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Ruin Bares Us: William Bronk and the Poetics of Demolition

Ben Lerner and the Transcendence of Words

Leonardo Da Vinci famously argued that painting is superior to poetry, in part because painting calls upon the “more worthy” sense of vision, whereas poetry merely acts “by way of the ear.” Moreover, a portrait clearly resembles its subject, but the verbal equivalent of a portrait, the subject’s name, is arbitrary, and corresponds in no clear way to its bearer. Finally, Da Vinci points out that a painting of, say, a battle, will have more viewers, provoke longer consideration, and garner more praise than a poem about a battle.

Some have said that Da Vinci’s argument is merely a clever rhetorical exercise, and clearly, his is not the final word on what has come to be know as the paragone (Italian for “comparison”) between the verbal and the visual. Recently, for instance, the topic was taken up in Ben Lerner’s short story, “The Polish Rider,” in which the unnamed narrator states that “I love [stories] that involve ruined paintings or missing paintings or unmade paintings.” He goes on to discuss non-existent paintings that have been described in fiction, pointing out that they demonstrate how writing/literature is superior to painting:

words can describe paintings the crazy artists can’t actually paint, or intuit canvases that were as of yet unpainted, unpaintable. And isn’t it really true of all ekphrastic literature, fiction and poetry, that even when it claims to be describing or praising a work of visual art it is in fact asserting its own superiority?

In an interview, Lerner acknowledges that while the narrator’s point may be overstated, we should still take him seriously. Lerner explains:

Take the classic example of ekphrasis: the description of Achilles’ shield in the Iliad. The description is so elaborate and expansive as to cease to be realistic; no actual shield could contain all that detail. . . . The verbal, while pretending to give life to the visual, often transcends it: words can describe a shield we can’t actually make, can’t even effectively paint. . . .

Lerner’s claim that words can “transcend” the visual is strikingly similar to a comment Coleridge made about Milton:

Milton’s description is a tissue of contradictions: a shapeless shape consisting of an insubstantial substance: “for each seemed either.” Coleridge explains that Milton’s passage compels the reader to attempt to visualize “the unimaginable,” which will not be reduced to “a mere image,” thereby “exhibiting the narrow limit of painting, as compared with the boundless power of poetry.” We simply cannot picture what this passage attempts to depict. In other words—specifically, Lerner’s—Milton “transcends the visual.”

The idea that the verbal can somehow overwrite the visual is underscored by the title of Lerner’s story, “The Polish Rider.” It’s also the title of a well-known painting by Rembrandt. Rembrandt is never actually named in Lerner’s story about two missing paintings. It’s as if the painting has been supplanted by a story that itself describes a provocative absence.

Yet Lerner’s thinking does not stop there. Words not only have the capacity to figure the unimaginable, but—as Lerner argues in his recent book, The Hatred of Poetry—they can also describe a literature that cannot be written. Lerner points out that Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn” “describes an ideal music the poems themselves cannot achieve”:

Heard melodies are sweet, but those unheard Are sweeter; therefore, ye soft pipes, play on; Not to the sensual ear, but, more endeared, Pipe to the spirit ditties of no tone.

Lerner cites Michael Clune regarding Keats’s “images of a virtual music,” and explains that it’s “a music Keats can describe but not play (and that nobody can play: it’s not difficult, it’s impossible). Literary form can’t achieve Keatsian music, it can only figure it. . . . [W]hat [Keats’s lines] describe can’t be realized by any human instrument in time.” This is the source of poetry’s “hatred” of itself: “‘Poetry’ is a word for a value no particular poem can realize. . . . Hating on actual poems, then, is often an ironic if sometimes unwitting way of expressing the persistence of the demand of Poetry.”

Capital-P Poetry, then, is an impossible ideal that can be posited, but cannot be achieved, by individual poems. Or as Wallace Stevens put it 60 years before Lerner, each poem is “a part, but part, but tenacious particle, / Of the skeleton of the ether, the total / Of letters. . . “ (“Primitive Like an Orb”).

Towards a Plural Poetics: on C. D. Wright’s “The Poet, The Lion”

The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All C.D. Wright Copper Canyon, 2016

Published a week before her death in January, C. D. Wright’s The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All is itself a demonstration of the poetics it proposes to discuss.

Consider its sprawling title. “Poetics,” my dictionary informs me, is a plural noun that’s to be “construed as singular,” which suggests that any given understanding of poetic practice must be somehow cohesive and unified. Wright's title tells me that my dictionary is wrong: for Wright, a poetic practice worthy of the name will not be reduced to a principle or precept, but is necessarily expansive, plural, and protean. “Less and less am I persuaded by the medium’s essence,” Wright informs us early on, “and more and more I am pulled by its mutability.”

The book consists of brief prose sections—many less than a page—that variously take up the book’s many themes, most of which are indicated by the title. The “lion,” for instance, refers to the eight sections called “Hold Still, Lion” devoted to Robert Creeley’s writing, life, and death. The heading comes from a few lines from his poem “Drawn & Quartered,” cited by Wright: “Hold still, lion! / I am trying / to paint you / while there’s time to.”

Other poets figure prominently in the book: Jean Valentine, Brenda Hillman (she’s the “Fire” in the book’s title, drawn from Hillman's recent book, Seasonal Works with Letters on Fire), and John Taggart (her introduction to his collection Is Music is included in its entirety). Another longish section discusses the studied artlessness of Michael Ondaatje's poem, "Driving with Dominic." William Carlos Williams and his circle are explored in the six sections called “Spring & All.” Sculptor Anne Truitt and painter Agnes Martin are mentioned throughout the book, and, with Valentine, form a kind of personal artistic trinity for Wright:

Anne, Agnes, Jean: theirs is not a system of theories, not a representation of portents, but a commitment to the labor. ‘Writing a word / / changing it.’

Reflections on favorite words and language in general are found under sections headed “In a Word, a World.” There are several headings that only appear once—”My American Scrawl” or “Concerning Why Poetry Offers a Better Deal the World’s Biggest Retailer”—but even those sections touch on many of the more visible leitmotivs of the book.

The result is an intricate weave of ideas stated, revisited, extended, explored. Each iteration does not build linearly towards a conclusion, but keeps the subject open and allows it to resonate with other themes. “Poetry moves by indirection,” Wright explains, “Indirection…changes the route, and often the destination.” For the reader, the repetition of terms and themes provides a kind of non-sequential, open-ended coherence. I’m reminded of a passage Wright cites from Taggart, vis-à-vis his hallmark repetition: “Augustine on repetition: a mode of assuring the seeker that he is on his, way, and is not merely wandering blindly through the chaos from which all form arises.”

The Poet, The Lion, then, is not an argument, nor is it an apology, or statement, much less a manifesto. The book would be best described as an anti-manifesto: what is bestowed upon the reader is not a set of sureties and precepts to believe/live by/write by, but a shift towards an open, expansive relationship with language and the world. In this way, the book aspires to engender in its readers a kind of poetic thinking, a contemporary version of Keats’s negative capability. In a central passage, Wright explains:

The language of poetry specializes in doubt. Without the doubters, everyone is cut off at the first question. Poetry does not presume to know, but is angling to get a glimpse of what is gradually coming into view; it aims to rightly identify what is looming; it intends to interrogate whatever is already in place. Poetry, whose definition remains evasive by necessity, advocates the lost road; and beyond speech—waiting, listening, and silence.

Yet this listening is not passive.

On a wall in Whitechapel [Gallery] I saw it written: I propose to keep looking. I propose we all keep looking. I propose it is an unyielding imperative for the poet to do so.

