Thin Waters

Yeats, the bardic lord, foretold the condition
of modern poetry when he said, "Things fall apart,
the center cannot hold." He was foretelling the breakdown
of the centers of civilization, but it was really
as always about poetry. I've read enough
Gertrude Stein now to realize that she was right
in her self-assessment that she was shallow actually.
Words glorious words about nothing much at all.
If you get under the surface of her plays, they're parlor
plays with little drama. Still, a good pun is a good pun.
A phrase well-turned, she is the darling of the language
that that nothing poetic to say except about itself.
There's a golden maple outside my window, blown
in bleak gusts, half its leaves on the ground
shed like words or worlds, its branches still
half-leaved. It's not that shallowness is bad, unless
there's no center to hold, but that these word players
glory in their inanity. They don't even want more meat.
Robert Duncan, whose word tangles were at least as
exotic never lost the center of his purpose, which
was bardic. Bards, skalds, tellers of the insistent news
of other lands, travelers between small kingdoms
more cultural than geographic, small minds in large halls
firelit with retellings of the oldest Anglo-Saxon epics,
lust and battle and pointless deaths albeit monstrous.
Put that in your meerschaum and scribe it. I wish,
as everyone probably does, that life had some kind of
meaning or purpose, even an invented tradition rife
with accumulated verbal fossils. These vintage lake beds
are very shallow, many layers but all very thin. Not enough
time to compress them to solidity. Word-play is no bad thing.
It's just that like Duncan meaning lurks below the scintillation
of the surface tension. To glory in one's tepid ordinary,
no mass, seems shale. I keep looking for the dark matter
hidden behind the facade of words, but telescope not
wit nor jot. A list-poem of fashionable name-checks even Whitman
would reject. I ramble incoherent, here myself at play with words.
More leaves fall like words in the wind. Apples and maples all fall.
I find I cannot go along with embracing pointlessness as being
the point. Some part of me yearns for dragon's teeth in the warp
and weft, handspun yarn uneven and clumped, not perfect
but dangling with threads of connection. Go to, young language.
You can be small-scale, explore domestic mysteries, or overblown,
making a life mythic because resonant with archetypes. What else
is "Beowulf" but a cautionary tale of hubris and self-deceit?
If I name-check other poets it's to weave them not deceive them.
My own word-hoard is darker than you think.

Art & Life & Art

It is important to remember that we are free to make art and poetry out of anything: a loaf of bread, some beans, a hasty jotting on the train.
—Alison Knowles

Alison Knowles was one of the influential artists in the Fluxus movement, with conceptual art and performance pieces often including the ideas of indeterminacy brought into art by John Cage. Fluxus was in part about removing the artificial distinction between "life" and "art," and many of the Fluxus participants not only practiced what they preached, a lot of the art made by them was conceptual and boundary-denying. Of course, one of things that makes movements like Fluxus what they are is that if you ask twelve of the artists, you'll get fourteen or more definitions, even denial that it in fact was a movement at all. And that very indeterminacy about the art itself is of course one of the reasons we love it. Fluxus was also post-modernism in that all things were considered fair game for being used in art as well as life.

What makes a piece of art? We put a frame around it. Even a conceptual frame will do. How do you separate art from life? Well, if you must, you do it by taking something and making it Special by calling it Art. That was the lesson of Dada, as exemplified by Marcel Duchamp's "ready-mades," the found objects he put on the wall of a museum or gallery and declared them to be Art. Of course, Dada was a protest against the mandarins of the gallery and museum institutions, the self-proclaimed gatekeepers of artistic taste. Fluxus, as post-Surrealism and post-Dada, was postmodern in the sense that it was assumed that the battles of Modernism had already been won, incorporated, absorbed, and forgotten as all avant-gardes are forgotten as soon as they become interior decoration and design.

The problem of contemporary poetry, in that it is hung up on being "all avant-garde all the time," is that at some point even the most rabid of rebels must acknowledge that they have won, and have now become the establishment—which is exactly the position that "post-avant" poetry currently finds itself in. Language Poetry is no longer rebellion when most of its best-known practitioners are now themselves the academic establishment. (LangPo in the US, the Cambridge school in the UK, etc., etc.)

