“To celebrate growing older, I once wrote the 45 lessons life taught
me. It is the most requested column I’ve ever written.

My odometer rolled over to 90 in August, so here is the column once more:

1. Life isn’t fair, but it’s still good.

2. When in doubt, just take the next small step.

3. Life is too short to waste time hating anyone.

4. Your job won’t take care of you when you are sick. Your friends and
parents will. Stay in touch.

5. Pay off your credit cards every month.

6. You don’t have to win every argument. Agree to disagree.

7. Cry with someone. It’s more healing than crying alone.

8. It’s OK to get angry with God. He can take it.

9. Save for retirement starting with your first paycheck.

10. When it comes to chocolate, resistance is futile.

11. Make peace with your past so it won’t screw up the present.

12. It’s OK to let your children see you cry.

13. Don’t compare your life to others. You have no idea what their
journey is all about.

14. If a relationship has to be a secret, you shouldn’t be in it.

15. Everything can change in the blink of an eye. But don’t worry; God
never blinks.

16. Take a deep breath. It calms the mind.

17. Get rid of anything that isn’t useful, beautiful or joyful.

18. Whatever doesn’t kill you really does make you stronger.

19. It’s never too late to have a happy childhood. But the second one
is up to you and no one else.

20. When it comes to going after what you love in life, don’t take no
for an answer.

21. Burn the candles, use the nice sheets, wear the fancy lingerie.
Don’t save it for a special occasion. Today is special.

22. Over prepare, then go with the flow.

23. Be eccentric now. Don’t wait for old age to wear purple.

24. The most important sex organ is the brain.

25. No one is in charge of your happiness but you.

26. Frame every so-called disaster with these words ‘In five years,
will this matter?’

27. Always choose life.

28. Forgive everyone everything.

29. What other people think of you is none of your business.

30. Time heals almost everything. Give time time.

31. However good or bad a situation is, it will change.

32. Don’t take yourself so seriously. No one else does.

33. Believe in miracles.

34. God loves you because of who God is, not because of anything you
did or didn’t do.

35. Don’t audit life. Show up and make the most of it now.

36. Growing old beats the alternative — dying young.

37. Your children get only one childhood.

38. All that truly matters in the end is that you loved.

39. Get outside every day. Miracles are waiting everywhere.

40. If we all threw our problems in a pile and saw everyone else’s,
we’d grab ours back.

41. Envy is a waste of time. You already have all you need.

42. The best is yet to come…

43. No matter how you feel, get up, dress up and show up.

44. Yield.

45. Life isn’t tied with a bow, but it’s still a gift.”

Its estimated 93% won’t forward this. If you are one of the 7% who
will, forward this with the title ’7%’.

I’m in the 7%. Friends are the family that we choose.

ON MICHAEL DONAGHY: BLACK ICE, RAIN AND THE CITY OF GOD
Michael Donaghy (1954-2004) was a fastidious poet, slow to write and slow to publish. He was always prepared to endure the frustration of sitting out the time it took for a poem to begin to emerge, in order to have the equally frustrating pleasure of working on it. He once claimed, more or less jokingly, to write only three poems a year. This Collected Poems contains roughly 150, of which about a third were unpublished at his death in September 2004 at the age of 50.

This is not a large corpus, but it is remarkably diverse and exciting, and one turns repeatedly in sorrow and anger to the fact that he was not able to complete his work. W.H. Auden proposed that poets die when their work is finished: Donaghy is clearly an exception. The ‘late’ material in Safest, and some of the uncollected pieces here, indicate that a further stage of development was in progress, albeit inescapably shadowed by the intensifying awareness of mortality which he experienced after his health grew fragile in the last few years of his life. A number of the poems strike a valedictory note, but Donaghy the poet had by no means exhausted his art, and there are signs that he was moving towards the further reconciliation of his wit and learning with greater lyrical economy and directness.

Wit and learning were among the powerful attractions of Donaghy’s first collection, Shibboleth (1988). He didn’t simply have opinions: he knew things – about literature, history, music, science, anthropology, non-Western cultures. The book boldly announced his arrival among other poets of his generation, including Jo Shapcott and Matthew Sweeney. Donaghy was doing something different again from either of these strongly contrasting poets. In his constellation of interests and his delight in the connectedness of things, he most resembles his exact contemporary Ian Duhig, like him a poet of Irish descent.

For those who cared to notice, Donaghy was among other things renovating some features of the scholarly, formalist American poetry of the 1950s, whose leading exponents were Richard Wilbur and Anthony Hecht. By the 1980s these poets had little readership, especially among the young, on this side of the Atlantic, because they had been eclipsed by (according to taste) Lowell and Plath, the Beats and the New York Poets. What Donaghy shared with Wilbur in particular was a love of the art, and artfulness, on its own account, as a sign of imaginative

plenitude. Those who enjoyed poems of Wilbur’s such as ‘Shame’ and ‘The Undead’ and ‘The Mind-Reader’ could recognize a kindred spirit in Donaghy, one free of the gentility to which Wilbur was sometimes prone. Equally, those who admired Hecht’s ‘More Light! More Light’ or ‘The Dover Bitch’ saw what Donaghy was about while noting the absence of that faint superior coldness which can seem to impede Hecht’s work. An Irish working class upbringing in ethnically diverse and at times dangerous district of the Bronx gave Donaghy’s work a salty vernacular life which in turn lent his forms a packed, excited urgency. And the poems are often talking to someone – a lover, a ghost, the passer-by drawn in to hear the story. This sense of address to the reader recalls Frost, while the simultaneous aspiration to visionary grandeur reveals among other things the depth of Donaghy’s immersion in Yeats.

Such a list risks creating the image of an imaginary monster – the Donaghy – something described but never actually seen or heard. Donaghy was of course far more than the sum of his reading. He was of the academy (until he couldn’t stand it and gave up his graduate studies: he had contemptuously funny things to say about the orthodoxies of theory), but he was not an academic poet. The masters in his pantheon shone with special intensity because their presence proved that art, rather than attitude, or ownership, was at the core of his interests.
…It’s something that we’ve always known:

Though we command the language of desire,
The voice of ecstasy is not our own.
We long to lose ourselves amid the choir
Of the salmon twilight and the mackerel sky,
The very air we take into our lungs,
And the rhododendron’s cry.

Paradox is fundamental to Donaghy’s imagination, and the impassioned and hilarious ‘Pentecost’, an early poem about the cries of lovers, is one of his boldest examples. Language is deployed to evoke a state beyond itself – speaking in tongues, which crosses the division between the self and the world. In effect, consciousness is brought to serve its own renunciation, at the merging of the sacred and profane. Where Marvell’s ‘green thought in a green shade’ is the apotheosis of solitude, this poem imagines an addressee:

And when you lick the sweat along my thigh,
Dearest, we renew the gift of tongues.

It would be a mistake to read these closing lines as a glib or cavalier QED. They offer a joke, issue a challenge, invite the partner to engage in a lovers’ amused conspiracy, and they also pretend to test the partner’s credulity for the purposes of a seduction which has already been accomplished. The amusement is not directed at but enjoyed with the lover. The harmonic range of tones is very rich, the voice made present to us as to the object of desire, a method indebted to Browning but clearly new-made by Donaghy.

‘Pentecost’ begins with the neighbours furiously hammering on the bedroom walls – to which the ultimate riposte is a religious-philosophical defence of selfishness. Its most prominent source is Donne’s ‘The Good Morrow’ – though of course Donne’s transcendent self-assurance is quite different from Donaghy’s proposed shedding of identity. As with many another poet, identity, time and memory are fundamental terms of Donaghy’s imagination. While they are ‘traditional’, they figure in Donaghy’s work not as tropes securely anchoring him to an unthreatening past – but as provocative crises in which the imagination engages anew with its inheritance.

We might say that Donaghy’s ultimate subject was human nature, the question being in what that nature consisted. The poems are full of assumed, discarded, temporary selves (see ‘Smith’, ‘Shibboleth’ and ‘Ramon Fernandez’ among the early work), creations necessary for legitimacy, survival, change of allegiance. They are not the self-creations of existentialism, still less of banal scientism, since they acknowledge the corridors of religion, history and culture down which the speakers have been led to the poems’ eventual declarations. For Donaghy’s characters there is no way out of the labyrinth; for the unbelieving poet the language and imagery of belief are not discredited fetishes to be discarded by atheistic maturity, but crucial means of vision and understanding. ‘City of God’ from Errata (1993) tells of a failed priest returning to the Bronx from the seminary, obsessed with practising a form of memory art:

He needed a perfect cathedral in his head,
he’d whisper, so that by careful scrutiny
the mind inside the cathedral inside the mind
could find the secret order of the world
and remember every drop on every face
in every summer thunderstorm.

The teller offers us both the poignant absurdity of this project and the reverence in which it is conceived. In the kind of joke that Donaghy enjoyed, the deranged psycho-encyclopaedist is independently covering the same ground as Borges’s Funes the Memorious, as well as recalling the ‘authentic’ but uncategorizable labours of Pierre Menard in writing Don Quixote in a form identical to but wholly independent of Cervantes’. More problematically, the character in ‘City of God’ seems to be committing a supreme heresy, even in the attempt to glorify the Creator, by undertaking to comprehend and encompass and thus internally reproduce His works. The poem closes as narrator and madman contemplate ‘a storefront voodoo church beneath the el /…/its window strange with plaster saints and seashells’ – signs of faith, of pilgrimage, and of the ungovernable character of the religious imagination.

It has been suggested that Donaghy’s status might suffer from his lack of interest in politics, but in fact Shibboleth contains a number of poems, adjacently placed, whose material is inescapably political – ‘Auto da Fe’, ‘Ramon Fernandez?’, ‘Partisans’ (which mirrors ‘Shibboleth’) and ‘Majority’ , a bleak series that progresses through the attempt to understand the appeal of Franco’s cause, the nature of allegiance, the banality of political terror, and lastly the horrors of complacent ignorance as (it would seem) embodied in the attitudes of the ‘majority’ of Donaghy’s fellow Americans. (And ‘The Safe House, from Safest, poignantly recounts the imaginary future of American leftists who shared an apartment with a concealed copy of the revolutionary Manual of the Weather Underground.) Throughout this series, the inseparability of religion and politics presents itself in various ways. ‘Auto da Fe’, a sonnet with an intriguing ballad-like feel, as though half-meant for singing, tells of an uncle who fought with the Irish volunteers in the Fascist cause in the Spanish Civil War (1936-39). In the poem’s dream-encounter, the speakers debate this allegiance. Goya’s ‘The Sleep of Reason’ is cited without attributing the reference to either of the participants (the Church always claims the monopoly of Reason) and the poem moves on from discourse to image

The shape his hand made sheltering the flame
Was itself a kind of understanding
But it would never help me to explain
Why my uncle went to fight for Spain,
For Christ, for the Caudillo, for the King.

‘Yet man is born into trouble, as the sparks fly upward’, declares Job 5.7, and the next verse continues: ‘I would seek unto God, and unto God would I commit my cause’. The image of the lit match invokes both a Catholic Hell and the obligation of the faithful to protect Holy Mother Church and the inferno which burns encouragingly at the base of her theology. (There is an entire essay to be written about the role of fire in Donaghy’s work.) In the Holy Trinity named in the last line, the uncle’s commitment seems to entail seeing ‘the caudillo’, Franco, as a grim practical embodiment of the working of the Holy Spirit – an act requiring a subjugation of the self unthinkable to a poet such as Donaghy, who remarked that he himself had a lifelong problem with authority, as anyone who tried to get him to meet a deadline or catch a train could testify.

‘Ramon Fernandez?’ is an altogether more complicated piece of work. Any reader of modern poetry will know Wallace’s Stevens’s ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’, written in 1934 and published in his collection Ideas of Order (1936). Towards the close of the poem, the speaker asks ‘Ramon Fernandez’ to explain why the lights of the vessels in harbour seem to impose an order on the darkened sea. This rhetorical question enables Stevens to go on and reorganize its materials as a statement of the ‘maker’s’ ‘blessed rage’ for order, rather than undertake an answer which would either be impossible or tautologous. Following the publication of Ideas of Order, Stevens was concerned to formulate a response to the Marxist critic Stanley Burnshaw, who saw him as the poetic representative of a doomed, privileged class soon to be swept aside. In a letter Stevens declared himself, rather implausibly, to be of the Left, by which he may really have meant that while (like most of the major modernist poets) he was a reactionary, he was not a Fascist.

Ramon Fernandez was an invention for the purposes of the poem – a non-speaking companion. The name is by no means unusual, and Stevens declared that he did not intend to refer to anyone particular, although he acknowledged that he had heard of the French critic Ramon Fernandez, a contributor, like Stevens, to the magazine The Dial. In the period 1934-37 the actual Fernandez moved from anti-Fascism to membership of the Fascist Parti Populaire Francais led by the ex-Communist Jacques Doriot, in bitter opposition to the Popular Front government of Leon Blum. Both Doriot and Fernandez became eager collaborators following the fall of France in 1940. Donaghy’s poem is ‘about’ neither the historical Ramon Fernandez, nor Stevens’s ‘Ramon Fernandez’, but both identities are present in the wings, as are Steven’s 1937 poem ‘The Man with the Blue Guitar’ (from the 1937 collection of the same name) and, presumptively, Picasso’s 1903 Blue Period painting ‘The Old Guitarist, which was exhibited in Stevens’s home town of Hartford, Connecticut, in 1934 (also the year when ‘The Idea of Order at Key West’ was written). It was of course Picasso who delivered one of the most memorable – and artistically uncompromised – responses to the atrocity of the Civil War in his painting ‘Guernica’ (1937). Among the famous facts about Stevens is that despite his taste for the exotic and his extensive imaginative travels, he never left the United States, but in Donaghy’s poem much that, explicitly or otherwise, concerns Stevens, is transported to the Fascist siege of Barcelona, to the sphere of practicality and survival.

I include this fairly complex background in order to suggest the richness of the resources Donaghy could bring to a poem, as well as the double vision he offers in this one. The reader too is likely to bring some literary-cultural knowledge to a poem which also has its own story to tell. That story seems both to criticize the presumption and to underwrite the urgent, inescapable relevance of the artistic questions Stevens raises, by showing that in the dawn of totalitarianism nothing lies outside or above the sphere of the political.

A hero to the Republican troops who sing his songs when going off to battle at the Fascist invasion Catalonia in January 1939, Fernandez is also a composer of choice for the forces of Franco, with ‘A few words changed, not many.’ Eventually ‘he vanished back across the front’, perhaps to suggest that an audience is an audience whatever its political stripe, perhaps that it was the border rather than the musician that moved. In the meantime, the Lenin Barracks clock, beneath which he played at noon, its hands arrested at half past eleven, is struck by a stray round and the hands are blown off, leaving ‘the face / To glare like a phase of the moon across

the burning city.’ The background presence of another reactionary poet, W.B. Yeats, can be felt here. In ‘The Phases of the Moon’ from The Wild Swans at Coole (1919), Michael Robartes summarizes the moon’s twenty-eight phases, noting that ‘there’s no human life at the full or the dark’ – for example, at the dark noon of the Fascist triumph, which was assisted by members of Eoin O’Duffy’s blueshirts serving among the Volunteer Brigade, like the uncle in ‘Auto da Fe’ – blueshirts for whom Yeats had at one point written marching songs (though these were apparently too verbose for the purpose).

Donaghy was more aware than most of the ultimate sterility of the poem-as-anecdote which is so heavily represented on the contemporary scene. As ‘Ramon Fernandez’ and many other poems demonstrate, his search was always for a deeper, more extended resonance than that offered by mere sentimental recognition. At the same time, his range of learning was present in the texture of his poems rather than appearing as a prohibition to those less well-informed than himself. We do not find in his work the not uncommon tendency to confuse erudition itself with poetry. One of the reasons he liked living in the UK was that the reading and listening audience for poetry which seemed to him to have gone missing in the United States was still to be found here, and the most complex of his poems will always extend the courtesy of an invitation rather than an admonition or a dressing-down.

Donaghy’s most extended piece of critical writing, Wallflowers, begins by observing a crowd of dancers at a ceilidh – the local dance being perhaps the most democratic of the arts – and derives its discussion of pattern and memorability from the scuff-marks left on the floor by the dancers’ feet. He was always keen to affirm the highest artistic standards while insisting that poetry must live in the wide community of its readers and listeners, and his own public readings were delivered from memory, like the traditional Irish music in which he also excelled as a flute player. Some of his most memorable poems concern music – the haunting ‘The Tuning’, for example, or ‘Remembering Dances Learned Last Night’ (the latter taking place after the returning Ulysses’s massacre of Penelope’s suitors) – and the sequence ‘O’Ryan’s Belt’, from Errata (1993) was central to his work. It seems, too, from the previously unpublished material included here, that although he had published this sequence he had by no means finished with it. The triangular relationship of artist and material and audience is part of these half a dozen poems as it is of ‘Ramon Fernandez?’, and surmounting everything is the idea of what Pound called ‘a live tradition’, in this case sustained by memory and personal transmission, the common property of those who care for it.

Donaghy was neither pious nor sentimental on this topic. The story which perhaps most interested him is told in ‘A Reprieve’, where the Chicago Police Chief Francis O’Neil offers the fiddler Nolan, who has killed a Chinese man in a fight, the chance to leave town on a freight train if he plays his music so that O’Neil can transcribe it. For this night O’Neil has a Medici’s powers of life and death and patronage, while Nolan’s art receives official sanction – the further sting being that Nolan must try against nature and tradition to play the jigs the same way twice in order that they can be recorded on paper, and thus, in a sense, betrayed. The knowledge that the true art is inseparable from everyday contingency and circumstance is given a humorous airing elsewhere, in ‘The Natural and Social Sciences’ from Shibboleth, where a visiting American asks a player what the last tune was and is told, ‘Ask my father’, which he takes for an answer rather than an instruction.

Vanishing, escaping, illusory, unavailable for consultation, many of the characters in Donaghy’s crowded yet often solitary world seem to reflect his own sense of exile. He was from the working class but educated out of it, a scholar who gave up the academy, a leading poet in Britain whose work was little known in the country where he grew up. He recorded that he injured his parents by insisting that he was an American rather than, as they believed, an Irish boy who happened to be living in New York, while the last twenty-odd years of his life were spent in England with only occasional visits to the United States to give readings. To many people of Irish extraction this is a version of a familiar story, part of the complex and continuing diaspora that can lead anywhere except ‘home’ and that can make questions of ‘where your people were from’ of interest mainly to the enquirer. Many of its features held no interest for Donaghy, but the theme of connection and disconnection, separation and reconciliation, was an abiding one, and it emerged most clearly in his last completed book, his third collection, Conjure (2000). The book opens with a series of three poems dealing with near misses and attempted encounters with fathers. The poems share a certain hermeticism in that while the author’s ‘actual circumstances’ (he spoke at times of his father) are somewhere in the offing, the poems take place in an apparently fictionalized context and are all in some way concerned with lies and illusions and attempts to invoke what is not there. The book’s title, with its imperative form – Conjure – leads back to the history of that word, which takes in senses including: plot, conspire, swear an oath, bind together, call upon, appeal to a sacred person or thing, implore, invoke, charm, bewitch, employ magic. This etymology combines the sacred with the profane, illusion with ultimate reality, faith with deception, self with self-invention:

‘My father’s sudden death has shocked us all’
Even me, and I’ve just made it up.’
‘The Excuse’
Do I stand here not knowing the words
When someone walks in?
‘Not Knowing the Words’
This isn’t easy. I’ve only half the spell,
and I won’t be born for twenty years.
‘Caliban’s Books’

The speaker cannot know the father, though he may well turn into him. This is an inheritance he is powerless to evade, and its responsibilities are most strongly felt when the child becomes, literally, the father. In the book’s closing poem, the Coleridgean ‘Haunts’, dedicated to Donaghy’s son Ruairi, the child himself comforts the father by simply existing, able to dispel the fears attendant on the adult night. In a sense, the child frees the man of the question of himself: pass it on, as the saying goes.
In a more sombre sense, transmission is also a significant part of ‘Black Ice and Rain’, perhaps the most brilliant poem among many fine pieces in Conjure. It is the story of a not-quite ménage a trois involving the narrator and a young couple he meets at a party, told retrospectively to a young woman he has followed into her bedroom at another party some time later. The pretext for his narration is that he can see that he and his listener have important things in common. One is, apparently, an unusual sensitivity (something missing in the boring party they have deserted, a party on which the speaker at any rate is dependent for enabling him to draw this perhaps adolescent distinction). Another is a sense of destiny so elaborate as to encompass the actions of chance. A third is the susceptibility to the pull of memory: ‘the past falls open anywhere.’

The poem recalls Eliot’s ‘Portrait of a Lady’, with the male and female roles reversed, retaining a sense of sterile erotic futility and manipulation. More than that, it offers the complex riches of a story by Henry James, where apparently cultured society is stalked by cruelty and perversity and we witness the indulgence of a power whose near-intangibility serves to enhance its effect. In ‘Black Ice and Rain’ the speaker’s confession is an act of cruelty towards the listener, whatever moral awareness it shows from line to line. In an earlier time the listener might at least have reasonably complained that she and the speaker had not been introduced, but now, in a period of insistent informality, the ‘truth’ is held to be its own social justification, and this predator of the mind is at liberty to pass on his own torments. The poem is full of shifting depths, and each repeated reading finds it renewed, but one of the most significant features is the balance between the religious background, mocked and discredited by the young couple as they endlessly sketch quote-marks on the air, and the apparent meaninglessness of the suffering that chance has inflicted on the object of the narrator’s former desire by the car accident which has killed her partner. She may have got religion now, but her grief empties into a void. Worse (for the narrator) not only have her looks been destroyed, but now that he could have her to himself it is clear that it was her unavailability that made her attractive.

Then having lain at last all night beside her,
having searched at last that black-walled room,
the last unopened chamber of my heart,
and found there neither pity nor desire
but an assortment of religious kitsch,
I inched my arm from under her and left.

The narration, we remember, is staged in a bedroom at a party, while the rhetoric manages to be both stagey enough for a proscenium theatre and compellingly intimate its disclosure; both melodramatic and self-mocking; and unable or unwilling to credit the original integrity of any of its ‘material’. Its fascinated (and rapturously self-fascinated) coldness recalls a major character from another novelist, the composer Adrian Leverkuhn from Thomas Mann’s Doktor Faustus, who sold his soul to the Devil in order to be able to make music that could escape the confines
of late romanticism. The result was marked by brutal parodies of feelings it had allegedly outgrown. With the characters of ‘Black Ice and Rain’ we are far from high art as practised in early twentieth century Munich, but though the characters have no art of their own to make, only attitudes to strike, the human stakes are the same, and while the narrator makes a performance of his damnation, its psychic reality is not to be denied.
I’ve discussed ‘Black Ice and Rain’ in novelistic terms, through story, plot and character, in order to indicate Donaghy’s artistic confidence. He’s not simply rubbing up against fiction in the familiar timid and affectionate manner of a great many poets. He incorporates its forms and possibilities into the work while retaining the pacing, orchestration and variety of register which are the province of a poem. The poem more than stands its ground. What we have in ‘Black Ice and Rain’ is much more than another honourable addition to the genre of dramatic monologue. The poem offers a compelling renewal of the genre’s possibilities, applied to subjects – belief, value, the confusion of art with the self and the self with the good – which the era of postmodernity has lent new colours and new urgency. The poem is also, slyly, circumstantially, damningly, a critique of postmodernity as a mass cultural movement / product on the grounds of its simultaneous fetishization of ‘creativity’ and denial of artistic authenticity. Donaghy disapproved of the notion of artistic ‘progress’, with its banal suggestion that ‘now’ is somehow better than ‘then’; he would even have disputed the notion that at bottom ‘now’ is even different from then. For him – as it surely should be for us – the poetry that matters, that deserves to live, that engages the imagination and nourishes the memory, emerges in contact with ‘a live tradition’. It offers itself to a general audience as both challenge and invitation, to create a space which can be colonized neither by vulgarity nor remote self-regard. It is, in the teeth of the odds, poetry undertaken as an act of good faith.

Sean O’Brien
Newcastle
October 2008
© Sean O’Brien

Sean O’Brien’s lecture is a version of his introduction to Michael Donaghy’s Collected Poems, which will be published by Picador in March 2009 alongside The Shape of the Dance. This companion volume to the Collected Poems will gather together the best of Donaghy’s writing on poetry and the arts.
12

Michael McIrvin

Poetry and the Aesthetic of Morality

The Myth

The goddess Cantarita, known by some as La Verdad, bathed in coldclear water under a moon so full her breasts ached, her midnight aureoles dripping the deep blue milk of life. As she moved, the inchoate hum-of-being rose from her flesh, for she had left her amulet of syllables on the bank with her gown. A man peered from the bushes, frightened by the voice of creation, but he hungered for Cantarita too, and he felt ashamed. As she washed, he crept forward to touch the perfect hem of her moonlit gown and discovered the string of vocables wrapped in it. He could feel her eyes on him then, her night-black eyes, and her voice rose to a senseless shriek as he dove for theunderbrush, swam through the bramble and hit the road at a dead run. When he stopped to catch his breath, he sat under a tree and used the string of sounds as prayer beads, letting them mumble through his fingers until he could intuit the many possible permutations, could taste them rising in his mouth, erupting on his tongue.

