Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random 3

10. Don't give in to the tendency to describe your own work as the end-product of an evolutionary process.

There is often a tendency in critical essays that describe artistic progression or aesthetic development to arrive, in the end, at the -isms and schools the author likes, approves of, and, often enough, is a member of. You see this supremely self-serving tendency in academic overviews of poetry written by professional poets with an agenda to promote. It's always tempting to justify one's own poetry by placing one's artistic ancestors into a linear narrative.

But the study of how people write history has shown us that such narratives are always constructed, like linear narrative fiction. Usually such histories are at least partly subjective, since they are narratives meant to prove a point. History is rarely only about telling a story; there is usually an underlying ideology one can identify by looking at what is presented and what is left out. (A good example of how to perceive this inner agenda can be found in John Gallaher's dissection of a Tony Hoagland essay on poetic history.) The point is that self-serving histories cannot be called objective, since they do have an agenda which is not purely to tell a history.

The paradigmatic example of this egotistical progression is those old anthropological diagrams that showed how apes gradually evolved into man. These were accompaniments to densely written tomes describing the evolution of human cultures from primitive hunting and gathering societies to, naturally, the pinnacle of Western civilization. That Western anthropologists would proclaim Western civilization to be the pinnacle of human cultural evolution comes as no surprise, since most such tomes were written during the period of Western colonization of imperial rule over the more "primitive" parts of the globe. Western culture did develop a technical civilization unlike any other, through our ambitious mastery of fire: gunpowder, industrial mechanization, steam, electricity.

It's truly ironic when poets write essays about poetry that echo this pattern of placing oneself and one's poetic peers at the pinnacle of artistic evolution. Most post-avant poetry manifestos do this, in many cases directly echoing the early Modernist poetry manifestos of a century ago.

Poetry is fractured and diverse at this point in history. It seems like every poetic movement and -ism has to justify itself with a manifesto. You have to present your theory before you can present your art. Then and only then can you justify a poetry that no one cares about, that is totally obscurantist, and that only your fellow members of your -ism will read or care about, or respond to.

Placing yourself at the pinnacle of some artistic evolution is a way of constructing a narrative that justifies your art's existence in the face of existential insecurity. If on some level you're anxious about the worth and value of your art (and your self)—and what artist isn't occasionally anxious about their art?—this is a great way of giving yourself a narrative of worth. It's actually rather elitist in spirit.

11. You can't call yourself avant-garde if you're not actually doing anything new or different.

The irony is that post-avant, postmodernist poetry is not an ongoing avant-garde, it is artistic Mannerism. The contemporary post-avant refers constantly to the avant-garde of a century ago to legitimize its perpetual rebellion, even when those rebelling have already become the professional poetry establishment. "All avant-garde all the time" is the motto. The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz, Nobel laureate and renowned poet, had this to say about avant-gardism:

Many have commented on the disappearance of a true avant-garde and its replacement by avant-gardism. . . . I see this as a prolongation of experimentation usually leading further on from collage and montage into ever-increasing fragmentation and eventually into a degenerative disease which, adapting an already common usage, I call "disjunctivitis." The argument, used by some producers who, correctly locating the seats of available power in the academy, have ensconced themselves therein every bit as much as the establishment "mainstream," to the effect that the disruption of the common linguistic coin is part of a war against "late-capitalist" discourse is singularly inept. I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?

As Paz points out, lots of post-avant poets claim to be rebelling against a poetic establishment which doesn't really exist. Lots of straw-men as set up to be knocked over, but they're set as myths that don't actually reflect the true nature of things. There isn't anything to actually rebel against, so a narrative of rebellion has to be constructed, usually via manifesto, laying out a narrative of oppression that justifies generating one's own avant-garde.

As I have said before, postmodernism is really Late High Modernism. It's not really anything new; it's at best something that comes after. If it were really new, postmodernism wouldn't need to include "Modernism" in its very name. So it is a reactive -ism, not a genuinely new alternative. It is in fact the decadent, mannerist end-point of the Modernist ideal that began in the arts a century ago.

There was a genuine avant-garde a century ago, creating new kinds of poetry, aesthetic theory, and artistic expression which actually were rebelling against 50 or 100 years of enforced artistic stagnation. Post-avant poets nowadays insist on their innovative status, but in fact they're still rebelling against the phantoms of fixed forms that were first rebelled against by the genuine avant-garde of a century ago.

it's hilarious nowadays to hear post-avant manifestos use Marxist and Freudian ideologies to justify their reasoning, since Marx and Freud have long since passed into the history of ideas as no longer descriptive of life as we actually live it and know it nowadays. Marxist theory in the arts is doubly hilarious because, as Paz says, there is no proletariat supporting the post-avant's artistic uprising. Power to the people? The "people" are mostly ignoring you, or yawning.

Which of course is the root of anxiety that one's art might in truth be irrelevant. Which leads to the fictive histories mentioned above, which generates manifestos to justify one's avant-gardism, and which also leads to the formation (via those manifestos) of cliques and elites within poetic -isms.

An absurd aspect of poetic avant-gardism is its conformity. A lot of post-avant manifestos praise individualism and uniqueness as elements of their forever-rebellion, but in fact a lot of the members of any given -ism tend to all sound alike. They experiment in the same ways on the same materials. You get a lot of variations on a theme, rather than a genuinely new theme.

