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On Poetic Curiosity
*David Caplan <16.1bios.html#caplan.bio> *
/ Ohio Wesleyan University/
dmcaplan@owu.edu
© <#copyright> 2005 David Caplan.
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A response to Lori Emerson, Demystifying the Digital, Re-animating
the Book: A Digital Poetics <16.1emerson.html>
1. As I write this response on my office computer, three uneven
stacks of books threaten to tumble across my desk. On top of the
piles perch Jack Spicer's The Collected Books (for a conference
talk that needs expansion), an edition of Shakespeare's Sonnets
(which I just finished teaching), and my MLA ballot (due soon). My
computer runs Windows 98 because I am too lazy to have the
information systems staff update it and because the program fits
my needs just fine. This morning I entered the changes I made on a
hard copy, revising the opening in a neighborhood coffee shop.
Outside the large front window, tourists admired the cobblestone
streets and small brick homes built for German brewery workers and
rehabbed by lawyers. Soon--I hope--I will email my response to the
editors of Postmodern Culture so they can post it online.
2. Like our neighborhoods, our desks, and our lives, writing
commingles the old and the new. I type, I email, and I write by
hand. Alert to such daily facts, contemporary poetry quickly
learned to embody familiar dislocations: the white noise of
overheard chatter, the experience of listening to a CD while
driving down streets organized for walking or walking through a
suburban housing development.
3. Young poets coming of age now also face a particular
literary-historical challenge. They follow the generation born
around the mid-century, including Charles Bernstein (born 1950),
Ron Silliman (1946) and Lyn Hejinian (1941), whose groundbreaking
efforts replaced "tradition" with "innovation" as the poetic
culture's keyword. Ben Lerner speaks for his contemporaries when,
in his debut collection, The Lichtenberg Figures, he wonders what
comes next:
The poetic establishment has co-opted contradiction.
And the poetic establishment has not co-opted contradiction.
Are these poems just cumbersome
or are these poems a critique of cumbersomeness?
To which Lerner offers a qualified solution:
Perhaps what remains of innovation
is a conservatism at peace with contradiction. (22)
Like the fussy noun, "cumbersomeness," Lerner's poetry dramatizes
an awkward moment. It wryly recalls the contentious debates that
the previous generation's work inspired. Partisans wrangled over
the terms Lerner reproduces, debating what constitutes "the poetic
establishment," co-option, and "critique." Lerner, though, less
refuses to take sides than realize the sloganeering's acute
limitations. "Willful irresolution can stabilize into a manner
just as easily as facile resolution, right?" he asks in an
interview, responding to a question about the "prevailing
post-avant penchant for hyper-cool and fragged surfaces." "Honk,"
another poem more wittily concludes, "if you wish all difficult
poems were profound" (23).
4. Instead of an attachment to "willful irresolution" or "facile
resolution," poets need curiosity--curiosity about the state of
language, poetry, culture, and the world in which we live. A
lyric's structure shows the importance of the seemingly
trivial--the sound that a syllable makes, a pause's hesitation, an
easily ignored quirk of language. A successful poem, then, offers
a model of curiosity. It demands and rewards inquisitiveness,
demonstrating less a discovery, a paraphraseable insight, than the
process of discovery. To account for this dynamic, we might
consider "curious" and "incurious" poetry, depending on the degree
to which it attends to the contemporary moment and the art form's
venerable history, the past's complex, shifting relationship to
the present.
5. Loss Pequeño Glazier's Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm follows
Glazier's Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, which argues
for the aesthetic stance that underpins the poetry. The two books
are intimately connected. Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm
includes passages from Digital Poetics as epigraphs, suggesting
that the poetry illustrates the principles that the critical book
espouses. According to Glazier, "innovation" marks the most
important poetry. In Digital Poetics, he clarifies this point:
In general, the term "poetry" is used in this volume to refer
to practices of innovative poetry rather than to what might be
called academic, formal, or traditional forms of poetry. (181)
Earlier Glazier responds to his own question, "What makes it
innovative?":
Innovative work avoids the personalized, ego-centered position
of the romantic, realist, or modernist "I." Such a
sentimentalized 'I," often concerned with its own mortality,
can be considered as having passed away. Innovative practice
is practice that overcomes the "I" to explore material
dimensions of the text. (174)
Lerner prizes an inconsistency that fuses seemingly opposed
qualities. He implicitly answers Glazier's question, "What is
innovative?" by presenting "conservatism" and "innovation" as
inextricably connected. The most "innovative" work, Lerner
suggests, leaves behind the techniques and gestures most often
associated with "innovation." In my terms, such poetry is curious
about the complications that literature inspires. In contrast, a
defensiveness guides Glazier's assertions, as he establishes a
series of three oppositions, each of which bears some scrutiny.
