Review of: Laura Moriarty, Ultravioleta. Berkeley: Atelos, 2006; Jocelyn
Saidenberg, Negativity. Berkeley: Atelos, 2006; Juliana Spahr, The
Transformation. Berkeley: Atelos, 2007.
- Disturbed by the mid-century capitalistic imperative that Americans make a living,
and unsatisfied with the Soviet Union's alternative of valorizing communal labor, Hannah
Arendt seeks in the human condition some other idea of freedom. She is drawn to the
ancient Greek
polis model of a public space accessible exclusively to free male citizens
liberated from the bonds of household labor and the work of crafting material goods. There
men freely engaged in activities possessing virtú, or a liberating
virtuosity
and improvisational subtlety not unlike that of a musical performance. For Arendt,
politics, speech, and music "do not pursue an end (are ateleis) and leave no work
behind (no par' autas erga), but exhaust their full meaning in the performance
itself." The freest and most political action in this schema is that which expends
itself in the moment and place of its enactment, where "the performance is the work"
(206). Arendt especially struggles to pinpoint where poetry lies in her tripartite
schemata
of work, labor, and action. She contends that "a poem is less a thing than any
other work
of art; yet even a poem, no matter how long it existed as a living spoken word in the
recollection of the bard and those who listened to him, will eventually be 'made,' that is,
written down and transformed into a tangible thing among things" (170). An odd predicament,
indeed. Poetry does not belong to this world, nor can it found a polis. Since its
material is language, it closely resembles Arendt's esteemed category of thought; but
because words must be put to paper, poetry is not properly atelic. Thus, she judges it to
be an impotent form: it cannot hope to found a new form of politicized action and freedom,
and it may not even be the stuff of an intellectual performance.
- I do not know whether Lyn Hejinian and Travis Ortiz had The Human
Condition in mind when they named their new publishing venture a decade ago.
Yet their press, Atelos, implicitly challenges Arendt's--and many
others'--misunderstanding of poetry's relationship to politics. Since its first
publication (Jean Day's The Literal World, 1998), all of the press's
books have included a clear mission statement: "Atelos was founded in 1995 as a
project of Hip's Road, devoted to publishing, under the sign of poetry, writing which
challenges the conventional definitions of poetry, since such definitions have tended
to isolate it from intellectual life, arrest its development, and curtail its
impact." The press sets out to correct commonplace contemporary misunderstandings of
poetry (as Romantic, self-contained, removed from politics, or unable to create new
communities), and it also takes on those respectful but skeptical views of poetry
such as Arendt's. Atelos does have an end, a telos, since the publishers
have announced that the list will include only fifty titles, a sort of literary
republic or poetic polity mirroring the constitution of the actual States. Atelos
resignifies not only how we understand "poetry" as a literary genre but also how we
understand the virtuosity of poetic performance. The work need not disappear with
the performance for it to have political virtú. Atelos Press reminds
us that quite the opposite is true.
- In the current climate of globalized capitalism, it's impossible to
romanticize, as Arendt had, a revolutionary space apart for politics or for poetry.
We cannot naïvely want a genuinely atelic performativity. Art's political
performance now depends on manufacturing a product whose very materiality exists in a
critical and conflicted relationship with dominant economic and political logics.
Atelos has produced books that double as aesthetic objects and commodities.
All of the books have the same distinctive dimensions (7.9 x 5.3 inches), with a
slender band wrapping around the cover and containing the title's number. While the
objects are branded, what's between the recognizable covers varies greatly--perhaps
too much so for some readers' tastes. In small press publications, content, like the
covers, is usually branded. Not only does the Atelos catalogue contain a miscellany of
authors not always thought to "belong" to the same poetic "tradition" or "school" or
even "generation," but Atelos projects often mark a departure from the authors' own
previous ventures. Rae Armantrout's recourse to a form resembling memoir in
True (1998), Barrett Watten's documentary poetic prose in Bad
History (1998), and Fanny Howe's inclusion of a CD of a dramatic performance
of her poem Tis of Thee (2003) are exemplary cases in point. The Atelos
list has included work by younger poets--sometimes their first books (like Lohren
Green's Poetical Dictionary: Abridged, 2003) and sometimes not (like
Rodrigo Toscano's Platform, 2003)--that offer exciting evidence of the
emergence and strengthening of newer generations of U.S. poetries that are at once
lyrical and experimental, literary and political, philosophical and
documentary/citational.