It is responsive, fluid: “One has to be responsive to [poetry’s] movement. One has to adjust to its unfamiliar configurations. One has to train one’s best ear on its retrofitted lyre.” Poetry as dialogue, interaction. The poet is one with others. Speaking of One Big Self, her collaborative book with photographer Deborah Luster, Wright observes, “Collaboration offers an opportunity to break out of the isolation of one’s own overly familiar braincase, an opportunity to have an experience that can’t be got on one’s own.”

It’s not surprising that a book that encourages, through its own example, a plural poetics of listening, mutability, and openness, comes to a close by directly engaging the reader with “Questionnaire in January,” a series of end-stopped questions and writing prompt-like statements. I conclude with a few examples:

Collette said writing leads only to writing. Where does it lead you. And what led you here.

Into what forms do you see poetry poring, morphing, shuddering.

Emily Dickinson said poetry was her letter to the world. Write me.

A Horde of Destructions: Orides Fontela’s Poetics of Silence

Does not the saying of Picasso that a picture is a horde of destructions also say that a poem is a horde of destructions?

—Wallace Stevens

I recently picked up the exhibition catalog for destroy the picture: painting the void, 1949–1962, exhibited at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles. The book/exhibition considers post-WWII artists who "staged a literal assault on the picture plane.” These artists employed “techniques such as puncturing, ripping, cutting and burning to break through the two-dimensional support” in order to “figure the void.”

Looking at the catalog, I’m struck by how visually stunning paintings seemingly bent on their own destruction can be. For instance, here’s the work displayed on the cover, by Alberto Burri:

The exhibition also features widely recognized artists such as Lucio Fontana:

I found myself thinking about poetry: what poets have turned poetry against itself in the service of portraying “the void”: emptiness, nothing, silence, and other sorts of privation? What poets—driven by the need to go “beyond”—have brutalized their own medium? What does the verbal equivalent of these paintings look like?

One poet who came to mind was Brazilian poet Orides Fontela** (1940-1996). Her work is not well known to the English speaking world, and it’s a shame. Her spare, elemental poems are like shards of what was once an immense vessel. But her concern is less with the vessel than the emptiness it encompasses. Her favorite words—silence, white, water and space—suggest she’s more interested in what she can’t say than what she can. Even song cannot contain the vastness she seeks:

River II

Waters don't sing: they flow gentle they flee. II Fresh silence: the flower does not speak. III No noise. Just white petals of the flower which navigates the splendid waters.

It’s been said that language can be as much barrier as bridge, that words, instead of bringing us closer to things, push things away. Fontela recognizes this, and suggests that true intimacy with the world comes from silence: “wise rose in its / ripe silence.” But it seems impossible to summon silence with words:

To know the silence by heart — and desecrate it. Dissolve it in words.

What’s called for is a more active dismantling, taking the words we have away: “One step / From the bird / I in / Hale.”:

PENELOPE What I do I un do what I live I un live what I love I un love (my "yes" brings a "no" in the breast.)

But words always return—or maybe we always return to words. Thus the poet has an essential but impossible task. The effort to flee language must be continually renewed with each poem, each line:

Leap I Form’s ungrasped moment leap seeking moment’s beyond. II To devitalize form to dis - member to dis - make and - beyond structure - to live the pure un inhabitable act.

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This is the first in series of posts on poets who aim “to destroy poetry” in some way. I hope to write a new one each week or so. At the moment I have 5 or so poets in the hopper, but please feel free to send suggestions.

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**For the sake of simplicity/readability, I use only English translations of Fontela’s poems in this post. To read the originals alongside their translations, visit this helpful webpage.

Our / Vertical / Miseries / & / Joys: A Fantasia on Noelle Kocot’s ‘Phantom Pains of Madness’

Typically, I write on a legal size notebook, turned long-side horizontal, treating the page more like a blackboard. But in honor of today’s topic, Noelle Kocot’s new book of poems, Phantom Pains of Madness, I’ve gone vertical, since her entire book consists of poems with one-word lines, like this:

I Am Not An Ogre And Without All Of This Propelling Me To Write Poems What Is Left Only The Life The Singing Language Around The Life (from “Life is Beautiful”)

All / Of / This / Propelling / Me: the writing does propel, in that it feels incomplete, straining after an impossible wholeness:

I Am Telling You The Truth That The Limitations Were All Pure Lies (from “Limitations”)

You’d think, and I know you’re expecting me to say, that Kocot’s lineation emphasizes each word. But that’s not quite right. The stress—that is, the emphasis and the tension—is on the following word, a relentless sense of anticipation, of endless nextness. As the false endings accumulate, the reader is put on edge:

Edges Over Your Visual Cliff (from “The Gone World”)

I Don’t Know The Future But Exile And Mitosis Are The Commas That Lurch Us Into A Galaxy Of Forever (from “The Future”)

This format is perfect for expressing anxiety as well as creating it in the reader. It’s unsettling: you could say that Kocot’s lines are paratactic, a jolt from word to word. Or you could say they’re enjambed. I’d argue that it’s always both, and that it’s up to you, dear reader, to decide at each turn how to read it. The word verse—etym. Latin, “to turn”— was never more appropriate: each word/line is a turn.

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Why do they call it longing, that aching sense of yearning/grief/desire? Kocot’s line scheme makes these poems long. In fact, you could say that Phantom Pains of Madness is a phenomenology of longing:

I Expend A Ball Of Yarn Out In The Yard Yearning (from ”Yarn”)

I Find I Want Ceaselelessly

(from “Pills”)

A yearning for

A Future Full Of Holes (from “(____)”)

Or an irrecoverable past:

Life Of The Things That Pass (from “Stains”)

In “Sunstorm,” Kocot mentions “Salad / Days,” a phrase that finds its origin in Antony and Cleopatra. It’s Shakespeare’s most enjambed play—its lines, like its characters, always overspilling their bounds—and appropriately enough, it’s a play of longing: “Give me my robe, put on my crown, I have / Immortal longings in me.”

Or as Kocot puts it:

The God- Hunger (from “Addict”)

A Hereafter Where Infinite Hope The Most Profound Kind Lays Itself Out (from “On Paul V’s Birthday”)

To Go Close Means Forgetting: John Berger’s Art Criticism

Many gallery and museum goers are guilty of what I’ll call the identification fallacy, that is, confusing the name of the artwork/artist with the experience of the work. For many viewers, that moment of identification—usually accomplished with the help of a wall label—marks the end of seeing. As a result, a rich, intricate artwork that has the potential to occupy our eyes and minds for hours is reduced instead to “a Picasso” or “a Martin.” But for the critic who wants to encourage viewers’ deep engagement with the work, the question becomes, how to help viewers resist this birder-like tendency to treat artworks as names to be collected/checked off a list?

I’ve been dipping into John Berger’s essays on art, and I’m fascinated by how he solves this problem. Here’s the opening of the appropriately named essay, “A Gratitude Hard to Name”:

Is it still possible to write more words about him? I think of those already written, mine included, and the answer is “No.” If I look at his paintings, the answer is again—for a different reason—“No”; the canvases command silence. I almost said plead for, and that would have been false, for there is nothing pathetic about a single image he made—not even the old man with his head in his hands at the gates of eternity. All his life he hated blackmail and pathos.

Only when I look at his drawings does it seem worthwhile to add to the words. Maybe because his drawings resemble a kind of writing, and he often drew on his own letters. The ideal project would be to draw the process of his drawing, to borrow his drawing hand. Nevertheless I will try with words.