In order to make a poem sound hip, for example, a lot of pop culture references get included to make the poem sound contemporary and relevant. This often ends up sounding like name-dropping and product-placement. Frank O'Hara could pull this method off, but many of his followers cannot. Conformity is symptomatic of followers and disciples trying to imitate a master's style, and not being able to grasp the master's intent from the inside. This is largely because their hearts aren't in it, only their minds: there is no original impulse driving the content, only an imitation of form and means. They end up imitating the surface elements of the style, without grasping the original impulse that generated the style.

This is surprisingly true of many contemporary haiku poets, who imitate the japanese haiku masters without really feeling the poetic impulse from the inside. It is particularly noticeable among imitators of Buson, rather than Basho.

12. There is a genuinely new art happening, but it doesn't appear on the radar very often.

Or maybe it's a really old art, with an old set of values, trying to re be restored and re-integrated with what we've learned from the new art.

Usually genuinely new art, and new approaches to art-making, happens under the radar for a long time before anyone notices them. People quietly experiment, play with their materials, and discover something new. Sometimes it happens when familiar things are put together in a new way, generating a new viewpoint or way of thinking about them.

A century ago in literature, Virginia Woolf, James Joyce, and Gertrude Stein (and a few others) took the familiar forms of linear-narrative fiction and found new ways of forming them. Some of those forms were non-linear, others were means to go deeper into narrative, or to explore psychological realism without much actual plot happening. This was both a completely new way of thinking about narrative, and a new way of expressing time.

That these new ways of performing narrative remain controversial, and still somewhat below the radar, says not much about the value of experimental literature per se, but it does say a great deal about the context and environment in which these experiments are undertaken.

It doesn't really matter that Joyce, Woolf, and Stein didn't overturn the novel, or forever change the ways in which fiction is written and read. In truth, most readers still like to read a straightforward linear narrative: story narrative is still king. (What this says about general mob psychology can be described on the symbolic, archetypal level by acknowledging that the rate of cultural change is usually only as rapid as its slowest members can sustain. The tribe is inherently conservative, as it carries a lot of inertia.) It doesn't really matter if literary experiments didn't become the new mainstream: experiments are not always meant to replace anything. They were experiments, a word that implies questing, researching, exploring, and trying new solutions, and doesn't exclude the possibility of failure. Call this Modernist avant-garde the experimental science of literature in the early 20th Century.

What Octavio Paz calls "disjunctivitis" in poetry began with the Symbolists, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, their peers and their forebears. When free verse and the prose-poem were first introduced, they were below the poetry mainstream's radar, and stayed there for some time. Then came the simultaneous discovery, acrimony, and plaudits. From these roots we ended up post-avant language-based poetry that disconnects the words on the page from all referent to the real world, or to the inner universe of consciousness.

I see hints, now and then, of the return of several things to poetry, which remain under the radar partly because they would be dismissed out of hand by the new post-avant mandarins of literary fashion, who are themselves become the new establishment. Elements of this eternal return include:

• deep psychology, by which I mean an archetypal psychology, Jung rather than Freud, which is a transpersonal and affirming psychology, rather than the current fashion for dysfunctional psychology manifest as confessional poetry (which is always confessions about the bad stuff in life, you might have noticed), or as acedia poetry that is disassociative from the soma, and from other aspects of psychology.

• a renewed emphasis on words as transparent carriers of meaning, rather than being ends in themselves. The experiment of Language Poetry, still dominant in critical circles, is beginning to fade in practice, if not yet in theory.

• poetry that is in the lineage of Rilke's Thing-poetry; of Lorca's duende and mining of the strata of existence that also generates Surrealism; and of Robert Bly's formulation of "leaping poetry," which he describes as poetry that "leaps" from the conscious, cerebral, intellectual mind suddenly into the subconscious, archetypal, shamanic, mythic mind, and thereby gains power and resonance.

With this last point, I am perhaps committing the sin of placing myself at the end of an evolutionary chain, since this lineage of poetry—Rilke, Lorca, et al.—is one I feel I belong to, if only as a distant descendant with no real claim to any substantive inheritance. It is the type of poetry happening with some poets, again mostly below the radar, that I feel kinship with. This cluster includes several of the West Coast poets such Jeffers, Snyder, Everson, and others such as Wendell Berry, Barry Lopez, jane Hirshfield, et al. And other poets who I've run across, whose books carry a definite mythopoetic charge, most of whom are relatively unknown, and are definitely under-recognized in the professional poetry world of MFA programs and academic criticism. (If anyone's interested, I'll compile a list from within my personal poetry library at some point, when I have a significant chunk of time.)

Nonetheless, I feel this revival of the archaic, the archetypal, the "primitive," is creating a genuine revival of soul in some contemporary poets' work. I can connect this to several similar upwellings of the old powers that are seeking to integrate with the new, to create something that will live and endure. At root, this poetry seeks to re-enliven contemporary poetry, and cure it of its overwhelming acedia.

The keyword here is integration.

There are parallel developments happening in philosophy, in which some younger thinkers are trying to restore to philosophy its interest in ethics and soul, as well as in pure reason. At the end of the Medieval period, in the Western history of ideas, at the beginning of Renaissance and continuing into the 17th C. Enlightenment period, myth and superstition gave way to reason, the scientific method of experimental observation, and ultimately to the logical-positivist, materialist worldview. This led to the development and triumph of a technological, instrumentality-based civilization. But now, three hundred years later, there is a desire to re-enchant the world that science and philosophical reasoning have disenchanted, have divorced from body and soul. There is concern that technology divorced from ethics produces catastrophe, manifest as environmental degradation, overpopulation pressure, and even nuclear holocaust. There are now philosophers and scientists seeking to restore soul to reason, and to integrate them into a synergistic, greater whole. And there are scientists trying to do the same, from the opposite direction.

