advance independent literary culture through publications and programs that foster awareness and appreciation of innovative writing.” Nikolaj Rønhede is the interviewer, with Kristine Samson, in “Marjorie Perloff On & Off the Page of Poetry” (included in the volume). Kristine Samson is Assistant Professor of Visual Culture and Performance Design at the Department of Communications, Business, and Information Technologies, Roskilde University (Denmark). Jeffrey Side is the editor of the online version of The Argotist literary magazine, The Argotist Online. Robert von Hallberg is Professsor of Literature at Claremont McKenna College (USA). He specializes in early literary modernism as well as postwar American poetry and poetics. David Wojahn is Professor of English at the Virginia Commonwealth University (USA), and his most recent collection, World Tree, was the 2012 winner of the Academy of American Poets’ Lenore Marshall Prize.

Index of Names

A Acconci, Vito, 45, 151 Adair, Gilbert, 75 Adorno, Theodor, 38, 81, 94, 169 Agamben, Giorgio, 168–169 Aji, Hélène, 28–49 Akhmatova, Anna, 18, 23–24 Albers, Josef, 33, 62 Albiach, Anne-Marie, 44 Allen, “Don” Donald, 47, 141–142 Altieri, Charles, 64 Ammons, Archie Randolph, 47 Anderson, Maxwell, 103 Andrews, Bruce, 46, 56 Angelou, Maya, 97 Antin, David, 22, 32, 45, 47–48, 53–54, 59–60, 97, 111, 123, 152, 161, 166, 224 Apollinaire, Guillaume, 23, 33, 58, 103, 138 Aragon, Louis, 59 Aristotle, 158, 178, 182, 207 Armantrout, Rae, 46, 162 Arnold, Matthew, 223 Ashbery, John, 22–23, 31–32, 37, 39, 42, 44, 46–47, 51–55, 57, 61, 63, 101, 106–107, 110–117, 121, 150, 153, 162–163, 166, 168, 183, 191, 199 Auden, Wystan Hugh, 52–53, 55, 113, 116 Austen, Jane, 33, 177

B Badiou, Alain, 168 Baetens, Jan, 44 Ballerini, Luigi, 123 Balzac, Honoré de, 3 Barthes, Roland, 4, 19, 24, 43 Baudelaire, Charles Pierre, 20, 27, 133, 145, 191, 197 Baudrillard, Jean, 94 Bausch, Pina, 95 Beardsley, Monroe, 4 Beckett, Samuel, 13, 22, 36, 52, 94–95, 111, 146, 153 Beddoes, Thomas Lovell, 113 Bellamy, Dodie, 171 Benjamin, Walter, 19–20, 24, 27, 93, 148, 158, 160, 162, 167 Bergman, Ingmar, 76 Bergvall, Caroline, 25, 36, 117, 151–152, 160, 221 Bernstein, Charles, 17, 19, 24–25, 27–28, 36, 46, 48, 51, 56, 63, 65, 68, 71–91, 98, 100, 106, 114, 117, 131–144, 147–148, 153, 160, 162, 167, 170–171, 179, 187–188, 224 Berrigan, Ted, 122–123 Berry, Ellen, 66 Berryman, John, 119, 121 Bhabha, Homi, 225 Bidart, Frank, 118, 187, 195–196, 198 Biryukov, Sergei, 209

236 Bishop, Elizabeth, 32, 40, 118–119, 129, 196, 198 Blake, William, 34, 139, 197 Bloch, Ernst, 189–190 Bloom, Harold, 33, 54–55, 61, 67, 115–116, 178, 199 Bluhm, Norman, 22 Boccioni, Umberto, 136 Bök, Christian, 36, 38–39, 117, 151, 154, 221 Boltanski, Christian, 92–93 Boone, Bruce, 171 Bourdieu, Pierre, 19, 223–224 Boyers, Robert, 124 Bradstreet, Anne, 190 Braque, Georges, 211 Braziller, George, 22, 31 Brecht, Bertolt, 167 Breton, André, 59, 168 Brooke-Rose, Christine, 60 Brooks, Cleanth, 4, 13, 26, 33, 54, 169 Brower, Reuben, 8, 27 Brown, Edward J., 210, 217 Browning, Robert, 33 Bruns, Gerald, 16 Bush, George, 97 Butler, Judith, 225 Byron, George Gordon, 6, 33, 163 C Cage, John, 22, 25, 30, 32, 35, 38, 52–53, 55, 57, 61–62, 94, 96, 101, 105, 111, 149–150, 154, 159, 165, 192 Calle, Sophie, 44 Campbell, James, 107 Canetti, Elias, 106, 164 Cassity, Turner, 183, 190–193 Cavell, Stanley, 25, 223–224