In front of a drawing, drawn in July 1888, of a landscape around the ruined abbey of Montmajour near Arles, I think I see the answer to the obvious question: why did this man become the most popular painter in the world?

You’ll find the full essay here.

When it comes to art criticism, we’ve been trained to expect to be told the name of the artist somewhere in the first paragraph, if not the first sentence. Here, only in the 3rd paragraph do we begin to have a guess as to who the artist might be, and even then, Berger does not name him, but only mentions his status as “the most popular painter in the world.”

In fact, Berger never mentions the artist’s full name, giving us only his first name, 2 lines away from the end of the essay. I’ll quote the final 2 paragraphs so you have a full sense of the effect. Berger imagines the artist working on the drawing of the ruined abbey:

As he sits with his back to the monastery looking at the trees, the olive grove seems to close the gap and to press itself against him. He recognizes the sensation—he has often experienced it, indoors, outdoors, in the Borinage, in Paris, or here in Provence. To this pressing—which was perhaps the only sustained intimate love he knew in his lifetime—he responds with incredible speed and the utmost attention. Everything his eye sees, he fingers. And the light falls on the touches on the vellum paper just as it falls on the pebbles at his feet—on one of which (on the paper) he will write Vincent.

Within the drawing today there seems to be what I have to call a gratitude, which is hard to name. Is it the place’s, his, or ours?

Berger employs this delayed naming in many of his essays on art (to varying degrees: sometimes it’s just a paragraph), as well as in his profile pieces. For instance, in his essay “A Girl Like Antigone” he does not name his subject, Simone Weil, until the very last sentence. But the effect is the same: we engage particulars instead of generalizations; our preconceptions are suspended, and line by line a new understanding emerges, with Berger as our guide. Our relationship to Berger’s writing as well as to his subject becomes more intimate. As Berger says elsewhere, regarding the artistic process in general, “To go close means forgetting convention, reputation, reasoning, hierarchies and self.“ Berger helps us forget so we can go close.

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A note regarding the new anthology Portraits: John Berger on Artists, edited by Tom Overton. The “delayed naming” technique is clearly important to Berger’s “project” (a word that Berger himself would probably find too grandiose), as he has employed it in essays from the ‘60s to the present. For this reason, I’m dismayed at what I imagine was Overton’s editorial decision to remove the original titles of the essays, and replace them with the name of the artist they discuss. So now “A Gratitude Hard to Name” is bluntly called, “Vincent Van Gogh.” Of course 500+ pages of Berger’s incredible writing gathered in a handsome volume is to be celebrated, but it’s unfortunate that Overton compromised the integrity of the titles.

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This essay is a follow-up to my piece posted on Essay Daily last week: Colluding with Accident: John Berger’s Artful Artlessness

The Feeling of Of: The Unappreciated Preposition

Prepositions can seem to be adjuncts to a vocabulary, more grammatical devices than words. But they, too, mean. —Robert Graves and Laura Riding

The recent/ongoing debate about adverbs betrays a bias, so deeply held that we fail to recognize it as such. It’s assumed that nouns and verbs are essential. So are adjectives and even adverbs, we allow, despite the occasional kerfuffle over their relative importance. But prepositions? They’re unworthy of either praise or condemnation. They’re just there, and barely so.

Yet that easy-to-miss quality is what makes them the most important part of language. Prepositions work almost invisibly, while the more salient nouns and verbs and their modifiers hog all the credit. They truck in relations, which is a trickier—and frankly more essential—business than naming things or designating actions. They are the duct tape of language, jerry-rigging words and phrases into sentences.

It’s no accident they’re called “function words”: they do the real work of language. Nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs are just fingers pointing at the moon—or fingers pointing at the fingers pointing at. . . .

Other words are replaceable, but you can’t thesaurus a preposition. As the result of centuries of make-do use, rushing in where other words fear to tread, each preposition has acquired a complex range of meanings, so subtle that it’s almost impossible to define, that is, to put into other words. If you don’t believe me, look up of or about or at.

They are also the most flexible/adaptable word type, embracing all other functions of language. According to Laura Riding and Robert Graves, “Of, as a possessive force, is very verbal.” But sometimes, they add, of can be “nominal, quasi-appositional,” for example, “a case of mistaken identity.”

This grammatical shapeshifting is much more subtle than, say, than classic anthimeria, using one part of speech for another, such as verbing nouns, as I did a couple paragraphs back with “thesaurus.” Anthimeria is self-conscious, show-offy, and calls attention to itself like a crack in the mirror. It makes readers stumble. But prepositions silently and effortlessly adapt to the needs of the situation.

Their nuance enables their neglect. Let’s face it. Most of us are linguistic Yahoos, oohing and ahing over glittery substantives. But as William James warned:

We ought to say a feeling of and, a feeling of if, a feeling of but, and a feeling of by, quite as readily as we say a feeling of blue or a feeling of cold. Yet we do not: so inveterate has our habit become of recognizing the existence of the substantive parts alone, that language almost refuses to lend itself to any other use.

Yet the importance of prepositions has not been lost on everyone, especially poets. For example, Gertrude Stein (who studied with William James at Radcliffe) said that

Prepositions can live one long life being really being nothing but absolutely nothing but mistaken and that makes them irritating if you feel that way about mistakes but certainly something that you can be continuously using and everlastingly enjoying. I like prepositions the best of all.

Most prepositions are modest monosyllables, so we can understand why Stein had a thing for possibly the most ostentatious preposition, notwithstanding, using it five times in the final paragraph of Tender Buttons.

In this excerpt from Stanzas in Meditation, Stein uses prepositions—by, for, with, of, and in—to finesse our understanding of an antecedentless “it.”

By it by which by it As not which not which by it For it it is in an accessible with it But which will but which will not it Come to be not made not made one of it By that all can tell all call for in it That they can better call add Can in add none add it. —From “Stanza VII”

Stein’s use of a cypher-pronoun compels us to seek meaning elsewhere: we lean into the prepositions, and the meaning becomes kaleidoscopic. “Meaning,” I admit, is a clumsy and flat-footed term to designate what this poem says—really, does—but that only proves my point: prepositions take us to a place where our metalanguage gives out, where we need the linguistic equivalent to quantum physics to account for what’s going on.

But not all pro-preposition poets are experimentalists. Robert Frost, for instance, seemed almost obsessed with “in” and “out”: “All out-of-doors looked darkly in at him” (“An Old Man’s Winter’s Night”); “What I was walling in or walling out” (”Mending Wall”); “Back out of all this now too much for us” (”Directive”). His “Spring Pools” is a study in prepositions:

These pools that, though in forests, still reflect The total sky almost without defect, And like the flowers beside them, chill and shiver, Will the flowers beside them soon be gone And yet not out by any brook or river, But up by roots to bring dark foilage on.

The trees that have it in their pent-up buds To darken nature and be summer woods— Let them think twice before they use their powers To blot out and drink up and sweep away These flowery waters and these watery flowers From snow that melted only yesterday.

They say you should never end a sentence in a preposition, but we know that’s just more anti-prep propaganda, denying this amazing word-group the most prominent place in the sentence. So, as a corrective, allow me to break another marmism—”Never end with a quote!”—and conclude with two preposition-heavy quotes from contemporary poets. First this brief but brain-bending excerpt from Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s “Experience In Groups,” from April’s Boston Review:

The sun Has gone out in the poem In both senses of out, all senses Of in.