In poetry, a parallel revival and integration of the mythic, epic, bardic/skaldic, and prophetic/vatic modes of poetry is beginning to emerge—more properly, has been emerging for some time, but has largely been dismissed by the mandarins of postmodernist mannerism—to stand alongside the currently dominant poetic modes of the personal (post-confessional, narcissistic) lyric, the language-oriented word-play-based "clever" poem, the didactic/philosophical poem, and the prevalent "workshop" poem (usually some small observational slice-of-life irrelevant to anyone but the poet and her friends).

So there is hope for the future of poetry. Really, there never was any doubt. It's a basic law of art and psychology alike that whatever is discarded or repressed will eventually return from the shadows in a new form.

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Previous entries in this series:

Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random

Literary-Critical Thoughts at Semi-Random 2

Langour and Luxury

Ocatvio Paz wrote in his important book-length essay, In Light of India, on some essential differences between Western poetry and classical Sanskrit poetry, which is the living foundation of Indian poetry. In Western poetry, lyricism is often accompanied by melancholy. Paz writes:

In Indian poetry, on the other hand, there is a feeling that is rare in ours: luxuriousness, that moment in which the body, without losing its composure, seems to waver, enveloped by extreme pleasure, and falls into a delicious swoon. The poem becomes a naked body adorned with jewels, lying conquered. Luxuriousness is an effluvium that glows and vanishes. It is also an agent of metamorphosis: the male body, weakened by an excess of pleasure, twists into that of a woman; in turn, the female body, goaded by desire, leaps on top like a tiger. The transposition adds ambiguity to the erotic battle: Krishna seems at times like a maiden, and the graceful Parvati, in a flash of the eyes, turns into the terrifying Durga. . . . This is the great difference from Western eroticism, which since the end of the eighteenth century has been largely concerned with infraction and violence. Bataille emphasizes that eroticism is essentially transgression: Hindu art proves him wrong. It is not a legal code but a fan: unfolding, refolding, unfolding again, displaying the whole range of pleasures. An art and a poetry that have never known sadism.

Eroticism in Indian art—eros itself, if you will—is often depicted as languorous, as opposed to conquering. Sexuality is not a war between the sexes, but a blurring of their boundaries. Role-reversals are not uncommon: the woman must ride on top, and be dominant. The rigid gender and sexual roles that have become reified by custom and religious dictates in the West are not present in this poetry. Neither is the Western division of soul and body, the alienation of the flesh, the exaltation of the spirit at the expense of denigrating the physical form. Even Indian food is luxurious, a complex blending of scents and tastes that overwhelm and envelope the senses and the soul alike. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that for me Indian food is comfort food, bringing back memories of my early childhood in Andhra Pradesh. (Comfort food has become even more available now that one can find in the USA restaurants that include or even specialize in South Indian cuisine.)

Yet even within the Western poetic tradition there are eddies and streams of langour and luxury. I find them especially in the poets who write in the Spanish-speaking tradition, both in Europe and in Central and South America. I find these characteristics in Federico Garcia Lorca, in Pablo Neruda, in Antonio Machado, in Xavier Villaruttia, and others in this lineage.

I have maintained for some time that the full flowering of Surrealism was not amongst the French and Italian poets who founded that school, but in Latin America. French Surrealism remained a post-Freudian intellectual game; even as it valued the irrationality of dreams and the unconscious, it valued them primarily as sources of imagery that were mined for use by the conscious craft of the waking poet. There are some marvelous games invented by the Surrealists, but they remained games. And there is little luxury in the artistic results. More paranoia than langour, to be honest. The French Surrealists might have wanted to visit the jungle of dreams, but they didn't trust the jungle to provide for them, and so they never fully relaxed into its embrace. And later Western poetic -isms, in their polished intellectual rigor, have often dismissed langour and luxury as soft and not to be taken seriously as Art. The triumph of the rational insists that the sensual be demonized.

Octavio Paz himself is exemplary of the full flowering of what Surrealism could have become, and did become when it was employed by Latin American poets. In Paz as in the others mentioned above, the tools of Surrealism became fully embodied, fully alive. And this is because, unlike the French Surrealists but like the classical Sanskrit poets, the Spanish-speaking poets involved the physical body and its erotic possibilities in their poetry.

In his many essays on poetry and its history and sources, Paz returns again and again to the eroticism of the physical world, of nature, of the body, and the world as the body. Paz of course was strongly influenced by his many years spent living in India; the small selected poetry volume that speaks to this directly is A Tale of Two Gardens, one garden being Paz' native Mexico, the other India. Paz' poetry, for example Sunstone, is deeply luxurious while simultaneously rigorously formal and profoundly philosophical.

For myself, I often seek a more luxurious, sensual, langourous poetry. I seek a poetry of the body, an embodied erotic poetry, a poetry that evokes the senses as much as the mind. I've long stated that poetry written only from the head ultimately fails, and I stand by that. The soma needs to be part of the experience of reading and re-creating a poem in the reader's own self. It can't be always just dry, dessicated, puzzle-box, intellectual language-based heartless mental games, it needs to be full-body, full mind-body experience. The best poetry sings.

