Poetics in a New Key: Interviews and Essays

book.

Preface

In the 1970s, when I was teaching at the University of Maryland at College Park, I had an excellent PhD student from the Philippines named Isagani Cruz. In those days, when the New Criticism was at its height, Cruz wrote his thesis on the criticism of Cleanth Brooks, especially in relation to T. S. Eliot. But upon his return to Manila in 1976, Cruz began to carve an amazing career as educator, writer (both in English and Tagalog), and cultural leader. He has done much to shape what is a new postcolonial Filipino literary consciousness.

What serendipity, then, to receive a letter from one of Cruz’s former students, a young professor and editor of the De La Salle University Press named David Jonathan Y. Bayot. David had edited the festschrift in honor of Cruz published in 2010, to which I contributed an essay on Samuel Beckett’s poetry. He now suggested he would like to publish a selection of my interviews, together with some relevant essays not available in book form. A whole book of interviews? I was at once honored and mystified. Yes, over the years I had been interviewed a number of times for various journals and online programs, but I considered the transcripts of these interviews little more than afterthoughts to my real work. Then, too, with rare exceptions, I treated these interviews casually, responding, whether orally or in writing, without much preparation. Indeed, I regarded them largely as conversations, many of them with friends and colleagues, in which I had the opportunity to air certain issues and debate the role of various poetic movements and poets, as well as the larger relationship of poetry to culture. Once completed and published, I largely forgot about them.

Imagine my surprise, then, when David, an indefatigable scholar, sent me a long list of interviews and essays he had unearthed by means of diligent sleuthing on the Internet. Rereading the texts from which David and I made our selection, I found myself once again absorbed in the discussion and pleased to find that, despite certain gradual and inevitable changes in outlook, the interviews and essays, occasional and fugitive pieces though they are, have a common thread.

In his own commentary (see Afterword), David places me, broadly speaking, in the aesthetic camp as opposed to the sociopolitical one that was very much his own when he began his career. He talks about me as a formalist, but, as he well knows, my formalism has a particular historical and evaluative cast. It is very important to me to place individual works and authors in their larger context—a context that transcends Anglo-American paradigms as my studies of French and German, Russian and Brazilian poetry hopefully show. In assessing placement, I put great emphasis on what I take to be the value, or lack thereof, of the works in question. In most academic circles today, as I know only too well, the very reference to value is taboo: one accepts what a given poet or movement has done as emblematic of a particular cultural, racial, ethnic, or gender complex—a complex one wants to define—and hence it really doesn’t matter whether the exemplar in question is an especially good poem. What, for that matter, is good anyway?

Yet, as I have often noted, we all make value judgments, if not of the poetic texts themselves, then in our choices of the theorists we cite or cultural paradigms we apply to the work. As Agamben says …, as Badiou notes: these stock phrases immediately impose particular values. Again, the very choice of subject is always already a value judgment.

For better or worse, in any case, I have increasingly come to drop the as … clause and rely on my own judgment, informed, as I hope that judgment is, by years of reading and studying poetry. Then, too, I have come to realize that each of us has his or her own preconceptions and predilections—preconceptions often highly personal, and culturally as well as biographically grounded. I myself, for example, have never shared my colleagues’ admiration for Charles Olson; for me he fails on two counts: his language does not have the density I look for in poetry, and his rhetoric is insistently and overtly masculinist in ways I find irritating. Conversely, I find that, however questionable the late politics of Gertrude Stein (currently a hotly debated topic in literary and art circles), the unique and revolutionary language construction of such volumes as Geography and Plays—construction more revelatory at each reading—places her squarely at the center of my own personal poetic canon.

But of course one cannot draw a hard and fast line between the aesthetic and the cultural. As someone whose roots are in the Central European world of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, an empire abruptly destroyed in World War I, I learned at a young age to adopt an ironic posture—to laugh at one’s own situation so as to avoid tears. Consequently, I put great stock in a sense of humor. Gertrude Stein is wonderfully funny—her portraits of Apollinaire or Duchamp or Edith Sitwell—are full of comic and malicious touches—whereas Olson is, for my taste, a bit too serious—so given to what D. H. Lawrence, writing about some of Whitman’s more bombastic poems, called chug chug chug. Then again—and this is why I am so drawn to the conversational mode of the interview—I am quite willing to be persuaded that I have been wrong. Make a good case for Olson—as Robert von Hallberg does in his important study of this poet—and I am quite willing to back down—at least to a point. And here again, a sense of humor, or at least of the absurd, may be necessary. I will always treasure the exchange I had with John Cage about Jackson Mac Low. I confided in Cage that I had a hard time appreciating some of Mac Low’s long writing-through sequences. Forget about the quality, Cage responded, and think of the quantity. Over the years, I have treasured that advice.

