This is the last thing I’ll say about all this and then I’ll shut up

I like my poets loony and orphic — can you blame me? Maybe that’s why Bernadette Mayer and Joanne Kyger are more important to my poetic universe than, say, Joan Retallack or Susan Howe — both of whom I nonetheless respect and aspects of whose work I unabashedly imitate.

Retallack and Howe are academics — interesting ones, to be sure. My preference for the likes of Mayer and Kyger has, I suspect, a great deal to do with my resistance to the growing professionalization of poetic culture. My roots are in punk, in grassroots, do-it-yourself modes and communities. Language poetry at its outset was such a model community, although it evolved into an entirely different beast.

Of course, I have no problem with “professionalization” when it comes to actual professions such as law, medicine, and education, where “professionalism” means putting the interests of the client, patient or learner foremost, and behaving according to a commonly-agreed upon ethical code.

Literature and other forms of cultural production should be exempt from such requirements.

A writer can be politically committed or ethically sound and choose to have those commitments and ethics reflected in her work. I might value the work all the more because of it. But that does not make such commitment a requirement, because writing is not a profession. Even when people do it in exchange for money it is not a profession the same way that law or education or medicine are professions. It is different because “reader”, in the case of literature (as opposed to propaganda or texts whose primary purpose is to “inform”) is a wholly different category from “client” or “patient” or “learner.”

This is one reason I don’t buy the role of critic as a “more knowledgeable” person with “better judgment” who screens works of literature for the reader-consumer. Nor do I believe that as poets we need to be concerned with “principles” (except, of course, in our lives), or have an overweaning need for “prose we can trust.” If anything, our work seems to come out language’s inherent untrustworthiness. That’s exactly what we are working with so productively!

Unlike journalists, we are not obliged to be “responsible” to our readers, or to tell the truth. We are not, as it were, fiduciaries for our readers. We are not even obliged to be fiduciaries for our own ideas, for their clear and precise conveyance. If we want to express something awkwardly or obscurely, we have every right to. Writing is the only place we have to fight for “true autonomy” — whether we can achieve it or not. (Think of the Buzzcocks here, if you please.)

Let’s try a thought experiment. Try to conceive of literature, as I do, as a giant SANDBOX where we can play however we want as long as we don’t hurt anyone too gravely. Take it as a given that we play within the confines of pre-existing meanings and with some (occasionally oppressive) familial supervision. Aggressive behavior is, for better or worse, natural and unavoidable in such an environment. There are those who will choose to play cooperatively, others who will sit in a corner autistically counting sand grains, and still others who come whapping at your sand constructions with a shovel.

In the sandbox, you’ll see natural tribal corrective behaviors such as Brian’s (“we need to build better, more structurally reliable sandcastles”) or mine (“who are you to set the standards and indeed what are your motives for trying to so?”) or Kasey’s and Stephanie’s (“No fighting, guys.”)

Personally, I will always stand up against what I see as a repressive call for “standards” in the literary sandbox. Doesn’t mean I don’t have standards or very strong opinions about what is worthwhile and what isn’t. I just don’t see the point of imposing these notions on others. Why not? It has a great deal to do with my world view — what’s the point? As long as I get to play in the sandbox, I don’t particularly care whether I am the boss of it. And, as Brian pointed out in his lovely if a leetle beet condescending review of _V. Imp._, my world view is heavily colored by a (to him) “tiring” sense of reductio ad absurdum. What alternative, I wonder, does he propose? Reductio ad technos? And what does that get us but more — sigh — “progress”?

It seemed like Brian could see neither the forest nor the trees in _Spin Cycle_, just a few bits of lichen, a gall, and maybe some termites here and there. Hence his myopic, nitpicking example. He’s a great reader, but maybe he could learn to read certain texts more holistically.

The first thing that we learn as ESL teachers is that in the theory of communicative competence there are two poles: fluency vs. accuracy. No learner really ever manages to achieve 100% perfection at both ends of the communicative spectrum. ESL teachers, therefore, have to learn to tolerate and work through a lot of ambiguity to try to understand exactly what it is a learner wants to communicate. It is helpful, but not necessary, to be able to speak the native language of the learner as well, so you can understand her errors from the inside out. I don’t think Brian is really fluent enough in Chris’ conceptual language to be able to read his book holistically and fairly.

Let me now posit a somewhat outrageous assertion. For poets, one’s native language is in some sense always a foreign language –definitely a site of struggle. Murat Nemat-Nejat has written much the same thing. The struggle may be visible to various degrees.

Clear prose may be evidence of a kind of “mastery” (O most loathed word) over that struggle. On the other hand, it can be a method of ssssseduction or persssssuassssion, an impressive feat of formal, grammatical, and rhetorical clarity masking the fact that the ideas it is so “successfully” conveying are not really all that (to some readers, anyway) interesting, useful, or even accurate. I do have a specific essay to exemplify this in mind, not one of Brian’s BTW, but I won’t be so petty as to name it. Backchannel me if you really want the dirt on this.

At any rate it’s very difficult to say anything conclusive about the value for poetry and for poets’ prose of what we first called “clarity” and more usefully amended to “precision.” Does “precise” mean the same thing as “principled”? This is a problem of language. Would the poetic world really be a better place if we managed to eradicate faulty nominalization, comma splices, misplaced modifiers, wordiness, and unclear anaphor?

I’m not exactly saying that it wouldn’t — just that the assertion that it would reeks to me of Age of Enlightement- or Academie francaise-style calls for standardization and hence a very deep kind of psycholinguistic repressiveness. A comma splice in its onrush may for example say something that the mere words of the sentence cannot I know you know what I mean.

The push for clarity and correctness also reeks to me of, yes, I’m going to say it, a kind of problem of class. I’m not necessarily talking about actual economic class but of class identification and of how that identification is made manifest in language. One of the many reasons we appreciate a Brian or a Jack is for their aristocratic bearing, their diplomatic, even princely, language, and their willingness to further the art with many generous acts of (sometimes, but not necessarily economic) largesse.

Chris, on the other hand, figures himself as more of a working-class superhero, a Harvey Pekar deluxe, a “continous peasant” whose story is much more remarkable than Pekar’s in that it has taken him into conceptual and linguistic realms that I doubt Pekar would ever have access to. I simply take Chris’ prose on different terms than Brian’s or Jack’s. Am I guilty of making excuses for it? Dunno. Certainly, more than Brian’s (though not more than Jack’s, whose idiosyncratic combination of the fey, the learned and the blueblood feels almost priestly), it meets my preferred criteria of “loony” and “Orphic.”

For those who would wish to disregard the biographical coloration of my comments, I can only say that it is impossible for me to divorce the writings of these people from my personal experiences of them. “The person comes before the writing.” Well, the last thing to which I would ever make a claim is… objectivity.

Therein lies the differance.

“Prose you can trust.” What does that mean when everything — really everything — is subject to radical doubt? Frankly, I wish I didn’t feel that way. I wish I could sail ahead through life full of clarity, conviction, and certainty. But how can I? Can you?

1) “The darkness surrounds us.”

2) “Sooner or later, everyone disappoints you.”

and on that cheery note, I’m off to go play in the sandbox…