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So it is always a pleasure to discover a book of poetry new to me that is also able to evoke a powerful somatic response in the reader. In this case, it's both pleasure and inspiration. Sometimes the world does give you what you've been desiring.



Furious Lullaby by Oliver de la Paz.
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2007)

I was in the bookstore, browsing, when I came across Furious Lullaby. I had never seen this book before. I picked it up and scanned it, then put it back. After awhile, I came back to it, drawn by some unnamed instinct, and picked it up again, and began to read. I was soon completely absorbed. I bought the book, and took it home, and have now read through it several times.

I had never heard of the poet, Oliver de la Paz, and still know almost nothing about him. I am interested not so much in the poet's biography but rather in these poems that emerged from his life and heart.

And these poems are immensely satisfying to read. They are fierce, intelligent, often surprising, coming from oblique angles at otherwise familiar topics, deeply felt, occasionally funny, and altogether stunning. I haven't been turned on by a new book of poems like this in a long time. (Let's face it, most of what gets published these days is dull, dry, overly thought-out, self-conscious to a fault if not outright narcissistic, and lyrically bland.) De la Paz' poetic antecedents are Lorca, William Blake, perhaps Neruda or Paz or Machado. The poems remind of the suppleness of the Spanish-speaking tradition, both in terms of the surreal juxtapositions of images and objects, and in terms of the erotic language. There is a luxurious use of language here, a frequent display of pyrotechnic technique, but not for its own sake, rather in the service of what is being given in the poem. I feel no words are in excess, nothing needs to be trimmed away, it's all quite precise even in those moments of extremity or ecstasy.

The lyric poem is lately a small thing focused on small moments, small events, personal reflections, too much of smoke and mirrors. All too many MFA workshops teach poets to think small. In this book, to the contrary, de la Paz finds (as did Blake) whole universes in the grains of desert sand that scorpions clatter across. His poems often open outwards, taking in wide vistas, before returning in the end to where they began. Zoom out, zoom back in.

There are several Aubades in Furious Lullaby, for example, Aubade with a Thistle Bush Holding Six Songs, which has as its opening lines:

A man told me that he had wasted his life. I did not know him.
We were on a train moving from one trespass to the next,
the fields in the windows shifting utterly into daybreak.

He told me about the guitar he bought with a little cash
saved at odd jobs, how he could not play but kept the thing
as a symbol for failure.

An aubade, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is 1. a song or poem greeting the dawn; 2. a morning love song, or a song or poem of lovers parting at dawn; 3. morning music. (The latter being the opposite of a nocturne, an evening or night music.) The tradition of aubade in poetry is something one finds more often in the Romance languages than in the Anglo-Saxon rationalistic tongues. Some mornings one lingers, in langourous pleasure, in memory, before arising. Each of the several aubades in contains aspects of morning, of music, of lovers parting. Sometimes it's implied that lovers will rejoin come nightfall, but not always. Aubades can be both praise and farewell, and both tones are struck here.

Many of de la Paz' titles in Furious Lullaby are themselves intriguing enough to mention:

Aubade with Doves, a Television, and Fire

My Dearest Apostasy

What the Scapula Said

Epitaph for the Musculature of the Neck

The art of finding a great title for a poem is one that perhaps de la Paz might consciously work at, but these seem so effortless, so natural and un-mannerist, so fresh they take the breath away. Poems with "My Dearest" and "Aubade" in their titles outnumber the rest here; which itself lends a certain tone to the collection. As though an wordly cavalier, a learned aristocratic lover, was writing florid farewell and hello letters to the body, to lovers, to the Devil, to himself. There is wit, regret, langour, and sharp observation of the familiar here, all made sensual by the sparkle of a turn of phrase. I discussed Sanskrit poetry earlier, and there are connections here to that tradition as well, both sensually and philosophically.

I am taken back to my own childhood in tropical India, for example, by Aubade with Scorpions and Monsoon:

Little sleeper, I mentioned the scorpions
were thoughtless in the rain, as they swarm down

the length of the green skins to the flood, eel-like
with furious tails. Earlier, the sky

had turned a mustard color proving that August
and its rains would soon bathe the desert, making

the whole thing become a dark scar. Water caused
the scorpions to shelter against the cacti

spikes. . . .

Rather than quote the whole poem, I want to give just enough of a taste to inspire the reader to go seek out the rest.

I could go on and on, droning away with insufficient, inarticulate praise, and suffice to say Furious Lullaby rewards each reading.

The highest praise I can give a poet or book of poems is that reading the poems inspires me to write. When I re-read Rilke's Duino Elegies, I want to write. When I read Coleman Barks' luminous versions of Rumi, I want to write. When I re-read Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin, or Jean Valentine's Ordinary Things, or Sam Hamill's lucid translations of the Japanese haiku masters, or Octavio Paz, Federico Garcia Lorca, or Odysseas Elytis, I want to write. I don't write in imitation, but in response. Reading such poetry evokes a creative response; I discover that I have something to say back. I am triggered not by every poem, or every poet, but by those who speak most directly to my experience, and to my peculiar mindset or way of thinking about the world. Poems that speak to the whole self, to the soma as well as the mind, are often the most reliable triggers.