And finally this poem by Rosmarie Waldrop, from her poem sequence Pre + Con or Positions + Junctions, reprinted in Gap Gardening: Selected Poems, just published by New Directions:

Of bodies of various sizes of vibrations of blue excite of never except in his early in childhood has he touched of the space of between of to allow of for impact now of that color has slowed its pitch or of skin of but light no deep foundation nor of leans into the blue

#geoffrey g o'brien #prepositions #gertrude stein #robert frost #rosmarie waldrop

Margin of Error: Notes, Failure, and the Reader’s Proximity

Proximity is not a state, a repose, but a restlessness. . . . Never close enough, proximity does not congeal into a structure. . . .—Emmanuel Levinas

Dwelling at the bottom of the page or in the back of the book, appended to the main text by tiny superscript numbers, notes (be they foot- or end-) are often considered to be the site of obscurity and pedantry. Yet in the past century or so, notes have moved conceptually if not literally from the margin to the center of certain works of literature. For instance, many have argued that the notes to T. S. Eliot’s “The Waste Land” (1922) should be regarded as part of the poem. For Nabokov’s Pale Fire, the notes are the novel. David Foster Wallace’s marginal shenanigans are well-known. More recently, Tyrone Williams and Jenny Boully have each written essays consisting entirely of footnotes.

Two works published this April put notes to innovative and compelling use: Jen Hofer’s essay on translation, “Proximate Shadowing: Translation as Radical Transparency and Excess” (published on the Poetry Foundation website) and Brian Blanchfield’s collection of essays, Proxies: Essays Near Knowing. Interestingly, both writers draw our attention to their notes by explicitly discussing them.

Hofer discusses how translation is so often thought of in terms of access and assimilation, providing readers with something they can completely comprehend. Hofer counters that the true aim of translation should be “empathetic not-understanding.” She explains:

For years I’ve been thinking and writing through ideas around the ways translation can generate empathetic not-understanding as an alternative to simplistic and often essentializing or assimilationist ideas around the way texts in translation can provide a “window” into other cultures, as opposed to being tools for unlearning the dominance of English and of USAmerican frameworks for conceiving and categorizing complex interrelated phenomena like race, ethnicity, nationality, linguistic culture, gender, class, sexuality, ability, and all kinds of other constellations that make people people.

Hofer points out that no translation wholly ‘gets’ its source text. But most translations work hard to cover up these inevitable shortcomings. Hofer thinks the translator should instead highlight the source text’s resistances, and acknowledge—even emphasize—the translation’s failures:

My approach constitutes interventionist translation . . . goes a little too far, while not getting near enough. It’s not quite right, as translation never gets things quite “right”—it’s not about rightness or fixity or one-to-one correlation, not about digesting the source or hitting the target, but about the always-in-process-of-failing attempt to recognize the substance and context of something from somewhere else, and bring that recognition here, while remaining wondrously aware of the processes of transfer, and of what resists transfer.

Here’s where notes become so important. A note in a translation is an acknowledgement of a failure: if the translation proper is “good enough,” no note needed. Even in traditional translations, the note, in its attempt to explain away a translation’s deficiency, only draws our attention to it—and to the essential otherness of the source text:

The notes come directly from and into the translation process itself—they are not afterthought or afterward, but interruption, excess, interjection, extraneous needful commentaries that leave the imprint of where I was or imagined or wished myself to be as I was in the moment of not-understanding that builds, question by question, impossibility by impossibility, the particularly political kind of not-understanding-but-coexisting-in-proximity translation can spark.

Proximity: much of Hofer’s essay is taken with an analysis of the spatial metaphors we use to talk about translation. We translate something “into” our language. We digest the text; translators hit the target. So described, the original of a translation becomes the quarry, something to be shot and consumed. Proximity offers an alternative to the violent paradigms of translation. It replaces knowledge with acknowledgement, silent assimilation with noisy interruption. Proximity is an uneasy coexisting, sustained and embodied by the notes.

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Brain Blanchfield’s Proxies: Essays Near Knowing has garnered significant critical attention in part because of its intriguing premise: this entire collection of essays—on everything from owls to Br’er Rabbit to frottage—was written with a constraint: “a total suppression of recourse to other authoritative sources.” Blanchfield adds a second and related constraint: “to stay with [each essay’s] subject until it gives onto an area of personal uneasiness, a site of vulnerability, and keep unpacking from there.” Each essay begins with an “invocation of sorts” that recommits Blanchfield to his project: “Permitting shame, error and guilt. Myself the single source.”

This commitment to vulnerability, error and shame is underscored by what Blanchfield calls a “rolling endnote”:

At the end of this book there is a rolling endnote called “Correction.” It sets right much—almost certainly not at all—of what between here and there I get wrong. It runs twenty-one pages. It may still be running.

Like Hofer, Blanchfield associates notes with failure. Notes are indices of weakness, error, or incompletion. He connects the “imprecision” that his notes seem to stress with his book’s title:

In the sciences. . . proxy. . . expressess a kind of concession to imprecision. A failure. It’s the word for a subject you choose to study to produce data that can approximate the data you’d get from the actual, desired subject, if it were not prohibitively hard to apprehend.

Proximity haunts Proxies: the subtitle of the book is “Essays Near Knowing” (my emphasis) and it concludes with an essay “The Near Term.” There’s an entire essay on “peripersonal space.” Blanchfield explains:

Peripersonal space . . . is the entire volume of space within a person’s reach, or within a single conceivable momentary extension of his person. Think da Vinci, and the geometry of his jumping jack in extremis sketch. All that. It includes everything at arm’s length and a bit more. . . .

Both Blanchfield and Hofer believe that the “failures” foregrounded by notes are essential. For Hofer, notes are an indication of/respect for a source text’s foreignness. For Blanchfield, they’re a necessary concession to not only the imprecision of memory/personal knowledge, but also the complexity of human relationships. For instance, the essay on peripersonal space is about his vexed relationship with his mother. And both writers are concerned in their own way with the proximate, the close-but-not-identified-with.

This leads me to a final “proximity”: the reader. Notes are an acknowledgement of the reader. Jacques Derrida has written of the “double-bind” of notes: that they attempt to close off a text, to make it self-sufficient, while simultaneously demonstrating that it is not, as notes are there for the benefit of readers who may need additional explanation. Notes are the site of vulnerability, a hemorrhage, where the boundary of the writing becomes porous. Blanchfield emphasizes this vulnerable aspect of notes. Combined with his ritualistic “invocations,” the notes become a serial confession. And the reader is his witness.

As Hofer would have it, notes create a double bind that’s significantly different from Derrida’s (or Blanchfield’s) understanding. For her, the note acknowledges the reader while emphasizing the foreignness of the text. The note brings us close without letting us in: proximity. These noted resistances of the source text aren’t difficulties to be surmounted; they are instead “opportunities for us as readers to become translated.” Hofer admits she’s not completely clear on what that means in practical terms, but I find the idea compelling. The translation becomes not a window into another culture, nor a tool of assimilation, but a means of exposing readers’ native conceptual limitations, and making us strangers to ourselves.

#levinas #brian blanchfield #jen hofer

Where to Draw the Line: Anadiplosis in Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s “Experience in Groups”

A quick definition: anadiplosis is a rhetorical figure in which the last word (or phrase) of a clause is repeated at the beginning of the next clause, like this:

The love of wicked men converts to fear; That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both To worthy danger and deserved death. (Shakespeare, Richard II)

Anadiplosis is often climatic, describing a sequence of causation, building towards Something Big, as is the case with our example.

But poets are wily, and have employed anadiplosis in non- and anti-climatic ways. As I discussed in this post, Wallace Stevens uses it to embody his poetics of transformation. For Laura Riding, the technique serves to demonstrate a failure built into the very fabric of language, how seemingly important names degrade into mere words.