Which brings me back to Fluxus, because I think it is correct to argue that what Fluxus left us with was not a body of art, even of conceptual art (which is not the end-point of artistic evolution after all), but an attitude towards art and life, and art-making.

Which brings me back to Alison Knowles' point: It is important to remember that we are free to make art and poetry out of anything. Of anything. Anything.

Which of course is where we find ourselves in the creative world nowadays: anything is fair game for art. Life and art are not separate. You live as you create. And some of us create not only a way to live, but out of necessity: it's as necessary as breathing. Whether or not you enjoy the process all the time isn't really relevant. That you engage with art-making is.

So we are all in some sense children of Fluxus, Dada, and Modernism. The history of 20th century art was in many ways the history of the dissolution of categories and divisions between "fine art" and "popular art" and "outsider art." It was the history of the dissolution of ideas about what art should be or could be. This has overall been a process of greater artistic freedom. It does have a shadow side—mannerism, imitation, loss of center, the substitution of shallow ironic distance for deep connection and sincerity—but those are topics for another day. I'd rather focus for the moment on remembering that, as Alison Knowles said, we are indeed free to make art out of anything. Including whatever comes up in our lives. An artist is someone whose first response to life is to make art about it. And anything is possible.

(Hat tip to Jerome Rothenberg for getting me thinking about all this. Not the first time his work has been a catalyst for my thinking about art, probably won't be the last.)

The New New Sentence

In these days of bland no-style generic post-Hemingway prose, not to mention the lamentable influence such prose has had on contemporary poetry, is there anyone left who understands that a complex sentence is not necessarily a run-on sentence? You'd think not, based on most of the criticism I've read on the topic.

In Samuel R. Delany's early-career novel Empire Star, a schema is laid out of intersecting ways of interpreting experience, memory, and understanding the universe. It is a set of three progressive and mutually interfingering layers of awareness and consciousness: simplex, complex, multiplex. What's interesting is that the style of the novel changes as the lead character progresses in his awareness from his simplex origins, through the complexification of his awareness, to a multiplex, and equivocal, even circular, ending. Simplex sentences generally complexify, as the novel progresses, till we get to the point where time and space are considered from several angles simultaneously, and traditional (simplex and complex) linear narrative breaks down (becomes multiplex). I find most visionary artwork and poetry to be multiplex in its perspective; and I tend to articulate my experience of the Universe that way, as well. (And thus I get called an experimental poet, for my pains.)

So, the long complex sentence has some potential to affect the way the reader structures experience, which in some way is how we also structure the universe: the world is made of stories.

The problem with the complex sentence these days is environmental: we live in the age of The Short Attention Span. The post-Hemingway no-style style that dominates every work of popular fiction on the bestseller lists nowadays (which itself has become dominated by crime thrillers and literary romance novels) is geared towards short sentences, quick rhythms, and rapid action and dialogue. Plot, not characterization: the anti-Proust. Short, choppy sentences even dominate in poetry, where one might imagine that there is room to stretch out a bit, and spread one's language-making wings. Instead, what we usually get is significant shrinkage.

Case in point: what first drew me to Robert B. Parker's series of mystery novels featuring his character Spenser was the first three novels in the series, which I originally purchased and read while living in Indonesia for a year; these three novels each contained long, complex, occasionally rhapsodic sentences. There is one scene in one of these early novels where Spenser is making account of a fistfight; the writing style causes the reader to forget all else, and focus down to the sheer visceral level of action, which is described in balletic detail, in a paragraph that stretches to almost two pages in length, in the paperback edition of the book that I have. It was a genuinely memorable scene. But the most recent Spenser novels rarely contain a sentence over 10 words long, and most paragraphs are also short and compact. Parker's earlier novels in the Spenser series contained a great deal of poetic prose, even some memorable passages that could qualify, in another context, as prose-poems. More recently, the prose in the Spenser novels is more like a blunt instrument. I dislike thinking that Parker is just phoning in his performances these days, but one does notice a significant shrinkage in his writing style.

We also live in an age where the soundbyte stands in for wisdom, and simplistic, knee-jerk sloganeering stands in for genuine philosophy. Everything is reduced to simple black-and-white equations. Signs and symbols stand in for the wisdom of experience, and discourse is reduced to aphorism. Is it any wonder that genuinely interesting sentences have been replaced by merely serviceable ones?