I find myself writing an aubade or two, in the current series of poems that have been coming to me this summer, after a long period of writing nothing much; and I have de la Paz to thank for kick-starting me. I also, in this new series of poems, have Jim Harrison to thank, for likewise kick-starting me as I re-read Letters to Yesenin, which are some of the most brilliant and gutsy prose-poems of the last fifty years. Both of these books were there in late June, when chronic illness was dragging me down, depressing me, and gradually wasting me away towards that edge of a precipice that's hard to climb back from. It was reading these two books of poems that opened that door in me that had been closed for many months, and new poems began to spill over the jamb. Now I find myself feeling better, surprised by a new treatment regimen that promises to turn around the downward spiral, not surprised so much by a cautious optimism that doesn't quite dare to assume the best since the worst has so often been the pattern these past few years. And as I feel better, surprised by it, I am equally surprised by the fierce will to make poems, make art, make music, that is rekindled in me. As though making poems were a pure reminder that I'm still here, still alive. And so I go on.

Furious Lullaby made me want to write, in response, and as I say, that's the highest praise I can give a book of poems.

The Re-Enchantment of Art 1: Preliminary Thoughts

Back now from the recent vacation/photo roadtrip, thinking about making art, thinking again about how marking art brings me back to life, sitting on my porch on a sunny warm March afternoon, reading through a vast array of new books acquired on the roadtrip. The most interesting to me at the moment are the books about art, about making art, about putting hand to earth, pen to paper, bow to string, foot to dancefloor, stone against stone against earth.

I find I've lost my patience (again?) for the arguments about what is right and wrong, who is right and who is wrong, in all this. I look instead for the re-enchantment of the art world, as well as the world in general.

I remember thinking, as I was gathering driftwood in Mendocino County in California, that if I were to live out there, my art would no doubt become even more shamanic, more rooted to land and natural materials, more focused on process and relationship and connections—those very things that have made my art "fail" in most urban art-world settings. More than one of my artist friends have pointed out to me, however, that I'm also more likely to find an audience there than I ever have in the big cities of the Midwest, which is where my art has been so often rejected. Or at least misunderstood.

I've long since come to accept that the art I make out of my own need to make art—which is the opposite of artistic "self-expression," but rooted in the world and in connection both physical and spiritual—is going to be largely passed over by most people, for various reasons, but mostly because it seems to make them uncomfortable. I chafe at that, on occasion, less than I used to, but still a bit; not because I wish to be rich and famous, but because the art itself seems to carry seeds of reconciliation and healing. I've had people tell me they feel like they're getting an energy-healing treatment when engaged with some of my music, some of my art; I don't plan that, it just sort of happens, yet it does please me when someone tells me that they feel changed in a positive way by their encounter with the art that I've made. (The fact of making, to be clear, does not presume ownership on my part.)

I've long since come to accept that the usual commercial art world of galleries, showings and art-criticism will never be a home for my art. It's too outside the usual expectations of that art-world. That chafes too, on occasion. But then, I'm not an artist who buys into much of the assumptions of that art-world, to be honest, and I find some of them to be horribly toxic. How do we measure "success"? How do we measure fame, or wealth? How do we decide that great art must meet these criteria, and not those? We live in the time of a massive cultural paradigm shift, and the art-world is not exempt from it.

What's deeply wrong with the post-avant-garde is that its stance of opposition is ridiculous: the former maverick avant-garde of Modernism has been entirely bought out and co-opted by the mainstream of reproduction, repetitions, and commercial application of art as design: so there's nothing to rebel against, which makes the post-avant's stance of permanent rebellion appear silly in the extreme. The Mexican poet-critic Octavio Paz, Nobel laureate and renowned poet, had this to say about avant-gardism:

Many have commented on the disappearance of a true avant-garde and its replacement by avant-gardism. . . . I see this as a prolongation of experimentation usually leading further on from collage and montage into ever-increasing fragmentation and eventually into a degenerative disease which, adapting an already common usage, I call "disjunctivitis." The argument, used by some producers who, correctly locating the seats of available power in the academy, have ensconced themselves therein every bit as much as the establishment "mainstream," to the effect that the disruption of the common linguistic coin is part of a war against "late-capitalist" discourse is singularly inept. I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?
—Octavio Paz

The post-modern disruption of meaning, its denial of the possibility that art has any utility or meaning or social usefulness, is not in fact "post-" anything, but is the final flowering of the Modernist disruption and destruction of the the pre-Modernist established canons of meaning. But when nothing means anything anymore, when it's all a homogenized equal playing field, what is there to revolt against? Nothing. As Paz says, I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. That alone should tell us how silly the post-avant-garde truly is: nobody devours their products but themselves, in an endless hermetic cycle of theory and self-presentation, self-promotion and incestuous marketing. Nobody outside Poetryworld remotely cares. Paz was and is read by non-poets; the post-avant is not. That's also because Paz had something to say, that he wished to say, and said most articulately.

Perhaps Language Poetry, and it offspring-sibling post-avant poetry, didn’t start out as avant-gardism, but it has ended up there. When the LangPoets started out they had some fresh things to say, they viewed themselves as a necessary rebellion against the existing poetic establishment—already dominated by the academy, in turn dominated by the New Criticism and the post-Eliot, post-Pound varieties of Modernist poetry. But now the LangPoets and the post-avant have become the establishment, and are fighting hard to keep their well-fought turf. You cannot claim to be an outsider poet when you win all the academic professorships and literary awards. If the post-avant-garde began as a rebellion, it has nonetheless become ossified into the new establishment. Which is precisely what Paz is describing as avantgardism, because once you're the establishment you cannot realistically claim to be rebelling against the establishment.