          He was now the Master Signifier, but he felt an abiding guilt for his theft, which he answered by singing songs of healing for the infirm, songs of resurrection for the dead. He told histories around every fire pit he encountered as reverent faces stared at him, and he chanted the goddess’s name night and day to atone for his thievery. Sometimes, he was careless, however, and left words lying about, which were stolen, re-spun and used for dark purposes, to label the neighbors furniture or twisted meat or dirt, so that they might be treated accordingly. The Master Signifier disapproved, but what could he do? Common criminals and kings alike ignored his pleas, and he told himself he would redouble his efforts. Chant harder, tell grander histories, sing and sing; and for a time, it worked –but eventually the darkness deepened around him as if the light of the truth were being smothered. One day, he happened to find himself on the same road down whichhe had fled with the string of sacred syllables, near the same riverbank where the goddess had bathed. She was nowhere to be seen, but he could feel just the slightest remnant of her passage in the grass and rising from the water. He fell asleep and dreamt that La Verdad had dissolved in the river, disintegrated in the air, and that her molecules were disseminated from where he slept to beyond the horizon. As the Master Signifier dreamt, a magician-hypnotist who had been following him, waiting for his chance, leapt forward and stole the syllables strung along a golden cord and skulked away. From that day forward, the magician-hypnotist lulled humans with deftly juxtaposed images, and most who heard could not seem to help but do his bidding. They ate what he told them toeat, wore what he told them to wear, thought they saw what he told them was real. His favorite trick was to rename their neighbors — Filth, Less-than-Human, Not-Us — and all who heard behaved accordingly. Now, nearly everyone seemed to hear.

A Fragmentary Exegesis

          I was working on a novel and a new and selected poetry collection the day the World Trade Center towers melted to dust. I understood two things almost immediately following: the poetry book now needed a poem added to address this terrible event — and to address what I knew would be the official U.S. response — and the novel would be hard to sell to publishers (the bravery necessary in
the face of an inevitable shift in market forces difficult to locate). The protagonist of the novel is a
former CIA agent who worked in Mesoamerica in the last century, training so-called counterinsurgents
in mayhem, particularly in the finer elements of torture, and the book is an implicit protest against
that role. This intuition was strengthened by the almost immediate media chatter about increasing CIA
powers at the cost of civil liberties, but most definitively confirmed when Alan M. Dershowitz,
renowned former civil rights lawyer and one-time defender of Soviet dissidents (and therefore
emblematic in the extreme, perhaps), suggested that sometimes torture is a valid tool of war and
offered a made-for-TV-movie argument: the ticking-bomb scenario. Importantly, he also suggested
that torture be done openly and include "accountability," which stated the other way around is to
"officialize" torture of course, to declare that there is such a thing as "good torture," presumably
definable as the kind that the U.S. performs.

          This shift away from a cultural emphasis on protecting human rights did not happen overnight,
however. The attack in New York was certainly a catalyst, one that the powers-that-be obviously
seized upon in something approaching a state of ecstatic joy, but the diminishment of language to a
tool for dark magicians (politicians premiere among them) has a long inglorious history that merely
seems to be culminating in America at the present moment. Governments have always renamed their
adversaries so that they become something other, something less than human, but the practice
seemed mostly unconscious, the perverse obverse of the atavistic human tendency to refer to
ourselves as the people (i.e., the Dineh, Bantu, and Inuit — which is also rendered "the real people,"
among many others, although there are notable exceptions too: Hopi means "the peaceful people").
At most, the success of modern advertising merely made the manipulation of the masses seem more
overtly possible, which resulted in wars, military assaults, and weapons systems named like romantic
movies — Star Wars and Shock and Awe and Desert Storm — which the news media has mostly
insisted on repeating. This was one of the starting points for the poem to be added to my poetry
collection.

          The primary starting point, however, was perhaps the most amazing image ever broadcast:
human beings falling feet first from the upper floors, as if children leaping from a porch, and exploding
when they hit the ground. The image was like those in dreams, too odd to comprehend except
metaphorically, as a cipher for some larger meaning. The images were shown as if by accident, the
camera turned on and no tape delay, and then that footage was not repeated as the others from that
day were, ad nauseam, as if we needed to be convinced these were not scenes from a movie. Perhaps
the images were pulled from the airwaves to protect loved ones and to honor the right of those who
leapt to dignified anonymity, or maybe because what those bodies exploding meant could not be
withstood by those of us watching. For what we witnessed was not merely the upshot of our human
being, evanescence in the extreme as it was acted out before our eyes, as a tide of effluvia spread
over the pavement and washed away on the air, but humans diminished to a trope, in this case, to
anonymous victims. These were not people because our brains would not allow us to see them as
such, but merely one end of a metaphor, however existential and no matter that they had once been
members of our category: the people.

          Shock and grief were the dominant responses to this tragedy, but perhaps inevitable as
lightning after thunder, that was soon followed by rage, which was what the poem tried to subvert in
the reader — the tendency to demand vengeance upon those with faces the general shape and hue of
the killers. This was not understood by many who read the poem early on, insisting I had given "the
terrorists" (now too often a catch-all for anyone who dissents, whether they throw a bomb or not, and
thus the quotation marks) too much credit for humanity. After all, "they" had killed a couple thousand
of "us." The fact that the poem offers a context for this act was contested most loudly, but there is
always a context. Towers have long been associated with divinity because they reach for heaven, like
the pyramids in Egypt and Mesoamerica, but these edifices are monuments to something else entirely
in the modern U.S., to our sense of having defeated nature perhaps or to commerce unto its
apotheosis. That fact in combination with the international banking activities that went on in the World
Trade Center, and what those activities portend for the people who live in the third world, the poem
asserts, means these towers represented Western economic oppression and the worship of mammon,
the perceived evil now being pumped via satellite into countries where traditional cultures still hold
sway, and mounds of debt. They represented undue Western influence and the subversion of their
religion, both in the form of temptation and economic leverage. Thus, these pyramids "wave in the sky
as fingers in the face of God, / as accusation and rebuke" and represent America’s "dissonant dream
translated into a thousand / dialects (two-thirds dead in our lifetime) as dominion, / as winner-takeall,
as devourer-of-whatever-gives-you-identity" (McIrvin 147).

          This assertion of context was not intended to excuse the killers, however, who murdered not
only those they assume responsible for their economic lot or who represent Western decadence and
work to spread its influence, but janitors and cafeteria workers and those whose job it was to try to
save everybody else. Moslems as well as Christians, atheists, and Jews, and probably a Buddhist, a
Hindu, and a Jain or two. In short, the killers had made all U.S. citizens sufficiently other to withstand
the thought of murdering the innocent, which was of course the official American response too. The
poem was written long before the U.S. bombing of Afghanistan, but one need not be an historian of
international relations to predict the death of innocents would be the official reaction of our
government. Not surprisingly, the number of dead in the towers and the number of dead in those
bombing raids, mostly the blameless in both instances, were roughly equivalent. Markers were merely
named something other than what they were, human beings, killed under "the rain of thousand-pound
bombs" — the poem’s initial trope transmogrified — and tallied against a perverse accounts owed
entry in a virtual ledger.

          The overarching theme of the poem is that both groups of killers had made the same move as
regards signifier and signified (and one is tempted to term it the same PR move, however traditional
unto biological such a strategy might be), made their victims less than human before assassinating
them. In the poem, the rain trope transmutes once more, to the tears of God that fall now "as
impotent rain," which would be a cliché except for the fact that both sets of killers are branches of the
same Abrahamic tradition, obviously sharing a taste for blood as well as common ancestors. Murder is
despicable, period, but perhaps all the more so when it is brothers who are killing each other, in this
case, taking turns playing the part of Cain. Murder is enough to make a father weep, but fratricide is
more than a double blow, the grief compounded geometrically, for there can be no other from this
perspective, only blood kin gone under by the hand of blood kin.

The President of the United States as Performance Artist

          This does not completely explain the current situation in the U.S., however. Many of us were appalled, albeit less than surprised, by the revelations of torture at U.S. prisons in Iraq and Cuba, of possible secret prisons in former Eastern Block countries and kidnappings in the night (so-called "extraordinary renditions," as if the act were merely a virtuoso performance), of spying on U.S. citizens. Most hard to take, however: many Americans were not appalled. In fact, progressives have been utterly naïve, myself included, about the state of the U.S.-American psyche, the capacity for critical thought on the part of the masses. But then we did not expect such a masterly stand-up act by the President of our country: the man who was born in Connecticut and educated at Harvard and Yale speaking in a Texas drawl like an actor in a B-grade movie, telling us these macabre jokes in fractured syntax, but with a straight face because of course he means every debauched word. At first, it was hard not to simply smile and shake your head, perhaps like you did when you first heard Steve Martin in the 1970s speaking in an ersatz Eastern European drawl about liking women with heads (because, he said, he hates necks). But from the beginning the President’s shtick carried an air of fear too, because he is President, because the brain is caught off-guard. We are wondering how an idiot got the most powerful post in the world, when it occurs to us: maybe he is actually a diabolical genius, Buster Keaton or Groucho or Lenny Bruce without the profanity but untoward aims. Or maybe he was simply
born to the job in this age of hive-speak and language as advertiser’s tool, best used for hypnotism and dissembling — an idiot savant born to be king.

          He repeated the same joke over and over prior to the election: "We are fighting a war, a war on terrorism, and Saddam walks into a bar, see, and he’s carrying this weapon of mass destruction." The setup was always the same, but then he careened into some other topic before he got to the punch line, only to skip back to the setup again: Saddam, weapons of mass destruction, al-Qaeda. The effect was hypnotic, and when the time to vote rolled around, a poll indicated that 42% of the electorate believed that the Iraqi dictator had something to do with the attack on New York. This in the face of logic, in the face of expert testimony from witnesses with Capitol-cred up the kazoo, conservatives formerly on the inside sufficiently appalled by the sham to speak out. Moreover, anyone who dissented was called a terrorist, or at least a terrorist sympathizer, and sometimes this was just implied, but I swear I could hear strains of "America: love it or leave it" echoing throughout the land from some bygone era.

          I doubt Fredric Jameson could have imagined that the President of the United States would eventually offer such ultimate and utterly uncomplicated proof of his assertion that "the anxieties of the absurd … are themselves recaptured and recontained by a new and postmodern cultural logic, which offers them for consumption fully as much as its other seemingly more anodyne exhibits" (150), and in fact, the integration of propaganda in the form of absurd utterance turned out to be a simple formula, really. The President appears in media X times more than his opposition, Y times more than does the truth told by people with infinitely less cachet than the "leader of the free world," and the news media is now merely a medium (with all the passivity the word implies), toothless and slightly insane with all the concentration of power in so few hands — afraid is a better word perhaps — and so does not call him on this nonsense. Or maybe they were hypnotized too. After all, we are at war, or so the President says, over and over; and people are actually dying, some of "us," so it must be true –
the fact that the reasons for mayhem in Iraq were trumped-up not withstanding — and so the whole performance act became a circular argument: Saddam, WMDs, Osama, war that creates an actual insurgency that is backed in part by Osama, and there are continued rumors of WMDs (spread mostly by the performance artist himself), and Saddam’s Baathists are part of the problem now, part of the insurgency. "See, I told you," the performance artist said, having finally reached the punch line, and the citizenry stared in dull-eyed silence for the most part, accepting as misspeak what was really a subliminal policy assertion and linguistic sleight of hand. Then, suddenly, the citizenry was accepting misspeak as the truth.

The Pandemic Public Use of Cell Phones as Metaphor and Sign

          Once upon a time, a conversation about your mother’s hemorrhoid operation or an argument with
your significant other was considered a private matter, in part because we are traditionally a wary
culture about putting "our business" out there before people we do not know, but also because
imposing our personal information on others was considered rude. However, the omnipresent
conversation into thin air, while driving or walking around the supermarket, is now an element of the
American landscape. This is obviously partly just a function of technological innovation, because
people can now talk and drive down Main Street or walk about Wal-Mart at the same time, and it is in
part merely symptomatic of the death of our tendency to privacy and public civility. However, it is also
symbolic of both the ascendancy of a hive mentality and the need not to be other, to prove even to
strangers that the speaker is part of some specific community — people with whom they converse –
and that larger community — cell phone users in general. We are connected. We belong, and don’t you
wish you did too?

          Of course, this is the gist of all advertising as it has been raised to a primary tenet of market
capitalism: buy to be, to belong, to be considered part of some community however tenuously; do not
buy and be outside this group of lucky consumers, and my, they do all seem so happy, bouncing
about the screen and smiling lasciviously, mocking you out there, on the outside. So to be other
becomes the antithesis of being a citizen of the U.S. (because he/she who does not belong must not
aspire adequately), and to being human (because it is only "natural" to want to be connected to other
humans, to belong to the community). By default, the traditional divisions of race and class and
gender all become subsumed into us-ness and otherness as defined by commodities and what
advertisers purport them to signify, amorphous concepts that might indicate people who wear
particular shoes and like a particular band or who imbibe one brand of beer and not another, who
drive a Toyota and not a Chevy. This is not to say that the traditional divisions of in- and out-groups
no longer obtain (Black men and Hispanic females and older Jewish people of both genders, etc.,
remain significant as target markets if nothing else, as they are sold commodity fetishes tailored to
their group), but rather, that the sense of commodity community supersedes these more concrete
categorizations and substantially ramps up alienation as a mechanism of differentiation in the service
of market capitalism, and by extension, control.

          The concept became something substantially more
than merely a marketing ploy with the advent of new technologies like cell phones and, to some degree, the Internet. For now there were actual lines of communication established in the purchase, the product both significant of belonging and an actual tool of connection to said community. The fact that these are virtual associations and so less than fulfilling in any traditionally human sense aside, such nodes of shared experience come to define belonging in extraordinary ways. Not because there is a great amount of meaning in belonging or otherness so defined, but because alienation as both experience-to-be-escaped and as potential experience-to-be-avoided becomes the defining psychological mechanism for so many. Thus, the American public nods its head to affirm whatever assertion is in vogue at the time, perhaps more easily than any other population in history, and given what has happened as a result of other populations being easily led at other times in history, this assertion should give one pause. Sheep by any other name, who can become a pack of proverbial wolves just like that.

          Thus, an entire people (definable via religious affiliation, ethnicity, geographic homeland) can be deemed the enemy, and the enemy can be made other, that much more easily — and so tortured and killed. The same move that yielded "gooks" three-plus decades ago yields "towel-heads," but now even such creative neologisms are not necessary because "terrorist" covers it all ("liberal" standing in for those of us who are accused of not going along, thereby relegated to a sub-category of not-us). Thus, the President can mouth certain key elements of what he wants the masses to believe, inserting them almost randomly into any speech he gives, and the masses will not only buy a subliminal policy assertion but do so readily. For by this time we know how those people are, the terrorists, and we sure as hell know what they look like (they have that damned swarthy look about them), what god they pray to, how much they hate the good old U.S.A.; and come to think of it, I would not put it past them to do something big like that again if we do not blow them to hell. And surely we have the right to pull out a few fingernails if that means America will be safe from terrorism, and the President assures us we are not safe now. And the President swears on the Bible he would not eavesdrop on any of us who do not by God deserve it, just those in that sub-category of not-us, the bastards who are only pretending to be one of us, who are perhaps the terrorists next door as depicted in those TV shows.

          Otherness becomes easy to ascribe, a sense of pariah-hood made all the more egregious by
one’s fear of being assigned to the category "outsider" too. And so the listeners go along with
whatever the misspeaker says who delivers policy pronouncements in code that border on the surreal
but make so much subliminal sense (the following quotations were collected by Weisberg): "He was a
state sponsor of terror. In other words, the government had declared, you are a state sponsor of
terror" (On Saddam Hussein, Manhattan, Kansas, 23 January 2006). "I mean, there was a serious
international effort to say to Saddam Hussein, you’re a threat. And the 9/11 attacks extenuated that
threat, as far as I-concerned" (Philadelphia, 12 December 2005) (see Weisberg
<http://www.slate.com/id/76886/>). It is worth noting that, if the masses were actually listening (as
in critically), they could hear a kernel of the truth in these assertions too. As in much of our exalted
performance artist’s best material, the truth is bobbing along just beneath the surface: "the
government declared … as far as I-concerned [sic]" (Weisberg <http://www.slate.com/id/76886/>). It
is almost as if the truth cannot be kept out of language, however hard the speaker might try, but
increasingly, it is apparently quite a trick for most of our fellow citizens to hear it through the noise.

Poetry: Toward an Aesthetics of Existence

          What kind of moronic naïf expects a poem to stand up to such master-hypnotist machinations,
especially given how widely disseminated, consumed like any other product, those messages are, how
shot through the culture the manipulation of our sense of otherness and the anxiety it produces have
become, especially given the fact that poetry is read by so few and perhaps for good reason, because
it has become anemic? Besides, the best poem is too insubstantial a thing to possibly achieve agency.
There is no heft in the palm as when one holds a club or a gun, or a cell phone or a Blackberry for that
matter. The poem is nothing but air clipped, sliced, and twisted by the tongue, slid across its surface,
maybe spanked like a buxom, a broad-shouldered lover as it is spat forth to flap away on the slightest
breeze — the poem’s inarticulate mother/cousin and sea of return at once. The thing tails away into
oblivion as soon as it is spoken, to silence, the poem killer.

          Ironically, there is all that noise with which to contend as well, seemingly an insurmountable
wave for such a tiny creature to withstand. Televisions blaring are but one source of static (in bars,
restaurants, Times Square), now joined by cell phones and handheld electronic devices and computers
and deep basso stereo-delivered music like the sound of the sea as migrating birds crossing Kansas
must hear it. But this wave of sound is everywhere and so not a sign by which to navigate:
Laundromats and eateries, exuding from implements carried by strangers and loved ones, drivers and
pedestrians, the same message on all of them in one master-hypnotist’s voice or another — or
mimicked by successfully hypnotized average citizens — until these carriers-of-devices and watchers
of screens must hear it in their sleep, see the electronic print. The wave threatens to subsume the
hearer him/herself, so how can there be even a dime-sized space for the subtle rhythmic shift of the
poem, its alliterative magic, let alone the well-placed caesura? Worse, perhaps Sven Birkerts is right:
"a fundamental cognitive reorganization is underway" (115). Not only is the poem in danger of
disappearing in the noise that is its context or dissolving to nothing before it can be noticed, read,
fathomed, but the human capacity to comprehend the text at any level below its surface is diminishing
anyway, and so poetry’s ephemerality in the face of such odds is only a prelude to utter extinction.
The masses do not fathom the master-hypnotist’s aims, only hear his words as if in a dream, and a
poem that stands in opposition is recognized only as another instance of the same disjointed syntax
like they type into their palms — c u @ home luv u:). In Birkert’s words, "My intuition — and fear — is
that … changes in the way we live are altering our cognitive structure and moving us away, perhaps
irrevocably, from former aptitudes … Our movement into electronic environments has brought us to a
threshold" (112).

          I am a poet — which is perhaps a Quixote-esque admission given what precedes it — and thus
I do not take these obstacles lightly, cannot be flippant in my approach to my art (for its own sake, as
it were, is not an option). If Birkerts is right, the ability to decode text, to arrive at a deeper sense of
what words contain, whether it be a poem or the master-hypnotist’s dark incantations, is a muscle
atrophying, but giving up is hardly the answer given what is at stake. Perhaps the poet’s primary job
in our age is, first, to reclaim the role of language in our lives by stealing back the tools with which the
master-hypnotist has absconded, and then to insist that a reader participate in the making of meaning
(that the reader exercise the appropriate muscle, as it were). I am certainly not suggesting that many
will answer the challenge, successfully or otherwise, or that the wall of noise is even penetrable, but
one must try. This is perhaps what Michel Foucault meant by "the search for an aesthetics of
existence," which he said must follow the disappearance of "morality as obedience to a code of rules"
(49). And how else can we explain the fact that arguably the greatest democratic republic in the
history of the world officially sanctions torture (or the other dark arts as practiced by the present
administration) than the utter abandonment of morality-as-obedience-to-a-code-of-rules. If we are to
withstand this onslaught against our humanity, it would seem that just such an aesthetic, a sense of
our shared human being that countermands the diminishment of anyone to furniture and dirt, to notus
and all that portends, is in order.

          The most eloquent defense of the role of poetry in this regard is John Berger’s: "Every
authentic poem contributes to the labour of poetry. And the task of this unceasing labour is to bring
together what life has separated or violence has torn apart … Poetry can repair no loss, but it defies
the space that separates … Poetry renders everything intimate. This intimacy is the result … of the
bringing together-into-intimacy of every act and noun and event and perspective to which the poem
refers. There is often nothing more substantial to place against the cruelty and indifference of the
world than this caring … To break the silence of events, to speak of experience however bitter or
lacerating, to put into words, is to discover the hope that these words may be heard, and that when
heard, the events will be judged" (450, 451, 452). I would push this assertion further, however: if a
poem is actually received, if indeed the reader does the work to "get it" (however dynamically "getting
it" must be interpreted), the reader must participate not only in the making of sense the poem implies
like a multivalent seed, but also deal with the experience the poem represents relative to an aesthetic
of existence. As William Carlos Williams said a long time ago, "It is the imagination / which cannot be
fathomed. / It is through this hole / we escape // Through this hole / at the bottom of the cavern / of
death, the imagination / escapes intact" (212). In short, the imagination allows us access to all of
human experience, and thereby the poem is the ground whereupon a dance between the poet and the
world takes place, but it is also a dance between the reader and the poet, what he or she engendered
there. And no dance is passive — you are dancing or you are not. The poem represents the experience
it conveys, and thus the reader must deal with that experience, incorporate it into his or her
conception of the world or explain it away. If the experience the poem contains includes torture,
whether it actually portrays the poet’s lived reality or, as is the case in the following poem written for
this essay, it is a radical act of creative empathy, the issue is rendered "intimate" and must be dealt
with as such:

          You do not recognize the voice
          as cinderblock echoes meet precisely
          where you sit, blindfolded and piss-drenched.
          The current flows better now
          and you have almost grown accustomed
          to the smell of boiled urine, singed
          pubic hair, hot flesh….
          Maybe it is not a voice at all, but rabbits
          being slaughtered or hundreds of children weeping
          or a nail driven through glass.
          Strange to be embarrassed your tormenter
          knows you so intimately, sees you this way,
          smells you. Then shame gives way to emptiness
          big as God: the rise and fall of the voice matches
          the waves of pain inevitable as incoming tide.
          And you open outward like a hothouse flower,
          names rising like pollen on the scorched air:
          your priest the vagabond urchins on your street
          the man you met on the bus yesterday a librarian
          you have only admired from afar the checker at the
          market a neighbor’s prepubescent child your dentist….
          All innocent as far as you know, but you
          can hate yourself tomorrow, the rest
          of your life you can dream them screaming
          in the same strained register as the cinderblock echoes.
          Your tormentor removes the blindfold,
          you blink to reveal a pair of bloodstained
          panties, and the God-sized emptiness
          fills with impossibly white sheet lightning.
          You beg to die, but the tormentor asks patience,
          cooperation. Just one more name so he can stop
          hurting you, all this wailing and the mess
          and the dreams he will have too, one
          more name, so your daughter your wife
          your sister can go free.

Admittedly, this poem employs a cheap trick, one of the most rudimentary tools stolen back from the magician-hypnotist. The second person pronoun demands that the reader enter the poem by taking the speaker’s place even as he has taken the prisoner’s place. The reader is now participating in the production of the world, but not "in the classical economic sense of the word, but … the nevercompleted, always-being produced state of experience: the production of the world as reality" (Berger 458). In short, this is not merely a vicarious experience to add to the trove that is one’s life list, but requires subjective participation that yields some small change in the fabric of the universe, first the reader’s personal universe and then the consensual human universe. The poem dares you to scoff, to be unchanged,
to listen to lies that permit such violence without protest.