One of the things I dislike about Language Poetry—besides the basic objection that its theory precedes its praxis, which is almost always a recipe for making bad art—is that it tends to be deconstructionist, and uses reductive analysis rather than organic synthesis as its hallmark methodology. You often end up, in LangPo, with a lot of short, disconnected sentence fragments. But then, LangPo is not at all about sense and meaning, it's about playing with alphabet blocks.

One of the marker indicators of Language Poetry, as illuminated by one of its chief proponents and practitioners (and cheerleaders), Ron Silliman, is what Silliman describes as "the new sentence," which he characterizes, in part, as follows:

1) The paragraph organizes the sentences;

2) The paragraph is a unit of quantity, not logic or argument;

3) Sentence length is a unit of measure;

4) Sentence structure is altered for torque, or increased polysemy/ambiguity;
—from Ron Silliman, The New Sentence, p. 91

George Hartley explicates this in more detail here. Some LangPoet ideas about LangPo are quoted here. Three perspectives on a Silliman's Ketjak can be read here.

What do I think about all this?

Mostly I think it's a smokescreen: a justification. A justification for fracturing and fragmentation. Not in an interesting fractalized way, but as a means of breaking language away from meaning. As a rationale, it doesn't seem ot mean much, or hold much water. The structuralists and deconstructionists argued that All Things Are Text, and thus can be analyzed as text: broken down via reductive analysis. Certainly the inception of Language Poetry began as a (justifiable) rebellion against, in part, the confessional lyric. They broke away from the dramatized personal expression of the Confessional Poets, and focused instead on language's surface action. They broke language away from meaning, and unstitched syntax from sense. But putting language back together again, after you've broken it down into its constituent parts, is a more difficult project. Mere deconstruction ends up in nihilism, and one ends up stranded on the many islands of solipsism.

There is, however, an argument to be made for the sentence to be thought of as the unit of composition, rather than the line, especially in prose-poetry. Silliman argues that Gertrude Stein's Tender Buttons presages the new sentence in exactly this way. (Other thoughts about Tender Buttons approach the work from a slightly different perspective.) If the sentence is the basic unit of composition, though, I think we end up with prose, rather than poetry. Certainly much contemporary poetry reads like prose broken into arbitrary lines. It reads like prose in tone and style, rather than like poetry.

The prose-poem has the potential to stitch this all back together. (And Stein remains more readable than most Language Poetry, to this day. Her work has a musical rhythm to it that remains fresh.) One of the benefits of the prose-poem is that one can let go of strict prose grammar and syntax, and experiment with non-narrative (multiplex) time. Prose-poetry has many strengths, and many flexibilities.

In truth, however, I began this meditation on the sentence with a parody, written spontaneously one recent morning as a single complex sentence. Is this a manifesto? No, it's a joke. Is this the way I think poets will mostly write, in the future? Get real. Is the New New Sentence better than the New Sentence? No, it's just different. Take it as a parody, or a polemic, or an antidote, if you wish. It is, essentially, a parodic rebuttal of Silliman's New Sentence, in the form of:

•

The New New Sentence

is endless, spiral, scrolling, and flexible, goes where it wants, following the brush, following the pen, reeling off its sidebar parenthetical remarks (which when read out loud by Clifford Geertz, each layer of embedded parentheses being read in a softer and softer voice, until some deeper, most important layers are barely audible) with gusto, yet finding its way back to its central point, eventually, if obliquely, before skirting off again into another parallel associative digression, long-winded, perhaps, but unapologetic to the post-Hemingway short-attention-span generation who like their sentences to be short and sharp and bitter (not knowing that irony itself is not a way of life, but only a tool of instigation), making no concessions to the reader that cannot track along, and eventually winding its way towards conclusion, having said a great deal (full of sound and fury) about very little (signifying nothing), very quietly coming to its close, having spread its wings to encompass the world, and now roosting at last on a cliff overlooking a quieted airless planet whose geologic plates ceased lubriciously floating and bumping against each other eons ago.