My great subject, to which the bulk of these interviews testify, has been the avant-garde, both of the early twentieth century and its contemporary—now 21st century—counterpart. Recently, the venerable Poetry magazine asked me to contribute to a roundtable to be published in the Spring 2013 issue commemorating the centennial of Ezra Pound’s ground-breaking piece A Few Don’ts, published in Poetry in 1913. Perhaps my own version of Pound’s manifesto, adapted here from the Poetry selection, will set the stage for the spirit in which the interviews and essays that follow were written.

My Few Don’ts

—Use no superfluous word, no adjective which does not reveal something.

—Don’t use such an expression as "dim lands of peace." It dulls the image.

—Don’t be viewy—leave that to the writers of pretty little philosophical essays.

—Ezra Pound, 1913

—Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial, and don’t be proud. The slightest loss of attention leads to death.

—Frank O’Hara, 1964

—No more superiority of the interiority of that unnatural trinity—you, me, we—our teeth touch only our tongues.

—Vanessa Place, 2012

Plus ça change … Frank O’Hara’s admonition Don’t be bored, don’t be lazy, don’t be trivial echoes Ezra Pound’s prescriptions about accuracy and precision: don’t waste the reader’s time by adding to the storehouse of clichés (e.g., "dim lands of peace) or producing pretty little philosophical essays. Our teeth, after all, touch only our tongues."

The slightest loss of attention leads to death. O’Hara’s aphorism is little honored these days when any and all demands upon poetry as an art form are dismissed as elitist, undemocratic, and just plain cranky. To declare oneself a poet is to be a poet! Basta! Who’s to say otherwise, to spoil the party? Here again I turn to Pound:

The mastery of any art is the work of a lifetime. I should not discriminate between the amateur and the professional. Or rather I should discriminate quite often in favor of the amateur, but I should discriminate between the amateur and the expert. It is certain that the present chaos will endure until the Art of poetry has been preached down the amateur gullet, until there is such a general understanding of the fact that poetry is an art not a pastime.

And Pound adds, If a certain thing was said once for all in Atlantis or Arcadia, in 450 Before Christ or in 1290 after, it is not for us moderns to go saying it over, or to go obscuring the memory of the dead by saying the same thing with less skill and less conviction.

Or so common sense would tell us. In To Hell With It, O’Hara declares:

(How I hate subject matter! melancholy,

intruding on the vigorous heart,

the soul telling itself

you haven’t suffered enough ((Hyalomiel))

and all things that don’t change,

photographs,

monuments,

memories of Bunny and Gregory and me

in costume

The word Hyalomiel inside those double parentheses above, is the name of a French vaginal lubricant, a kind of miel (honey). So much for the cry of the suffering soul and for an elevated subject matter. When O’Hara says Don’t be proud, he means, don’t be so self-important. Or, in Vanessa Place’s formulation: "No more death without dying—immediately."

For the centennial of 1913, that annus mirabilis for avant-garde poetry that gave us Georg Trakl’s Erste Gedichte, Apollinaire’s Alcools, Blaise Cendrars’s La Prose due Transsibérien, and Anna Akhmatova’s Chetki (The Rosary)—I have extrapolated a few further Don’ts—don’ts squarely in the Pound tradition but also, I hope, apropos in 2013.

1.Don’t assume that free verse, now the default mode of poetry is equivalent to the mere practice of lineation. Greeting cards, advertising copy, political mantras: these are lineated too. Don’t imagine a thing will ‘go’ in verse just because it’s too dull to go in prose (Pound). Conversely, if you use traditional poetic devices like rhyme, remember that A rhyme must have in it some slight element of surprise if it is to give pleasure (Pound). Or, in the words of poet-sculptor Carl Andre, Verse should have that quality of surprise which endows familiar things with strangeness and makes the strange familiar. A tension between irregularity and habit.

2.Don’t take yourself so seriously. In the age of social networks, of endless information and misinformation, sensitivity and the true voice of feeling have become the most available of commodities. Remember that, as Wallace Stevens put it, Life is a bitter aspic. We are not / At the center of a diamond.

3.As a corollary of #2, don’t underestimate the importance of a sense of humor, of irony. Remember that satire, parody, mock-epic, and burlesque are hardly inferior forms of poetry. Rather than worshipping at the shrine of the Poet with a capital P (e.g., Heidegger’s Hölderlin), let us reread Swift and Pope. The comic Byron of Don Juan, for that matter, was surely as masterful a poet as the very serious Shelley of Prometheus Unbound.