          The poem implies several rhetorical questions: Could you withstand this pain, dear reader?
Are you man enough? Woman enough? At what point would you too give up everyone you know? At
what point beg for death? Can you see the torturer in your mind? A man/woman with dark skin or fair,
light or da0rk eyes, wearing what uniform? Can you imagine the torturer as your neighbor, a guard at
Abu Ghraib perhaps because we may never forget those images of some of us guilty of such offenses?
And why does the torturer claim to wish to end your ordeal — truth or ploy or both — and what of the
mention of dreams in that section of the poem? Is the torturer too a victim of his/her government’s
ability to make other some poor sap, you, who must pay with his/her blood and perhaps a descent to
madness? And what did you do to deserve this fate, this pain, dear reader, this burden that you as the
man/woman in the poem will never outlive? Did you speak too much? Too little? Is your religion the
wrong one? Were you caught in a place you should not have been, like in the street during a
rudimentary round up of people who look like you, talk like you, dress as you do, who are about your
age? Does it matter? Does anyone on earth, regardless of his or her violation, deserve to be in this
heinous chair? And perhaps some questions not immediately within the purview of the poem’s
thematic strategy will also arise for a reader in our bleak present, a further extrapolation from the
poem to the world as it joins the reader’s experience set, as it demands to be dealt with relative to
his/her ever-developing moral aesthetic: Can you accept assertions of the otherness of those your
government tortures? Can you simply accept the dark magician’s claims of the need and efficacy of
this practice? Can Alan Dershowitz read this poem and still offer a scenario from a television show
(one of those designed, consciously or un-, to keep us afraid, to perpetuate the dark magician’s
claims) without breaking out in hives?

Coda

          In his book The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference, Malcolm Gladwell
describes a model for society-level change that advertisers have known about for decades: ideas (and
products) spread in the same way as viruses (and hence "viral marketing," and indeed, the marketing
industry’s embrace of Gladwell’s book as a training manual). Exposure is followed by contagion, and in
between are a series of incremental changes on the part of individuals that result in critical mass, or
what Gladwell terms the tipping point: that moment when there is a dramatic rise in a given idea’s
presence in the population.

          As a poet friend told me once: no one ever stormed the barricades because of a poem. The
call to arms, or even to overt protest, is not the poem’s purview, however. The poem works more
subtly, at the level of human emotions and psychology, by enacting experience. Paradoxically, the
overt aim of any authentic poem is not to change the world precisely because a poem never has, but
then again, that is the aim as well, to change readers in some incremental way by foisting a vision of
the world upon them with which they must interact, that they must subjectively assess relative to
their context and their aesthetic of existence. D.H. Lawrence’s assertion becomes all the more true
within our present shared context, the current historical moment when the odds are so long that a
poem will even get through and the noise is threatening to drown us all: "The essential function of art
is moral. Not aesthetic, nor decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral. The essential function
of art is moral. But a passionate, implicit morality, not didactic. A morality which changes the blood,
rather than the mind. Changes the blood first. The mind follows later, in the wake" (180).

          A powerful harlequin-king rules over the present dark age, and poets’ efforts seem so paltry compared to the vast media apparatus he manipulates that we aren’t even on his radar screen. Although the truth resides in nearly every surreal claim (and disclaimer), there in plain view for the American public to decipher, although polls indicate that the masses grow increasingly restless at the rising body count (the tally marks in the "us" column) but more so because of the rising tab, little has changed for the good in the overall tone of U.S.-American discourse since this grand performance began shortly after the attack in New York. I have no illusions that my simple attempts to reincorporate the other in a few poems will awaken readers in sufficient numbers to overthrow the harlequin’s regime or bring about a rebirth of respect for human life, but my aesthetic of existence entails the attempt — and my hope remains that the tipping point is closer than is immediately apparent. What can a poem accomplish in the world? Not much against such odds maybe, but perhaps just enough.

Works Cited

• Berger, John. Selected Essays. New York: Vintage, 2003
• Birkerts, Sven. Readings. Saint Paul: Graywolf, 1999.
• Dershowitz, Alan M. Why Terrorism Works: Understanding the Threat, Responding to the Challenge. New Haven: Yale UP, 2002.
• Foucault, Michel. Politics, Philosophy, Culture: Interviews and Other Writings, 1977-1984. Trans. Alan Sheridan. New York: Routledge, 1998.
• Gladwell, Malcolm. The Tipping Point: How Little Things Can Make a Big Difference. New York: Little, Brown, and Co., 2000.
• Jameson, Fredric. The Cultural Turn: Selected Writings on Postmodernism, 1983-1988. New York: Verso, 1998.
• Lawrence, D.H. Studies in Classic American Literature. 1923. New York: Penguin, 1977.
• McIrvin, Michael. Optimism Blues: Poems Selected and New. San Diego: Cedar Hill, 2003.
• Williams, William Carlos. Paterson. New York: New Directions, 1958.
• Weisberg, Jacob. "The Complete Bushisms." Slate (11 Sept. 2007): <http://www.slate.com/id/76886/>.

Author’s profile: Michael McIrvin is the author of five collections of poetry, most recently Optimism
Blues: Poems Selected and New (Cedar Hill Publications). He has also written a collection of essays,
Whither American Poetry, and a novel, Déjà vu and the Phone Sex Queen. He is currently shopping his
novel manuscript titled The Blue Man Dreams the End of Time, which is partly about the CIA’s actions
in Mesoamerica and mostly about violence as the bleak mechanism of history, and he is finishing a
new poetry collection tentatively entitled Hearing Voices (one section is called "Poet in Wartime" and
will include the poem discussed in this essay). McIrvin taught literature and writing for several years,
most recently at the University of Wyoming, and presently makes his living as a writer and freelance
editor. Email: <mcirvinm@earthlink.net.>

For all poets who refuse to give up on the possibility
of renaissance.

Copyright 1998 and 1999 by Michael McIrvin
Printed in the United States of America
First Edition
All rights reserved

Also by Michael McIrvin:
Love and Myth,
Lessons of Radical Finitude,
Dog,
The Book of Allegory

Please see the Preface for acknowledgments.

Cedar Hill Publications is dedicated to the rejuvenation
of American poetry and to that end publishes the very
best poetry and criticism currently being written.

Cedar Hill Publications
3438 Villa Terrace
San Diego, CA 92104-3424

          Bottled up for days, mostly
          in great sweat of being, seeking
          to bind in speed—petere—desire,
          to construct knowing back to image and
          God’s face behind it turned as mine
          now is to blackness image shows
          herself, desire the light
          speed & motion alone are, love’s
          blackness arrived at going backwards the rate
          reason hath—and art her beauty God the truth
                                                                                          Charles Olson, “Maximus of Gloucester”

CONTENTS:

PREFACE

WHITHER AMERICAN POETRY

THE WRONG TURN

THE POET IN A NONSENSICAL AGE:
STEPS IN A HEALING RITUAL

THE TALE OF THE POSTMODERN TRIBE:
NOTES TOWARD CONTEMPORARY VERSE EPIC

WORKS CITED

 
                                                                                                   PREFACE: A FIRST VOLLEY

      What passes for poetry criticism these days tends to fall into only a handful of categories, but it ranges from the naively nostalgic to the apocalyptic. On the one hand are those critics who assert that in order for poetry to be poetry we must revert to the forms of old, and hence that most of what presently passes for poetry isn’t; and on the other end of the spectrum are those who maintain that language itself is inevitably hegemonic and must be taken apart, one brick at a time or wholesale in a kind of bricolage of negation, which is meant to explain the disfigured syntax and near absence of subjective assertion in much of contemporary American poetry. This is, of course, the conservative and liberal long and short of the current situation in poetry criticism, but then there is also the voice in the wilderness, from either stage right or stage left (to further convolute the metaphor), decrying without adequately critiquing the loss of poetry’s readership, its purportedly former central location in the culture, and its imminent death (i.e., Joseph Epstein and Dana Gioia).

      This last stance may be emblematic of poetry criticism generally in recent years in as much as it derives from a single simplistic binary opposition that seems to be the bottom line for all extant critical stances: poetry or no poetry. That American poetry has severe problems is a given in the critical community. As William Logan, who by temperament tends to the conservative side of the scale, says in All the Rage,

          Most American poetry now consists of tract housing:
          the personal narrative is a trim backyard, a little swimming pool for the household
          Narcissus, and no second story. No poetry can long survive without history,
          without ideas, without a hidden psyche… . [T]he generation of Pound and Eliot
          and Frost and Stevens and Moore was greater than the generation of Auden and
          Lowell and Bishop, which was in turn greater than the generation of Hecht and
          Ashbery and Ginsberg and Merrill, which is a generation greater than ours

Such an assertion of degeneration is in fact the premiere premise underlying the essays contained herein; however, for the critics of the present it is as if the poem’s demise as purveyor of truth happened in a literary/philosophical/cultural vacuum, as if this demise were asymptomatic of some larger cultural malaise. It is also not much of an extrapolation from the underlying despair in their writing to assert that these critics believe the situation beyond repair, except of course for those who would, naively, have us retreat in the direction of the sonnet and the sestina, toward strident iambs and overbearing trochees in our age of chaos theory and existential randomness.

      This is not to suggest that poetry has not lost much that must be reachieved if the poem is to be a tool of culture change as well as critique, which is also a major underlying premise of this book: that poetry can and indeed should be a tool, a weapon in the service of our cultural health, which is to say our freedom. This is also not to suggest that concerns regarding the efficacy of language to achieve either critique or change in light of its hegemonic past and present, the language’s capacity to even include the other in civilization’s oeuvre, are groundless either. In fact, one of the primary assertions imbedded throughout this book is that regaining something of what has been traditionally the provenance of poetry must be balanced with the concerns that have grown out of deconstructive theories of language and power. However, this book is also as unabashedly prescriptive in places as it is unapologetically a work of commentary overallin short, balance is not to be construed here as simplistic synthesis or equivocation. These essays are meant to be strident, meant to engender discussion that borders, ideally, (and only borders, of course) on physical violence, because the stakes are so high and the current discourse too genteel when not merely stunted. Which is not to say that I necessarily take specific aim at the icons of the mainstream (although a few will certainly be named and taken to task) or anyone else, but, rather, that this book’s intended purpose is as (inflammatory) heuristic, an opening volley that raises questions that should have been asked long ago, but that also broaches tentative answers that exceed the above sad dialectic to the questions critics have been acknowledging as primary at least implicitly for some time. Such as: How can language be revivified in the face of poststructural revelations of indeterminacy and the consequent problematization of everything from being to truth, in the face of media’s dark intentions for the word and the image, in the face of all the numbing but manipulative noise on the airwaves?

      Although critics at present seem to be avoiding (or denying) the larger, more problematic issues of contemporary poetry, some versions of criticism are obviously more helpful than others in any real attempt to understand the current situation, and such critical work has been a touchstone, albeit a limited one, for this collection. Real literary criticism has always been an ongoing argument, of course, an attempt to inflect our pangeneral understanding of the task of the writer and the viable range of the text. The best of criticism as polemic remains true to that traditional desire to clear the ground for the kind of poetry the critic deems “good,” deems the poetry most representative of our age. As opposed to the other forms of criticism discussed below, most of which take as their goals and frames of reference much smaller (nearly incestuous) purviews, this is a frequently unpleasant task in as much as the critic must deal with the dreck as antithesis. If the critic is to offer up something other than a picture of his/her own aesthetic in reverse, however, the poetry in question must be located relative to the overall poetical melange and discussed in terms of its larger tendencies.

      Fred Chappell, for example, in his recent A Way of Happening, begins one essay railing at the “sloppy purple” of Alfred Corn’s most recent collection, “the mumble of [his] disjointed abstraction.” He subsequently correlates Corn’s book to another poet’s work he believes shares the same egregious aesthetic (Michael Burkard), then declares them Ashberians, whose poetry he indicts as desiring “above all else to avoid critical stricture. Whatever complaint is brought against it is opted by its partisans as a strength. ‘This stuff is boring,’ you say, and are told that it is meant to be boring; the fact that it is boring says something about poetry in our time. Silliness, lack of logic, disjointedness, sameness of toneall those qualities ordinarily noted as indices to bad poetry are referred to as symptoms of social and spiritual and literary conditions.” As insightful as this observation is, he does not go the next logical step, however, and locate this poetics within the larger enterprise of poetry generally, let alone as a symptom and product of forces in the culture at large. If these poets are consciously enacting the status quo, aren’t they complicitous in its perpetuation? In other words, he too fails to step beyond the impasse these poets map by simply implying that poets must adhere to traditional notions of what a poem is supposed to do.

      At least Chappell has the audacity to make value judgments within a dynamic ongoing discussion about what a poem should or should not be. Too much of current criticism is not so much about the shape of the poem and the current situation of poetry generally as it is a shameless act of self perpetuation within the microcosm that is the “poetry biz.” The critical act, so-called, becomes an act of self-aggrandizement-by-association. Only poets of reputation, that is of the mainstream, and books from “reputable” houses, which is to say the powerful ones, are critiquedif the word is still valid in so diminished a usage. The vast majority of the poetry terrain, including the most interesting and vital environs, is either denied existence or dismissed as a wasteland.

      At best this criticism, which is never negative, is vapid. Helen Vendler says of Jorie Graham in The Given and the Made for example, in a kind of lit-pop-psycho-babble: “In these knottings and loosenings, slowings and quickenings, ending in, stopping on, a word, Graham finds the only linguistic and imaginative equivalents for the self as she now understands it.” But more often than not such criticism carries an air of promotion, self promotion by/of the critic by virtue of how smart he/she is, which we know because the poet whose work is being explained to us so eloquently is so very smart, which we of course know because the critic, in an act of self serving boosterism, tells us so:

          The real power in the idea of the poetic self conceived as matter emerges in
          Graham’s intense and lavish transcriptions of the material world, in which all her
          formidable energies of description and kinesis are engaged. Graham’s attempt to
          describe the material world with only minimal resort to the usual conceptual and
          philosophical resources of lyric…and to make that description a vehicle for her
          personal struggle into comprehension and expression, is harder even than it would seem.

      At worst this brand of criticism dissolves into tabloid assertions about the poet’s life as it is supposedly manifested in the poem. J.D. McClatchy admits in his introduction to Twenty Questions, for example, “I have tried to lay out the terms of a career, the topography of an imagination… .” He is referring to his essays on James Wright, Merwin, Larkin, Heany, Wilbur, and Merrill; but the juxtaposition of the words “career” and “imagination” is telling in terms of his own intentions as they are manifested in the limited scope of these essays and their tenor of mostly uncritical praise. At least McClatchy tends to avoid the most pathetic version of this brand of criticism. In his recent review of Randall Jarrell’s Selected Essays, Alfred Corn resorts to speculations about the dead poet’s “latent homosexuality,” and does so as if it were gossip, never relating that possibility to any larger assertions about the work or the age in which it was produced. In short, when such criticism is not serving merely as a meal for the critic’s own undernourished cachet, it is offered up as titillation of the variety Americans expect as regards their celebrities. Only accidentally does it ever attempt to categorize and explain let alone to navigate the larger issues now facing poetry.

      One major exception to such a limited purview is the criticism informed by the work of Foucault and Derrida and Barthes. Although the tenets of poststructural philosophical systems make for a very narrowly programmatic discussion, critics like Marjorie Perloff and Charles Bernstein at least attempt to locate the problems of poetry within the larger cultural milieu, albeit in abstract terms and with too little critical venom in their voices as if the present situation were either inevitable or innocuous. Because the poetry that is informed by the same premises as the criticism is by definition against the grain of the status quo, which is to say of mainstream poetry that still traces its roots to Romanticism, these critics are frequently defensively explanatory, which seems understandable; but their matter-of-fact defensiveness also seems merely a reflex, an automatic acceptance of one’s alterity that is almost precious. As Perloff says of a poem by John Ashbery,

          the opacity of “Europe,” its resolute refusal to relate meanings, is not attributable
          to its excessive disjunctiveness as Harold Bloom, who calls the poem a “fearful
          disaster,” seems to think. I would argue that it is, on the contrary, too one
          dimensional, which is to say that it is not “disjunctive” enough.

      Worse, however, too often these critics succumb to the very philosophical tenets that are the basis for their criticism. The result is a linguistic razzle-dazzle that is by turns laced with poignant assertion, that is nevertheless so dense that only a handful of people can understand it, or which refuses to be anything less than indeterminate. To be certain, the situation of poetry is complex, and the collection in your hand is more dense in places than I am comfortable with as a result, but the limitations of subjective assertion should by now be a given and thus dealt with in some active fashion. My expansion of Chapel’s complaint about the Ashberians holds for these critics as well: it is time to transcend the impasse. Charles Bernstein can assert in My Way:

          I am conscious that an ideological poetry, insofar as it may dismantle whatever
          self or group identities we may have already developed, risks making us more
          atomized and so more passive. In this state of “postmodern” paranoia, all
          collective formations—real or imagined—are ironized or aestheticized…debunked
          as arbitrary codes, with fashion and market ascendant as the arbiters of value…

and go on to suggest that a poetry of resistance is possible, only to undercut that assertion by telling the reader it isn’t possible: “poetry is the most necessary form of language practice after the wars: but a different poetry than we have known. The task of creating this poetry is impossible and for that reason takes place.” In other words, the race is caught in a feedback loop of desire and failure to achieve that desire. If the above quotation were not the last sentences of the essay in question, it would be less disturbing; but as it stands critics like Bernstein are obviously caught in their own devices and cannot escape to say the world, let alone escape to help the rest of us say the world via some reactivation of the subjective.

      Thus too much of the poetry criticism of the present, like too much of the poetry, is complicitous in the way-things-are. Critics are either caught up within the bases of their own assertions, like so many self-programmed rats in a maze, or using criticism as the vehicle of ascendancy within a poetry establishment madly self-replicating, seeking to steal prestige from the chosen while ignoring the majority of the real poetry being written in America, poetry that at least aspires to be more than present circumstances seem to allow. It is within this malaise that I have attempted a book that is not complicitous. Whither American Poetry seeks to locate poetry as a whole in the culture at large, and to locate the more egregious aspects of the genre in terms of their manifestations as force and product, frequently among the practices of poets and critics as well as in the world-out-there, and to cover some small portion of the poetical ground not currently granted the status of existence by most critics. Although my aim for this collection is to raise questions, it also attempts to answer some as well, to balance the heuristic with the polemical. Presently, it is as if those few critics whose purview is poetry-at-large are stuck and can at best only map the problems poetry faces. Although his analyses are frequently accurate, in his latest collection of criticism Bernstein repeats the phrase “the problem is…” like a mantra, without ever offering any but the most abstract of assertions for solutions, if these. And a writer as in the middle of the conservative/liberal critical scale as McClatchy says in the preface to his latest collection, “this is a book of questions, not of answers.” The questions are important only to the degree that we actively seek to resolve them, only to the degree that they spark vigorous discussion, only to the degree that they incite change, which is the task, now more than ever, that poetry criticism must undertake.

                                                                                                    *

      There are a variety of reasons so much of American poetry at present is lamentable, a complex of reasons, all interacting in sundry ways specific to the “brand” of poetry under discussion. I do not pretend in my prescriptive analysis to understand the whole dynamic in our complicated age, but a few egregious tendencies that cross brand categories bear remark precisely because they are pandemic, which suggests a causality larger and deeper than simple aesthetics. A recurring theme in the following essays is pastiche, the making of copies that has become an unconscious replication born of neither a desire to satirize or to pay homage, let alone as a creative extension of a particular vision of the poetic enterprise. This pathetic mimicry is the Xerox version of a feedback loop. Poststructuralism has warned us that nothing is really new, but in the final analysis there are degrees of not newness, and what is being produced now is all too often lifeless, empty, a mere copy of a copy of a copy, the print getting successively lighter and harder to discern, all of the original’s energy rung out of it. Which is to say that poets no longer have a connection to their poetical progenitors except as replicators of what said progenitors did considerably better. The current situation is not what Bloom labeled “misprision” in the seventies, the purposeful misreading of the poetry of the past in order to clear a place for one’s own sense of the poem. Although I argue that the current crop has misread certain major premises of the moderns and the poststructuralists, and thus carry some of those tenets to illogical extremes, contemporary poets in general tend to passively repeat what went before without either understanding or questioning their own poetical impetus, the set of premises out of which one’s art grows. And the phenomenon is visible in all endeavors in our culture, from popular music that sounds like it was made by some previous group before they had practiced much to second rate reproductions of movies from our youth.

      Equally egregious is the diminished subject in the current incarnation of the American poem, the poem seemingly intended by its maker to be as innocuous as is possible. Poems rarely say anything at present, either in the largest or most pedestrian sense of the assertion. Not only has the poem as a vehicle of cultural criticism given way to suburban ennui, the effects of the mundane “real” on the egoistic “I,” but even a viable speaker is missing from most poetry, in some cases as if the poem were the random product of a computer program designed to hook up signifiers (in the loosest definition of the word). Consequently, contemporary American poetry lacks referential depth and subjective gumption, any fire, any fight, any desire. At best, contemporary poetry is a snapshot of the current impasse in the culture’s intellectual life generally: the inability to act, to have ideas, to bring one’s subjective desire to bear upon the world, to move forward.

      The ultimate result of these tendencies is not so much a dying poetry, that bleak pole of the implicitly dyadic premise underlying most present criticism, but, like all products of the culture whether they be artistic or political or from the marketplace, a somnambulant one. I have no doubt that MFA programs can fill all the seats in the house for some time to come, but in the absence of a more active paradigm, one that allows for subjective assertion and the inclusion of a dynamic meaning beyond the merely egoistic or the stolen as part of the poetical project, the same dreck will be passed from poet to literary magazine to publishing house, boring the reader, and alienating any potential reader outside the loop of this little cottage industry, at every turn. I have no doubt that poetry will “live” in the absence of a revivified sense of what a poem is and what it can be, but in the same diminished guise as at present, without cease but without much verve either.

                                                                                                    *

      Although this book refers to the necessity for a reconstructive poetics, the agenda is not nostalgic. Reconstruction is defined as part of a larger dynamic principle that, inevitably, entails more than simply recovering what has been lost in terms of poetry’s traditional role for the race. The previous version of the poetry community as the closed club of what is referred to as the mainstream, the monolith of unscalable walls whose only members were born inside, the bastion of poetical exclusion where the rules are composed in order to keep certain versions of the world out (in spite of Walt Whitman’s injunctions to the contrary) is not to be hungered after as some vision of our innocence before the fall. Although peopled occasionally with poets whose very existence was denied previously, the mainstream still exists, of course. However, these poets are too often tokens of diversity whose realities as they are captured in language are not overly disconcerting, and are sometimes even comforting, to the dominant reading audience. Hence, the mainstream is still a force to be reckoned with: of stasis, which is to say of control and exclusion and death.

      But the mainstream vision of what a poem can and cannot be is no longer the only one available. Admittedly, the current decentered version of the poetry community is chock full of bad writing, which only suggests the dark affinities between the outriders and their more sanctioned brothers and sisters, affinities that require a broader critical perspective if we are to get a handle on the present situation. It is true, the current chaotic world of American poetry sometimes seems overwhelming. The side effects, however, are well worth what we have gained: more voices of every hue and orientation and class are heard, reaching out to people who previously did not visit the poetry section at the library because they were not represented in poetry, their experiences having been deemed less than real, perhaps even aberrant. I offer this observation in part to suggest that there is indeed hope to balance the despair over the current literary malaise, albeit a product of picking wheat from chaff. American poetry is at least straining toward polyvocality like no other medium of expression. But I also want to suggest via this observation that any criticism that ignores vast chunks of the poetry landscape is incomplete.

      Thus, the eponymous essay offers a broad interpretation of the poetry situation in America by looking at its various strains. Such categorization allowed for generalizations I could not have made otherwise for getting bogged down in the particulars of individual versions of praxis. Given the size of the project, I make no claim to an absolute completeness in my assessment, but I have attempted to be categorically complete, including as many representations of various types of poetry operative in America at present as occurred to me. The picture is not a very cheery one, it is true. The egregious tendencies described above, in concert with others specific to the individual strains under discussion, suggest an art (and a culture) in distress. However, the underlying premise is one of hope nevertheless, given the chaotic breadth of the poetry community and the few excellent examples of poetry magazines currently serving as oases of quality that have risen out of the morass.

      As opposed to Logan’s seemingly unidirectional decadence, overall the current situation in poetry is offered as a potentially dynamic decay, as the morass out of which American poetry must be reborn. And rebirth, revivification, renaissance, is put forth as a transcendent third to the vacuous and oversimplified dialectic of present poetry criticism: poetry or no poetry. In fact, throughout the book the journey into the underworld and back is offered up as a relevant metaphor for the process that poetry and the culture generally must undergo if we are to escape the current morass wherein language and meaning and human existence are no longer covalent.