(Re)Language(ing) Poetry(ies) Fei(ai)nt(s)

I remain engaged with so-called Language Poetry, but most often in the way one picks at a scab.

Since Language Poetry is so prevalent nowadays, one of the better-known braids of the twisted rope that is postmodern, post-avant-garde poetry, one must engage with it, even if one is rarely convinced by it. I am occasionally accused of committing Language Poetry, in my more experimental poems: I can't tell if that's general ignorance on the part of the reader, conflating similar-looking things without knowing their antecedents, or if somehow I have been assimilated by the Borg and didn't realize it. Resistance is futile. Your distinctiveness will be added to our collective. Not that I wake screaming in the night worrying about it, or about much of anything else literary; yet one wishes to be oneself, a context of one's own. One wishes to discover one's own voice. If poems of mine seem to appear to be Language Poetry, I can only say that we may have arrived in a similar place, but from very different directions, by different paths, with different intentions.

I generally find the vast majority of Language Poetry to be all surface and no depth. I've read tremendous amounts of it, in various anthologies and individual collections. At its inception, it was a fresh voice that needed to be heard. Much early work still seems impressive, and one or two poets associated with the trend remain interesting to read. But much of it has been self-referential to the point of narcissicism, and guilty many times of excluding the reader(s) entirely. It can be hermetic as well as hermeneutic, deliberately obscure for its own sake, and on occasion more concept than anything else. (More on concept later.)

Language Poetry asserts, implicitly or explicitly, that language is its primary (or only?) field of play, and ignores the rest of experience. This can be tremendous fun. What I question is if it's Deep Play. It can, at its most genuine, be a remarkably vivid way of expressing non-ordinary states of consciousness, and has a knack for expressing stream-of-consciousness. Language Poetry is about language, and as such, it is about itself. It is ultimately recursive. Is language (grammar, syntax) itself a proper subject for poetry?

Yet a lot of Language poems seem like stunts: tricks done by a show dog, with no deep authentic heart in them. Set them side by side with The Sonnets to Orpheus, which remain remarkably avant-garde even now—breakaway sonnets, barely contained or recognizable as sonnets, exploding out of form and content both—and most modern Language poems seem paltry. Yes, there is experiment and adventure in both examples: but is there movement, music, heart? Do they contemplate? Do they move one, at one's core? Is the pleasure all intellectual, or is there something visceral as well: vaguely dangerous, unsettling, sensual? Is it play, or deep play?

I expect to convince no-one of my viewpoint. I expect no vast migrations will be triggered between poetic camps. Nonetheless, I have to ask, because it seems to me (as Philip Larkin put it a half-century ago), Nowadays no one believes in "poetic" subjects. Is language truly the proper subject of poetry, as well as its medium and principal toolset? If language is the proper subject of poetry, what of the rest of life? What else is there to write about?

Perhaps the worst sin of Language Poetry is that it panders mostly to Language Poets. I think it's a sin to dismiss the audience, even as I still believe it a sin to pander to an audience. In this, Language Poetry is no different than the worst of any literary style or genre: the sin of recursive auto-eroticism. You scratch my ass, and I'll scratch yours. This situation is only exaggerated by the move, also in the past half-century, of many poets into teaching positions in the Academy, as tenured professors of creative writing and English programs. The tendency to only talk to one's colleagues, and ignore the rest of the world, is heightened in academic and university settings.

Much of Language Poetry theory that I have encountered discusses the spoken word—poem as speech—which is, after all, essential to poetry. A poem doesn't live only on the page (unless it is meant to be part of a visual art piece, in which case typography and calligraphy provide as much meaning and resonance to the words, as do the meanings of the words themselves), a poem must survive equally spoken loud and read on the page.

I have always had a deep interest in text-sound poetry, by which I mean the sort of thing Richard Kostelanetz and Jerome Rothenberg were promoting in the 1970s; parallel to them, John Cage and others were doing similar things with music. Text-sound poetry is multimedia experience: more than a poem simply being read-aloud, although one can argue that "spoken word" recordings fall under this rubric, more than simply a text treated as a performance-text, but rather creating a musical event from text. This makes text into a score for musical interpretation. Typography and punctuation can become notational rather than formally grammatical: notation, as in score for performance.