Index of Names

Cazé, Antoine, 28–48 Celan, Paul, 164, 190 Cendrars, Blaise, 23, 33, 57–58, 138 Clare, John, 113 Cohen, Leonard, 76 Coleridge, Samuel Taylor, 33, 197, 200 Collins, Billy, 75, 83, 144, 220 Cometti, Jean-Pierre, 83 Cowper, William, 87 Crane, Hart, 8, 107, 120, 126, 150 Creeley, Robert, 5, 22, 46, 59, 78, 98, 107, 120 Cunningham, Merce, 22, 95, 101, 150, 165 D Dante, Alighieri, 96, 176, 224 Darras, Jacques, 48 Davenport, Guy, 60, 134 Davie, Donald, 54, 60 De Campos, Haroldo, 32, 36, 44 De Man, Paul, 67 Deleuze, Gilles, 43, 148 DeMille, Cecil B., 85 Derrida, Jacques, 24, 34, 43, 62, 148, 154, 168–169, 187 DeWolfe, Mark, 207 Dickens, Charles, 33 Dickinson, Emily, 30, 61, 186–187, 191, 195, 224 Dolfuss, Engelbert, 29 Donne, John, 4, 34, 198 Dostoyevsky, Fyodor, 3, 96 Dove, Rita, 160 Drucker, Johanna, 101 Duchamp, Marcel, 25, 64, 88, 99, 104, 109, 150–151, 158–159, 220 Duncan, Don, 54 Duncan, Robert, 47, 95–96, 120, 141

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Index of Names

Durer, Albrecht, 35 Dworkin, Craig, 5, 26, 35, 41, 45, 49, 83, 117, 131, 151, 158, 161, 221 Dydo, Ulla, 134 Dylan, Bob, 144 E Eagleton, Terry, 25, 27 Ehrenpreis, 124 Eliot, George, 33, 50 Eliot, T. S., 4–6, 8, 13, 21–23, 27, 32, 39, 53, 55, 59, 63–66, 68, 85, 88, 98–101, 103, 111, 116, 120, 122, 141–142, 153, 155, 157, 161, 171–172, 185, 191–192, 197 Emerson, Ralph Waldo, 8, 61 Empson, William, 8, 26 Engell, James, 197 Epstein, Andrew, 80 Ernst, Max, 62 Espina, Eduardo, 147, 155 F Fearing, Kenneth, 122 Feldman, Morton, 150 Ferlinghetti, Lawrence, 201 Finlay, Ian Hamilton, 107 Fitterman, Rob, 160 Flaubert, Gustave, 3 Foucault, Michel, 4, 19, 24, 43, 61–62, 168 France, Peter, 210, 217 Frank, Joseph, 8, 26 Fraser, Kathleen, 43 Fredman, Steve, 141 Friedlander, Benjamin, 134 Frost, Robert, 32, 120–121, 136, 140, 216

Frye, Northrop, 8, 26, 169 Furr, Helen, 89 Fusco, Joseph, 37 G Gelpi, Al, 64, 141 Gewanter, David, 118 Ginsberg, Allen, 42, 72, 101, 115, 121, 150–151, 165, 177, 192 Gioia, Dana, 77, 83 Giovannini, Giovanni, 3, 9 Gizzi, Peter, 41, 117 Glazier, Loss Pequeno, 79 Glück, Louise, 171, 183, 187, 195, 198 Goethe, Johann Wolfgang von, 30, 176 Goldsmith, Kenneth, 5, 36, 39, 41, 49, 117, 151, 158–161, 179, 218, 221 Graham, Jorie, 37 Graham, Martha, 103 Gramsci, Antonio, 222 Grumbach, Doris, 22, 31 H H.D., 120 Hafley, James, 3 Hall, Donald E., 103 Hallberg, Robert von, 103, 181–207 Halpern, Rob, 171 Hammer, Langdon, 107 Hardy, Thomas, 61, 191 Hare, Peter, 73 Hartigan, Grace, 22 Hartley, Marsden, 104, 158 Hartman, Geoffrey, 33, 67 Hass, Robert, 189 Hassan, Ihab, 101 Hecht, Anthony, 23, 34