6. First, Glazier opposes "innovative poetry . . . to what might be
called academic . . . forms of poetry." Glazier wrote Digital
Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries as a dissertation for SUNY
Buffalo; his acknowledgements page thanks his committee members
Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, and Susan Howe. The University
of Alabama Press Modern and Contemporary Poetics series published
the book; Bernstein serves as the Series Co-Editor and Howe serves
on the Series Advisory Board. Bernstein's and Creeley's praise
adorns the back cover of Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (the
book's two blurbs). Glazier has published two "academic" books:
one a dissertation revised for a University Press series co-edited
by his director, the other a poetry collection praised by two
distinguished poets who served as his committee members.
7. Glazier, then, is an "academic" author, if we understand
"academic" as a descriptive term, neither honorific nor
derogatory. (To add an obvious example, I enjoy certain "academic"
scholarship and poetry, including several titles published in the
Modern and Contemporary Poetics series and by other university
presses, and dislike others.) Glazier, though, defines "academic"
and "innovative" poetry largely as period styles. "Innovative"
poetry, he maintains, "overcomes the 'I' to explore material
dimensions of the text." Such elements, though, might be
classified as "givens" rather than "discoveries," as Lyn Hejinian
writes of Jena Osman's collection, The Character:
Ethical density, political ambiguity, shifting subjectivity,
multifold social terrains, multicultural identities and
interrelations--these are givens rather than discoveries in
Jena Osman's work, and as a result the work doesn't stop
there. (xi)
An "innovative" poem goes beyond the "givens." It cannot remain
content to reproduce established stylistic techniques and
pre-existing accomplishments; it must not "stop there." Glazier's
understanding of "innovative" poetry strikes me as insufficiently
dynamic, inattentive to the terrain that such poetry traverses. In
Hejinian's terms, it confuses "givens" with "discoveries."
8. Finally, this separation of "academic" and "innovative" poetry
oddly echoes the assumption that so many "innovative" poets
dispute (and Glazier himself would dispute in other contexts): the
denial that "creative" and "scholarly" work inspire each other.
"Various voices speak in my poems. I code-shift," Rae Armantrout
observes of her poetry. Setting it in a broader context,
Armantrout observes, perhaps a little too bluntly, the affinity
that "innovative" poetry shares with contemporary scholarship. "In
the last decade or so," she continues, "academics have been
raising the question of who speaks in literary works and for whom.
There is a contemporary poetry that enacts the same questions, a
poetics of the crossroad" (24-25). Glazier's poetry similarly
explores the "poetics of the crossroad"; it is "academic" in the
sense that it pursues questions about identity, culture, and
language that academic scholarship raises.
9. Second, Glazier opposes "innovative poetry . . . to what might be
called formal . . . forms of poetry." All poetry is formal;
otherwise it is not poetry. As the redundancy, the "formal . . .
forms of poetry" suggests, no informal forms of poetry exist.
There are only informal styles. /Terza rima/ is no more "formal"
than poetry written under aleatory or newly developed procedures.
To call a sonnet "formal" and not poetry written under aleatory
procedures is to deny the complexity of contemporary poetics.
10. Third, Glazier opposes "innovative poetry . . . to what might be
called . . . traditional . . . forms of poetry." When Jena Osman
re-ordered language from press conferences conducted by Bush,
Cheney, and Rumsfeld, her "Dropping Leaflets" claims a tradition,
as well as a method: Tristan Tzara's cut-and-paste procedure. She
sets the Dadaist technique in a specific political and
literary-historical context. This manipulation of tradition might
strike readers as more or less curious; partly its effect arises
from the manner it extends the past into the present, using a
nearly century old technique to address contemporary realities.
Glazier's simple opposition of "innovative" and "traditional"
poetry does not account for this process of synthesis,
development, and invention. Poets bear no responsibility to
develop an adequate critical vocabulary for their work. While
Glazier expands our understanding of poetry to include digital
poetics, my concern is that his conception of print-based poetry
limits his work in that medium.
11. An author's note relates that many of the poems in Anatman,
Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm "have had digital versions, have grown,
have been 'sounded', or have been co-developed within the digital
medium" (97). In a conspicuous gesture, Glazier, the director of
the Electronic Poetry Center, borrows from the vocabulary of
computer software for his print-based poetry. "Windows 95" ends:
Artists tend to left-click while
Republicans tend to the right. If the period might've once
been called "Error & After" it will now be known as "Eudora &
after". Thorn and sing-shrub or Subject: I know I shall have
awful DOS pains in the morning as a result of this. (61)
Reviewing Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm for the online
technology site Slashdot, Dylan Harris declared his dislike for "a
lot of avant-garde poetry's excess use of strange words." Glazier,
Harris charges, has
succumbed to the usual academic habit of filling his poems
with obscure incomprehensibility, like http, chmod, EMACS . .
. hang on a second, I know these words. They're not literary
jargon, they're software babble, the words I work with.