Of course, and this is one of my strongest personal reasons for my lack of interest in the post-avant poetry world: One thing that most LangPo or post-avant poetry does not leave room for is silence. Rather, LangPo is a theology of grammar, of meaningless content, of style over substance, of surface over meaning: it lauds that, it applauds it, it rewards it. In this, it is indeed the ultimate flowering of the Modernist disjunctive and dislocative trends. I've said before, half-humorously, that postmodernism isn't really post- anything, since it includes "Modernism" in its very name; it's own rhetoric proves itself to be the end-result of Modernism, rather than anything Other that genuinely comes after Modernism. That other is coming into existence, all over the art-making world, in the works of dozens of artists—most of whom are still working below the radar of the art establishment, which cannot perceive or acknowledge them because they come from a genuinely different paradigm; a paradigm not of disjunction but of connection, not of heroic individualism but of communal justice, not of rebellion but of gathering-in.

A prophet's voice in the art-world wilderness was Albert Camus. We still haven't caught up to his insights, especially with regards to the art establishment or avant-garde. Camus once wrote:

A man's work is nothing but this slow trek to rediscover, through the detours of art, those two or three great and simple images in whose presence his heart first opened.
—Albert Camus

In whose presence his heart first opened: to me, this is one of the keys to the re-enchantment of art. The rediscovery of what we first loved about art, about viewing it, about making it. This is the living key to how we can still approach a work of art, or engage in the art-making process itself, and let it be a living process.

Whether or not it's the academy, art schools, or the commercial gallery and art-criticism scene that denatures and destroys that open-hearted first love, it's observable truth that most artists in those scenes have lost that first love. The definition of success, commercial or in terms of fame, is of an innovative elite, in that world: a world of individuals, of hero-artists, of rebellion against an establishment. The whole history of art, as it come to be taught, is a list of individual artists (almost all men) who rejected the past, innovated the future, and made changes in technique and/or in subject matter that demonstrated artistic "evolution." The titanic struggle of individual genius against the dead and deadening packs of establishment conformity. The rebellion of the genius-hero against the stupid masses. If you get the sense from this description that the history of art is taught from the same mindset as military history, you're not far off.

Camus and Paz both speak of the open-hearted encounter with the real as the source of art, and art-making. Both speak of art as a response to life: a dialogue, an engagement, a web of relationship and connection. As poet Muriel Rukeyser once wrote, The universe is made up of stories, not of atoms.

The Inner Compass 2: Another Vista

One of the most remarkable aspects of much contemporary poetry criticism is how remarkably parochial it is. Very few contemporary critics have a real sense of history, and even less of a sense of the rest of the world's poetry. I won't even mention how few of them have a sense of the history of the rest of the world's poetry. When you are a poet, like me, who has been strongly influenced by Asian poetry, and the history of Asian poetry, constantly finding new insights and fresh depths therein, finding like-minded poets and critics in the West can be an exercise doomed to frustration.

The truth is, of course, this dislocation and misunderstanding is something I've felt my entire life. I was, after all, a child who grew up in southern India before "returning home" to the USA, a country his parents were from, but of which he has no memory. I've always looked to India, and later, to Japan, not only for artistic inspiration, but to find out who I am. My inner compass has always pointed towards Hindu-Buddhist values. There are still times when Greco-Roman myths and philosophies, and the ideologies derived from them, can seem to me, as they seemed to me when I first encountered them in history and civics classes in public school, quaint and exotic. Edward Said defined Orientalism, in his book of that same name, as often prejudiced and outsider views of the East by the West, in which the mirror can be distorted by the history of political Imperialism and colonialism. I wonder sometimes if there is an equivalent reverse-exoticism operating in those from the East, a kind of Occidentalism?

This morning, I picked up and re-read part of Octavio Paz' book In Light of India. Paz was Mexico's greatest poet and critic of the past century; but he was also an internationalist, a world thinker, who had spent many years as Ambassador to India, and whose life, like mine, had been deeply affected by long encounters with the Other, in other cultures, and through travels. One aspect of American provincialism that I find parochial is that few Americans travel very far, or very often; and this is reflected in the parochialism in criticism. Far too few American poets and critics know even more than one language. Paz, on the other hand, traveled widely, learned from his travels, learned other languages, and brought all his experience into his poetry. Even his most deliberately Mexican writings cannot help but contain reflections of the rest of the world.

In a long discussion of poetry in ancient India, Paz points out several things that are shocking to the parochial Western mind, that serve to explode assumptions about the world. For example, he contrasts classical Indian Sanskrit poetry with that of the Renaissance, pointing out that one mood that is common to Renaissance poetry does not appear in Sanskrit poetry: melancholy.