Innovative as these examples are, they did not prepare me for how anadiplosis is used in Geoffrey G. O’Brien’s poem “Experience in Groups,” recently published by the Boston Review. You can read it in its entirety here. It’s long and challenging, and I won’t attempt a full reading of it. As best as I can discern, the poem explores how “everything / Touches everything else” and the ways we often take contiguous things and arbitrarily assemble them into something that seems cohesive. For example, feelings:

each feeling Departs the time in which it lasts For another point on the graph…

Days: ”One day hate-rhymes with the next.” Even cells: “All my cells are pages stamped.” Things hold together, even when they don’t really belong together; we fret about things falling apart, but as the poem points out, parodying Yeats: “Things stay together, the center can hold.”

The poem also investigates the opposite, and equally arbitrary, tendency we have to separate and divide things, such as groups of people. Here’s where the section employing anadiplosis comes in:

Far from being climatic, anadiplosis here shows how things bleed into each other, how “complicity” is, etymologically speaking, a kind of fold (literally, “folding together”); how borders are not only lines on the map, but also the cause of long TSA lines; how those lines can detain us, or how we may, after standing in those lines, be detained by the TSA; how, waiting in line, we “camp out,” and how being from outside a certain country’s borders can land someone in an internment camp.

Beyond this blurring of lines, formally speaking, the lack of linearity is emphasized by the multiple appearances of “detention at a border,” disrupting any sense of sequence.

The poem has obvious political resonances, though I’d be hard pressed to state, in blunt terms, what position it advocates. In any case, that’s unlikely the point. Instead, O’Brien compels us to reexamine how we put things together, how we separate them, and where we draw the line.

The Pursuit: Shakespeare’s Sources

The 400th anniversary of Shakespeare’s death has prompted an onslaught of “did you know” sorts of articles, including Jonathan Bate’s recent piece on Shakespeare’s sources. Bate points out three major ones: Arthur Golding’s 1567 translation of Ovid’s Metamorphosis, Florio’s translation of Montaigne, and Sir Thomas North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives of the Most Noble Grecians and Romans.

I’m interested in a less often discussed source: Tottel’s Miscellany: Song and Sonnets of Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey, Sir Thomas Wyatt and Others. Published in 1557, the Miscellany is believed to be the first printed anthology of English poetry, and is the central source for the poems we have by Sir Thomas Wyatt and Henry Howard, Earl of Surrey. Their translations/adaptations of Petrarch's sonnets appear in the Miscellany, and mark the beginnings of the English sonnet—what came to be known, somewhat misleadingly, as the Shakespearean sonnet.

Based on that formal influence alone, there’s no doubt that Shakespeare was familiar with the Miscellany, but the influence goes beyond that. He quotes lines from it in The Merry Wives of Windsor and in the narrative poem The Rape of Lucrece. In Hamlet, the gravedigger sings a few slightly misquoted lines from Lord Vaux’s “The Aged Lover Renounceth Love.”

As far as I can tell, Shakespeare’s most substantial engagement with the Miscellany occurs in his sonnet 129, "Th' expense of spirit in a waste of shame." I’d argue that this poem is a recasting/agonistic re-writing of Surrey’s “Brittle Beauty,” which is the ninth poem printed in the Miscellany. Here’s Surrey’s poem:

And, for ease of reference, here’s Shakespeare’s sonnet 129:

Thematically, they're quite similar: the promise of beauty/bliss vs. the disappointment of its attainment. Both are explicit about the unreasonableness of the pursuit: “Tickle treasure, abhorred of reason” ("Brittle Beauty"); “Past reason hunted; and, no sooner had than / Past reason hated” (129). And both call their subjects toxic: "infecting as the poison" ("Brittle"); "a swallowed bait/On purpose laid to make the taker mad" (129).

Most compelling to me is how they explore the temporal nature of desire—how it moves from present or proposed (future) enjoyment to consequent disappointment (past)—and how their lines and logic enact that movement in similar ways:

“Brittle”:

Flowering to-day, to-morrow apt to fail…

Costly in keeping, past not worth two peason…

Hard to obtain, once gotten, not geason

129:

Mad in pursuit and in possession so…

A bliss in proof and proved, a very woe;

Before, a joy proposed; behind, a dream.

However, I did evoke a bloomian agon above, so I feel compelled to address whether WS’s piece does more than echo Surrey’s sonnet—whether WS overwrites his predecessor. It feels cheap and opportunistic to succumb to bardolatry on the 400 anniversary of Shakespeare’s death, but I must give the win to him here. First of all, there’s the rhythmic ruggedness Shakespeare’s “lust / Is perjured, murd'rous, bloody, full of blame, / Savage, extreme, rude, cruel, not to trust,” portraying in language the unsettled state of mind that is “lust in action.” It could be argued that Surrey’s subject is beauty, not lust, and does not call for such language of extremity. However, it could also be argued that the point of 129 is to show that’s Surrey’s verse is not up to the representational challenge lust presents.

Speaking of representational challenges: it is perhaps more accurate to say that lust isn’t linear, but circular, which strikes me as something that’s particularly difficult show in language. Look at how Shakespeare does it: “Mad in pursuit and in possession so, / Had, having, and in quest to have, extreme.” The second line here goes beyond the binary before/after pattern discussed above, evoking instead three states—and presenting them in reverse order. Shakespeare shows us that lust is not linear, moving from pursuit to attainment to disappointment, but an endless series of never nows.

Striking out: Missing Poetry

Recently on the NPR website philosopher/aesthetician Alva Noë offered Robert Francis’s poem “The Pitcher” as a celebration of the start of a new baseball season—and, of course, to set up an opportunity to talk about one of his favorite subjects, art and our experience of it. Here’s the poem:

The Pitcher

His art is eccentricity, his aim How not to hit the mark he seems to aim at, His passion how to avoid the obvious, His technique how to vary the avoidance. The others throw to be comprehended. He Throws to be a moment misunderstood. Yet not too much. Not errant, arrant, wild, But every seeming aberration willed. Not to, yet still, still to communicate, Making the batter understand too late.

Noë points out how the poem highlights the pitcher’s paradoxical task: to throw a pitch that’s “hittable”—that is, in the strike zone—but to do so in a way that ensures the batter doesn’t hit it. The pitcher “Throws to be a moment misunderstood. / Yet not too much.”

To Noë, pitching is much like art. The artwork pitches us “unhittable hittables.” Noë stops with that suggestive phrase, choosing not to elaborate—pitching, perhaps, his own unhittable hittable.

Yet I’m intrigued by this analogy, specifically how it seemed to relate to comments and observations poets have made about their strange art of obliquity. For instance, what first came to mind when I read Francis’s poem was Wallace Stevens’s lines “The poem must resist the intelligence / Almost successfully.”

I’m also struck by what’s unelaborated in this comparison, specifically the role of the batter, who would seem to be an analogue to the reader. What exactly is the reader doing in this scenario? It would seem that, if the poet-pitcher is pitching well, the reader-batter will swing and miss and eventually strike out.

The poet aims to strike out the reader? That doesn’t seem quite right. As Francis puts it in the final lines, the goal is “Not to, yet still, still to communicate. / Making the batter understand too late.” Note that this is the only couplet that fully rhymes. The rest of the poem’s couplets form varying degrees of partial rhyme—they’re “willed aberrations” that keep the reader off balance, in the manner of a good pitcher. The hiccup in the penultimate line, “Not to, yet still, still to communicate…” serves a similar purpose. So by the time we get to the final line, we’re probably no longer expecting it to rhyme. The poem rhyme scheme works like a curveball—it looks wild, but at the last second it bends into the strike zone. And most likely the reader-batter forgot to swing.