      In an early work, Kora in Hell, William Carlos Williams recognized that creativity and decay are, as a wheel, continually cycling:

          When the wheel’s just at the upturn it glimpses horizon, zenith, all in a burst, the
          pull of the earth shaken off, a scatter of fragments, significance in a burst of water
          striking up from a base of a fountain. Then at the sickening turn toward death the
          pieces are joined into a pretty thing, a bouquet frozen in an ice cake.

The image of the ephemerality of art, truth captured only momentarily, until it transubstantiates to a more primary form, is illustrative of a further underlying premise of Whither American Poetry: creativity is inevitably cyclical in as much as decadence follows creation. However, its twin premise is that an upturn toward active creation is not inevitable, relying as it does on the will to action, on subjective gumption. In William’s epic, Paterson, the protagonist imitates the fate of creativity in time through his decline toward decadence and parody and his preoccupation with death. This seems an accurate representation of where we are as a culture presently, poetry but symptomatic and emblematic of our pangeneral downturn. But, at the end of Book Four, the hero ultimately walks away from the sea (symbolically from the morass that threatens to swallow all heroes) “renewed in his creative energies, ready for another descent that will lead to another ascent” (Peter Schmidt). This is the role Whither… encourages poets to be willfully cast in, with emphasis on the necessity of will. The current situation of poetry, its stunted and impotent incarnation, is certainly a reflection of our cultural malaise; but in its traditional role as a function of ritual and translator of experience into values, and in its modern and postmodern role (mostly dormant at present) as vehicle for cultural critique, the trace of all these functions still visible in some poems of the present, poetry can potentially serve as a means to a renewed sense of our generalized being.

      The first two essays in the collection chart our current malaise. The initial overview of the American poetry milieu is followed by a further assertion of loss in the second essay, “The Wrong Turn”: the death of what I term subjective gumption. The essay locates that loss not only in the poetry of the present but also in the culture at large as the death of critical consciousness and, worse, in our collective explanation-unto-rationalization of that death and the servitude it entails. The format of the third essay, “The Poet in a Nonsensical Age: Steps in a Healing Ritual,” serves loosely as a model for the structure of the book itself, the descent that will be followed by ascent if we desire and if we act.

      After offering a description/definition of our nonsensical age, this essay outlines the first tentative steps in a healing ritual for poetry that is an attempt to reachieve what the culture and poetry have lost and to suggest a reinvention of what poetry is for the culture as well. Broadly, the steps are as follows: First, poets must steal back the image and the word from mass media and politicians and any others who not only demean (all puns intended) our primary poetical tools as vehicles of truth but so inundate us with inane signs that the majority of the populace has shut down against the onslaught. Poets must again use language as a sensual gateway to the imagination, the ground upon which the poet and the reader and language dance together in a dynamic of signification. To signify poignantly is to draw the reader onto that ground, even against his/her will. Second, as the book as a whole attempts to map the situation of poetry, and to map a way out of the current impasse (to move from culture critique, a la deconstruction, to praxis), the poet must be the mapper of our collective terrain, both the inner and outer. Given our tendency as a culture to deny the existence of what James Hillman calls our psychic underworld, our darkness has been perversely projected outward into the everyday. The culture cannot escape a labyrinth it denies exists, cannot escape without a map, and consequently the poet’s job is to chart both the terrain of our psychological malaise and its representation in the world: prisons, poverty, madness, to name but a few of its manifestations. But it is also the poet’s job as mapmaker to chart that in us which transcends the darkness, to sing of love and our children and hope. In spite of the projection of our fear and self loathing outward, that is not the whole of the human condition. Much is to be said for potentiality, for an imagined forward that transcends the labyrinth without denying it. Third, the poet must again seek the mystery at the center of our being and attempt to convey it via the poem as myth. The search in this section of the essay is for a method that does not recreate the old hegemonies in the form of outworn metanarratives, that translates individual human experience relative to history. Poetry-as-myth seeks to integrate consciousness into action, to achieve meaning on the largest of scales: the human relationship to the great what-is as it transmutes before our eyes.

      This is the poet’s traditional role as the speaker of the nearly unspeakable, the individual life as it is confronted with the mysterium tremendum et fascinans, as it is translated in the panhuman; but poets have always been the tellers of “The Tale of the Tribe” as well, and the last essay explores what such a work would look like in the absence of modernist hieratic claims to high culture and (in the case of Pound and Eliot) a frustrated retreat to authoritative paradigms. The overarching assertion is that this epic would both self consciously locate itself in history and recognize its own failed claim to inclusion, to being encyclopedic in scope and therefore complete. The poet would attempt to give a picture of this time and this place relative to personal experience, as it impinges upon and forms the everyman/woman who is the inevitable postmodern hero. And, by the very nature of a decentered discourse, within which no claim can be made for privileging certain experiences over those of others, the epic would aspire to be polyvocal and multivalent. It would aspire to be a portion of the tale that, along with the other portions and variations, creates a mosaic of the human experience as it evolves, one to stand in opposition to the current leveling and controlling metanarrative that enters our households and our consciousness over the airwaves.

      Perhaps the ultimate assertion of this collection is that the healing ritual described in “The Poet in a Nonsensical Age…” must be never ending. At present, poets and the people of the culture generally seem to have abdicated any larger notion of human meaning than the one prescribed by media and the market. Certainly, the deconstructive move that has been the reaction of many poets is ongoing given the continuing assault upon our senses and our sense of self, given the tendency to hegemonic acquisition of all assertion, the inevitability that our weapons, words and imagery, will be turned on us. However, reconstruction is a necessity if we are to again feel human, mysterious and meaningful and dynamically connected to the substrate of our being. This book makes big claims for the possible role of poetry in the rebirth of the culture as well as large claims for the revivification of poetry itself. Throughout I am self conscious of the criticism such assertions will bring. However, I can never forget that Orpheus, that prototypical versifier, failed to bring Eurydice back from the underworld. In Rilke’s most heart rending version of the tale, she cannot come back because she has forgotten, because she has been too long in the dark:

          She was already loosened like long hair,
          poured out like fallen rain,
          shared like a limitless supply.

          She was already root.

          And when, abruptly,
          the god put out his hand to stop her, saying,
          with sorrow in his voice: He has turned around—,
          she could not understand, and softly answered
          Who?
                                                                                         (“Orpheus, Eurydice, Hermes”)

There are possibly others who would traverse the dark to bring us all back, but if the poet is forgotten, the poet who is the traditional keeper of “the first element of our existence that expresses the disorder of our soul’s song…[and] the breaking down of the modes of harmony” (C.K. Williams), indeed if the poet no longer knows the way out of the chaos, then who?

                                                                                                    *

      I would like to acknowledge those without whom this collection would either not exist at all or at least would be something other than it is: Christopher Presfield of Cedar Hill Publications for requesting I write it in the first place based only upon the first essay and book reviews I have written that he has run across in the last few years; Leonard Cirino who publishes Semi-Dwarf Review and requested the eponymous essay for its pages, an essay which garnered much attention for yours truly as well as much critical discussion with poets across America, and the reason Christopher was inspired to publish such a collection at all; Vincent Bator of The Pannus Index who will publish another of these essays in a different form; all the editors of the other magazines who are at this moment considering the essays in spite of the fact that they will appear in book form (many refused on these grounds alone) before credit for publication in those other venues can be given properly here (and I apologize for the short turn around time: Christopher grows impatient); and especially William Doreski of Keene State University and Doug Reitinger of the University of Wyoming for their invaluable comments on early drafts. Thank you all.

                                                                                                   WHITHER AMERICAN POETRY

      When initially asked to write an assessment of American poetry as we near the millennium, I expected to produce another diatribe against the general creative writing program tendency to poems that make form an end in itself, one more rant against the gentrified mainstream, one more middle finger raised in lugubrious salute to the captains who control what we read (and, therefore, think) as the ship we are all on continues to list hopelessly in the heavy seas at the end of history. However, and in spite of my occasional despair, my notes for this piece revealed something quite unexpected: hope for the future of American poetry…and hope in a certifiable cynic must certainly ¬¬mean somethingand a discussion of meaning, that much maligned and assaulted creature, is precisely where this essay will lead eventually.

      My hope, however, is hope in the truest sense of the word, since it is premised upon possibility, potential in our current circumstances that will effloresce or die because of our (poets’) actions or lack thereof. In the words of a recent poem, and at the risk of sounding apocalyptic, as a culture generally we are at that strange point, the dialectical fulcrum/ between renaissance and ruin… (“Prelude,” Dog) where the choice to act is not an option but a necessity if we are to survive. Paradoxically, however, the former must grow out of the latter and hence the pun in the title of this essay and my unanticipated discovery of hope in the situation of American poetryit is probably a discredited archetype in the post-structural milieu, but nothing grows unless fed from the roots by the decaying corpse of what went before it.

                                                                                                    The Corpus

      Railing against creative writing programs and their generally banal products may be in vogue in some circles, but not merely so. In fact, that content has been sacrificed on the altar of form in the mainstream, period, might almost be a truism now. However, even form has de-evolved in most academic poetry to a mere semblance of its former self. Staunch rhyme and meter have given way to some chimerical, flickering thing that vaguely resembles an archmodel of a poem in its overall rhythm: it does one thing at the beginning, another in the middle, and something to resemble closure at the end, as if it were put together on an assembly line. These products are not the result of a constraint against which the poet must move creatively (not Berrigan’s sonnets or Yeats’ masterful use of rhyme) as a great chef works in the mode “soufflé” or “sauce,” risking failure even as he/she reaches for success, but little squares of pasty nothing. Not ambrosia on the tongue, but not shit either; certainly not fortifying, but not exactly nauseatingjust fast-food-sameness, as Donald Hall has referred to them: McPoems and McStories.

      Much has also been made, in those same circles, of the neo-confessional inflection of the bulk of workshop poetrypoems frequently so private, so solipsistic in their imagery that they are virtually meaningless for any reader except, in some poems, the voyeur at the window box with his hand in his pants. At least in this version, however, there is someone breathing under the cardboard printout, some small flavor in its consumption even if the reader gets little more than a slight prurient buzz from the experience.

      Although there are probably good programs somewhere, and although there are certainly good teachers/writers struggling in bad ones, by-and-large the fin de siecle version of the creative writing program poem is compost for two further reasons: 1) the format itself has led to program saturation. That is, enough generations have been bred to replace their teachers so that the gene pool now approaches absolute banalityno mutation, no innovation, and too great a remove from real literary lineage, which is by definition multivalent, fecund. And 2) Over the past few decades there has been a decay of English departments generally as places where anything interesting (read creative and/or as regards ideas) happens; which is to say that, not that long ago, to declare your critical/poetical allegiances was to have enemies, however collegial, with whom to argue with conviction over the shape of the discourse. Presently, however, critical decisions are merely menu choices determined by whatever will best serve one’s chances of publication, and those critical decisions are offered as just that to students as wellno commitment, no fire in the belly required.

      Likewise, however, those poets who generally consider themselves the creative writing program’s antithesis are also compost, albeit for different reasons. These are the neo-beat/neo-Bukowski-ites who have seized upon much of the masturbatory adolescent rant of the former without either their political and social commentary or the latter’s cynical wit. Although this movement as abreaction is understandable given the new conservatism and its mirror image, political correctness, now loose in the land, which together are more effective at stifling individual assertion than any uniformed protector of the status quo, these poets’ attempts to out-Buk Bukowski (and there are exceptionssome of Ron Androla’s work comes to mind) are usually as self indulgent as the neo-confessional. Worse, their intention seems to be merely to shock in an age when nobody gets shocked by much of anything, and consequently these poems tend to be vignettes of human suffering that are rarely poignant and too often boring, which is a paradox of some import.

      This is not to discount the vox populi, the voice of the people, the American idiom as Williams called it, the syntactical beauty of vernacular American English; but when both diction and subject become merely a pose, an ersatz stance toward the world offered up for effect, an affectation, that voice becomes self-parody, pastiche that is neither homage to a way of life or ironic, just ridiculous. So-called spoken word poetry is a premiere example. The best of it is truly a reflection of the emotional life of the speaker as inflected by his/her political and economic reality, and it is shared in a community that uses language nearly as tribals use it, as a way of establishing and maintaining social bonds. Frequently it is also a way of establishing an identity in contradistinction to the larger culture that has marginalized the speaker. However, too often (especially in a slam environment, that strange conception of poetry as competition, which seems truly, and ironically, American), each poet seems merely hell-bent on blowing the audience away, concerned with effect that is only effect. The ultimate result is too often, unwittingly, parody.

      Likewise, although the etiological premises that underlie poststructuralism and the poetry it inflects seem valid, the poets who work in this mode may have done as much as any to bring us to our current state of poetical malaise. At the very least the opacity (Ashbery’s term) of much of that work is as meaningless as the neo-confessional and, at its logical extreme, kills communication altogether.

      That our language carries the taint of its patriarchal origins and context is probably nearly another truism, and that it at least can be hegemonic certainly is true (and perhaps the best of poets have always existed to counterbalance this tendency). But to so endlessly displace meaning so as to achieve meaninglessness, to reduce language to amorphic cipher (and this pun, in spite of the fact that poststructuralism’s great gift to poetry is the heightened awareness of the multivariate possibilities in every word to subvert the established and generally accepted order, here works against the poststructural agenda), to understand that the subject of the poem is the same entity subjected to power but not that this entity is also potential change agent, has led in its most extreme incarnations (in much L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry) to dead graphemes on the white void of the page and the murder of the subjective speaker.

      Such poetry has not only eviscerated meaning and embalmed the subject but is egregiously elitist. The limitations of language to achieve meaning for segments of the population seems valid, but how does anyone who is not steeped in critical and philosophical esoterica, Derrida and Barthes et al, understand the assertions in a poem in which certain premises are presented as a given? The paradox in Barthes is, of course, that the reader seems more subjectively alive than the writer, but if so the writers of such poetry are at least conscious enough to assume a small but “enlightened” readership, as if their work were an inside joke or the answer to a koan shared with a sneer among adepts. Worse, however, is the tendency among these writers, including those poets whose work has been self-consciously inflected by poststructural assertions but who do not fit neatly into the L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E school, such as the Jorie Graham of The End of Beauty, to use what seem to be canned devices. Although I assume the intended effect, if such non-poststructural language can be excused, of the blanks Graham uses throughout that book is to enact certain of poststructuralism’s premises, such as offering up the possibility of infinite word choices and therefore potentially infinite interpretations in her use of elision/omission, at best such devices are overused; but mostly these poets seem to ride a one trick thematic pony. Even the reader who is steeped sufficiently in esoterica to understand frequently wants to howl, “OK we get it…now what? Please, step beyond these tired assumptions and do something new with words.” Which is of course exactly what those assumptions preclude.

      In short, these poets have taken arguably valid philosophical assumptions as regards the relationship of language to power, and control and privilege, and replaced language itself with a silence to equal death. The most thanatos-ridden civilization cannot long stand such dark self-consciousness, such absolute quiet, and these poems are emblematic of the withering-away out of which America’s poetry, if it is to survive, must be reborn.

                                                                                                   Renaissance?

     And these tend inward to me and I tend outward to them,
     And such as it is to be of these more or less I am,
     And of these one and all I weave the song of myself.
                                                  Walt Whitman

     In the imagination we are…
     locked in fraternal embrace,
     the classic caress of author
     and reader. We are one. Whenever
     I say “I” I mean also “you.” And so,
     together, as one, we shall begin.
                                                  William Carlos Williams

      So, rather than turning our backs and walking into the nearest wilderness, if one can still be found, to live out our days on trout and snow melt, what must poets do if poetry is to grow again out of its own decayed carcass? How can the dead grapheme give way to the well placed phoneme and, ultimately, flower into loaded morphemes? How can American poetry not only be reborn but transcend its elitist former incarnations, those before it composted so utterly, without losing the best of what that poetry was?

      Before these questions can be broached, however, account must be made of that other, much-less-discussed participant in the poem, the reader; and here I must admit we will swerve dangerously toward despair. For one thing, I am a poet and thus open to accusations of sour grapes (and I readily admit to that part of the poet’s condition: whining about not being understood), but this part of the interaction that is a poem is difficult to evaluate more because of the complex psychosocial scope of the exchange than my vested interestbut herein lies what is at stake if poetry is allowed to die away completely.

      In the bad old days, the poem’s meaning was assumed to be fixed and only “experts,” critics and professors, knew for sure what the thing meant. Although there was much lively critical discussion among the New Critics themselves, too many of their academic disciples tended to view the poem as equation: tone + figurative language + rhetorical situation + etc. = specific theme. Happily, that exercise in official reality gave way to what conservatives would characterize as idiosyncratic readings that were all somehow relevant, even if many veered toward the irrational, since any “true” reading was of necessity encyclopedic. Obviously, although decentralizing and democratic in the extreme, communication suffered since all but the most psychotic interpretations (and why not these?) were viewed as valid within the constraints of the individual interpreter’s personal experience.

      However, synthesis of these dialectical extremes has yielded something far darker than mere convolution of meaning. The suppliant reader who once sat at the foot of the professor or critic for an exegesis now hears only pandemic noisethe poem as noise as well as its interpretation. That is, if those potential interpreters of the poem even bother to speak. Hence teachers who don’t teach poetry except as the strange artifact of an age and the virtual extinction of the contemporary poetry critic, especially as strident interpreter of the poem in relation to the culture at large. Consequently, the reader him/herself is silent before anything that remotely resembles a poem.

      To some extent of course poets are to blame. Poetry that is solipsistic and banal and masturbatory (i.e. seems to assume no reader, no other, and speaks to little beyond the poet’s own tiny life) demands at best a voyeuristic reading or, more likely, a completely passive one in which no meaning is achieved for anyone except, maybe, the poet. The words just flow by for the reader like words across a screen.

      But in an age in which information is entertainment, in which music is a vehicle of corporate pandering, in which the image especially is omnipresent as an adjunct to advertising, to trap us in that bleak simulacrum, in which all realities are mediated and thus vitiated and consequently our being attenuated, it remains to be seen whether we have merely transcended the limitations of interpretation (i.e. all is, merely, noise) or if our readers have lost the capacity for empathy and critical reason that any real achievement of meaning requires.

      Therefore, the first logical objective for a reborn American poetry is to steal back what mass/capitalist culture has stolen from us: namely, music and imagery that enacts meaning for our readers. That is, we do not want to regain the “tyranny of the metronome” or end-rhymed lines for their own sake (mostly because strident form reflects a more ordered universe than we can believe in and thus is inadequate to contain what we must convey), not technical facility of any kind for its own sake. Nor do we wish to canonize any stand toward the world. But poetry needs sound wedded to sense in order to awaken the higher cognitive faculties of readers, to open the doors of perception for them via a sensual engagement with the work. Like the moderns and some of the post-moderns, we need to sing, to paint pictures; but neither for its own sake. Our readers, once awakened, must be inspired, inflamed, saddened, truly sexually aroused, goaded to action…something. Robert Bly laments in a recent essay for the literary magazine Black Moon that “maybe none of us, now that the language has been worked over so incessantly, by advertisers or evangelists, can create something that is consistently brilliant, golden, resonant,” but one thing is certain: art for art’s sake won’t cut it, or art as effluvia of the tiny alienated self, or there will be no art, period. Noise untranscended remains noise.

      Which brings us to the purpose for poetry and the promised discussion of meaning. It is conceded that any act of communication is an attempt to control discourse. Writing is, poetry especially (or at least it should beso curse me for being prescriptive), an act of violence, even if the aim is beauty (another discredited concept, ringing as it does of Platonic idealismall puns intended here too). It is an act of violence against the pathetic way-things-are, against exclusion and control, against the average citizen’s complacency as he/she sits vacant eyed before the bizarre remnants of civilizationlong an old bitch gone in the teeth, as Pound said, but now one of the walking dead and “living” off the blood of conscripted others.

      In short, American poetry must also be far more than sensation and emotion; it must contain ideas again. When Williams said, “No ideas but in things,” he did not mean that poems were merely to be the containers of objects, but enactments (as in to make active, a la Charles Olson’s assertion in “Proprioception”) of ideas through the constituents of the work, the object being to momentarily reify ideas rather than to wax abstract, to leave room for the reader in this dance to interpret meaning as it is inflected by his/her own reality, their own being, to argue with other readers, to argue with the poet about what his/her poem says or does not say, to achieve some dynamic and provisional consensus, then to re-read the poem and start again.

      And the poem must be inclusive, the poet a Whitmanic cannibal swallower of all the speakers he/she meets in order to give them voice, especially the utterly voice-less. The self no diminished oversoul, of course, not the diametrical opposite of the current tiny creatures who only ambivalently occupy our compost, but a real product of human joy and suffering that must be sung, must be shouted, must be enacted to save us all from mechanomorphisis, to save us all from the willing slavery of market place and media that the masses, no longer even suffering in quiet desperation, seem sometimes to have already entered.

                                                                                                    Envoi

      I can hear the voices of exasperation already: poets once more the unacknowledged legislators of the real? Who do they think they are? Poetry, the salvation of democratic individualism and the rebirth of real discourse? Right, and Grandpa Ezra was a fascist and some Romantics wrote opium-induced paeans and Rimbaud gave up poetry for gun-running (which is part of his celebrity but false) and the author of arguably the most widely read poem of the last half of the twentieth century proudly announced in that very poem his pederastic appetites and old so-and-so got scandalously drunk at his reading in our town and had adulterous sex with the hostess/her daughter/son/pets….

      In her essay, “A Leak in History” (What Is Found There: Notebooks on Poetry and Politics, 1993), Adrienne Rich diagnosed what America is lacking as sensual vitality and pointed out how that lack leads to amnesia, the forgetting of our past as devastation in our present, and anomie, the personal that exacerbates the societal that deepens and reinforces the personal. Poetry has the potential to arouse all six senses (mind, as in Buddhist thought, being the sixth), and, thereby, to help us in some small way to retain/regain our humanity. Just maybe, if readers feel breath (spiritus) rising from their bellies, through their chests and shining in their vocal chords, feel the buzz of creative attention deep in their brains, perhaps the species can again achieve an active connection to the universe, to life, can again belong here. And if we belong here, perhaps some notion of community, of shared identity, of individual identity that stands in opposition to all that is negative about what the species has wrought (please note the pun ) thus far, renaissance is not so far fetched an idea.

      That said, I am no utopian and have few illusions about the future of the culture or about poets as extra-human, which would of course only be an admission that we are extra-flawed (as I said, I am a cynic, certifiably), but a poem is potentially, as Williams said, the ground of the dance, where the poet and the reader can do the reality two step…and, right now, too few are dancing. However, some few poets and their courageous publishers and hungry readers are dancing, which brings us to that assertion of hope I made at the outset.

      Although chaotic, and death always isthe final dissolve, absolute decadencethe current poetry scene is at least multivariate, filled with voices of all persuasions. The mainstream remains monolithic, exclusionary and elitist and conservative, but in truth educated, upper-class white males are no longer the only arbiters of what poetry should be in America. In fact, part of our conundrum is precisely that fecundity, that mad complexity, which inevitably yields a widely disparate perception of what good poetry is; but that fecundity also reflects our desire to be inclusiveand not just in that Whitmanic version mentioned above, but in terms of who gets to speak, whose experiences are as valid as anyone’s experience. However, my overall assertion here is that most strains of poetry, however vibrant when initially sprouted, have become static at best, if not destructive, have declined unto being compost, albeit a nutrient rich compost.

      And out of this luxurious chaos the first tentative new growth can be witnessed in the form of literary magazines like Black Moon, which promotes a poetry of imagination that rises out of South American and East European Surrealism (as opposed to the mostly frivolous French variety), and Semi-Dwarf Review which offers up a mix of the same in combination with authentic spoken word poetry that reflects the working class reality of the poets who produce it. Likewise, Cedar Hill Review publishes poetry of depth, of ideas, frequently political work that dares to be didactic but that is never simplistically so; the Pannus Index attempts to explore the very difficult terrain of American literature in thematically focused quarterly issues; and a brand new publication, The Raw Seed Review, launched its inaugural issue recently with the most authentic poetry its young editor could solicit.

      This is obviously a very short list, but the whole list is, sadly, not much longer. However, that these few exist is indeed cause for celebration. The editors have managed to attract writers, and readers, whose sensibilities have not been numbed by media saturated American life, who have not yet succumbed to meaninglessness, but, on the contrary, who stand in opposition to it. A cause for hope, indeed.

Pastiche is, like parody, the imitation of a peculiar or unique, idiosyncratic style, the wearing of a linguistic mask, speech in a dead language. But it is a neutral practice of such mimicry, without any of parody’s ulterior motives, amputated of the satiric impulse, devoid of laughter and any of the conviction that alongside the abnormal tongue you have momentarily borrowed, some healthy linguistic normality still exists. Pastiche is thus blank parody, a statue with blind eyes.
                                                                                Fredric Jameson

      Some time ago, in a fit of despair over the current state of the culture, especially art, especially literature, I wrote: American writing now is all irony, parody, and bad mimesis. Part of my depression, what the poet William Doreski calls, in an excellent recent collection from Pygmy Forest Press, “our postmodern funk,” is of course due to the poststructural assertions of the death of the subject and that strange, albeit all too accurate, anti-utopian version of the end of history in which writers (and everyone else) are merely making copies of copies (not making it new as Pound told us we must) wherein the repeated image subsumes both act and actor.