- At the time of this writing, the Atelos catalogue contains twenty-seven
titles. The six most recent are: Taylor Brady's Occupational Treatment
(2006), Ed Roberson's City Eclogue (2006), Tom Mandel's To the
Cognoscenti (2007), Jocelyn Saidenberg's Negativity (2006), Laura
Moriarty's Ultravioleta (2006), and Juliana Spahr's The
Transformation (2007). Each continues Hejinian and Ortiz's mission and
deserves review in its own right. I concentrate my remarks on the last three. These
are written by women now based in northern California, the original home of
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr are well-known
and respected as important younger writers. All are concerned with poetry's ability
to pursue new political horizons, and each of their volumes plays with the relation
between syntax and the poetic line. Unlike their predecessors' New Sentence, though,
these women are differently invested in what Ron Silliman denounces as conventional
syntax's "syllogistic leap, or its integration above the level of the sentence, to
create a fully referential tale" (79). Referentiality, he argues, is capitalism's
chief ideological vehicle. If poetry reproduces the imperative that sentences
combine to make sensible narratives, or if it commits the equally cardinal sin of a
lyric association of poetic word with spoken parole rather than with written
langue, the genre would be incapable of producing a resistant politics.
Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr may not opt for lyric, but their abandonment of
earlier vanguardists' suspicion of narrative still prompts questions. What's so
generically distinctive about poetry or its "intellectual life" if it produces works
locked into market and branding logics, and cannot distinguish
itself from other written forms? Can contemporary poetry really deliver virtuoso
political and intellectual performances?
- Of the three titles, Jocelyn Saidenberg's Negativity most
closely resembles what nearly all readers would recognize as contemporary poetry.
Its eight integral sections feature longer pieces constituted of segments, sometimes with
line breaks (but more often not) and written in the familiar (even comfortably so) style of
experimental poetry--what Spahr's book repeatedly describes as "writing that uses
fragmentation, quotation, disruption, disjunction, agrammatical syntax, and so on" (e.g. 59,
61, 62, 63, 64, 78, 80, 155). As the director of San Francisco's Small Press Traffic
Literary Arts Center and a participant in the Bay Area's queer arts community, Saidenberg is
explicitly invested in the politicized relationship between art and community. From her
opening Dante-esque walk through a dusky wood ("Dusky, or Destruction as a Cause of
Becoming"), Saidenberg constructs a shadowy, infernal world inextricably linked to her
American one. "In This Country" turns on its head the Bush administration's recapitulation
of Samuel Huntington's "theory" of civilization versus barbarism and its jingoistic rhetoric
of being "with us" or "against us": "In this country I'm in two places at once, with you and
with you" (51). This voice is a representative of a queer nation: "In this country, we take
our identity from how it feels when we come. When we come we are only that" (49).
Here sex and pleasure do not found an idyllic queer community; rather, they entail a negotiation
of homophobic ideologies, narratives, and realities. For example, in "Not Enough Poison"
Saidenberg's narrator performs cunnilingus on her partner's "gash." Citing a misogynistic
slur, the poem tries to resignify the negative reference as "not separating, but unifying
the abrasion to all the impure, non-separated." This is not an utterly naïve or
utopist attempt to remedy social ills with a verbal patina. Orgasm, that
experience of supposed transcendental unification, is disturbingly represented as an
"unmending, secreting, and discharging, leaking out in glops and gummy pus. Blending into
the boundaries, coterminous sore of the visible, not presentable superannuated surface of
self" (38). The narrator's subjective agency is reduced to a mere fetish's objectivity.
"So I as shoes that have been sniffed and bitten and kissed hundreds of times" (44).
Devastating scenes like this recur in Negativity. They form a perverse wall
(one section is even titled "Immure") into which we run headlong. As Saidenberg warns, "let
no gate deceive you by its width" (31). Whether that gate is understood to refer to a
general promise of freedom from a subjectivating order or to the specific promise of erotic
freedom that comes through vaginal or anal gateways, freedom always has a price: of pain,
fear, even death. By linking radical pessimism to radical critique, Saidenberg tries to do
for poetry what Kathy Acker or Reinaldo Arenas had done for fiction. As we might
expect
from a poetic resistance reminiscent of Acker's inveighing against Reagan's
murderous silence
about HIV/AIDS or Arenas's maniacal tirades against Castro's internment of Cuban
homosexuals, the political effectuality of Saidenberg's narratival lyric risks being
confined to that negative milieu it references and from which it cannot wholly extricate
itself.