238 Hegel, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich, 169 Hejinian, Lyn, 32, 46, 56, 94, 147, 162 Hemingway, Ernest, 21, 201 Herbert, George, 107, 198–199 Hesse, Eva, 60 Hewitt, Pete, 88 Hirsch, E. D., Jr. 33 Hirsch, Edward, 161 Hitler, Adolf, 29 Hölderlin, Johann Christian Friedrich, 44 Hollander, John, 54–55, 61, 124, 161 Holman, Bob, 97 Homer, 176 Hopkins, Gerard, 193 Houseman, A. E., 191 Howard, Richard, 54–55 Howe, Susan, 25, 32, 36, 44, 46–47, 56, 68, 78, 80, 98, 117, 144, 162, 170–171, 179, 183, 185–189, 191, 193–197, 206–207, 224 Huang, Yunte, 85–86 Hughes, Langston, 122 Humboldt, Wilhelm von, 50 Huyssen, Andreas, 67 J Jakobson, Roman, 17–19, 26–27, 175 James, Clive, 106 James, William, 83 Jameson, Fredric, 101, 206 Jankowicz, Grzegorz, 110–117 Johns, Jasper, 22, 101, 113, 150, 166 Johnson, Samuel, 182 Joris, Pierre, 45, 49 Joyce, James, 3, 8, 13, 21, 24, 36, 59, 66, 108, 135, 169, 171

Index of Names

K Kafka, Franz, 31, 33, 135, 164 Kaplan, Allen, 105 Keats, John, 33, 114, 197 Kees, Weldon, 119 Kenner, Hugh, 13–15, 27, 33, 52, 60, 104, 143, 146, 169, 175 Kermode, Frank, Sir, 23, 61 Kernan, Alvin, 33 Khlebnikov, Velimir, 17–18, 23, 64, 99, 137, 208 Khruschchev, Nikita, 21 Kilgore, Jennifer, 49 Killian, Kevin, 171 Kostelanetz, Richard, 105, 192 Kosuth, Joseph, 151 Kraus, Karl, 31, 164 Kristeva, Julia, 24–25 Kruchenykh, Aleksei, 23 Kuszai, Joel, 79 Kutik, Ilya, 212, 217 L La Drière, Craig, 3 Lang, Fritz, 155 Larkin, Philip, 33, 183, 190–193 Laughlin, James, 28, 155 Lazar, Julie, 38 Lehman, David, 123–124 Lehrer, James Charles, 97 Lemon, Lee T., 27 Lenin, Vladimir, 18, 108 Levertov, Denise, 39, 47, 95–96, 120, 142 Levine, Philip, 187 Lewis, Wyndham, 21, 109 Lilly, Gertrude, 77 Lissitsky, El, 215–217 Logan, William, 107 Longenbach, James, 53

239

Index of Names

Lowell, Robert, 21, 31, 41, 110, 118–122, 124–125, 127–129, 132, 140–141, 150–151, 163, 198–199 Loy, Mina, 121 Lyotard, Jean-François, 24, 148 M MacBride, John, 108 Macherey, Pierre, 186–187, 189–190 Mack, Maynard, 34 MacLeish, Archibald, 103 Mac Low, Jackson, 38, 46, 48, 74–75, 150, 152 Malevich, Kasimir, 143, 208 Mallarmé, 103, 111, 133 Mallen, Enrique, 145–156 Marclay, Christian, 16 Marinetti, Filippo Tommaso, 23, 135–137, 143, 167 Marvell, 198 Maso, Carole, 98 Masters, Edgar Lee, 172 Matejka, Ladislav, 15, 27 Maxwell, Glyn, 105–106 Mayakovsky, Vladimir, 18, 23–24, 208–209, 211–217 McCaffery, Steve, 35, 46, 62, 68, 98, 150, 166, 188, 224 McConnell, Christine, 160 McGann, Jerome, 65, 67 McGrath, Tom, 189 McNeillie, Andrew, 98 Melville, Herman, 30 Meredith, William, 130 Merrill, James, 107, 121, 202, 196 Merwin, W. S., 54, 115, 187 Messerli, Douglas, 32, 48, 56 Miller, J. Hillis, 67 Miller, Lee, 211 Milosz, Czeslaw, 106