      Hence my assertion about parody and mimesis, at any rate. Writers (and others: popular musicians are as guilty as anyone) are content to shamelessly sound like their literary (musical, etc.) progenitors. But that last word, of course, is poststructurally suspect since both the subject and any sense of linear history that might imply cause and effect relationships are defunct. It is probably more accurate to call what these few generations imitate as the literary or musical or etc. soup, the melange of what went before. I am not suggesting that any generation wrote in a vacuum, since all literature has certainly grown out of the compost of what preceded iteven acknowledged innovators like Joyce had precursors; but no previous generation has written so stylessly, so unrelentingly failed to contribute to what will come after, so not incorporated influences to inflect an overall intent, so not written in reaction to previous versions of what writing is “supposed to be” (unless of course you allow that the endless, and mindlessbut more of that below, manipulation of extant elements is a reaction).

      This is admittedly a far darker version of parody than Jameson’s traditional literary definition above. Previously, my students may have lovingly tried to write like Rimbaud or Tolstoy as part of the development of what we then, perhaps naively, called their voices, as acts of homageany annoyance of purist fans of either author being merely incidental. Previously, a writer may have purposely exaggerated diction or emphasized the trite, unto making it ridiculous, in order to lampoon certain 19th century sensibilities like those found in Henry James’ novels, sensibilities still found in only slightly muted form among current gentry. The present mode of parody I am describing, however, lacks any intent beyond the intent to imitate.

      But this is not yet what I have termed “bad mimesis.” At least those writers who have read some of the works in the proverbial soup seem to know they are imitating other writers, but the bad mimics, the vacuous contributors to too many mainstream literary magazines, just pull stuff from the morass and, almost as if at some preconscious level, apply it like a dab of a particular color of paint, like a ribbon or a bow to dress the thing up, but only tangentially in order to mean. Here Jameson’s pastiche is born of the perverse union of the dead subject, for how can there be intent without a desiring consciousness, and the endless labyrinth of the simulacrum. In this bleak paradigm, not only is there nothing new to say but there is no guiding sensibility to choose among signs. That is, even if doomed to make poems and stories out of the same finite set of images and words and styles, the active and conscious subject could choose from an infinite possibility of arrangements over the course of a lifetime (a la Derrida before the murder of the subject). The dead subject, however, merely repeats, and repeats, and repeats…without any discernible end (all puns intended);or so the current banality of most American literature would indicate. Hemingway’s minimalism and Carver’s realism give way to domestic, and usually domesticated, ennui: middle class, mid-life boredom. Even the active subjectivity of previous writers like Whitman or Pound gives way to a masturbatory triteness, a solipsistic sameness that reeks of “I,” but a tiny, pathetic, passive “I” that chooses elements for his/her “text” almost at randomor at best for stylistic reasons that have to do with conformity (what do those editors at The New Yorker want, anyway???). Thus parody as mere imitation gives way to a pathetic mimesis that not only fails to offer up either positive or negative commentary on the original (if that sad appellation can be forgiven, since in the poststructural sense there can be no discernible original) but is merely the random association of signs that takes on the attributes of some previous text only accidentally, at best in order to appeal to a particular editorial sense of style, in order to get published. All of which would be horribly ironic, an ostensibly creative and radical act reduced to random applications of formula, if that state were still possible.

      Which brings us to that final component in my triadic lament, and an important element in our discussion of the wrong turning that has resulted in the decay of the postmodern age. Jameson identifies irony as a modernist construct that has survived into postmodernity. In fact, however, it has flourished, and in some strange way been simultaneously subsumed into American life, and consequently lost much of its power.

      Only a few years ago American literature was irony, especially fiction. There was a perpetual knowing wink between writer and reader that the characters were insipidly stupid, that their reality was certainly someone’s, but we were too hip for those pratfalls, too intelligent to be in such a situation, and certainly smart enough at least to know when we were in deep do-do, all unlike the characters in the story. And this was funny, laughter at someone’s expense, as it were (though for a purpose, whether it be mere ridicule of particular life ways or as blunt political tool), courtesy of Johnson or Robbins or DeLillo et al. Then a couple of very strange things occurred: we stopped laughing, or reacting at all for that matter, and merely gawked; and, because, we became aware that life itself is ironic in postmodernity. As Tom Wolfe noted some years ago in a Harper’s article, invoking the Jim and Tammy Faye Baker story, replete with two-story air-conditioned dog houses and Jimmy Swaggert giving them hell for their sins when in the pulpit and hanging out with “combat zone prostitutes” when not, who could make this stuff up? We can ask the same question about the President’s semen stains on midnight blue velveteen as a topic of public discourse, or any number of scenarios that pummel us daily. The point here is that irony used to either make us chuckle into our fists knowingly or self righteously nod our heads in agreement that the protagonist was getting his or her due. Now Americans stare glumly at their TV sets and don’t so much as twitch. Like pastiche, irony in the absence of normality is a “statue without eyes.” Irony as reality is just another day in the postmodern world. Who can feel morally superior or get self-righteously indignant if mass mediated life looks like a cartoon, if the cartoon is accepted as life? Likewise any attempt to represent the world in language: the absurd gives way to the merely ridiculous, which becomes, almost dutifully, the mundane.

      Although this is not the place to debate the teleology of philosophical systems, the degree to which they describe and/or inflect the way things are, it seems an easy assertion that not only is critical subjectivity deathly ill, that individuals are seemingly incapable of outrage let alone reasoned analysis, of establishing any idiosyncratically inflected sense of normality, but writers have been complicitous in the plot to murder the active subject. They seem at best satisfied to choose not to choose as it were. Many postmodern writers justifiably take Jameson’s assertions about postmodernism-as-pastiche as positive, as the absence of a conservative norm to which they would be expected to adhere; and in those terms it is positive, albeit that those same writers happily acknowledge that we are left with only the possibility of making copies of copies in the bargain. However, it is highly debatable that there is not a norm, a standard to which writers unwittingly adhere, even if we have defied the previous premises of individual creativity, indeed of individual being. In fact, that denial may well mask the most grievous version of conformitya consumptive passivity.

      Herein lies our conundrum: we live in a time of the discredited human, the diminished human. The proof is everywhere in public discourse, from the vast numbers in prison, which causes nary a citizen to question individual circumstance relative to the hard and fast laws of the land meant, ironically, to protect us all, to television programs endlessly peopled with characters, ostensibly, just like the watcher (only better, of course) whose only claim to individuality, more irony, is belonging to one group out of manyas the member of a focus group, a target audience, a demographicto which those TV characters can appeal to define themselves further as one of the group by what they eat/wear/drive. Worse, psychology has become merely chemical, the spirit, the self, no longer essential or individual but phantasmal, variations on some ill defined ideal, although we would never use that word. Mind is merely the brain functioning (or dysfunctioning, see below) in complex biochemical sequences that yield behavior, which stands in relation to the above mentioned ideal (and here is the rub), which we call “normal” and to which all else stands in juxtaposition as abnormality. The body has been downgraded to a sad suit worn to cover and transport the chemical machinery that we attempt to mend (also chemically) in the hope that it will not fail us, ultimately dreaming of the day we can all be downloaded to purity, stored forever in some fantastic video game, the last vestigial notion of heaven become techno-sizzle wherein we are all, finally and ultimately, the same.

      In short, we have ourselves become copies of copies, pathetic creatures dreaming of the final dissolve as an ultimate conformity, not in terms of the dissolution of the body, let alone some greater conception of our being, into the chaotic morass of universal stuff (how gauche), but in terms of mechanomorphisis: to be swallowed by, to become, our machines, immaculate energy. This transformation in our self perception has also entered our discourse, especially for this new generation whose lives have paralleled the exponential growth rate of information storage: from toys that “morph” from animal or human into robots to my youngest son’s tendency to yell “pause” rather than “time out” during a basketball game in order to tie his shoe. And in the interim we strive to achieve an appropriate passivity, to be the best of copies, and, for those of us who write, to be the best copiers of copies. No assertions of individuality allowed, because it simply cannot be true. There is no referential depth to our products (Eagleton’s assertion about postmodernity generally) because, more and more, there is no referential depth to ourselves: “One-of-a-kind [has become] a lie! And the poets,/ who should have spoken for us, were busy// panning landscape, gunning their electrics, going/ I-I-I-I-I” (Heather McHugh). The use of the personal pronoun being our ultimate irony, of course, although we no longer recognize irony when we see it.

      Which is to suggest in part that the death of the subject seems nearly complete at times, but far from freeing us, far from destroying any norm to which we must conform (unless of course abdication is a perverse form of freedom, a life without responsibility), this is the last act of fascistic controlto happily give up and then rationalize the status quo as freedom. To paraphrase Orwell, when the final roundup comes, the masses will be led, smiling, to the gulag; but even so prophetically apocalyptic a writer could not have envisioned our present and, what looks like from this vantage, our inevitable future: the gulag is quickly becoming virtual and one need not leave home to enter it, can drive to and from work, take a two week vacation to Mexico, and never escape it. We have not only given up on subjective being, we have explained the death of our own critical consciousness to most everyone’s satisfaction, internalized a value system that promotes passivity, and in the process become our own jailers, accepting the pathetic way-things-are as just the way things are. Hence, conformity, a lack of creative ingenuity, poetry that is all pastiche become, via what might be called a kind of post-ironic legerdemain, the norm against which too few poets are writing and against which even fewer are railing.

                                                                                                   American Poetry’s Wrong Turning

      The poet, editor, and publisher Leonard Cirino once told me that he had nothing against William Carlos Williams or his aesthetic, but that Williams’ progeny had bastardized his pronouncements, codified their misreading of him, and thereby damaged American poetry in his name. Likewise, my argument is not with poststructural philosophy per se, with Derrida and Barthes et al, and in fact much of that description of the world seems painfully accurate, but with writers who not only refuse to fight the current trends in poetry toward solipsism and witless pastiche but perpetuate the decay of contemporary American literature by misunderstanding that description as some kind of rationalization of their own complacency, their own lack of will to go against the grain.

      Perhaps to be misread, misquoted, and misunderstood when quoted accurately, has always been the lot of both poets and philosophers, to have one’s words misused in the service of stasis rather than change (Heidegger and Nietzsche are famous, and extreme, examples of the latter; Williams and Pound will serve as more problematic examples of the former in our discussion below), but the inevitability of misconception makes it no less potentially dangerous, especially in light of the diminished subject in our age.

      Examples are of course rampant in our culture, but I will offer up only a few, from the material arts, to serve as analogy to the poetical examples that will follow: In 1917 Marcel Duchamp attempted, famously and unsuccessfully, to hang a urinal with the word ART under it in an exhibition in New York. The art world was of course, also famously, shocked, but their immediate reaction was beside the point. Duchamp’s “ready-made” art raised questions about context, about the valorization of some human constructs over others, and about elitism in the arts, especially as art works were valorized or devalorized by critics who seemed to do so based on arbitrary value assertions that served to enforce their own position above the rest of us. However, shock value is all that seemed to filter down to Duchamp’s postmodern successors. The now infamous “Piss Christ” is probably a premiere example. Although I would fight to the death for the artist’s right to piss on whatever he/she desires, and at least holler loudly for NEA funding on first amendment grounds for that matter, the piece lacks not only any ideological grounding of its own over which to be truly offended (as were many in Congress, at least on the face of it), but the possibility for meaning, for a dynamic discussion of content and context, is almost nonexistent. Catholics, and Christians generally, justifiably see sacrilege in the defilement of their iconography, but the Church long ago ceased to be a major force in Western Civilization, has lost center stage in its attempt to prescribe values; and consequently the artist seems, at best, to be throwing a tantrum, striking back at his own upbringing perhaps. But he is not trying to offer up critical commentary on the values that particular religion represents, say abstinence VS birth control or outlawing abortion and the effects of those policies on third world population growth. Nor is he attempting to utilize the icons in some larger assertion about the world, say the diminishment of religion generally as social control mechanism a la Marx. Both intentions would entail a more complex association of signs. Beyond mere defilement, and then for only some viewers, the signs mean nothing, either in concert or in juxtaposition. In short, aside from offending a constrained group of people, the range of possible interpretations is almost nil and we must assume the artist’s intent only personal, a product of the tiny, passive “I.” He might as well spray paint taboo words on the side of a church or give the Pope the finger as publicly as possible; the level of significance achieved is about the same.

      However, at least this artist expected some force of emotion as a response from a portion of his audience, however limited both the audience and the response. Two recent installations, one in Russia and one in America (and location is perhaps as arbitrary as any other fact about the works, given the globalization of American-style mass culture), don’t even attempt to shock us. In fact, their iconic associations are so limited as to require absolutely no response. The first, entitled “Modern Farming,” consists of corrugated sheet metal and tarpaper hung from the gallery walls. The second consists of album covers and posters and notes from the artist to himself, which is appropriately solipsistic (the self as both sender and recipient of “the message”), all hung densely over the walls of an enclosed space designed to look like an adolescent’s room in the 1960’s. I assume there is possibly an inchoate political message in the former piece, but it is so submerged by virtue of the limited universe of its signs as to be a one-liner that was never funny, a cliché that is neither representative (and the aim is not to be, of course, a la Duchampone of his few assertions the artist did not misread) or significant, that is wholly static. Likewise, although the second piece has ample possibility within its constituents to be both historical and political, to say something about the individual, the human, within both contexts, the overall effect is merely that of a snapshot of an adolescent’s bedroom, a period piece of innocuous memorabilia, and the artist is only a cipher produced by the culmination of the paraphernalia he purchased as a kid, the stuff that Madison Avenue convinced him would equal an adequate self definition.

      Ironically, early in his career Duchamp asserted his desire to use art in the service of ideas, and many of his ready-mades attempt to do just that, including the urinal. The above postmodern installations are so self contained, so solipsistic, as to approach meaninglessness. At best their universe of signs is so simplistic these works give the viewer the possibility of nothing more than a single pedestrian interpretation. Duchamp’s urinal is complex by comparison, drawing on referents that don’t need to be present in the gallery to be present in the piece, to inflect our interpretation by working in concert with some (the viability of any well made human construct as art) and in opposition to others (his culture’s definition of what art is, and is not, and who is arbiter). Duchamp was working hard against the grain of the status quo, attempting to inflect the milieu of American and European art in his age. The makers of the above installations are participating in the status quo, are dead subjects whose choice of signs might as well be utterly arbitrary. Such lack of referential depth, such “radically antianthropomorphic” constructs (Jameson), might well be called camp, which is not necessarily redeeming, if they had any energy at all, if they were at all self conscious; but as it is they are merely dead, the hollow symbols of nothing, things with at most only the slightest taint of an idea lingering in the air around them, copies of copies. And, in as much as their work is normative, the artists are complicitous in our enslavement.

      Postmodern poets have also taken a few tenets of modernism and managed to so misread them in the absence of a viable critical subject as to, at best, make them innocuous and, at worst, to rationalize their own complicity in stasis, in the pathetic way-things-are, which may give credence to the assertion that postmodernism is not a next step, a reaction to grievances against modernism, especially of the “high” variety, but merely diminished modernism, a bad copy. Two glaring examples will suffice: Williams’ famous assertion, “No ideas but in things,” and Pound’s call for the primacy of the image in poetry.

      To begin, however, I would like to offer a rudimentary explication of the brief poems by each poet widely considered emblematic of Objectivism and Imagism respectively, the categorical epithets offered up to represent both of the above assertions. The postmodern tendency is to deny the referential depth in both, to see word pictures only and to thereby rationalize the reader’s own lack of critical engagement. In the absence of any conception of an interpretive subject, they see only a wet wheelbarrow beside the white chickens, but of necessity ignore the poem’s initial mega-assertion: “So much depends/ upon… .” That short stanza puts a sustained, albeit momentary (which I will argue is part of the point), act of attention at the center of the universe. The speaker’s reality, if not the world at large from the speaker’s perspective, somehow depends on the constituents of this scene. Perhaps his sanity hinges on this moment in time, on this perception of the world’s finitude, or perhaps this is an inchoate epiphany of the world’s precision and ephemerality in the microcosmic scene before him. It is pristine, but not in some simplistic bucolic way: the rain is pure, but part of a larger and, from a human perspective, harsher cycle that nourishes or famishes or overwhelms by turns; and the wheelbarrow is a tool of human labor, our own tiny functioning in the great what-is that the rain represents; and the chickens are both products of human cultivation and, naturally, alive, as well as being future sustainers of human life as food. Archetypally, they are life and death: the former in all its frenetic everydayness and the latter incipiently, as the inevitable destination of the former. In short, this poem is Mallarme’s injunction, that a poet’s job is the purification of the language of the tribe, incarnate. Mallarme is frequently misread in this regard, but I doubt he meant that the poet is the arbiter of correctness, but rather intended to suggest that the poet is he/she who boils language to the essential so that an act of interpretation might yield sense, albeit a dynamic and arguable sense. At its extreme this poem is an assertion of significance that borders on the unsayable, that only the poem as written could attempt to reveal in all its nuance and complexity. Although awareness of the occasion for the poem is not necessary in order to achieve an interesting enough interpretation (that broaches human agency relative to the larger universe or faith in the interconnectedness of reality as human perception…), Williams claimed to have written it while waiting anxiously for a young patient’s fever to break. So much depends, indeed.

      Because they have read it in an anthology, most postmodern readers do not have the luxury of this poem’s original context, Williams’ mixture of poetry and difficult prose that explore his early notions of his poetics entitled Spring and All. Ironically, given the static interpretation of the poem by most postmodern readers, the poem precedes a discussion of imagination as a vitalizing force for things, as necessary to achieve significance relative to the world:

      The fixed categories into which life is divided must always hold. These things are normal—essential to every activity. But they exist—but not as dead dissections.

          The curriculum of knowledge cannot but be divided into the sciences, the
          thousand and one groups of data, scientific, philosophic or whatnot—as many
          as there exist in Shakespeare—things that make him appear the university of all ages.
          But this is not the thing. In the galvanic category of—The same things exist,
          but in a different condition when energized by the imagination.
……………………………………………………………………………………

          It is the imagination on which reality ride—It is the imagination—It is a
          cleavage through everything by a force that does not exist in the mass and can
          therefor never be discovered by its anatomization.
                                                                                (XXII)

      In short, the poem is not merely a picture postcard, but the product of a sustained but momentary act of attention on the part of the poet that must of necessity be read as a universe of signs that only the imagination, the critical subjective imagination, can decipher, which is to say ideas will be actuated, enacted there. Later in Spring and All, Williams declares:

          The imagination…attacks, stirs, animates, is radio-active in all that can be touched by
          action. Words occur in liberation by virtue of its processes.
…………………………………………………………………………………………….

          But the imagination is wrongly understood when it is supposed to be a removal
          from reality in the sense of John of Gaunt’s speech in Richard the Second: to
          imagine possession of that which is lost. It is rightly understood when John of
          Gaunt’s words are related not to their sense as objects adherent to his son’s
          welfare or otherwise but as a dance over the body of his condition accurately
          accompanying it. By this means of the understanding, the play written to be
          understood as a play, the author and reader are liberated to pirouette with the
          words which have sprung from the old facts of history, reunited in present passion.

          To understand the words as so liberated is to understand poetry. That they
          move independently when set free is the mark of their value.
                                                                                (XXVI)

The poem does not capture objective reality (as the poststructuralists would echo decades later), does not hold a mirror up to nature, and does not hold the poet’s meaning the way a pitcher holds water, but is a dynamization of subjective experience relative to objective reality which can only be reachieved via an act of interpretation of the objects as they circle and collide via language within the object that is the poem. This latter act of interpretation is also subjective, of course, and hence the independent movement of words when set free, and the magical possibilities in reception. The whole thing is a dance, of poet and reader, of subjective being with the objects in the poem, and of the objects and all our associations with each and in relation to the larger world; not stasis, not a convocation of dead things in a flat picture that conjures up a mere specter, the poet as tiny, diaphanous “I,” but a dynamic enactment that yields images and ideas in a complex rough and tumble ballet. Williams’ most famous poetical assertion does not mean no ideas, period, but rather no ideas but in the dance of things, and in the presence of interpretive agency.

      Postmodern poets have also misread the fourth of Ezra Pound’s six principles of Imagism, which is precisely the free use of images, which Pound defined as “that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in time.” For postmodern poets, imagery is frequently merely description with an emotional adjunct, usually a small egoistic one that is subsequently explained ad nauseam, with intellection given especially short shrift, or a seemingly random juxtaposition of details whose association yields opacity, an interpretive impasse. As Williams’ famous wheelbarrow poem is misunderstood relative to his premise about ideas, Pound’s “In a Station at the Metro” is touted as his most emblematic example of this fourth principle and then misread as a simplistic construct relative to the speaker, the context, and the presumed emotion inherent in the scene, which is as excessively minimal as the first stanza of Williams’ poem is vast, but just as available via an act of interpretation.

      Like Williams’ wheelbarrow, Pound’s poem is read as objectified reality, but is tentatively recognized as more psychically charged in as much as the transmogrification of the faces on the train to a “nature” image is more subjectively perceptual. However, this does not yield much more than a poeticized picture of a train station for postmodern readers. I came across the poem once among several haiku in an anthology for beginning literature students, the assertion being of course that Pound’s Imagism is a Western example of that Japanese genre, which it is only on the surface. The poem’s brevity and the mention of blossoms (that resemble the inevitable cherry blossoms in many haiku) suggest an affinity, as does the reliance on the image and lack of egoistic commentary, but the connection, of necessity, ends there. Pound’s poem, like haiku, certainly is not overtly didactic, but it cannot fall back on some inherent preconception of an ordered universe, the Buddhistic totality that traditional haiku evokes without speaking directly of it, as is found in the work of Basho or Issaalthough I don’t remember the anthology’s editors suggesting to students that these tiny poems were the product of anything beyond formula.

      Pound’s poem, nevertheless, carries its own absent-but-present referents, all historical and as equally cultural as haiku’s implicit philosophical ones. In fact, the poem’s referents stand in opposition to an integrated universe, except as a perversion of individuality. The men and women in the crowd blur to facelessness, become apparitions, ghosts, which would suggest that their subjective identity is an illusion, that the individuals have been subsumed by the horde. But then the horde itself is completely dehumanized as it is swallowed by the final image and becomes merely a stain on a speeding train that only looks like the wet limb of a tree. In essence, humanity dissolves into the machine, becomes part of the machine in what thus becomes a problematic, and perverse, image as the train/crowd is “naturalized” as “Petals on a wet, black bough.”

      In short, this is 20th century Europe. Not only is the machine age gearing up for the forward rush that will be the darkest century of all, in which Whitman’s 19th century American vision of a fire breathing Cyclops moving us communally and inevitably toward a bright future will give way to the actuality of our various machines of destruction (and the train so envisioned, especially given Pound’s own political affiliations during WW II, at least gives one pause if not a shudder), but the always tenuous concept of individuality is beginning to fade relative to industrialization. Workers are no longer craftsmen/women embodying some portion of their own projected being in what they make, which Marx described as in decline even by the middle of his century and in that discussion gave us our first modern working definition of alienation, but are interchangeable just as the goods they mass producewhich of course allows for such carnage. As Stalin would famously say some time later, one death is a tragedy, but the death of thousands, or millions, is merely a statistic.

      Perhaps even more than in Williams’ poem, given the subjective shape of the final image, the constituents of Pound’s poem form an iconographic universe that yields a complex sense, a civilization in flux as regards its values and the incipient confusion in the poet that such change conjures. “In a Station at the Metro” may have been read as a more convoluted conundrum when first published, but postmodern poets, in spite of their vantage in history and in the absence of critical subjectivity, are not even inclined to see the final image as problematic, but merely as a picture, as “poetry” in its ultimately diminished sense, as flowery (no pun intended) language.

      The premise of the death of the subject is also furthered in the postmodern reading because in these poems the speaker is not revealed as personality, that equivocal marker of human being in our age. However, neither poem is blankly oracular. In fact, clues as to the subjective vantage of the speaker are revealed in “the power of images and rhetoric and syntax” (William Doreski), by virtue of their actively subjective choices on all counts. That is, the range of possible interpretations is directly inflected by the “who” of the poem, its maker. The point here is not to discount the validity of the personal pronoun or even blatantly confessional versions of the poem, but to assert that the aspect of the speaker as revealed either by “I” or as a product of the constituents of the poem is suspect in postmodern poetry. What is available as regards the speaker in the two brief poems under discussion is precisely what is lacking in much postmodern poetry (along with referential depth and any but a rudimentary association with ideas, of course): some sense of the larger human that grows out of an individual’s sensibilities as revealed by the choices made in writing the poem.