Does Francis’s “too late” mean that, sure, the reader struck out, but perhaps after the fact will sit back and appreciate just what the pitcher was doing, its nuance and subtlety? But that’s still unsatisfactory. It would certainly make poetry a boring ball game.

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Yet I’m not ready to give up on this promising comparison just yet. On deck for the next post: John Ashbery on what it means to miss—

This poem is concerned with language on a very plain level. Look at it talking to you. You look out a window Or pretend to fidget. You have it but you don’t have it. You miss it, it misses you. You miss each other.

Of Witches, Weeds, and Words: on Gluck’s “Witchgrass”

Weeds occupy a singular linguistic space. It’s often assumed that language’s primary purpose is to name things, each word serving as an index finger meaning something along the lines of “that right there.” Call this the Adamic function:

And out of the ground the LORD God formed every beast of the field, and every fowl of the air; and brought them unto Adam to see what he would call them: and whatsoever Adam called every living creature, that was the name thereof.

The word “weed,” however, is a kind of linguistic feint: it may seem to name that plant we just plucked from our garden and discarded, but in truth only names our attitude towards the plant: UNWANTED. Weed is itself a weed of language, refusing to function the way we think words should, leaving its object effectively nameless.

Louise Gluck’s poem “Witchgrass” casts this nameless state in a positive light. The poem opens with my favorite indefinite pronoun, “something,” creating a linguistic muck from which Gluck’s weed emerges.

Something comes into the world unwelcome calling disorder, disorder—

The voice of the poem then abruptly shifts, with the poem assuming the caustic voice of the witchgrass itself:

If you hate me so much don’t bother to give me a name: do you need one more slur in your language, another way to blame one tribe for everything—

The witchgrass rejects its name, casting it as a “slur / in your language.” The name “witchgrass” itself comes from a variant pronunciation of “quick grass,” referring to the plant’s fecundity (learn more about it on the University of California’s terrific weed gallery).

Witchgrass, Panicum capillare.

Gluck however picks up on the “witch,” specifically its historical association with intolerance and scapegoating, suggesting that weeds serve a similar function. The plant decidedly refuses to play this role:

I’m not the enemy. Only a ruse to ignore what you see happening right here in this bed, a little paradigm of failure. One of your precious flowers dies here almost every day and you can’t rest until you attack the cause, meaning whatever is left, whatever happens to be sturdier than your personal passion— It was not meant to last forever in the real world. But why admit that, when you can go on doing what you always do, mourning and laying blame, always the two together.

Like the word weed, “witch” often names, not the thing itself, but our fear and hatred, and the need project these feelings away from ourselves. The plant becomes “a little paradigm / of failure”—our failures, especially those we cannot acknowledge or confront directly.

But our articulate plant doesn’t merely reject the names we call it; it embraces namelessness. The poem concludes:

I don’t need your praise to survive. I was here first, before you were here, before you ever planted a garden. And I’ll be here when only the sun and moon are left, and the sea, and the wide field. I will constitute the field.

Gardens are products of cultivation and care, of human intention; and a certain Garden is considered by many to be the birthplace of names. This plant “was here first…before / you ever planted a garden.” It’s the chaos/”disorder” from which language emerges and to which it returns. It is “quick”—alive, swift, protean—outstripping our intentions and our words. “I will constitute the field”: this wild fecundity founds language, allows language to emerge, change, grow, and die, but paradoxically is that which language itself can never contain.

Beyond the Elliptical Poets: The Voice of Indirection

(The poet, strayed the lost poem that had to be lost, or the world with it. —Robert Kroetsch

I love it when a rare or odd word crops up in two or more seemingly unrelated books I’m reading, creating an unexpected resonance or jar, and compelling me to lean on the word a bit more than I would have had I encountered by itself.

The word is indirection. I encountered it recently in the work of two poets, first in C. D. Wright’s new collection of prose pieces/fragments on poetics,The Poet, The Lion, Talking Pictures, El Farolito, A Wedding in St. Roch, The Big Box Store, The Warp in the Mirror, Spring, Midnights, Fire & All, published last month. Then I bumped into the term in Completed Field Notes, by Canadian poet Robert Kroetsch, published 15 years earlier in 2000.

I see little that indicates that they were very aware of one another. Googling gets me nothing. Yet there it is: indirection.

I imagine where they first heard it: in Hamlet, when Polonius instructs Reynaldo on how to sound out Laertes’s acquaintances. “With windlasses and with assays of bias,/ By indirections find directions out.” (I’ve always wondered why WS gave these terrific lines to the “tedious old fool.”)

Indirection in poetry suggests, possibly, a poetry that’s “elliptical,” to borrow a term from Stephen Burt’s oft-cited 1998 essay on a trend in then-contemporary poetry:

Elliptical poets are always hinting, punning, or swerving away from a never-quite-unfolded backstory. . . . [T]hey admire disjunction and confrontation. . . . [They] want to challenge their readers, violate decorum, surprise or explode assumptions about what belongs in a poem, or what matters in life…..

I heard you stifle a yawn. This is an old—though possibly still ongoing—story. Yet I want to say there’s more to indirection, at least as Wright would have it:

Poetry moves by indirection and in so doing avoids the crowd. This does not mean it would not draw others in. But one has to be responsive to its movement. One has to adjust to its unfamiliar configurations. One has to train one's best ear on its retrofitted lyre. . . . Indirection makes the circle hard to draw. It changes the route, and often the destination.

The inquiry poetry postulates remains intact. An inquiry extended along the lengths of the lines of knowing and beyond the tips of the known. . . .

As I understand Burt, the elliptical poet knows “the backstory” to the poem, but chooses to fragment and/or suppress it through various means and stratagems, in order to "challenge readers" and "explode assumptions." In other words, elliptical poets—Burt calls them “Ellipticists”—have palpable designs upon their readers.

But note the subject in Wright’s excerpt: not poets, but poetry, granting the writing itself a kind of agency: “Poetry moves by indirection. . . .” And its source is not knowledge that’s been suppressed or distorted, but doubt. For Wright, the poet of indirection is beholden to the poetry, which refuses certainty, “specializes in doubt,” and “advocates the lost road.” Indirection is a consequence of the poet’s task, not an after-the-fact filter-lens effect.

+++++

Robert Kroetsch’s work “The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof” is difficult to describe. Ostensibly a poem about the poet’s trip to Germany to give a talk on Canadian writing, the work is simultaneously a poem, a journal/source material, working notes, and theoretical musings, often collaged together on the same page. Here’s a page to give you a sense of the poem. Note that it includes our key term:

As Fred Wah has pointed out, “The Frankfurt Hauptbahnhof” is less about the trip than about getting lost. For the first half of the poem, the speaker “Couldn’t find the train” (this is mentioned several times) or “Couldn’t find the park…” For Kroetsch, such lostness is a condition of the poet, and this condition necessitates the “notes” and “notation” mentioned above and throughout much of his poetry. Elsewhere, discussing his ongoing project Field Notes, Kroetsch explains: “My own continuing poem is called somewhat to my dismay Field Notes. I think of the field notes kept by the archaeologist, by the finding man, the finding man who is essentially lost.”

For Kroetsch (and for Wright), the poem isn’t about controlling the story, but losing control. Lostness isn’t something imposed on the reader; it’s about the poet’s surrender to something more than what he intends or knows. The poem, the true poem, is outside the poet’s intention, beyond the poet’s deliberate reach, and can only be approached by indirection.