Mitchell, Joni, 76 Mitchell, W. J. T., 188 Mnouchkine, Ariane, 95 Moholy-Nagy, László, 13 Moore, Marianne, 120, 132 Morgan, Edwin, 214–215, 217 Morris, Dee, 150 Morris, Tracie, 36, 117 Moyer, Bill, 97 Musil, Robert, 31, 83 Myung Mi Kim, 78 N Natasha, 16 Nelson, Cary, 123–124 Nemerov, Howard, 103 Newman, Randy, 76 Nicholls, Peter, 157–162 Nijinsky, Vaslav, 113 Norton, Charles Eliot, 112, 154 Notley, Alice, 123 O O’Hara Frank, 21–22, 31–32, 35, 37, 39, 41, 43–45, 48, 51, 55–56, 59, 88, 101–102, 105, 112, 115, 118, 123–124, 131–132, 140–141, 144, 150, 166, 176, 201 O’Neill, Eugene, 103 Olson, Charles, 21, 59, 80–81, 101–103, 183, 187 Oppen, George, 14, 40, 42, 48, 63, 93, 119, 147, 183 Ovid, 184 P Padgett, Ron, 21, 31 Palmer, Michael, 46–48, 195, 220 Parisi, Joseph, 77 Pasternak, Boris, 18

240 Perec, Georges, 75 Perelman, Bob, 188 Perloff, Joseph, 29 Perloff, Nancy, 24 Peterson, Tim, 108 Petrarch, 185 Phillips, Tom, 157 Picasso, Pablo, 20–21, 138, 149–150 Pignatari, Decio, 105 Pindar, 185 Pinsky, Robert, 68, 97, 106, 187– 189, 197, 200–202, 205–206 Pinter, Harold, 95 Place, Vanessa, 160, 162, 169 Plath, Sylvia, 21, 32, 39, 150 Poe, Edgar Allan, 61, 197 Pollock, Jackson, 113 Pomorska, Krystyna, 16, 27 Pope, Alexander, 5–6, 191, 199 Porter, Fairfield, 113 Pound, Ezra, 8–10, 12–13, 21–22, 27, 32, 36–38, 40, 45, 48, 57–60, 63–68, 85, 88, 101–104, 120, 132–133, 140–141, 148, 155, 161, 168, 172, 175, 177, 182–183, 185, 187, 191, 200, 206 Pound, Williams, 111 Prestsæter, Ellef, 163–172 Proust, Marcel, 3, 21 Pushkin, Aleksandr, 212

Index of Names

Q Quartermain, Peter, 141

Rasula, Jed, 23, 27 Ray, Man, 211 Reed, Brian, 5 Reed, Jerry, 67 Reinfeld, Linda, 105 Reis, Marion J., 27 Retallack, Joan, 224 Reznikoff, Charles, 14, 63, 65 Rezzori, Gregor, 164 Rich, Adrienne, 47, 106, 115, 121–122 Richard, Jean-Pierre, 19 Riding, Laura, 113 Rimbaud, Jean Nicolas Arthur, 22, 32, 39, 57, 111, 133, 145, 178, 191 Robinson, Edward Arlington, 172 Robinson, Kit, 80 Roethke, Theodore, 120, 122 Rønhede, Nicolaj, 50–68 Rosenblum, Robert, 66 Rosenthal, M. L., 71 Ross, Andrew, 75 Roth, Joseph, 31, 164 Rothenberg, Jerome, 32, 45, 48–49, 60, 166 Rothko, Mark, 66, 113 Roubaud, Jacques, 35–36, 44, 179, 191 Rousseau, Jean-Jacques, 24, 39 Roussel, Raymond, 112–113 Rowlandson, Mary, 195 Rudy, Stephen, 27

R Railing, Patricia, 217 Rainey, Lawrence, 137 Ramazani, Jahan, 46, 123–124 Ramke, Bin, 98 Ransom, John Crowe, 33