      As ironic as the source might seem given the frequent lack of referential depth in her own work beyond the mere naming of ideas or historical asides and her too frequent surrender to passivity (she is capable of an immense poetic energy at timesthe reader generally wishes it would go somewhere, however), Jorie Graham wrote in her editor’s introduction to The Best American Poetry of 1990:

          The poetry that fails the genius of its medium today is the poetry of mere self.
          It embarrasses all of us. The voice in it not large but inflated. A voice that
          expands not to the size of a soul (capable of being both personal and
          communal, both private and historical) but to the size of an ego. What I find
          most consistently moving about the act of a true poem is the way it puts the self at genuine risk.…

          To place oneself at genuine risk, (i.e., of use to us), the poet must move to
          counter an other, not more versions of the self. An other: God, nature, a
          beloved, an Idea, Abstract form, Language itself as a field, Chance, Death,
          Consciousness, what exists in the silence. Something not invented by the
          writer. Something the writer risks being defeate—or silenced—by….

      Her assertions as regards the egoistic “I” and the lack of critical engagement with the world in contemporary poetry are absolutely accurate; but, perhaps more to the point, what many postmodern poems lack, especially in the Ashberian vein, including many of Graham’s, is subjective gumption. Presence rises out of the poem not so much as well-defined ego, as actor, but as subjective passivity. The constituents of the poem are presented as forces (ironically, without effect) acting upon that tiny self (if the word is at all accurate in as much as the site of being, of identity, is so tenuous), a self which does not truly risk defeat, annihilation, because it does not push back. Like any ghost it can’t push back. It seems that the mere survival of the speaker in the form of self-as-diaphanous-marker, as specter, and via a weak-kneed acceptance of the world-as-it-is, is what Graham must find acceptable. That is, subjective being is not formed and transformed in the fire of the poem’s constituents, but barely rises as mist from a dead pond. Ideas, and I suppose I should be thankful they exist at all in these poemssee below, seem to serve as mere backdrop for some facile and muddled observations that lack even the potential to inflect this even smaller version of the egoistic “I” than Graham inveighs against. And any conception that refuses to become inflamed with the power of conviction, flushed with its active force, cannot help, in any event, but fail to inflect anything. There is no causal force because the ideas that might arise out of the morass the poem offers up (by accident?) are still-born and the subject is nearly so, just another object, and a virtual one that too frequently fails to achieve the status of discernible thing let alone of being.

      And the poet’s choices seem all but random. The end result is a poem that consists of signs without attraction or repulsion, not a dynamic field of signification that yields significance via an act of interpretation, as do the short poems discussed above, nor does it yield a speaker, a maker, whose choices of image and descriptor have impinged upon our own sense of self and the world, but its “obverse/reverse” (Williams). Graham goes on to invoke Pound’s famous correlation of the poet’s technique as a measure of his/her sincerity. “That is why precision is so crucial,” she says, because the “nature of the encounter [and] whether the poet achieves or fails in the discovery” depends on it. But this poetry is anything but precise in its choice of images, of referents, which by extension suggests these poets are not sincere in the least.

      A poem by Vicki Hearne, entitled St. Luke Painting the Virgin, which appears in The Best of The Best American Poetry, an anthology edited by Harold Bloom and made up of choices from the Best American Poetry series for the previous ten years, will serve as an appropriate example. The poem opens with a promising interaction of the speaker with the painting of the title, wherein, in the background, “the figures of humanity/ Consult the ground, their eyes helplessly/ On the details of history that/ Hold them there….” However, then follows an abstract rumination on being entranced by divine light that ends in a vague poststructural assertion, and this act of quasi-intellection after the speaker says she is crying at the realizationwhich I suppose at least hints at the possibility of affect on the part of the speaker. But again this is a passive assertion the reader only recognizes as an assertion, not a fact enacted in the poem: “…which is why/ Landscapes, or whatever you paint/ Beyond the garden, become so central,/ Not to the conception, which is all/ Complete in what the St. sees, but/ To the training of the eye that is, After all, an action of painting// And illuminations… .” Which then bleeds into references to the poet’s lover: “…As it was I found my way through/ The shadows and arrived in your arms/ Only slightly bruised… .” The overall effect is only moderately less than random, a stream-of-consciousness that is nearly completely void of subjective vitality. The “I” that rises from the muddle is itself muddled, only weakly there in the face of the archetypes of dark and light, of divine illumination in contrast to its mundane opposite, that occur in the poem as mostly innocuous backdrop to inanity. A return to the archetypes leads to the poem’s closure, which is opacity itself, unless of course we include its sentimental tone in our definition of sense, and anything but precise except in its echo of the initial image of the figures in the background of the painting:

          Gaze at the ground, then look up,
          Is my advice, and see light, at last,
          As precious because we find it
          In the darkness outside a garden
          Between the light and the world.

      Although not interactive with the world, and yielding sense that borders on nonsense because the poet seems loathe to any assertion that might indicate an active subjectivity, at least this poem has some version of a self implicit in its making, however prone to evaporation before our eyes and however passive before the other constituents in the poem. Far worse are those poems that merely paint word pictures. Unlike the word and image choices that give rise to some sense of both an individual and communal voice in Pound and Williams’ poems discussed above, that interact dynamically to yield some arguable version of significance, such poetry, however connected the images to make a single scene come to life, is gratuitous. Charles Simic, who is capable of great poetry, Dismantling the Silence and The Book of Gods and Devils being excellent examples, has a poem entitled “Country Fair” in the same anthology as Hearne’s poem which serves as a case in point. The picture is of a six-legged dog that, in a note in the back of the book, the poet tells us he sees as allegorical; but there is no hint in the poem itself that this is so: there is just a mutant dog that runs and a drunk girl who laughs and whose neck is kissed ceaselessly by the man she is with…no interpretation necessary because “that was the whole show” (which is how the poem actually ends). There is no dynamic among signs, because they both access too little in the world at large and do not stand in any but a simple narrative and descriptive relationship to each other. And there is only a rudimentary glimpse of the subject who chose this scene in the first place. There is, obviously, no dance, just a snapshot dead on the table before us.

      Perusing a couple of recent issues of American Poetry Review offers us examples of what, in some sense, is the other extreme, but work that is no less void of vitality: poetry that explains itself endlessly. Some of this work offers up detail that is frequently merely descriptive, as in Simic’s poem, but then proceeds to interpret that description as closure. In other words, the poet tells us what we are supposed to get from the piece, and it is usually necessary because the imagery is so anemic. A poem entitled Hat on a Peg by D. Rodman Walker gives minute details of an older man’s arrival home and then ends,

          For Father, tomorrow never
                came, and for me
          yesterday still lingers
                on that peg on the wall.

This is the kind of simplistic, borderline sentimental closure that student writers are prone to, but they can be forgiven because of their lack of exposure to the world or to a valid poetics that disallows such drivel on its face (pun intended). This example occurs in one of the premiere poetry magazines in America, which I assume constitutes validation. It is telling that the epigraph references a poem by Billy Collins. A recent article in Publisher’s Weekly suggested that the upswing in poetry sales lately, and Collins’ work along with that by Sapphire and a pop star named Jewel who has a collection of poems out are offered as examples (and aside from Sappho and Ai it is apparent that poets with only one name are to be viewed skeptically), is due to the “accessibility” of recent poetry. I assume this word in translation means simplistic, referring to an enclosed context (i.e. there are no absent referents to complexify interpretation) and the most meager of figurative devices, if not to outright adolescent-speak (but more about that below). I assume that descriptor refers to poems that do not rely on the power of syntax and rhetoric and image but instead explain to the reader what they are supposed to get from the poem. In short, this is work that assumes the death of the critically subjective reader, one incapable of subtext, of interpretation. A poem by Billy Collins in a recent issue of Poetry serves as a high end example. The poem references Buddhism and uses it as an extended metaphor to discuss the speaker’s dog, which works well enough, but the poem ends with a summation like that above (and I will not pain you with it). Worse, it is so filled with simplistic ruminations meant to explicate the imagery as to be clichedagain like the student poetry mentioned above and again valorized by virtue of the power of its mainstream outlet. The worst examples of this non-commentary, however, are of the above mentioned adolescent-speak, in which an adult speaker never gets beyond a shallow conversational tone and topics that reek of the solipsistically egocentric. In a poem by Jennifer Snyder entitled “Guitar and Amplifier” in one of our recent issues of APR, she actually says, “And really, it makes a sort of sense/ in Nowhere, Alabama,/ that my teenage life would slam into walls/ holding the skull of a stupid,/ freaked out song,/ because, really, I had to believe in something, so I believed in pleasure.” Not only is she asserting a sixteen year old persona in a sixteen year old’s voice, which in and of itself could be a valid device, but she never gets beyond that reality in the poem in terms of some larger sense of humanity, indeed in some larger sense of her pathetic self, and neither does the reader.

      This tendency for poetry to explain itself ad infinitum is rampant in the issues of APR before me, but mostly in poems that almost totally lack imagery and thereby complete the exclusion of the reader in any achievement of significance. “Nine Elegies for Amy McClelland” by Hugh Steinberg, for example, is nearly all commentary (“I want to imagine you are an angel, that you are/ at peace, at rest. It is not easy… .”) and facile, “verbally incontinent” (Adrienne Rich) commentary at that. There is no room for interpretation because there is nothing to interpret, just the arrested equivalent of a teenager on caffeine rambling about death, which is apparently passé when the conversing subject might as well be as dead as the subject the poem addresses. It seems entirely possible that even death is ironic in postmodernity.

      Likewise all of the poems by Robin Becker, which have their moments but always retreat into a solipsistic cocoon. Her “Sonnet to the Imagination” is especially noteworthy in this discussion because it is an example of Williams’ assertion about the static version of imaginationthe attempt to recapture what is lost, all elements in all the poems merely meant to recapitulate the landscape against which the simple, egoistic “I” moves. In a few poems there are gestures toward a greater sense of the speaker as part of the larger human reality, but the movement is immediately, and always, back to the small self. “Life Forms,” for example, which starts out as a journey of discovery for the speaker who says, “When a whale rolls ashore/ the villagers know a drowned person/ is coming home/ who may have started life/ as a halibut, shucked tail and fins/ for a musher’s lot…,” ends with a whole culture becoming a voyeuristic tourist’s object of desire, and no more:

          I wanted to see the salmon-man
          who pumps gas at the filling station,
          forced into the human world
          after leaping upriver.

      Then there is the poetry out of which an “I” or anything resembling significance refuses to rise at all, or at least does so, if at all, only accidentally, because of the randomness of the signs and the weakness of the field they generate within the poem. As Heather McHugh says in her poem “Blue Streak,” “…chance [is] the form we adore” in our age and that is nearly all we get in Gillian Conoley’s poems in APR. The only presence in most of these selections is as a perceptual center, the poet noting the world literally around her (as in close at hand), but there is not only no organizing force but too little associational energy between the poem’s constituents to achieve anything but the most meager of assertions of relationship. In “The World,” for example, a woman sets a man’s clothes on fire in the parking lot of a gas station, the narrative interspersed with references to aliens and abduction, which leads to:

                                                            And a star is born.
          We observe a large number of these white dwarf stars.
          Giant Sirius, the brightest in the night sky,
          dog star. What we could have been had not the star
          been present, too much presence emanating
          away from us…
          then to certain constituents of the woman’s life (“…Pearls on the bread plate,
          make-up on the napkin,// a couple of burned-out butts…”) and ultimately breaks
          down to the patter of the mad, a nearly aphasic nonsense:

          For the world is one world now not that you may own your own home.
          Sinter me, sister. Threescore skullduggery, endless cradle holding a space open.
          Ruffous skylark, tell us off the skiff,
          sun up, the next day, we’re looking into a box.
          Let’s see the world. Are you coming with me. What’s for dinner.

      The result is not the disjointed texts of Celan intended to make a point via disjunction and purposeful neologism, to expand the boundaries of meaning by problematizing interpretation, but the absolute lack of an organizing force and something close to meaninglessness. In fact, the most subjectively assertive aspect of these poems is a conscious attempt to achieve absolute anonymity on the part of the speaker and the refusal to recognize a subjective identity in the other beyond presence as mere marker. In “Turned Back,” which takes place inside the filling station of the previous poem, the second and third person pronouns are used not to pangeneralize the experience but to depersonalize it: “You can read the mystics/ you can lay down with the martyrs// and brood/ on that other/ as one would fade in a river… someone flipping the radio putting voice over abyss// someone folding a map// someone bringing the sunglasses back down.”

      The result is much like Simic’s poem above, the only difference being that more work is necessary on the part of the reader in order to “see” the picture the poem paints, a kind of hermetic of banality. All becomes, merely, self consciously indiscriminate juxtaposition passed off as observerless observation. This is the final achievement of the diminished human: the speaker and any other bipedal constituent of the poem become just part of the backdrop, which is of course backdrop to nothing, and the reader a participant in the recapitulation of a value free version of the world.

      In fact, it is as if the poet abhors subjective being, or at least is at best confused by her own self perception. In “Fuck the Millennium” she says of a “beautiful woman” in a photograph, “so she’s feeling constructed but still must walk around,” and in a second poem entitled “The World”: “… selfhood marches// across the surface… .” The implication is of course that the poststructural description of the way-things-are is the truth on a perversely Platonic scale, that subjective being is but an illusion, a construct made by others (also illusions?) for their own selfish purposes, which is another paradox, unless of course capitalism as a totalized system is viewed as having more volition than the individual humans it exploits. The fact of the woman’s constructedness is apparently unchangeable, except perhaps via an act of denial because any poststructurally idyllic version of self-less being is beyond us. The paradox is obvious even to Conoley, however, in the second assertion that the woman must still “be,” as in self consciously exist. Such poetry is both victim and perpetuator of that silliest of poststructural conundrums: if the subject does not exist except as illusory marker, who writes the poem, how does anything ever change except randomly or as the product of the force of inhuman systems set in motion by humans (which is at least ironic if not another paradox): what the hell are we doing here? Such poetry is an abdication of subjective being and thus those who write it participants in our enslavement.

      At best these poems raise the conundrum again and again. However, in the absence of a belief in the possibility of any subjective referential depth, in a self that could deny or transcend the construction by others of its aspect, a self related to other selves via its humanity rather than shared alienation (and this is a post-existential version that views consciousness itself as a bad joke the organism plays on itself) or the self’s simplistic construct as demographic, this work amounts to the most disheartening of feedback loops: the intuition of subjective identity that also engenders fear at the recognition because it simply can’t be true, the human desire “to mean” but in the absence of a viable site for unique assertion or idiosyncratic observation. The result of such dark self consciousness, born of poststructural premises, must inevitably be paralysis on the part of the poet and a deadly meaninglessness in the poem, which sadly is a step beyond most poets (and a majority of the populace) who are automatons within the status quo, Graham’s voices that do not expand to “the size of a soul… but an ego.” Mired as they are in a pathetic universe of one, they cannot step outside their own tiny selves far enough to even recognize the magnificent scope of the problem because they are too self absorbed to know it exists at all, and so endlessly repeat the mainstream capitalist values that arguably brought us to this sad state in the first place. In the name of valorizing mass culture, they write poems with the referential depth of a television commercial (commercials at least pile image upon image, but at the speed of light, the object being to mesmerize), poems without ideas or an iota of human significance.

      Heather McHugh’s poem quoted above suggests that “the poets… should have spoken for us,” and by enacting our shared diminishing sense of a viable subject some of our most intelligent poets (Graham among them, and perhaps Conoley) have spoken for us in some sense. However, by endlessly repeating the conundrum without achieving a way out, without seeking one, by making senseless copies of senseless copies, they have enshrined a mind-numbing passivity to equal death. Too much of postmodern poetry is no longer the ground of the dance between subjective being and the world, the reader and writer also subjectively entwined in communal embrace and in battle over the truth, but an extension of the killing field whereupon our critical consciousness dies over and over and over. It is past time for something more.

           Returning home I had to ask myself: What happens
           to the heart of the artist, here in North America?
           What toll is taken of art when it is separated from
           the social fabric? How is art curbed, how are we
           made to feel useless and helpless, in a system
           which so depends on our alienation?
                                                                                        Adrienne Rich

          Poetry therefore as opposition. Opposition to the dogma
          and conformity that waylays us, that hardens the tracks
          behind us, that entangles our feet, seeking to halt our steps.
          Today more than ever is the reason to write poetry.
                                                                                        Nanni Balestrini

      What is it to be a poet in a nonsensical age? The question is filled with presumption, of course, about poetry’s traditional role within the culture and about the times in which we live. Perhaps more to the unabashedly prescriptive point of what follows, however, the question should be rephrased: In an age when language as received has been deemed both artifact and tool of repression, in an age when word and image are tools of a late capitalist ethic of nonparticipation, of passivity, of acquiescence, indeed in an age when the very notion of “meaning is under attack” (Rich), why write at all? What role can the poet play in his/her culture that does not perpetuate the status quo? That is, not only has language been deadened and deflated and even decommissioned as the boat of significance, but the fear of reification, of any idea becoming the idea, has lead to a bias against organizing ideas generally, “a bias against any kind of far reaching ideas, and a denial of systematic participation on the part of such ideas in the intelligent direction of affairs” (as John Dewey said a long time ago). Further, because of our realization of the malleability of language in concert with our realization of the machinations of power in the service of control, the poet knows beyond doubt that what we say will be co-opted and “everything we write/ will be used against us/ or against those we love” (Rich, “North American Time”).

      And the questions mount: How can language be revivified sufficiently to do what needs to be done, if life is again to have meaning beyond our stilted egohood, the small man/woman the culture currently allows us to be? And of course the language must be revivified, because how can the current state of the diminished word possibly do anything for the marginalized and the dispossessed, let alone for the somnambulists before their television sets? How can the poem in its quaint garb stand against media stimulation, media’s bouncing images and flashing lights that mesmerize? How can it stand against MTV which, emblematically, replaces the watcher’s actual experiential associations to the music with conjured images that devalue lived experience in favor of language and music and life as commodity? How can it stand against the drone of music in the elevator, interspersed with commercial messages, that invades our skulls without prior consent? How can the poem stand against the forces of the market that flood over us, that saturate our lives, the constant pressure to buy things that will give us an identity? How can language withstand, let alone stand in opposition to, the culture’s increasingly endemic sense of ennui, of powerlessness? How can language stand up to the cynical vacuity that has replaced any sense of engagement with the world, that has done its fair share in diminishing the validity of assertion, namely postmodern politics? And so, desperately, on and on toward a state of impasse that yields, ultimately, silence: the answers too elusive and the questions too much for our receptors to handle.

      Nonsense is the passive acceptance of this state of the world. Nonsense is the absurd-become-the-mundane, hardly bearing remark. Nonsense is human-being-become- frivolity, a barely breathing site of consumption, a cipher made of absorbed media images and signs that hardly registers on the scale of life let alone being. In the words of Sven Birkerts, nonsense is “increasing numbers of us…suffering time sickness…, no longer understand[ing] where we fit, or if fitting is even possible in the scheme of things” (Readings). Nonsense is the lack of any notion of a scheme of things or any viable, actively constructive, interactive modes of being in the world of poetry but one among many that our residually primal selves, our deepest selves, still remember, pine for even, but now only absently under the pressure of the increasing speed of modern existence.

      Nonsense is a feedback loop of desire: those of our hungers which are ever more engendered by the market slowly pushing out those more legitimate longings, our more primal urges, which in turn reassert themselves, too frequently in a perverse form of the original spawning violence and self-loathing, as the ersatz hunger is momentarily resolved by the baubles and bangles the market offers up to placate us just long enough until another engendered “need” can be pushed forward again. Nonsense is: somewhere, as I write this, a man, an “average” man who has recently purchased a Ford or a Chevy big enough to hold his emptiness for a short time, powerful enough to tow around his unacknowledged misgivings, is ordering a particular brand of beer, and in so doing further declaring to the world who he isall the while dreaming, against his will, of raping the cocktail server.

      Nonsense is us, is now. Nonsense is our civilization’s impending demise for lack of imagination, which is also under attack. As Diane di Prima says in her poem “Rant,” “the war is the war against imagination/…[and] the war of the worlds hangs right here, right now, in the balance.” Nonsense is the shocking lack of warriors attempting to save our collective imagination from extinction. In fact, nonsense is the participation of poets in our enslavement by virtue of their inability to exceed the impasse that has come to characterize the age and their response to our age, the langpo poets emblematic if not premiere among them. At their worst they give us Derridean aphorisms masquerading as insight (“She is the space of her own absence and she will always be there as the proper name never spoken,” Steve McCaffery), and are perhaps more laughable than inscrutable in this mode. But at their best, which is also to say at their most frustrating, the langpo poets give voice to the impasse but fail to exceed it. Bob Perelman can say in “The Marginalization of Poetry,” “In the regions of academic discourse,/ the patterns of production and circulation/ are different. There…//citation is the prime/ index of power. Strikingly original language// is not the point…,” and then admit that Derrida’s puns and citations are too slippery for all but the most “experienced/ cake walkers.” Which is to say that he recognizes the closed structures that perpetuate language as the purview of the elite and at the expense of aesthetics, and yet he participates in them, which is what langpo does generally: map the malaise, the circular construct of language and privilege as they impinge upon an ever diminishing subject, without ever discovering a way out.

      Given our sad state, the urge to deconstruct the text of the world, to tear it limb from bloody limb, is understandable, and to a degree even laudable. As William Carlos Williams said in Paterson (Book III): “…a chance word, upon/ paper, may destroy/ the world. Watch/ carefully and erase.” However, the deconstructive move is not merely the desire to tear down the machinery of oppression, the language of the fathers and metanarratives that are constraining and exclusive, an exhausted logocentric reality, but the primary desire to enter the underworld where chaos and silence reign, where meaninglessness is sovereign, so that rebirth can follow. Arguably, we have reached our initial dark objective, but only its doorway where the surface structures of hegemony are questioned and the old order deconstructed. Now it is time to descend with abandon into that black maw in order to chart its bleak passageways, and then to ascend again to the light and air of the world. The journey will be arduous because the forces that would keep us at the gates to the depths are ominous; but, ultimately, renaissance must be our conscientious new destination.

      First, however, it seems necessary to deny that this vision is utopian. As what follows will indicate, this descent to darkness, the urge to tear down all that was made before, is part of the inevitable cycle of humankind, perhaps especially inevitable now as we become hyperconscious of the machinations of power and privilege. However, a reciprocal ascent is not inevitable, as history seems to indicate. To turn upward toward the light requires that we act, and to act is a function of will and courage, both in short supply of late.

      It also seems necessary to deny that this vision is ultimately nostalgic for a golden age gone by. In fact, nostalgia is one of the enemies the poet, and the rest of humanity for that matter, must take a blood oath to kill. At best, the current cultural tendency to nostalgia is symptomatic of the darkness of our age, the desire to escape our own time and to retreat to some gleaming dream-like netherworld before the blight, which is really only our growing perception of certain cultural and historical propensities; but it is also indicative of how bereft of imagination the species has become. And who can calculate the danger of there being no imagined forward? Our children are not only listening to bad remakes of old rhythm and blues or rock and roll songs, for example, which would seem to indicate that creativity is nearly dead amongst song writers, they are listening to the same recordings we did in our youth and wistfully bemoaning that they were not alive in the sixties and seventies, that most longed for of erasunless of course you consider the spate of Victorian novels being put to film of late. Like the novels, the movies’ limited sphere of historical reality would indicate that everyone had money (except for servants, of course, whom the audience is never encouraged to identify with), which would seem to be the point: these “simpler” times were also easier.

      Mostly, however, nostalgia is a packaged thing, one more means the marketers use to fuel our discontent which they then satisfy with some false remnant of the past: “The illusion of advertising and entertainment persuades us that we can have it all, that we can buy Grandma’s homemade lemonade to sip as we lunch in our cubicles before our terminals” (Birkerts). Our real past is filled with blood, with puddles of coagulated gore, with enslavement of the other, with mega-weapons to indiscriminately kill the other, with increasingly ingenious ways to keep the powerless that way, with nature under attack unto the denial in some quarters currently that nature exists at all, having been so soundly defeated. And so, desperately, on and on.