- Laura Moriarty succeeds a bit more in that extrication; ironically, that is
due to the fact that her Atelos volume is generically closer to postmodernist science
fiction than to poetry. The central conceit of Ultravioleta is
allegorical: books function as a mode of transport. Characters traverse space by
vehicles
made of paper, driven by the activities of reading and writing. The book we hold in
our hands is itself a double for the fictive craft giving the volume its title. Moriarty's
narrative masquerades as epic, even including a feast reminiscent of Beowulf . .
. but the adventure circles about on itself and the plot literally goes nowhere. In its
generic failures as science fiction or epic, though, Ultravioleta (the book)
ironically succeeds. Moriarty challenges what Samuel R. Delany describes as the "linear,
systematic, more or less rational, more or less negotiable" conventional narrative. Ultravioleta is presented as a critical apparatus
because it takes varieties of sources and reconnects them in less "rational" and
"systematic" ways, and thus imbues its own internal "relations" with a "problematic status"
(Delany 416).
- Because of her fantasy relies on allegory, Moriarty--like
Spenser--walks a thin line between heavy-handed political moralism and ethical
reflection. At times, her characters' distrust of "the government" and the media
working in its service and infilitrating their homes reads as a bit too referential
to post-9/11 America. But the poet deploys poetry and sci-fi's shared device of the
imagination to let this pseudo-epic act more virtuously. Referred to simply as "the
I," the fictive Martians embody an imperialist force existing somewhere between
shadow and body, absence and presence, as they feed on human thoughts. Not reducible
to an oppressive government and symbiotically linked to their hosts, the "I" is a
subjectivating part of humanity that must be critically understood. With these alien
figures, Ultravioleta consciously reclaims Jack Spicer's poetic from
Silliman and the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets so as to rethink their rejection
of referential and lyric poetry. Her fantastic scenario echoes Spicer's warning to
other poets to "try to keep as much of yourself as possible out of the poem" (Spicer
8), and instead to let in the "Martians" and "ghosts" to move around the "furniture"
and "obstructions" of words, ideologies, history, and even personhood (29,
30). In her compelling "narrative" about the impossibility of narrative, in her
characters' allegorical struggle with being subjected to and occupied by a sense of
personhood that reduplicates the governmental strategies now responsible for
imperialistically occupying foreign lands, Moriarty is also implicitly criticizing
the naïveté underlying the unexamined ideas of resistance promulgated by
Spicer and the experimental poets he influenced. For Moriarty, opening a political
space for
poetry cannot rely on a New Sentence concerned primarily with language's structure,
nor can subjectivity be set aside so that language itself might speak.
- The "I" plaguing Ultravioleta is also the subject of the
struggle of Juliana Spahr's The Transformation. Even more narrative than
Saidenberg's and Moriarty's texts, The Transformation documents "a barely
truthful story of the years 1997-2001" in Spahr's relationship with her partners Bill Luoma
and Charles Weigl (217). Dispensing with the memoir's conventional first-person
narration,
Spahr opts to tell her story in the third-person plural. The threesome, then,
collectively
narrate their move from graduate school at SUNY Buffalo's Poetics department to Spahr's
first tenure-track job at the University of Hawaii to their move to partial employment in
New York City, just prior to the 9/11 bombings. The style of The
Transformation performs the political nature of our struggle with communication's
categorical imperative. Unlike a deconstructionist, Spahr is nostalgic for, rather than
skeptical of, transparent communication and referentiality. Poetry's anti-narrative
basis--its ability
to refigure relations and to sustain aporetic conditions--is presented by Spahr as the best,
if imperfect, means of communicating otherwise inexplicable differences.
- Against the current trend to see violence in categorization and
identitarian logics, The Transformation exhibits a nostalgia for
some acceptable way to talk about identity and community. Spahr reveals the problem
of defining who "they" are as ubiquitous in this age of Homeland Security. "So it
was a time of troubled and pressured pronouns" (205). What happens when we identify
not under the banner of an "us" (or the U.S.)