S Samson, Kristine, 50–68 Sant’Elia, Antonio, 136 Sargent, John Singer, 11–12 Satie, Erik, 35 Schiller, Friedrich, 30

241

Index of Names

Schnitzler, Arthur, 31 Schoenberg, Arnold, 30 Schubert, David, 113 Schwitters, Kurt, 13 Scotford, Martha, 217 Seldes, Barry, 217 Sexton, Anne, 196 Shakespeare, William, 8, 34, 96 Shapiro, David, 21, 31 Shelley, Percy Bysshe, 33 Sherstyanoy, Valery, 209 Shklovsky, Viktor, 15–16 Showalter, Elaine, 134–135 Side, Jeffrey, 100–109 Sidney, Philip, 182 Sieburth, Richard, 58, 60 Silliman, Ron, 34, 48, 80–81, 124–125, 163 Simic, Charles, 161 Simpson, Louis, 103 Skeene, Georgine, 89 Smith, Patti, 76 Smithson, Robert, 151 Solt, Mary Ellen, 46, 49 Sorrentino, Gil, 95 Spivak, Gayatri, 139 Stalin, Joseph, 18 Stapanian-Apkarian, Juliette, 211, 217 Starobinksi, Jean, 19 Stein, Gertrude, 8, 20–22, 51, 55, 59, 61, 64, 66, 83, 86–89, 99, 109, 111, 113, 120–121, 132–134, 137, 139, 140–141, 147–149, 153, 161, 175 Stevens, Wallace, 53, 59, 64, 67–68, 74, 103, 113, 120, 132–133, 176, 220 Stewart, Susan, 188–189 Stieglitz, Alfred, 104, 158 Stoppard, Tom, 108

Strand, Mark, 68 Stravinsky, Igor, 57, 94 Swenson, Cole, 36, 83, 98, 117 Swift, Jonathan, 191 T Tanning, Dorothea, 74 Tate, Allen, 33, 103, 107, 141 Tawada, Yoko, 25 Tedlock, Dennis, 79 Tennyson, Alfred, 33 Thoreau, Henry David, 149, 186, 197 Toklas, Alice B., 20 Tolstoy, Leo, 3, 16 Towle, Tony, 105 Tranter, John, 219 Trilling, Lionel, 8, 26, 222, 224 Trollope, Anthony, 33 Turner, JMW, 66 Tynyanov, Juriy, 17, 27 Tzara, Tristan, 33, 108 U Untermeyer, Louis, 124 V Van Zandt, Townes, 125 Vangelisti, Paul, 123 Velásquez, 11–12 Vendler, Helen, 53, 107, 114, 185 Viola, Bill, 92–93 W Wachtel, Andrew, 212, 217 Waldrop, Keith, 98 Waldrop, Rosmarie, 46, 98, 169 Waller, Fats, 200–202, 204 Warren, Robert Penn, 4, 26, 54 Warren, Rosanna, 54 Wasserstein, Wendy, 95

242 Weinberger, Eliot, 97 Wellesley, Dorothy, 140, 197 Wheelwright, John, 113 Whitelaw, Billie, 153 Whitman, Walt, 17, 30, 66, 107, 150, 192, 203 Wilbur, Richard, 23, 34, 61, 140 Williams, Carlos William, 13–14, 22, 35, 37, 42, 47, 59–60, 64–65, 71, 86, 102–103, 120, 122, 148, 155, 177, 187, 203 Williams, Oscar, 124 Williamson, Alan, 127 Wilson, Edmund, 135, 222 Wimsatt, William Kurtz, 4–8, 10–11, 17, 26, 34, 169 Winkelman, Andreas, 76 Winters, Yvor, 122 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 24–25, 34, 51, 81, 83, 88, 131, 139, 145–146,

Index of Names

151, 154, 164, 169, 175, 182, 204–205, 224 Wojahn, David, 118–130 Woolf, Virginia, 3, 98, 165 Wordsworth, William, 7, 16, 33, 61, 102, 116, 144, 154, 167 Wouk, Herman, 51 Wright, C. D., 98 Wright, James, 115 Y Yeats, William Butler, 6–7, 11, 27, 32, 39, 66, 107–108, 131–132, 139, 153, 161, 163, 197 Youngman, Henny, 81, 83 Z Zukofsky, Louis, 13–14, 41, 45, 63, 65, 147–148