      For the poet, the tendency to nostalgia manifests itself as a longing for a more strident form (hence the current incarnation of neo-formalism) or for Pound and Williams-like figures to ride over the horizon and save poetry from itself. The former, as in Mary Jo Salter’s nearly completely hollow acts of formal foofaraw, is a complete denial of the reality in which we live, of course, a desire for order on a scale that is not true and, worse, was hegemonic when the culture believed in it, i.e., all must con-form to the idea of an established order; but the latter is more dangerous. It is a messianic yearning for external salvation that allows inaction, even as the forest burns. It is true that “all revolutionary changes are led by individuals who articulate the inchoate perception of a collective need” (Anthony Stevens), but a concentrated and monolithic poetics offered up by poetical heroes is itself problematic. Too many misunderstand those big pronouncements and then take their perversely diminished form to illogical extreme; and such pronouncements are prone to co-optation anyway, that most subtle of subversive modes that power and the market can utilize. The work of individual consciousness as it is forged of individual experience is certainly necessary, and we wake up from the dark night of our collective soul one at a time, some sooner than others; but it is the collective vision as achieved and inflected by the individual poet in all his/her singular humanity that we need now, communication that is inclusive. There will certainly still be poets among us on occasion who transcend the rest in the poignancy of their visions (some new Blake or Rilke or Neruda on modern American soil, some Whitman), but that vision must not take primacy over the rest by virtue of access to a larger forum because of a kinship to the dominant culture. The voices in the wilderness must also be valid (like Blake in his own time, perhaps, but also the other however defined). And no vision must be reified, made the vision for American poetry. Diversity, and a damned good argument, are preferable to the sleep of a single vision.

      As I said, the desire to deconstruct the text of the world is understandable, as is a necessary journey into the dark that the culture has actually yet to undertake except in perverse forms born of the denial of the downward path’s existence, but at present we are in danger of throwing the baby out with the bathwater, if the cliché can be forgiven. There is certainly a problematic relation between signifier and signified given the nature of privilege: who gets to speak, by virtue of literacy and education, but also who and what the speaker is, e.g., the traditional situation of white males from the ranking class as the arbiters of what is published and consequently of whose reality is deemed most real. In light of this realization the present devaluation of metanarratives is also understandable, but the constant displacement of significance has yielded, for some poets, the utter invalidation of meaning, small or large. As John Dewey said well before the deconstructionists’ proposals were made, however, “there is no need of deciding between no meaning at all and one single, all-embracing meaning. There are many meanings and many purposes in the situations with which we are confrontedone, so to say, for each situation. Each proffers its own challenge to thought and endeavor, and presents its own potential value.” And as Derrida has said of his own work in Limited Inc.:

           The value of truth (and all those values associated with it) is never contested or
           destroyed in my writings, but only reinscribed in more powerful, larger, more
           stratified contexts (that is, within relations of force that are always
           differentialfor example, socio-political-institutionalbut even beyond these
           determinations) that are relatively stable, sometimes apparently unshakable.

      Obviously, some poets (and others) have taken the problematization of truth as its demise, and as a result seem to aim precisely for a murderous banality of assertion. Likewise, the question of authority in metanarratives has lead to a suspicion of all authoritative subjective assertions (and all assertions are author-itative inevitably, in spite of the syntactical parlor tricks some poets use to convince themselves otherwise) and has lead to the near absence of the active speaker in the text. For example, Steve McCaffery in Panopticon tells the reader at the outset, and in typical langpo third person in order to appear as clinical in one’s assertion as possible: “Eradicate the name, the character, the entire action and substitute the structural zones of clinical and critical discourse and she’ll still be there. Though displaced she was not annihilated.” In another poet’s hands this might be a positive assertion, that identity still exists, and perhaps even a radical imperative that is implicitly a critique of the diminishing subject and the danger inherent in allowing that to happen; however, in the context of the poem the woman is deconstructed down to her physical presence, “a sovereign presence in a lack of being.” And in spite of his attempts to remain aloof from the process of creation, giving the reader only the slightest hint that the poet has seen a movie and is here reiterating a scene, in his very assumptions as regards the readers’ understanding of the philosophy underlying his poem, not to mention his lack of desire to transcend the conceptualized subjective self of his character as mere cipher composed by the culture at large, he gives his motives away. As does the final 37 lines of “and on and on and on…” repeated as if it were a mantra of the disillusioned, waiting to die in one of the banal moments of his/her life.

      Contrary to achieving some sort of democratized utterance, such poets are guilty of an abdication of responsibility that privilege, by virtue of literacy alone if not education and class, inevitably carries with it. The use of language may well always be an act of violence, an attempt to tip the scale of belief or prejudice or perception, and to deny that fact is merely to participate in our subjugation. To paraphrase Czeslaw Milosz, every poem is political, or why bother; by which he did not mean that the poem is necessarily overtly didactic, but that poetry calls into question the way-things-are. In fact, according to some among us, of all the kinds of discourse available, art has a greater responsibility to be contrarian. Merleau-Ponty believed, for example, that “the work of art… teaches us to see and ultimately gives us something to think about as no analytical work can; because when we analyze an object, we find only what we have put into it… It is essential to what is true to be presented first, last, and always in a movement which throws our image of the world out of focus, distends it, and draws it toward fuller meaning.” In other words, art must be participatory, require an act of interpretation, and it must be against the grain of the status quo. Art must carry with it some perception of the world that the reader had not hitherto achieved, that sends a shiver of discord through him/her, if it is to fulfill its role of continually remaking the world. As Adrienne Rich says, “Words are found responsible/ all you can do is choose them/or choose/to remain silent (“North American Time). Writers who refuse to accept the call to write as a call to arms would do the rest of us a favor if they remained silent.

      Deconstruction as an ethical system is obsessed with accommodating the other, and there are many voices in the arts generally which were traditionally marginalized now being heard outside the mainstream (and some inside, although the tendency to tokenism and cultural voyeurism, the commodification of the other’s experience for the sake of entertainment, but in the name of diversity, is all too apparent). However, in the absence of authoritative assertion that is active, that is polemical, that risks destruction via mimicry or bitter irony by the agents of the status quo, the metanarrative that has become mostly noise will remain so rather than becoming the polyvocal narrative of the species that it must be if we are to truly accommodate all of us.

      In spite of the fact that our current condition is in part due to the misunderstanding by many people of the tenets of deconstruction, poets premiere among them, or at least some of those tenets have been carried to their illogical extreme, the philosophers and their system cannot be let off the hook. Simon Critchley has noted in The Ethics of Deconstruction that,

           the move that deconstruction is unable to make—what I have called its
           impasse—concerns the passage from undecidability to decision, from
           responsibility [as in the members of the dominant culture taking responsibility for
           the condition of the other] to questioning, from deconstruction to critique, from
           ethics to politics… [this latter] concerned as an activity of questioning, critiquing,
           judgment and decision; in short, as a creation of antagonism, contestation and
           struggle—what one might call the battle over doxa.

Critchley goes on to say that without a supplementary conception of the political deconstruction will become an “empty formalism” which, “as Rorty would have it, is a means to a private autonomy that is publicly useless and politically pernicious.” I know of no more apt description of too many contemporary poets whose lyrical personae never achieve the level of the communally human voice but are stranded in solipsistic ego, lacking either a living energy or affect, who are neither actors in the poem or in the larger world. Thus, in a poem about the disappearance of her young daughter for an hour, Sharon Olds can claim that her quest is “to know where it is, the evil/ in the human heart…,” but in the end she “saw only goodness…[ in the eyes of passers by and ] could not get past it,” as if to say that even the possible loss of her child could not impress her enough to recognize the dark side of human existence (“The Quest”), as if her daughter’s danger were merely backdrop for her own (feigned?) moral quandary over evil, or more accurately that quandary as we the reader are privy to it, as it is presented in solipsistic shorthandas if this precious image of the speaker means more than an actual exploration of the human psyche relative to the world. Thus, her poem entitled “May 1968,” which is ostensibly about political protest, turns out in reality to be about nothing more than the speaker’s self absorbed ruminations about the child she carries. Ultimately, neither poem speaks to anyone but the poet herself, in spite of the charged contexts for her ruminations.

      Hence the route out of impasse is the acceptance of the deconstructive assertion that “language is ethics” (Kearney), which entails an inclusive perception of the poem (who writes it and what it contains in terms of experience and world view) and a corollary acceptance of the responsibility that the privilege of participation in poetical discourse brings with it. To quote Diane di Prima’s “Rant” again (paraphrasing Keats in the final line):

           A woman’s life/ a man’s life is an allegory
                                                                       …

           There is no way out of the spiritual battle
           the war is the war against imagination
           you can’t sign up as a conscientious objector
           the war of the worlds hangs right here, right now, in the balance
           it is a war for this world, to keep it
           a vale of soul-making

Thus begins our journey toward reconstruction, toward the light of the daily world, with a declaration of war: on passivity, on submission to the co-optation of images and language, on ambivalence, on disintegration, on death. In 1870 Rimbaud used the term voyant (seer) to identify the new poet:

           one must, I say, become a seer,
           make oneself into a seer…

which Jerome Rothenberg connects to Mircea Eliade’s treatment of shamanism “as a specialized technique of ecstasy, the shaman as technician-of-the-sacred. In this sense, too, the shaman can be seen as a protopoet, for almost always his technique hinges on the creation of special linguistic circumstances, i.e., of song & invocation.” In other words, like the shaman the poet stands where the worlds (inner and outer) come together and creates a space there for others, for witnesses who are also participants, via language. “Art,” said Jean Cocteau, “is not a pastime but a priesthood.” All elitist connotations aside, poetry is capable of being a participation in the real at a profound level, for the reader as well as the writer. In the vision of poetry currently under discussion, the poet is not a hieratic purveyor of the status quo as mumbo-jumbo, but rather he/she who chooses to stand at the nexus of language and experience, who accesses the imagination where the subject and the objective real dance in a dynamic of potential signification The poet attempts to map the worlds, inner and outer, and attempts to make provisional sense of it all. This is the anthropologist Levy-Bruhl’s notion of participation mystique, but without the centralized originary force from which all else springs and to which the artist is beholden for images and archetypes. In this vision of art, poems become steps in a healing ritual, the ultimate aim of which is a momentary reconstruction.

           John Berger says in “The Hour of Poetry”:

           Every authentic [my italics] poem contributes to the labour of poetry…to bring
           together what life has separated or violence has torn apart… . Poetry can repair no
           loss, but it defies the space which separates. And it does this by its continual
           labour of reassembling what has been scattered.

And what has been separated is nearly incalculable: ourselves from nature; ourselves from a viable sense of being; ourselves, each from the other; ourselves from ourselves. To that end, much must be recovered, like our sense of connectedness to the natural order and the sensuality of the image, the viability of rhythm and breath as cognitive adjuncts to signification, as experiential relationships to/within the poem. We need some reassertion, along with Merleau-Ponty, that “it is impossible to say that nature ends here and that man or expression starts here.” We need this participatory re-enactment of the real if we are to overcome what Nietzsche termed our “passive nihilism,” defined as a decline and regression of the power of the spirit. We need a redefinition of mythology for our age, one which does not access sterile or constricting or controlling archetypes; and we need to make myths that are born of individual experience but that connect us in our humanity, that defy our alienation, our disintegration. We need maps of the inner and outer worlds, of the “pathologies of the modern” (Habermas) as well as that in us that stands in opposition to, and transcends, the madness of history. We cannot climb out of our darkness if the bulk of our poets pretend it does not exist. We need poems that ask the questions we must ask ourselves now, “when so much has to be witnessed, recuperated, revalued” (Rich, The Best American Poetry: 1996). We need poetry that allows a voice to the marginalized, that gives voice to the voiceless among us: those without means, without access, without language to equal their experiences. We need a poetry that is truly authentic to the human experience, its horrors and its joys, if we are to go about the business of reconstructing the world and our place in it.

                                                                                                    Authenticity in an Inauthentic Age

           The poet’s desire now is not to abstract himself from
           his being, to entrust his song to strange forces that
           would soon engulf him, nor, by some opposite
           push, to withdraw into his own weightiness to rage
           lyrically in the depth of his desolation. There is
           this movement through which the spectacle of the
           surround illumines (disorders), while the imposition
           of each word tends to order in the world. On this
           double necessity, which has been the sacred seed
           of poetry, the present articulates itself like a solemn,
           ineluctable law… . That is to say that poetry begins
           in the domain of the epic. In our anarchic universe,
           such a manner of poetry ceases to be accidental,
           imposes itself as the imperious Harvest. It names
           the Drama that is ours: fire of the Diverse, struggle
           of the Disparate, desire for the Other. It perpetuates
           the chaos and this labor, which is uniquely poetry’s:
           to tear down the walls, the barks; to unify without
           denaturing, to order without taxidermizing, to unveil
           without destroying; to finally know each thing, and
           that space from one thing to the other, these saps,
           these countries in the mind’s sharpness and the
           heart’s all-generosity.
                                                                                                   Edouard Glissant

      It is no easy task this elder from Martinique gives to the poem, the poet. The world, as he tells us, is a dizzying convocation of forces; and, by implication, to be passive before that chaos, that disorienting dance, is the greatest sin. It is to pretend that the poet/human is truly separate from the “anarchic universe”; it is to withdraw; it is to play dead. As Adrienne Rich says, authentic poems have “a core (as in corazon). The core of a poem is not something you extract from the poem’s body and examine elsewhere; its living energies are manifest throughout, in rhythm, in language, in the arrangement of lines on the page and how this scoring translates into sound” (BAP). In other words, the poem is a singular act of attention, an organic whole born of the poet’s presence in/of the world; but it is also a sensual organism/construct, made of breath and rhythm as they are forged into voice. The great poem resonates in the body as well as the mind. The great poem forms something out of the chaotic forces of being to be swallowed, experienced, lived with as part of an ever evolving sense of the real, and of being within the real.

      But authentic poetry is not merely spirit(ual), as in of the breath and the essential, but also a broader conception of the self, all the metaphorical darkness and light and the multichromatic shades in between. It is an honest map of the interior and exterior worlds. What passes for the map at present is like those early European renderings of the planet outside Western experience, all forbidding darkness; but this black hole in the map is, ironically, our experience: the dissolution of a valid conception of self, burgeoning prisons, war in our streets and across the globe, and etc., seemingly ad infinitum, all pushed into the interior and marked with a skull and crossbones. In some sense, the poststructural poem, its postmodern pastiche and dis-integrated speech, are of this map: the place where we get lost and wander, disoriented, in circles. However, to draw the impasse is to draw only the coast of mediaeval Europe, the metaphorical ground we ambivalently occupy. If we are to find our way out the poet must descend into the darkness, wholeheartedly, must depict the missing hands of the living and the bloated corpses, must speak to the demon’s responsible and allow them to speak for themselves through the poet, to rage against all the poet believes. And the poet must map his/her own darkest interiors, those corners where demons are born, whether inculcated there by the subliminal forces of the status quo or some vestigial urge made perverse by lack of use: born of nationalistic pride or notions of ethnic purity or the will to power become pathology. The poet must show the world to itself. More pointedly perhaps, as Pound said : “…it is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself” (Literary Essays).

           But there is more to the story than this charting of bleak geography. There is love as valid response, in spite of its many wounds, to the world-as-it-is. There are burned out cars on shattered streets where a man sings the blues as his mother taught him. There are soup kitchens and unregenerate trailer parks and skid marks on the highway where someone swerved as an act of faith in the sanctity of life. There are begging children smiling and a pestilential wail rising from the ground in protest. There is a jubilant and wild leaping in response to the outer wilderness. There is light on garden leaves. There are guitars impersonating birdsong. There are sons and daughters dreaming of a way through the dark regions of the impasse, of the present, dreaming the map itself that they will write down and explain to us all. There are birds of omen scripting infinity on the air. There is joy and remorse and an undying desire to change the world embodied in the poet, in the poem. And, finally, there is mystery (re)achieved, the conundrum of being, beating like a heart at the center of everything.

                                                                                                Toward Authenticity: Steps in a Healing Ritual
                                                                                                    (Stealing Back the Word and the Image)

           The human soul was threshed out like maize in the endless
           granary of defeated actions, of mean things that
           happened,
           to the very edge of endurance, and beyond…
                                                                                        Neruda (“The Heights of Macchu Picchu”)

     We start from this premise: that as a people we are cosmically, collectively, insane. That is, we have lost all formal structures beyond the inane for ordering our universe and, worse, any connection to the mysterium tremendum et fascinans. As a result, we have abdicated our subjective responsibility to being; we have enslaved ourselves; we have become automatons in a totalized system that is responsible for the death of our souls. Some among us are attempting daily to tear it all down: the ideology and its exclusionary structures that privilege certain experiences over others, but with those structures go the means to say, to reassert our being. We start from this premise: poets can be vital agents of reconstruction, of reintegration, or merely remain symptomatic of our malaise, participants in a no win end game.

      To begin to rebuild the poem as a vehicle of our rejuvenation, we must steal back our primary tools. Sound (the sensual) and mental image (the recreation of the sensual in the imagination) are central to a reader’s participation in the text: “Words…carry the speaker and the hearer into a common universe by drawing both toward a new signification through their power to designate in excess of their accepted definition, through the muffled life they have led and continue to lead in us, and through what Ponge appropriately called their ‘semantic thickness’ and Sartre their ‘signifying soil’ ” (Merleau-Ponty). That is to say that beyond the dynamic abstract meaning of individual words, and words in relation to each other, to their mutually arising context, the language of the poem taps the power of words to draw the reader into the realm of the imagination, “a common universe,” to make him/her feel as well as think. As Chris Mazza says in a recent article in Rain Taxi, “These are the moments I read to find: the moments when some trick of words strung together becomes a gasp, a sigh, a grunt, a moan.” The reader is not merely a voyeur, watching from a distance and at best titillated; but he/she is singing with the singer, hearing water roll and smelling the lightning riven trunk of a tree, all ozone and the scorched husks of beetles, loathing some stark antagonist his/her destruction of what is good or swelling with pride and fear at the sight of a child wading through chest-deep grass toward adulthood.

      But in contemporary life we are overwhelmed by sound, and by “the message.” Recently, as I was loading groceries into my vehicle in a supermarket parking lot, a wave of thunderous bass rolled over me from the car wash next door. A woman in a small, red car had pulled up to the vacuum cleaners, and over the sucking noise of the machine, over the constant sound of traffic as it streamed by on the adjacent road, I could make out every bathetic word of the song playing on her radio. All questions aside regarding the death of public civility and the ascendancy of an adolescent self-absorption among the populace, regardless of age, this was an assault by sound. I wanted to escape, to climb into my vehicle and roll up all the windows and speed away, and not just from the invasive noise but the deadening message as well: all that drivel reflecting the diminished romantic ideal of love as it is subverted, the goal being a subtle sense of grief in the listener that will be momentarily placated by the promise of attraction to the opposite sex that the commercial following the song offers. All the hearer need do is purchase the appropriate hygiene product.

      We are also assaulted by the image, whether word pictures or the actual image on television, billboards and in magazines. Even clothing is textual, endlessly self-referential (and the pun is telling), declaring the wearers sworn allegiance to the brand name or the sports team or the rock band, and subliminally encouraging the “reader” to do the same, to be a walking advertisement for the corporation and to participate in the ephemeral and noncorporeal corporate image, itself a floating and ill defined signifier that is intended to augment positively the wearer’s sense of self. If I could have seen my young assailant more clearly, doubtless she is an avatar of the Nike swoosh or the very embodiment of New York Yankee-hood.

      The result of all this noise, the muzak in the grocery store and the advertisements for videos and the Globe declaring the reality of the profoundly impossible and the Pillsbury doughboy staring out at us as if he were stoned or hypnotized or both, is obviously a diminishment of word and image as the conveyors of significance. But the result is also the shutting down of our sensory and cognitive mechanisms. We manage to drive away, cognizant enough of our aural and visual surroundings to function, but we no longer see and hear sufficiently to make sense of the world as text. We can no longer process everything, let alone sort out the dreck from the poignant, rare as this latter has become. In fact, our current malaise is due in part to the lack of a viable means of signification, a participatory communication. It is not just a case of sensual overload, or even of the notion of language as a diminished purveyor of truth, but a loss of “sensual vitality” (Rich, What is Found There) and any sense of being alive in time within a community of other vitally sensual creatures:

           …our power to speak and live languages enhances the bodily bases of our
           imagining. The speaking worlds we inhabit are not just intercorporeal, they are
           inter-personal worlds of human coexistence. Through the languages we speak, we
           are embodied in social roles, in cultures and subcultures, in forms of thinking and
           understanding and imagining. Languages and the sociocultural and intellectual
           dimensions they incorporate are produced, reproduced, and transformed as
           articulations of historical practice. The explicitly conscious theoretical
           structurings of our languages and cultures are imaginative elaborations of our
           implicit practical sense of historical embodiment. The original and continuing
           basis of our power to live intelligently in actual and possible worlds is our
           practical sense of the implicit carnal ground of our experience, communication,
           and coexistence—imagination’s body.
                                                                                         (McCleary)

      Our use of language is a participation in the larger world, a belonging; but it is also a way of interpreting our place historically and culturally, in terms of power and resistance, and a way of positing possible futures. To be overwhelmed, to roll up the cognitive windows of necessity against the onslaught, is to lose all of that and thus much of our humanity. Obversely, to use language imaginatively is to make sense of the world and our place in it, and “ ‘making sense’ must here be understood in its most direct meaning: to make sense is to enliven the senses. A story that makes sense is one that stirs the senses from their slumber, one that opens the eyes and the ears to their real surroundings, turning the tongue to the actual tastes in the air and sending chills of recognition along the surface of the skin. To make sense is to release the body from the constraints imposed by outworn ways of speaking, and hence to renew and rejuvenate one’s felt awareness of the world. It is to make the senses wake up to where they are” (Abram).

     In our shutting down, our shutting out of the glut of noise, we have also shut out our primary means of connection to each other and the world, ceased to make sense of the world and further attenuated our being. Therefore, the question before us is: how can poets again revivify the language and again “make sense” in spite of the surfeit of words and images that overwhelm us? First, we must not give in and abdicate our traditional role as re-enactor of the real relative to subjective sensation and rumination. We must again pay attention to language, rhythm and sound and connotation. It would seem to go without saying that poets must attend to craft, and in some circles that priority would appear to be paramount unto absurdity, i.e., too many MFA programs, where form is loosely defined but stridently enforced, and among the neo-formalists. However, craft for its own sake is not what I am suggesting, but attention to the musicality and sensuality of words as they are relevant to both meaning and to a participatory enactment of being. This is an attempt to draw the reader into the textagainst his/her will if necessaryvia their individual imaginations. The assumption here is that to signify, and all that it entails, from a notion of historical belonging to sensual enactment, is inherent to the species, and that to do so poignantly upon the sacred ground of the poem, of the imagination, is to issue an invitation to participation that cannot be refused. Because the meaning of human experiencing is metaphorical and imaginative as well as quintessentially experiential, the poem must be a breathing as well as ruminating and dynamically imaginative animal. It must taste and smell and be touch sensitive.

      Second, the poet must be unafraid of active, vehemently subjective assertion, unafraid of the strident use of word and image, of the sensual, in the service of meaning. Subjective assertion generally has been dubbed one of the more egregious signs of patriarchy, the desire to control the hearer, to name and define and conquer, by virtue of an overtly masculine energy that, it is true, manifests itself as undying certainty. But certainty need not be hegemonic in intent or result, need not be rigid and hierarchical, need not be any more than one more voice vying for the reader’s attention, albeit to inflect his/her perception of the world in a positive, dynamic way that the other “messages” he/she is bombarded with daily do not: to make him/her think and feel and to do so adamantly. As Barry Allen asserts in “Difference Unlimited,” “while as Foucault said ‘it is in discourse that power and knowledge are joined together,’ power is not necessarily wicked or irrational. It is not always on the other side of freedom, or objectivity, or truth.” Paradoxically, speech is, writing especially, as much an act of violence as it is community; but the recent passivity in much of American poetry, which is an attempt to deny that massive responsibility that comes with being a poet, with so self conscious a use of language, amounts to a rubber stamp of the pathetic way-things-are, and more voices vying for the reader’s attention that seek to overthrow our sad state are in order. The poet must be willing to risk ridicule and even subversion, and be willing in turn to subvert the language of the usurpers, the violators, of his/her assertions and judgments. The poet must be willing to challenge ideologies and behaviors, to seek change and accept the results of his/her actions, and then seek to undo or modify any perversion of his/her intentions, endlessly. The poet must be willing to change him/herself in response to challenges to their own assertions that make sense to them, or in response to some follower’s desire to reify those assertions and thereby make them as rigid as the dominant assertions he/she seeks to throw down.

           As Paz says,
           …better to be killed by stoning
           in the public square than tread the mill that grinds
           out into nothing the substance of our life,
           changes eternity into hollow hours,
           minutes into penitentiaries, and time
           into copper pennies and abstract shit.