In Indian poetry, on the other hand, there is a feeling that is rare in ours: luxuriousness, that moment in which the body, without losing its composure, seems to waver, enveloped by extreme pleasure, and falls into a delicious swoon. The poem becomes a naked body adorned with jewels, lying conquered. Luxuriousness is an effluvium that glows and vanishes. It is also an agent of metamorphosis: the male body, weakened by an excess of pleasure, twists into that of a woman; in turn, the female body, goaded by desire, leaps on top like a tiger. The transposition adds ambiguity to the erotic battle: Krishna seems at times like a maiden, and the graceful Parvati, in a flash of the eyes, turns into the terrifying Durga. (p. 153)

Eroticism in Indian art—eros itself, if you will—is often depicted as languorous, rather than conquering. Sexuality is not a war between the sexes, but a blurring of their boundaries. Role-reversals are not uncommon: the woman must ride on top, and be dominant. The rigid gender and sexual roles that have become reified by custom and religious dictates in the West are not present in this poetry.

The ambiguities of the erotic games that Kalidasa, Amaru, and other poets describe are not perversions, in the Freudian sense: pregenital games. And, unlike the Greco-Roman classics, homosexuality hardly ever appears in the Indian poetic tradition. Nor is there the notion of sin or the consciousness of the transgression of norms. This is the great difference from Western eroticism, which since the end of the eighteenth century has been largely concerned with infraction and violence. Bataille emphasizes that eroticism is essentially transgression: Hindu art proves him wrong. It is not a legal code but a fan: unfolding, refolding, unfolding again, displaying the whole range of pleasures. An art and a poetry that have never known sadism. (p. 154)

The eternal humanness of this Sanskrit poetry—it's durability, but also its location in the soma, the body, the sensual—brings into high relief, for me, why so many contemporary Western poetics seem like ephemeral fashions. Both the egoistic self-absorption of confessional lyric poetry, and the intellectual puzzle-boxes of language poetry, seem like bubbles on the surface of a long tradition—neither style destined to endure, neither topic or tone likely to be embraced forever by future poets. There are merits to both of these poetries, and things to learn from them; but neither of them will be the nature and root of poetry in the long run. In their distinct ways, they are both psychological and mental, with no strong connection to sensuality and corporeality and embodiment (I'm not ignoring that there are individual poems within both styles that are powerfully sensual) as part and parcel of the human experience.

The ancient Sanskrit poetry brings us back to the body. It also embraces by implication and interpretation the tantric awareness of the duality of personal energies, Shiva and Shakti, yin and yang, animus and anima, and in this aspect is deeply psychological as well as sensual and erotic. These are poetries of eros, while so much of Western poetry has become fascinated with and dominated by poetries of logos. Most Western poetics views Sanskrit poetry as exotic, and from another time, while poetries from contemporary poets that explore these domains of the flesh are usually labeled aberrant, transgressive, even pornographic. I do find it intriguing that most of the erotic poetry from contemporary Western poets that touches on the same topics and luxuriousness of Sanskrit poetry comes, now, from homoerotic poets. There is little overt homoeroticism in the Sanskrit poetry, but the poetry that comes closest to its tone and temperament nowadays in gay and lesbian erotic poetry. (One laments the loss to published literature of the magazine Yellow Silk, edited by Lily Pond, which was the beautiful and sensual exception.) There are several possible reasons why that might have come to be; foremost is the possibility that authors whose sexual differences from the normative values of the mainstream culture have made them targets of oppression rebel in every way possible, both to assert their own aliveness, but also as a form of tweaking the noses of those who insist upon more mainstream values.

I find the fashionability of contemporary poetic trends to be ephemeral rather than enduring precisely because they present themselves are perpetually avant-garde. They may have begun as resistance and rebellion, but now they have become established. It's very difficult to present one's group as continuing to be perpetually avant-garde when they have become the mainstream, or a dominant current at least. We cannot know what will endure, but we can make guesses when we see a style of poetry lose interest to the generations following that of its major creators. (In which instance, Romanticism has long outlasted Language Poetry, and well continue to do so.)

The necessity of following one's inner compass instead of the winds of fashion is not so that one's poems will endure for centuries, although that's not bad in itself; the necessity is because one cannot depend on fashion because fashion is ephemeral and fickle.

And the confidence in—the hope of—the appearance of a future reader, that twin soul who will save us from the injustices of the present, is a sentiment that runs through all poets and writers, both Eastern and Western:

Armed with their rules and precepts,
many condemn my verses.
I don't write for them,
but for that soul, twin to mine,
who will be born tomorrow.
Time is long and the world wide.
—Bhavabhuti (p. 160)

Does the Audience Matter? 2 (Further Notes)

My intention is to invite all of us to make a certain evaluation of why we artistically do what we artistically do. The results of such self-contemplation are bound to be surprising at times, but perhaps worthwhile.

It gets to hidden intentions, personal motivations, private agendas, things like that.

I found at a thrift store some weeks ago Abraham Maslow's book The Psychology of Science: A reconnaisance. This book is an examination of why, while some scientists are moved by the joys of adventure and discovery, many use science as a defense mechanism against uncertainty, error, and chaos, or as a means of controlling their surroundings. Maslow, in looking at a cross-section of the science world, finds the scientific method as it is ideally conceived to be less influential, in practice, than the nature of the human being who is doing the science. The way in which a scientist tackles a subject of inquiry—bit by bit, or grasping the whole; describing things as they are, or seeking to master and synethsize new knowslgde—these are the results of personality, and of personal values that have been largely unexamined and underestimated. Maslow specifically challenges the dominant mechanistic mindset that governs the definition of problems and methodologies concerned with human personality and behavior, and finds them inadequate to explain the whole person.