but as a "they"? "They agreed to falter over pronouns. They agreed to let them undo
their speech and language. They pressed themselves upon them and impinged upon them
and were impinged upon in ways that were not in their control" (206). This
volunteering to let one's self be undone--not dissimilar to Judith Butler's notion of
precarious life--leads Spahr's figures to a condition in which "they" come to terms
with their writing bodies' extension of their political environments. The
Transformation tries to embrace all forms of alterity that condition us and
estrange us from ourselves. Only then can we commune with those "theys" with whom
we're not supposed to sympathize. "Pumped through their lungs grief for all of them
killed by the military that currently occupied the continent, the thems they knew to
be near them and the thems they knew not to be near them, because to not grieve meant
that their humanity was at risk" (213). Here, the historical referentiality of
Spahr's memoir generates a rather unpoetic moralism and a suspicious longing for the
security of an identifiable world we might know and narrate in full. But this
postlapsarian melancholic expression may be forgiven if we concentrate on the
theoretical and ethical conclusion of Spahr's work: in the end, writing is an
ecological exercise. It affirms inclusive fields of connection, so poetry
can manufacture "a catalogue of vulnerability" that lets her memoirs' subjects, and
by extension the author and her readers, "begin the process of claiming their
being human" (Spahr 214). Even while longing for a humanist past, complete with its
identitarian fictions, The Transformation--much like
Negativity and Ultravioleta--demonstrates an awareness that
the very conditions that we use to signify the human and to understand our selves
have changed.
- Unlike their L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E forebears, Saidenberg,
Moriarty, and Spahr insist that language is referential, that the sentence be
combined syllogistically into narrative units, and even that the poetic personhood
be recuperated. These decisions open their work, and Atelos, to some criticism. When a press defines its genre so vaguely as to include prose poems,
memoir, and science fiction on its list, does the very term "poetry" lose meaning
altogether? Should experimental writers and publishers provide a more coherent
political and intellectual program today? Depending on their tastes, different
audiences will arrive at different conclusions. Many, I suspect, will be pleased by
the individual books but dissatisfied with what the list as a whole suggests about
the state and the coherence of contemporary American poetry. After all, like Spahr's
figures, many readers long for the security provided by identity, even an avant-garde
one. An oppositional identitarian attitude is often mistaken for a resistive
politics and for a sign that poetry is doing its work.
- However, these titles might also indicate that contemporary poetry
publishing stands to gain much by avoiding a return
to vanguardism's combatative and territorial posturing. Read together, the
volumes by Saidenberg, Moriarty, and Spahr offer a "catalogue" (as Spahr would
describe it) of how we are shaped, affected, and conditioned by forces to which we
must remain vulnerable--including language itself. These ethical lessons have
enduring political pertinence beyond the present moment. Writing "under the
sign of poetry," as Atelos' mission statement phrases it, are performances that
afford readers opportunities to critique the imperatives of
identification and categorization constituting our social, cultural, and political
lives. Such relations affect how we see both subjectivity and personhood. In this way, Atelos and its
authors continue the project with which Gertrude Stein charged her art over
three-quarters of a century ago. "The composition is the thing seen by every one
living in the living they are doing, they are the composing of the composition that
at the time they are living is the composition of the time in which they are living.
It is that that makes living a thing they are doing" (Stein 516). The poetic page
connects us anew with the world, and the selves we thought we knew. Some reference
is necessary, then, so that we might move forward. It is reckless to
insist on a poetic "us" absolutely divorced from a
political "them." Literature need not disavow narrative; instead, it can resignify
narrative as a device for constructing other forms of commonality and for beginning
the work of redefining personhood and humanity. We, the readers, are extensions of
the poem; ultimately, that is the only factor that makes aesthetic work atelic.
It's up to us to continue its performance, so that life
itself might be composed a bit more poetically. To paraphrase Stein, politics begins
only in our beginning again the work our poets have already begun.
Department of English
State University of New York, Albany
ekeenaghan@albany.edu
COPYRIGHT (c) 2007 BY Eric Keenaghan.
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Works Cited
Arendt, Hannah. The Human Condition. 1958. 2nd ed. Chicago: U of
Chicago P, 1998.
Delany, Samuel R. "Some Remarks on Narrative and Technology; or: Poetry and
Truth." 1995. Shorter Views: Queer Thoughts and the Politics of the Paraliterary.
Hanover: Wesleyan UP, 1999. 408-30.
Silliman, Ron. The New Sentence. New York: Roof, 2003.
Spicer, Jack. "Dictation and 'A Textbook of Poetry.'" 1965. The House that
Jack
Built: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer. Ed. Peter Gizzi. Hanover: Wesleyan
UP, 1998. 1-48.
Stein, Gertrude. "Composition as Explanation." 1926.
Selected Writings of Gertrude Stein. Ed. Carl Van Vechten. New York: Vintage,
1990. 511-23.
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