Harris's witty reversal demonstrates nicely his experience of
reading Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. Because Harris does not
expect to see "the words I work with" in a poem, it takes a few
moments to recognize them. Such moments of recognition possess a
certain charm, as the poetry accommodates unexpected sources of
language. Glazier organizes them with his favorite device, the
pun. As in this passage, he introduces the puns gently, with an
opening phrase suggesting the notion that the second phrase will
complicate. The line breaks after "while" and "&" separate the two
parts, building the reader's expectation over how the poem will
resolve the syntactical and rhetorical structure. The first pun
grafts a spatial cliché ("Republicans tend to the right"). The
second pun, "Eudora & / after" addresses the first word in the
phrase it echoes, "Error & After." Following the line break, the
second half of the phrase "after" simply confirms the reader's
expectation.
12. This kind of "word play," Lori Emerson observes, "becomes perhaps
too typical, the puns bearing more amusement value than performing
the kind of multi-leveled work that Glazier seeks to install as a
centerpiece of his writing." It is "typical" in another sense; it
constitutes the favorite device of much contemporary poetry.
Harryette Mullen's most interesting examples develop intricate
sound structures; as in a poetic version of a vaudeville routine,
Bernstein's juxtapose high and low. Glazier's puns are earnest and
well mannered, neither groaningly "bad" nor comically charged and
inventive. In this respect, they recall the technically competent
sonnets written by the mid-century generation.
13. Glazier's favorite pun is his own name, a tendency that Emerson
and I interpret differently. She sees such gestures as part the
"disintegration of 'Loss Glazier' as a coherent and locatable
author." The puns, though, project the author relentlessly onto
nearly everything he describes, witnesses, or imagines--places,
languages, and creatures. This tendency strikes me as the
expression more of poetic narcissism than of authorial
disintegration.
14. Glazier's interest in the exterior world is most vividly displayed
in the sequence, "White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (An
Iteration)." The author's note sets the scene:
As to the pumpkin seed in the title of this section, one time
I was on a 14-hour journey in Costa Rica, crossing a mountain
range in a dilapidated bus with bad shocks, enduring hour
after hour of hairpin turns. A gaggle of North Americans on
the bus complained vociferously about the inadequacy of the
country and its transportation system. At one point, we
stopped and boys came on the bus to sell home-baked pumpkin
muffins. I began eating mine and found a pumpkin seed in the
middle of it, another imperfection. I let the seed linger in
my mouth thinking, this is the gift of language I have been
given: to have this vocabulary on my tongue, to simply
participate in other ways of being in the world. (99)
"A lack of comfort is the obvious burden the American poet
carries," Robert von Hallberg notes in his definitive account of
the American "tourist poems of the 1950s," "this is as much a test
as a vacation."(73). With the setting switched from Europe to
Costa Rica, Glazier demonstrates his fittingness by the way he
handles hardship. As in other tourist poems, fellow travelers from
home--"A gaggle of North Americans"--offer contrasting examples;
their complaints highlight the poet's sophistication as he
experiences a moment of pre-industrial imperfection coded as
authenticity. When Elizabeth Bishop describes wooden clogs making
a "sad, two-noted wooden tune," she notes, "In another country the
clogs would be tested. / Each pair would have identical pitch."
Bishop analyzes her experience shrewdly, realizing "/the choice is
never wide and never free/" (18). Glazier similarly savors the
pumpkin seed in the middle of "home-baked pumpkin muffin,"
"another imperfection," yet he succumbs to the illusion of
unmediated experience. Forgetting the economic exchange involved,
he accepts "the gift of language I have been given . . . to simply
participate in other ways of being in the world." (99)
15. The sequence embeds this narrative, with suggestive moments of
lyric intensity and tourist discomfort: "Sleeping / hummingbird
doesn't wake--even to camera flash in volcanic night" (34) and
"Narrow seats and coffee-can sides of rattling bus" (29). The
fifth section returns to "the gift of language" embodied in the
pumpkin seed: "as language forms / fills the mouths, tongues of
tropical light, pura vida, compita" (31). This remarkably
energetic conclusion builds to an ecstatic moment, where cultures,
languages, and place commingle to sing an epiphany of "pure life."
An updated vocabulary and verse technique barely disguise what
Glazier elsewhere calls the "sentimentalized 'I'" that "can be
considered as having passed away." Rather, Glazier reproduces what
he wishes to reject.
/ Department of English
Ohio Wesleyan University
dmcaplan@owu.edu /
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Works Cited
Armantrout, Rae. "Cheshire Poetics." American Women Poets in the
21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Eds. Claudia Rankine and
Juliana Spahr. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2002.
Bishop, Elizabeth. Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, 1969.
Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-poetries.
Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002.
Harris, Dylan. "Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm." Slashdot 18
Dec. 2003
.
Hejinian, Lyn. "Introduction." The Character. Boston: Beacon, 1999.
Lerner, Ben. The Lichtenberg Figures. Port Townsend: Copper
Canyon, 2004.
---. Conversation with Kent Johnson. Jacket 26 (Oct. 2004)
.
Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980.
Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.
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