I have written and performed text-sound poetry pieces. Are these Language Poems? Not as far as I know. My own intention was, in the course of some tape pieces made in the 1980s, to create musical structures using the human voice as only sonic element. Readings were layered and shaped, edited and processed, treated as musical leitmotifs, cycled and patterned to create musical effects. Most of the texts I used were also taken from my own poems. (Examples of this compositional style can be heard in the pieces Light and in another world. The voices are Stuard Hinds and my own. More material about this can be found on the Music section of my main website.) These pieces, if they are at all successful, are not about language or meaning, but about music and meaning. The meanign emerges not from individual sentences or fragments, but from overall tone, shape, and flow, cinematically rather than grammatically.

I'm all for play, and experimentation, and I'm all for thinking outside the box of tradition. Adventurous writing will almost draw my attention, whether or not it holds it in the long run. However, when one turns around and creates a new box, the new box cannot be claimed to be immune to criticism or rebellion. I am not a counter-revolutionist, a conservative, or a luddite. I am not rebelling against what has become a sort of mainstream by wanting to turn back a metaphoric clock. I am, if anything, dismayed that Language Poetry has become so self-referential, which in my opinion makes it very limited. It cannot speak to the rest of human experience, except via language: where are the silent moments? the equivalents of Cage's seminal 4'33"?

Language Poetry, because it is rooted in language, may come to depend on concept rather than execution, idea rather than tangible object—which can make it a sort of conceptual artform. What are its artistic products? Often, just more ideas. We can discuss conceptual poetics, but what are we discussing, really? When we move from Language Poetry to its even more rarified subset, conceptual poetry, I think things can get even sillier.

Conceptual poetics is a double-edged sword.

On the one hand, it's a situation where the first person to get into the public eye with the concept (as Marcel Duchamp did with Dada, as did Cage with indeterminacy, as also did Nam June Paik with explicitly conceptual works) gets credited with the idea, even if someone else also had it at the same time—such conceptions are often a product of zeitgeist, and simultaneous discovery occurs.

On the other hand, it's hard not to see a published book of conceptual poetry as a one-trick pony, publishable once but never again. And it's also hard not to see that a conceptual poet could have simply made a one-page proposal (as Paik did for some pieces) without going to the effort (and waste) of producing an actual, published book—I mean, if it's a concept, why not let it remain a concept. (The ecology of paper consumption might become of the equation, as well.) Once you print it, it's an actual book of "poetry," and I resist calling it conceptual poetry at that point, no matter how novel or compelling the concept might be. After all, this is a book that, once you've got the basic idea behind it, what's the point in actually reading it?

Truly conceptual art is never executed. So, if a work of conceptual poetics is actually printed, how can we genuinely call it conceptual? There's the tangible thing: the ding an sich, an idea in itself, actual, present, taking up three-dimensional physical space. After you have it, what do you do with it? Do you actually read it? And if you don't read or peruse a book, what's the purpose of it? I think that's an open question.

I think it's different with an art-book, such as a(n in)famous handmade book with sandpaper covers, that would damage or threaten any other book next to it on the shelf—because in this case the physical fact of the book is still challenging and demanding of encounter. To publish a book of conceptual poetry as an ordinary trade paperback sort of seems to kill the point of its essential difference: just another book on the shelf, sandwiched in between the others, all on the same paper, the same size, etc. In other words, it blends in all too well, and risks being all too forgettable. It loses whatever it was that made it special.

In one way, truly conceptual art cannot be criticized because it never actually gets executed or made. Only the idea of the thing can be discussed, not the thing itself—not the artistic product, as there is none. Then again, in a poetry that is all about ideas, and not embodied in anything more than ideas, maybe it's enough that it exists. One does wonder, though. Once it passes from idea into fact, how do you approach it? The rules change, at that point, and the game changes, too.

This is an opening feint towards a critique of Language Poetry in general. There will be more to come. Perhaps I am merely rebelling against an easy target, the way every generation must rebel against their forebears. Or perhaps, I view some forms of postmodernism in poetry to be sillier than others, and can't resist saying so. For now, let's leave the question open; in the meantime, we can look at certain other strands in the braided rope of postmodernism, and see how much weight and torque they might support.