Eventually, the speaker “finds the train,” but only by heeding the voice of a stranger: “He told me I was about to get onto the wrong train. His voice at the time perplexed me, because it was at once a foreign voice, and familiar.” By indirection—by getting lost and attending to the perplexing voice of the stranger—the poet finds directions out.

Kroetsch points out elsewhere that “Perhaps every poem is a poem lost.” Perhaps the poet’s only possible path to its recovery is by becoming lost himself. It’s a heady paradox: the poet finds his voice by losing it:

The voice of the man who directed me onto the right train, the train that would take me to Koblenz, where I would then transfer onto another train and proceed to Trier, to give a talk on Canadian writing (and I gave the talk), had been exactly my own.

Not surprisingly, the poet of indirection is not comfortable with that absolute “exactly.” The next section of the poem begins with a correction: “like, I / mean,” because this stranger is not identical--he’s wearing a hat, and the speaker doesn’t wear hats. The poet/speaker’s relationship to the stranger is like notation’s relationship to the poem—an indirect, not-quite-synchronous, doubling: “Notation is the double of the poem. Or: we are the poem and cannot hear, except by indirection.” This indirection directs the voice of the poem, keeps it moving. The poem closes (I do not want to say it concludes):

#c. d. wright #robert kroetsch #elliptical poets #indirection #getting lost

Something about Something

I have a thing for “something,” having discussed it on this blog and elsewhere in relationship to works by Robert Hass, Annie Dillard, and Laura Kasischke. In my post on Hass, I mentioned in passing that David Ferry is a “heavy user” of the indefinite pronoun, and the most recent issue of The Baffler includes a poem by Ferry that affirms my claim. It’s titled—”Something”:

Ferry’s allusions here are interesting: Both are about voices that speak from beyond the grave. In the sonnet Ferry briefly quotes, Ronsard speaks as a “boneless phantom” whose words, paradoxically, will immortalize his subject, Héléne (as well as himself). In Gilgamesh, Talbet XII, Enkidu’s spirit emerges from “the netherworld” as a “puff of breath” to kiss Gilgamesh (I borrow the phrase from Ferry’s own translation of Gilgamesh). Both voices issue from absence, from beyond. And, Ferry seems to suggest, so does his: even his own words seem to come from elsewhere,“breathing towards” him, and sounding wrong.

The speaker hears his “own voice trying, / trying to say it right.” This kind of division, where the writer hears her own words as the words of another, is, I imagine, a familiar experience to most writers. Maurice Blanchot describes it this way: “To write is to break the bond that unites the word with myself.” The writer “is no longer himself. . . .The third person substituting for the 'I': such is the solitude that comes to the writer on account of the work.”

This division appears to be a central concern of Ferry’s recent work. Here’s a stanza from “Who Is it,” published last winter in the Threepenny Review

The voice that said what it was it had to say And heard what it said when it said it, and didn’t know Exactly what had become of the person who said What it was he said, just now, to tell the truth.

To me, the recursive stammer of these lines parallels the frantic reiterations of the conclusion of “Something”: in the last 3 lines of the poem, “trying” occurs 3 times; “it,” 4 times. The repetition suggests desperation: multiple attempts and failures to “get it right.”

Perhaps unsurprisingly, the referent of “it” isn’t specified. The title of this poem, while “wrong” by any conventional standard, couldn’t be more appropriate: whatever “it” is, the speaker hasn’t gotten it right yet. More: since the speaker doesn’t know what “it” is, it’s impossible to know when it’s “right.” Speaking generally, this is the writer’s dilemma: we figure out what it is we seek only in the process of seeking, that is, writing. Ferry’s poem embodies this dilemma. “It” necessarily remains evasive as breath—“something evermore about to be.”

Whistler v Ruskin: A Debate Worth More Than a Farthing

A recent exchange on Twitter reminded me of the infamous Whistler v Ruskin case from 1878. The case in brief: referring to James Abbott McNeill Whistler’s painting Nocturne in Black and Gold – The Falling Rocket (1875), art critic John Ruskin accused Whistler of “ask[ing] 200 guineas for flinging a pot of paint in the public's face.” Whistler sued for libel and won, but was awarded only a farthing (less than a cent, in dollars). Here’s the painting in question:

This anecdote is often recounted in art history courses (which is where I first heard it) and the intended take-away is clear: Whistler = the misunderstood, ahead-of-his-time champion of abstraction; Ruskin = the out-of-date, benighted lover of quaint over-the-couch realism.

But recently I’ve been dipping into Ruskin’s work, and I now realize things aren’t so simple. In 1843—almost 35 years before he was sued by Whistler—Ruskin defended J. M. W. Turner’s Snow Storm: Steam-Boat off a Harbour's Mouth against critics who said it was merely "soapsuds and whitewash." Here’s the painting, described by Ruskin as “one of Turner’s mightiest works”:

Ruskin goes on to say that Snowstorm is “one of the very grandest statements of sea-motion, mist, and light that has ever been put on canvas” (Modern Painters, Vol 1).

I think it’s fair to say that, with regard to degree of abstraction, Snowstorm is in the vicinity of Whistler’s Nocturne. And it’s clear from other passages in Ruskin’s work that he is not put off by paintings that we’d deem abstract. About 100 years before critic and self-appointed mouthpiece of abstract expressionism Clement Greenberg described “flatness as [a] criteria of aesthetic quality in pictorial art” (1960), Ruskin claimed that a good painting shows a “tendency toward flatness.” Ruskin does, however, often criticize painters—especially landscape painters—who apply paint carelessly, thoughtlessly filling in large spaces with undifferentiated color to denote skies or fields, thereby creating “a cold and vacant mass.” Instead, Ruskin contends that the painter should treat such passages in a way that creates richness, abundance, and mystery.

My point is that at the time, Ruskin was about as qualified as anyone to “get” Whistler’s sort of abstraction, given that he had been defending similar work since 1843, when Whistler was 9 years old. Perhaps he thought Whistler didn’t do his abstraction well. Or it may have been personally motivated, as some have argued.

In any case, this is not to defend Ruskin. I think he was wrong. The care and thought with which Whistler “flung” his paint has been abundantly documented. And to my 21st century eyes, Nocturne is an incredible work, and no one would dispute its place in the history of painting. I write this post simply to attempt to undo the cartoonesque quality such anecdotes tend to take on, and to restore the discussion to a richer, possibly more instructive, complexity.

Some Good Literary Criticism I Read in 2015

It seems strange to discuss “the Best Literary Criticism of 2015,”—a year in which, it seemed, the professionalism of the discipline itself was being called into question. Writers asked “Is Everyone Qualified to be a Critic?” (and answered yes). Another critic extolled the virtues of know-nothing criticism.

Despite this seeming affront to the profession, 2015 was a year of thoughtful, compelling, and innovative criticism, so I’d like to take a moment to point out what were some of the highlights for me.

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Poetry and The Metaphysical I

Dorothea Lasky

From Wave Composition

This is no tired discussion of the “the lyric I”: Lasky offers a fresh and compelling take on the role of the first person singular in poetry: “The best gift that a poet can give his or her I is to allow it to be its own cool animal. An I that is a wild thing, a mercurial trickster that resists all definition.”

Decomposition as a Spiritual Value in Poetry

Dobby Gibson

From The American Poetry Review

A meditation on decomposition and the poetic process: “A poem is provisional, composed as it is largely of the act of its own undoing. The lines break.”