At that same thrift store, I also found a festschrift on Octavio Paz. Skimming, I come away with these quotations about how and why poets order the universe with words.

Octavio Paz: There are two silences: one, before speech, is an attempt at meaning; another, after speech, is the knowledge that the only thing worth saying cannot be said. Buddha said everything which it is possible to say with words: the errors and achievements of reason, the truth and lies of the senses, the illumination and void of the instant, the freedom and slavery of nihilism. Words filled with reasons that cancel themselves and of sensations that consume each other. But his silence says something different. . . .

Language is the kingdom of dialectics which ceaselessly destroys itself and is reborn only to die. If Buddha's silence were the expression of this relativism, it would not be silence, but word. This isn't so: with his silence, movement, operation, dialectics, word, all cease. At the same time, it is neither the negation of dialectics nor of movement: Buddha's silence is the resolution of language. We come out of silence and return to it; to the word that has stopped being word.

I suspect that poets get too enraptured with their own voices, the words, their tools, their language, and forget about, or deliberately ignore, this necessary silence. I am reminded of cocktail parties in which people keep chattering about nothing, because moments of silence are perceived as being awkward or painful. I'm very comfortable with silence; I recognize this is not a common attribute of citizens in most urban settings. I am drawn to writing nature poetry in part because of the silence: when I'm out there in the wilds, or driving along the seacoast, I can go for hours and days without saying anything to anyone. It's out of those silent times that poems arise, for me. I often think of Yeats' poem Long-Legged Fly in this context.

What's intriguing to me, as Maslow explicitly and Paz implicitly agree, is how scientific rationality is often used as a shield against fears of the unknown, the uncertain, the mysterious, the unconscious, and the personally chaotic. I have more than once challenged certain formalist poets of my acquaintance to address this issue about their own motivations, and rarely received an answer.

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Personal ego can be transcended, in moments, in enlightenment, in satori—but not permanently and for all times thereafter. Ironically, it egoistic to think so. Spiritual materialism and spiritual arrogance lead us to believe that once we're enlightened, we're done: you've reached you goal, here's the brass ring, you're done. I've certainly made my mistakes on these fronts, and no doubt will again. The truth is: after you're done, you go on as before. Chop wood, carry water. After the ecstasy, the laundry.

I don't think ego is meant to be transcended. It is after all the necessary interface between presonality and world: rather like the computer's screen, a similar kind of interface between self and world. We need an ego, or we couldn't function. The problem is, personality-ego tends to get puffed up and overly-inflated. The goal is integrate it, keep it in balance, keep it small, reduce it: keep it in perspective. Much of the back-biting among poets is all about puffed-up egos colliding, and getting pricked. Not that poets are unique in this matter, not at all. Frankly, I see it mostly as insecurity and a lack of self-esteem, which everybody just needs to grow up and get over. (Do I exclude myself from any such formulation? Never.) Stupidity makes me impatient, and impatience is of course a terrible vice, an addiction I am working to overcome.

I am actually not antagonistic to ego. My position is more in that of the honorable tradition of loyal dissent, in which faults are examined in order that the overall system might be improved.

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I don't believe that it's egotistical or bad to write with an audience in mind, to tailor an eesay or poem towards an intended audience: but I do believe it's beside the point, even irrelevant. I think about the audience when I'm editing or rewriting, but not when I'm writing. If I think too much about the the audience when I write, it can stifle the act of writing itself. The internal editor can be a block rather than an assist, if called upon too soon. This has all been said before, of course.

What I don't believe is that writing for an audience makes any difference to what I write. Otherwise, one can end up compartmentalizing one's writing into "public" and "private" bins. Lots of writers do do that, it's true. But after a writer is dead? It all tends to come out, anyway. Especially in the case of any writer who develops anything like a sizable public following; the biographers will dig, even into the zones of discomfort and shame.

I firmly believe, based on experience, that control is an illusion—especially in the long haul. Attempts to control the world, and especially attempts to control what the world thinks about oneself, are doomed to failure, simply because people can be contrary and stubborn, and as ample evidence will always show, are not likely to share one's own opinion. All one can really address is what is in the present moment: what I'm writing now; my craft; my subject matter; my artistic desire. the eros of creation. You can't control what other people think of you, or your writing. All you can control is your own response to their opinions. That's a basic fact of life, in relationship with other sentient beings.

Where is the line between making oneself into a better writer, and pandering to fashion in order to get published? I think it's preferable to pursue becoming a better writer, and not to pander. Does this then lead to becoming the stereotype of the starving artist, laboring in solitary obscurity? No, I think that's irrelevant, too: it's a romantic delusion, a cultural stereotype. It's an archetype I actively repudiate. (I ain't starvin'.)

The point is, I think the true balance-point lies in writing what you want to write, following your muse (speaking of literary stereotypes), and not dwelling on the outcome.

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We also write to discover: I have heard it expressed by writers, "I write to know what it is I'm thinking about." We discover our own processes, through which we also discover the world.

We also write to experience, through the process of writing, some connection with the archetypes that transcend our oridnary selves.

If there were no numinous, liminal experience of discovery in writing, in music, in making art—then I wouldn't bother doing any of those things. The numinous is very real to me. It lies at the root of everything I do, and I can say with literal truth that I have written poems that were nothing more than records of visionary experiences.

Which is why I say that poetry is more than merely communication. Of course it is communication, but it is so much more than only that.