4.Don’t play the victim card, now the staple of much of what passes for poetry. Where, after all, are those virtuous beings, those sages who stand outside the capitalist system, refusing to accept any of its goodies? Are you and I really not complicit? The current opposition of the 99% (us!) to the 1% (them!) may be a great slogan for political action but it doesn’t make for a challenging poetry, shutting, as it does, the door on defamiliarization and on tough-minded thinking. Don’t think, we read in a Gertrude Stein play of 1921, a shot tower means war, it only means shot guns, or shooting. Or in Place’s words, No more politics put politically: let the thing be concretely.

5.Don’t forget that, whether consciously or unconsciously, all poems are written with an eye (and ear) to earlier poetry and that to write poetry at all, one must first read a lot of it. And of course one reads poetry and writes about it in the light of theory—but it should, to my mind, be literary theory. So I would say put down thy Agamben and pick up Eric Auerbach’s Mimesis, and, turning to poetry itself, pick up thy Auden, thy Ashbery, thy Rae Armantrout. Put down thy Badiou and read Beckett, Bernhard, Bachmann, Christian Bök. Put down the latest Žižek (at this writing, Less than Nothing: Hegel and the Shadow of Dialectical Materialism, 2012) and read Chaucer through the lens of Caroline Bergvall’s Muddle English, Charles Peirce through the lens of Susan Howe’s Pierce Arrow and That This, and Goethe’s Erlkönig side by side with Charles Bernstein’s Elf King.

Translation, adaptation, citation, comparison, re-creation: to my mind, Pound’s A Few Don’ts is still the best road map we have for the understanding of how poetry works. Even if ours is, as Vanessa Place and Craig Dworkin have argued, a new non-retinal poetry, it remains just as true as it was for the O’Hara of the early 1960s that the slightest loss of attention leads to death.

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

Marjorie Perloff

Pacific Palisades, California

December 2013

Part I: The Critic

1

Becoming a Critic: An Academic Memoir

Marjorie Perloff

I came to the study of poetry relatively late in my career. As an undergraduate, I was, like most students, much more interested in fiction than in poetry; my favorite novels were the big ones of the nineteenth century by Balzac and Flaubert, Tolstoy and Dostoyevsky, but I was also keen on Modernism and wrote my undergraduate honors thesis on James Joyce and The Stream-of-Consciousness Novel, followed by an M.A. thesis on Privileged Moments in Proust and Virginia Woolf. It was only in my first year of graduate school at the Catholic University of America in Washington, DC, that I began to discover the pleasures and challenges of poetry. Three amazing professors—James Hafley, Craig La Drière, and Giovanni Giovannini—taught me basically HOW TO READ. They, in turn, had been influenced by an extraordinary body of criticism then available—not only to specialists but to the larger literary public.

The fifties and early sixties are regarded today as the heyday of the New Criticism—a term that has become a dirty word, signifying the narrow or close reading of autonomous poems while ignoring their political and cultural significance, their treatment of race, ethnicity, and gender. It is true that most (though not all) of the poems discussed by the so-called New Critics were by white men and that some of these critics were writing from a conservative Christian perspective: Cleanth Brooks, for example, read T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land as exhibiting the central Christian paradox that life without faith in God is really a form of death and that conversely death can be life-giving.¹ Again, Brooks and his colleague Robert Penn Warren—the two wrote the key textbook of the period, Understanding Poetry²—tended to equate poetry with metaphor: they especially admired the lyric of the Metaphysical poets—say, John Donne’s A Valediction forbidding Mourning, which makes an extended comparison between two lovers who must be briefly separated and twin compasses that cannot be severed even as the outer leg (male) goes around the circle, bending away from its (female) partner.

But there were other studies, more historical than merely formal, that we read and that shaped our thinking in the late 1950s. The first I want to talk about here is W. K. Wimsatt’s The Verbal Icon: Studies in the Meaning of Poetry, which was completed in 1953, the year I graduated from college.³ The first essay in this collection, written together with Monroe Beardsley, was called The Intentional Fallacy, and I still think it is basically correct. The fallacy in question is the belief that we can judge an author’s work by his or her stated intention. It is, of course, always useful to learn what the author was trying to do, but, as Wimsatt argues, the design or intention of the author is neither available nor desirable as a standard for judging the success of a work of literary art (Verbal Icon 3). The word success here implies that there is such a thing as literary value, that there are better poems and worse poems—a very unfashionable view today but one which, in fact, we all espouse by our choices of what to read, teach, etc. And we might also note that long before Roland Barthes and Michel Foucault talked about the death of the author, Wimsatt and his colleagues were insisting that authors say all kinds of things to explain or account for their work—and yet that interpretation and evaluation must finally rely on the text