On Middlebrow Formalism, or the Fallacy of Imitative Form Revisited

Stephen Cushman

From Southwest Review, via Poetry Daily

Cushman argues against the notion that in good poetry, “The sound must seem an Echo to the sense," as Pope famously put it. Cushman urges us to move away from “an interpretive contortionism that insists on twisting sound into an auditory allegory of sense” and attend instead to “the intricacies of auditory design as ends in themselves.”

Theory of the Lyric

Jonathan Culler

Book, published by Harvard UP

Required reading for every poet. Culler brings a lifetime of reading and thinking to the topic, and he is equally good as a close reader and as a theorist. Reading this was enlightening and humbling: there just aren’t that many people on this planet with Culler’s exhaustive knowledge and insight.

Culler explains that the impetus behind the book is “critical”: “Current models falsify the long tradition of the lyric and encourage students to think about lyrics in ways that neglect some of the central features of lyric poetry, both past and present.” Culler’s goal is to present “a more accurate and capacious account of the lyric.”

Vanishing Point

Karl Ove Knausgaard

From The New Yorker

An ethics of the novel: Fiction as the antidote to the generalizations we use to avoid empathy with others. The piece includes a fascinating aside on Paul Celan. “If there is an ethics of the novel, it lies in the zone where the other moves between the definite and indefinite.”

The Art of Slowness: Sun Bear by Matthew Zapruder

Tony Hoagland

From The American Poetry Review

A detailed investigation of Zapruder’s “artfully clunky syntax, his irregular lineation and the way his extended sentences unspool their way down the page…”

The Art of Close Writing

Jonathan Russell Clark

From The Millions

An essay on “free indirect discourse” in fiction. I appreciate the playfulness of Clark’s approach (the entire essay is written in close third person) and I’m a sucker for technical discussions of literature, especially ones that examine multiple instances of a specific technique.

Write Like a Cow: On Taking Craft Cues from Your Subject

Nancy Geyer

From Brevity: A Journal of Concise Literary Nonfiction

A close reading/”craft essay” on Lydia Davis’s brilliant story, “The Cows.”

Susan Howe, Poet in the Academic Zone

Robert von Hallberg

From Lana Turner

Von Hallberg argues that Howe’s poetry and critical work serves as “a wake-up call to the academy,” revealing the creative possibilities of archival research and historical explanation.

By the way, last month New Directions republished Howe’s The Birth-Mark (1992), a collection of essays on early American Literature, and published The Quarry, a new book of previously uncollected essays.

Lines of Sight: Visual Art in Asian American Poetry

Micael Leong

The Asian American Writer’s Workshop

An introduction by Leong followed by a mini-anthology of 9 visual poets, each represented by full poems or substantial excerpts, and accompanied by lots of images. This sort of criticism may seem less sexy than theoretical musings or polemical diatribes, but it’s essential work, beneficial to the poets it discusses as well as the new readership it brings to them.

The Ocean, the Bird and the Scholar: Essays on Poetry and Poets

Helen Vendler

Book, published by Harvard UP

In her introduction, Vendler offers a succinct but accurate description of herself: "I'm a critic rather than a scholar, a reader and writer more taken by texts than by contexts." I don’t share Vendler’s enthusiasm for some of the poets she discusses, but I don’t read her to confirm my prejudices. I read Vendler for the same reason (I suspect) many watch sports: to see how she handles the challenging situations she encounters and to marvel at her skill.

Second Acts: A Second Look at Second Books of Poetry by Carl Phillips

Lisa Russ Spaar

From The Los Angeles Review of Books

Focusing on Phillips’s second book, Cortege (1995), and his most recent, Reconnaissance (2015), Spaar explores how Phillips’s language embodies his poetics of unknowing: “Both collections use simultaneous flourishes of artifice and a stripping away of any baroque foliage to create a nakedness, a clearing that in Phillips’s works often takes the form of a field or vista, a wake or aftermath…”

Equipment for Living: Poetry's complex consolations

Michael Robbins

From Poetry Magazine

Every generation, it seems, must have its apology for poetry. This is ours. “One way poetry helps you to accept perpetual unrest, to arm yourself to confront perplexities, is by reminding you that you’re not alone (a not coincidentally common refrain in popular song). This just in: everyone you love will be extinguished, and so will you. But this can be said of every person in the universe. You’re not special. Men and women have been living and dying for a long time, and some of them have left records. Those records won’t eliminate your fears; they might help you to live with them."

Ten New Ways to Read Ronald Johnson's Radi os

Derek Mong

From Kenyon Review, via Poetry Daily

I'd meet a Milton scholar who had never heard of Johnson. . . . I tried to describe Radi os (a sustained erasure of Paradise Lost) to him in earnest, but kept leaping into my different theories for how best to understand the book. More so than with any other poem I admired, I didn't know where to start.

This essay then is a series of starting points for a reading (or rereading) of Radi os

Mong’s piece is playful, fun to read, and thought-provoking. Literary criticism so often aspires to be the final word, whereas Mong seeks to initiate a conversation.

As If As If: Laura Kasischke’s Blurred Language

As a glance over any of the preceding posts shows, I’m interested in “limit situations” in language, where what it seeks to do is at odds with its acknowledged capacities. We know what language does well: limns, defines, and clarifies; it stays confusion. Recall the famous passage from A Midsummer Night's Dream: “And as imagination bodies forth / The forms of things unknown, the poet’s pen / Turns them to shapes and gives to airy nothing / A local habitation and a name.”

But I wonder: Isn’t giving “airy nothing / A local habitation and a name” a misrepresentation of that “nothing,” with the poet’s pen imposing a level of detail/specificity it cannot have? John Ruskin discusses this sort of inaccurate (over)accuracy in painting, pointing out that one of Hobbema’s landscapes “involves a contradiction in terms; it states a distance by perspective, which it contradicts by distinctness of detail.”

So what happens when we want to describe in words something dark, confusing, blurred, or unresolved? Words aren’t charcoal; they can’t be smudged with a blending stick. And simply calling something “confused” imposes an interpretive layer: it doesn’t allow the reader to inhabit the confusion. It’s the verbal equivalent of the contradiction Ruskin describes.

Poet Laura Kasischke has attempted to address this representational conundrum. One way she accomplishes what I’d call an appropriate vagueness is through the accumulation of similes. Consider this poem from her book Space, in Chains, in which the poet describes her dying father’s last day:

The similes follow one another, without transitions, and it’s not clear if the process is supposed to be cumulative or corrective. Some are so obvious that they’re almost redundant: “like desperation / in a dying eye.” Some are mystifying (at least to me): “Like science.” In any case, the traces of the preceding simile haunt our reading of the next one, creating the blurred richness of a Giacometti drawing. The effect seems appropriate to the uncertainty and difficulty of the death of a loved one.

In some poems, Kasischke follows the attempted similes with an “or,” explicitly calling into question previous similes, and emphasizing the provisional/tentative nature of the whole endeavor:

The poem depicts the struggle for a sort of clarity, and the clarity itself is fleeting, no sooner achieved than reduced to analogical “as if” in triplicate.

Kasischke also expertly employs indefinite pronouns—especially “something”—as well as “thing,” that misty noun anathematized by the gods of good writing (“The word ‘thing’ is a shortcut and a sign of vague, watered-down writing,” admonishes one website). Her most recent book, The Infinitesimals, opens with a straightforward but effective example, with an indefinite “thing” offset by a single sharp and eerie detail:

The Infinitesimals contains several poems called “Beast of the Sea” (the repetition of the title creates its own suggestive confusion). The one on page 89 combines all the techniques I’ve described: the multiple similes (the “like” is implied here); the corrective “or”s; and two “somethings” whose referents are never clarified:

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