In our case the mill is massive and daunting, but one of its many bleak manifestations is the move toward silence that has been a result of too much noise and of our increasing passivity. If poetry is to be something other than symptomatic, poets must again find their voices, certain and full of anger, and hone the weapons they previously put down for fear they had already been irremediably compromised.

                                                                                                  Steps in a Healing Ritual
                                                                                                   (Mapping the Territory)

           Our true faith is said in simple words, for we cannot escape them—for meaning is
           the instant of meaning—and this means that we write to find what we believe….
           Eventually, I think, there is no hope for us but in meaning.
                                                                                        George Oppen

           [Poems, like] dreams, instantiate meaning.
           Bert O. States

           All human perceiving is an historically interpretive
           perceiving, an imaginative perceiving.
                                                                                        Richard C. McCleary

      As a culture we suffer from what States calls “perceptual bondage,” which is to say we are tranquilized by the “parade of contexts” that the media offers us, but we are also lulled into a sense of the present, of reality, that is made of its surface constituents only: generally things to buy that, all added together, make up our self-perception. The only elements of the world lurking below the surface are deemed pangenerally dangerous and are symbolized on television by police dramas and infotainments that serve to warn us ad nauseum that we could be victimized any minute now. However, what is below the surface remains inchoate, faceless except for the temporary and ever changing masks the media give it: child stealers, Arab terrorists, black crack addicts, wife beaters and emasculating women, the restless poor in their guise as the robbers of convenience stores, perverts who poison our over-the-counter medications, the young who at any minute might shoot their fellow children en masse (as a television special on teen violence recently declared, “any kid could snap”). There is no correlation of these effects with some larger, more complex cause, no exploration of any of these events as symptomatic. It is all presented as a postmodern version of evil that rides the air, invisible, and that can infect anyone at any time. The only answer proffered is more control, and hence schools that look like prisons and actual prisons with a total American population that approaches 2 million (and 40% of inmates are incarcerated for nonviolent drug-related charges), mandatory minimum sentences and ridiculously long terms for offenses that would have called for probation not that long ago, three strikes laws that by any act of common sense would be deemed unconstitutional and a general erosion of our hard-fought civil rights. In a word, America has become paranoid while the pandemic crimes like poverty in the face of expanding profits, increased police power, environmental degradation, and third world labor that approaches slavery to turn out American consumer goods (and so, desperately, on and on) go largely unacknowledged.

      A cynic might suggest that the portrayal by media of the world as inordinately dangerous for the individual without broaching such dire particulars is sleight-of-hand to keep us unaware of the real dangers so as to protect those who profit from the world-as-it-is. However, the truth, the actual map of this time and this place, is the purview of the poet (as it has always been), and to access the truth is to journey downward into the abyss. According to James Hillman, “the pervading, though masked, depression in our civilization is partly the response of the soul to its lost underworld” (The Dream and the Underworld). His suggestion is that we as a culture have lost touch with the depths of our being, with the archetypal, primally human conception of mystery. However, perhaps because we have failed as a culture to look into the darkest corners of ourselves, and in fact refuse to acknowledge they exist, the underworld is also projected outward, manifested in historical terms. At present the underworld would seem to be manifested as our reality in toto, and the only relationship to it we have is, like children afraid of the shadows in the closet, in the form of the boogie man du jour the media offers us as a momentary objectification to deflect blame, to represent an easy fixcontrol of that singular entity.

      In “For those I Left in Asylum,” the poet Leonard Cirino offers us a glimpse of the enormity of the task, of the journey toward change that is also a kind of absolution given our will to change (that mighty act of the human universe that Olson told us was the one constant):

          …who can bother with such things
          now that we’ve lost sight in the dark
          and the way out is further down
          where even death doesn’t seem final
          enough.

This passage is from a poem about madness, about charting the path out, upward toward the light, which is paradoxically first downward into the dark. It is no wonder that this assertion comes from the periphery of American letters (a small press), from the margins, from (in Anne Waldman’s term) a cultural outrider. In fact, such attempts to map the dark terrain of the American everyday are ridiculed or ignored by mainstream critics who seem to believe that poetry is no longer the place for truth telling, unless of course the truth is tangentially available as a prurient voyeur’s buzz is achieved, critics who seem to prefer the current sleep of denial. It has always been this way, of course, and the price all too often a large one for poets who attempt to cut through all the obfuscation. In her book 7th Circle, a reference to Dante’s level of hell reserved for suicides, Maggie Jaffe answers the 20th century riddle: what is the relationship of art to the horrors of history? Those artists she writes of are victims of their age, of the weight of the truth and their unequivocal need to tell it, of the subversion of that truth by the powers-that-be; but they are also despised by the very people they wish to save with their unblinking honesty. She offers us Mayakovsky, who dreams “he’s/ naked at the podium/ while students mock/ his dada,” who dreams he is incapable of protecting himself; she offers us Celan: “a despised man,/ a pariah with a human tongue.” But these exempla serve as prototypes for those among us now who are likewise despised for portraying the world sans the veils spun of pure bullshit or solipsistic juvenilia by the purveyors of the unspoken rules of conformity and consumption. It has always been this way, but now poets have a larger task in the face of our current version of “perceptual bondage” and the more pandemic and powerful mechanisms that drive it in our age, in the face of a voluntary somnambulism before an unprecedented, albeit frequently subtle (by virtue of our acceptance of those mechanisms), violence:

          High up, and even higher, within
          the cyclone, metal grate, and star
          poised in pristine rows, guns
          like lilacs bend to kiss
          a cloud—to see it roil, spin.
          And what is torn is torn.
          And what is shot is shot.
          All day the catwalks creak;
          the sky filled-in holes
          above the din. Count goes on
          faces, names, and numbers spent
          like empty shells. Casings
          rattle the grillwork. At midnight
          even they must be counted.
                                                                                        (Christopher Presfield, “Siege”)

      But the mapping of the current human universe is much more complex than the iteration of what the populace seems hell-bent on denying (all puns intended). The poet must also map his/her own frustration and deep disappointment with the limitations of language to change the course of history, with its limitations to tell the truth. Poststructuralism has not misled usthe poet’s tools are malleable and fragile and capable of misuseand that knowledge gives rise to what William Doreski calls our “postmodern funk.” His own poetry charts that frustration, but there is also a coming-to-terms with those limitations, acceptance but also transcendence. “Description and homage are my tasks..,” he says in a poem entitled “The Satire of Icy Walks,” because whether or not civilization is winding down, whether or not we lose in our battle to regain the image and steal back the word and certain writers and popular media and politicians and corporate panderers have their way and meaning slips its traces utterly, whether or not words must melt equally before the beauty and the horror, the vulgarity and the burden and the ecstatic longing of being human into a puddle of undifferentiated sound in the end, there remain squash to be planted and rocks to be skipped and the geometry of geese flying, of trout rising, of a man and a woman embracing…and the undeniable desire to give voice to those experiences. All of this is also the truth, also within the poet’s purview. All of this is part of the map.

      As States says, “dreams and art are necessary in order to see the substructure of reality.” Invoking a paper by Gordon Orians and Judith Heerwagen, “Evolved Responses to Landscapes,” Anthony Stevens suggests that our aesthetic response to landscape derived in part from psychological structures that help us navigate the terrain, that we still require in order to “find our way.” Hillman, borrowing from Keats, refers to this act of mapping the outer world that is also the inner as “soul-making,” which is not to suggest the making of an essential substance but the “imaginative possibility of our natures, the experiencing through reflective speculation, dream, image and fantasy, that mode which recognizes all realities as primarily symbolic or metaphorical” (Re-Visioning Psychology). Again, the object is to make sense of the surface structure of the world, to enact it at a poignant level where we can come to grips with it, and perhaps change it.

      Not all can speak for themselves, however. Not all can tell the truth of their corners of the map, either for lack of the requisite language skills or for lack of access for reasons of economics or exclusion. By virtue of his/her skill, and the privilege that skill with language affords, which is nothing less than the skill to speak, to broach the truth, and by virtue of the conscious decision to stand at the nexus of language and experience, it is the poet’s responsibility to speak for those mute others to the best of his/her abilities. As McCleary suggests, “a successful pedagogy of imagination [and the poem so conceived] must explore and utilize the historical multiplicity of human embodiment and imagination. It must understand the historical conditions which enhance or alienate our power to imagine… .” This is not to suggest that the other suffers from a failure of imagination, but that the other is frequently disallowed either the skill or opportunity to speak, to participate in the imaginative body. This is what Craig Werner refers to, in Adrienne Rich : The Poet and her Critics, as cultural solipsism, “the tendency to treat only the self or group, sharing specific characteristics with the self (gender, race, religion, class, nationality, etc.), as real and to establish fixed roles for those defined as ‘other.’ Consigning the expression of these others to the ‘wild zone,’ the cultural solipsist, unable to acknowledge those aspects of the self associated with the other, inevitably subverts his/her relationship to community, nature, and the unconscious mind.”

      Cultural solipsism disavows certain experiences as real; therefore a wide variety of speakers are denied a forum, and consequently the map is forever incomplete. More accurately perhaps, the map that excludes anyone’s experience is a lie. This is not to suggest that those speakers should not, or indeed never will, be allowed their voice as “polyvocal microcosm”: “…the voices conscious and unconscious, inherited, cultivated, instinctive, trained, me, myself the polyvocal microcosm, one whose experience is particular, unique, but who also and always bears a communal, historical experience of language and culture” (John Edgar Wideman). Rather, as Barry Allen suggests, “When we consider the ethical character and political implications of inquiry and knowledge, and all the practices and interests interwoven with these, it cannot be a matter of no importance who is said to need or lack the truth and who is said to have it.” In short, although it is preferable that the experiencer speak for him/herself, in the absence of radical equivocity (and this may well be an ideal and thus unattainable in practice) the poet must accept the responsibility of language use and, via an act of creative empathy, attempt to tell the truth of the other, for the other.

      There are inherent dangers, of course, the possibility of misunderstanding and thereby misspeaking the least among them. In the final analysis, a middle class white man is not an African-American woman living in poverty or a prisoner stuck in the labyrinthine penal system. The greatest danger, however, is that the poet will co-opt the other’s experience for the sake of the reader’s voyeuristic entertainment or, far worse, subvert it to make it more palatable, to control it by either turning the other’s experience into cliché or otherwise simplistically portraying it. However, a true act of creative empathy is the valid attempt to see through the other’s eyes, to speak with the other’s sensibilities. Even when the other is completely capable of speaking for him/herself, i.e. the many excellent women writers struggling to speak the truth within patriarchy, what is gained via an act of empathy, understanding as far as we are humanly capable, far exceeds the negative possibilities And not just for our hypothetical middle class white male poet as regards the African-American woman living in poverty, but perhaps for other white males who, by reading her experiences in a language they recognize, but that is none-the-less accurate, will have a better, more realistic and compassionate view of that part of the map.

      This is the role for which Plato would banish the poet from the republic, the poet as chameleon speaker who can become the other via an imaginative act, can speak the truth of the other, albeit at one remove. Not only does he/she not serve a singular purpose as defined by the state by becoming the other, but the poet as voice for the other subverts the rationalization that keeps us in this most egregious form of perceptual bondage, a cultural solipsism that defines the world in terms of privilege and exclusion. As Wideman warns us: “Most of what passes for art, particularly narrative art, advertises mainstream values and culture. An ad for itself. Product endorsing product, creating a seamless web of resemblance and reinforcement.” The poet who risks becoming the other, however momentarily and imperfectly, breaks this cycle (again, however momentarily and imperfectly), puts a wedge into the monolithic block of the status quo to pry it apart ever so slightly, to let difference in as a valid assumption. In America, “when we get past the lip service paid to individuality, difference is abhorred, treated as a glitch in the cosmic scheme” (Wideman). The chameleon poet looks to put all experience on the map, to stand against the fear that would make us all the same.

The poet is a little god.
                                      Huidobro

Language is myth.
                              Merwin

          …everything is transfigured and is sacred
          and each room is now the centre of the world,
          tonight is the first night, today the first day,
          whenever two people kiss the world is born,
          a drop of light with guts of transparency
          the room like a fruit splits and begins to open
          or burst like a star among the silences
          and all laws now rat-gnawed and eaten away,
          barred windows of banks and penitentiaries,
          the bars of paper, and the barbed-wire fences,
          the stamps and the seals, the sharp prongs and the spurs,
          the one-note sermon of the bombs and wars,
          the gentle scorpion in his cap and gown,
          the tiger who is the president of the Society
          for the Prevention of Cruelty and the Red Cross,
          the pedagogical ass, and the crocodile
          set up as saviour, father of his country,
          the founder, the leader, the shark, the architect
          of the future of us all, the hog in uniform,
          and then that one, the favourite son of the Church
          who can be seen brushing his black teeth
          in holy water and taking evening courses
          in English and democracy, the invisible
          barriers, the mad and decaying masks
          that are used to separate us, man from man.
          and man from his own self
                they are thrown down
          for an enormous instant and we see darkly
          our own lost unity, how vulnerable it is
          to be women and men, the glory it is to be man
          and share our bread and share our sun and our death,
          the dark forgotten marvel of being alive…
                                                                                                   Paz

      The mapping of the human universe turns abruptly inward here, or rather reaches the junction of the objective real as symbol and metaphor and the subjective apprehension of meaning. Recently, mythology has come to be viewed as a psychological inflection of the dreaded metanarrative, one more means of constraining the other to terms identified and defined by the dominant controllers of signification. However, the need for this portion of the map remains as a way of ordering the universe, of making sense. As Anthony Stevens says in Private Myths, “In the unconscious we remain a primordial creature, homo religiosus, approaching the mystery of existence in quest of a religious understanding.” It is true that when reified the religious impetus has been an excuse for every atrocity the race is prone to, but what Stevens is suggesting is that the urge to understand the mystery of our being, however provisionally, is precisely and quintessentially human. In fact, our loss of a sense of the mystery at the center of our being, which I will suggest is a very recent phenomena (although in danger for decades), may well be our greatest sacrifice to the acquisition of knowledge in the logical positivist tradition¾although that loss relative to science is certainly not necessary or inevitable, which would suggest that there are other dark forces at work (i.e., the attack on meaning generally in our culture of late and the increasing power of commodities to form and define the individual, however unsatisfactorily in existential terms). It is perhaps almost a truism that in the absence of a unifying mythological system we have become fragmented creatures whose longing for “some sort of answer, a corroboration” (as Birkerts describes the reading act in a recent interview) remains inchoate and unacknowledged except in the fact of our fragmentation and the confusion it engenders.

      Stevens asserts that this fragmentation is an actual split in our brains and that,

          the English word yoke comes from the same Indo-European
                root as yoga and religion from the same Latin root as ligament.
                Dreams, myths, spiritual disciplines and religious rituals all have the same
           ligamenting or yoking function…designed to tie the body, mind, and spirit
          together. It is not far-fetched to imagine they could have similar
          neurophysiological consequences¾that narrative, ritual, and dreams strengthen
          ties between the neocortex and the limbic system, yoking them together.

In other words, and any accusation as to the circular logic of etymological example is duly noted, we need a richer psychic life, including mythology, in order to heal the “schizoid dissociation” between the modern and primordial minds, “between thinking and feeling, between ego and Self.”

      In the absence of a dominant religious paradigm, which I am certainly not suggesting we attempt to reattain, the concern over myth as controlling metanarrative becomes less poignant, or at least the dangers are more subtle (but I will discuss more of this below). In fact, the impetus for the creation of myth as psychological function remains in spite of the discrediting of an overarching myth system and is thus less a function of conformity and perhaps as radically individualistic an act as humans are capable:

          In the context of a traditional mythology, the symbols are presented
          in socially maintained rites, through which the individual is required
          to experience, or will pretend to have experienced, certain insights,
          sentiments, and commitments. In…creative mythology, on the other
          hand, this order is reversed: the individual has had an experience
          of his own—of order, horror, beauty, or even mere exhilaration—
          which he seeks to communicate through signs; and if his realization
          has been of a certain depth and import, his communication will
          have the value and force of living myth¾for those, that is to say,
          who receive and respond to it of themselves, with recognition,
               uncoerced.
                                                                                                   (Joseph Campbell)

In the absence of a dominating organizing system, individual experience, as it is recognizable by other individuals as a poignant assertion of being, becomes the basis for the stories, poems, and vignettes that lend insight into the human condition, that tie the abstract intellect to the primal brain where the mystery is enacted. In Campbell’s words, the individual becomes the “ultimate mythogenic zone,” and consequently our postmodern mythology is dynamic but meaningful¾that is, the small mythology we currently have in our culture of surfaces. As recently as the early 1970’s Charles Altieri could say in an essay in Boundary: “The postmoderns…take myth as essentially a condition one lives in, a way of experiencing, and not as a way of ordering and comprehending experience. The sacramentalizing functions of myth, its powers of creating a numinous present, are far more important than its structural and structure creating properties” (“From Symbolist Thought to Immanence: The Ground of Postmodern American Poetics”). However, in the face of a lost sense of life as meaningful, or at least of language as sufficient to convey what meaning we are privy to, and in the face of our increasingly material conception of the human as but neurons and electrical impulses guiding an unwieldy boat of meat, not to mention our diminished sense of the radical subject as actor on the world stage let alone the stage of the universe, poets presently tend to give us little pictures, to give us the domestic mundane, the tiny deaths of the everyday as mere event, one step beyond sterile statistic, if those deaths are mentioned at all. The poet as myth maker must “create…a dynamic pattern, seeking to integrate consciousness with action…emphasize [the] reconstructive attempt to present a ‘vision of the path toward the integration of spiritual vision into social reality’ ”(Werner quoting Carol Christ’s Diving Deep and Surfacing: Women Writers on Spiritual Quest). Contrary to Altieri’s assertion, beyond a sense of one’s own numinous being the poet as mythmaker must make sense of his/her relationship to that mystery as it is manifested in his/her experience and do the race the favor of offering up a vision for both experiential exploration and critical analysis.

      However, the tendency for myth to rely too heavily upon previously constituted, and therefore baggage laden, archetypes is well taken. Rachel Blau Duplessis, in her discussion of the feminist mythic sensibilities of several poets (Rich, Levertov, and Rukeyser chiefly), offers a useful distinction. She argues that the most effective poems that achieve the level of myth “are nonstatic and nonarchetypal…historically specific inventions…[and are compatible with these poets’ deconstructive commitment] to the rupture of sequences, ‘the splitting open and delegitimation of constituted stories.’ ” What she suggests is that our new mythology rely upon prototypes as opposed to archetypes. The former, she says,

          are original, model forms on which to base the self
          and its action¾forms open to transformation and
          forms, unlike archetypes, that offer similar patterns
          of experience to others, rather than imposing these
          patterns on others… . A prototype is not a binding,
          timeless pattern, but one critically open to the possibility,
          even the necessity, of its transformation. Thinking
          in these terms historisizes myth.”

      This is the human story made manifest in the experience of the individual as a creature of the historical moment rather than as a product of the egoistic “I” laboring under the illusion of the importance of its own presence on the tiny field of the domestic. This is the human story as “the integration of the spiritual and the social, of the personal and the political, [and] is itself a radical act” in the face of the primary urge to deconstruct currently operative in much American poetry (Werner). It is also a process of self-renewal that is continual in light of the tendency to reification (i.e., by any readers so inclined, but also the poet him/herself) and subversion by the dominant discourse. Rather than being a codification of a controlling ideology, the poem as myth is offered as a dynamic and provisional saying that is nevertheless a proof of the meaning of human existence.

      Although a conscious reconnection of what has been split asunder is itself a radical performance, unlike the cognizant and hyper-purposeful mapping of the human universe discussed previously, sometimes the poet as mythologizer, like the shaman as protopoet in Rothenberg’s assertion, has a unifying vision thrust upon him/her. This is the model of the poem as reenactment of being and the mystery at its center as it is subconsciously inflected by the poet’s position in time. It is a function of the poet standing not only at the nexus of language and experience and, paradoxically, of a conscious attempt to come back from the collision of history and cognition and the phenomenological carrying a dynamic artifact, an experiential touchstone, for others:

          For we move—each—in two worlds: the inward of our awareness, and the
          outward of participation in the history of our time and place… . Creative
          artists…are mankind’s wakeners to recollection: summoners of our outward mind
          to conscious contact with ourselves…as spirit, in the consciousness of being. Their
          task, therefore, is to communicate directly from one inward world to another, in
          such a way that an actual shock of experience will have been rendered: not a mere
          statement for the information or persuasion of a brain, but an effective
          communication across the void of space and time from one center of consciousness to another…
                                                                                                   (Campbell)

but it is also a function of collecting in the net of the poem the impulses and concerns lurking beneath the surface of the culture. Such poems-as-myth, because they access the unconscious yearnings of a people, frequently seem to have been prescient as those longings and rumblings move into communal consciousness.

      The poem-as-myth is, in short, part and parcel of the human condition as a mystery that confounds and fascinates, both a dynamic (re)definition of being and its (re)capitulation. This is also in part what Wideman means when he quotes a maxim of the Ibo of West Africa to the effect that all stories are true, are the one story, and what Duncan meant when he said that we are all writing the same poem, the poem. This is the story of our collectivity, but not a stridently conformist construct¾quite the opposite. This is the unspeakable vision of the individual that is also the panhuman struggling its way toward speech. This is our attempt to understand the mystery, ineluctable and ultimately always beyond us, of this tenuous and unlikely walk through the stars.

      Poetry-as-myth in this vision is, therefore, a late step in our healing ritual. It is a deep cultural work that defies our disintegration by reconjoining the disparate elements of our collective being, and it is the dynamic of being itself¾what we believe as it transmutes within and modifies the individual, both reader and writer, as it transubstantiates with multiple readings over time, as it refuses to become the sanctioned version of the human story but, rather, one temporary and poignant saying that leads to another and another, never ossifying, never giving up on the search for meaning, for understanding that is never an ultimate understanding, that allows us to be as vehemently human as we are able. The poem-as-myth is the indefatigable fight against the stasis at the center of modern life that has replaced the primally dynamic mystery, whether named or unnamed.

      In a poem dedicated and addressed to Joseph Brodsky, which is as much elegy as myth, Derek Walcott momentarily confounds our sense of the addressee and appears to choose the former, to name the mystery. In a moment of mythmaking that is a conjoining of an old prototype of rebirth and one of the naturalized omnipresence of the dead with the echo of a Christian phrase, and with a trope that stands for the bleakness of history as it was played out in the life of a man, he says, in a disconcertingly formal poem given the subject, given the tenor of the century of which the poem speaks:

          You refreshed forms and stanzas; these cropped fields are your stubble grating my
          cheeks with departure, grey irises, your corn-wisps of hair blowing away. Say you
          haven’t vanished, you’re still in Italy. Yeah. Very still. God. Still as the turning
          fields of Lombardy, still as the white wastes of that prison like pages erased by a
          regime. Though his landscape heals the exile you shared with Naso, poetry is still
          treason because it is truth. Your poplars spin in the sun.
                                                                                                   (“Italian Eclogues,” The Bounty)

Can I hear an amen?

                                                                                                   Envoi

          It is difficult
          to get the news from poems
          yet men die miserably everyday
          for lack
          of what is found there.
                                                            Williams

          The imagination is not only holy, it is precise
          it is not only fierce, it is practical
          men die everyday for lack of it
          it is vast & elegant
                                                 di Prima

          The descent beckons
               as the ascent beckoned
                ………………………
          The descent
                made up of despairs
               and without accomplishment
               realizes a new awakening:
               which is a reversal
               of despair.
                                                 Williams

      The gate to the underworld looms before us, regardless of the direction we turn. Lately, like very young children playing hide-and-seek, we have been closing our eyes, and then we smile: how easy it is to make that black maw disappear! Meanwhile, the carnage mounts around us as our acceptance of our own enslavement, our own inability (by virtue of our unwillingness) to act deepens and becomes increasingly mundane, our everyday reality. We live at the juncture where banality becomes a brutally subtle fascism.

      In the last few decades, we have had our eyes opened to a few unsettling truths: our destruction of the earth and our enslavement and/or exclusion of the other, and the degree to which the values that allow such behavior have been codified in all our systems, in the language itself. Aside from enclaves of righteous anger and a paradoxical, willed blindness to certain current exempla of precisely what we have had our eyes opened to, we have so far been unable to imagine other ways of proceeding and, consequently, expended much energy disarming those systems, including the language. We have reached an impasse between what we now know and what we can and must do. It is time to descend, so that we can be reborn, time to incorporate re-construction into a cycle that has become a feedback loop of almost nothing but de-construction.

      This essay has made large demands, and large claims, as regards poetry’s role in the journey upward toward the light which must first be a journey downward into the dark. It is, admittedly, a strange presumption, now, when poetry’s readership and its vitality are at an all time low. However, the convergent presumption is that our sometimes seemingly imminent loss of this primary way of saying, of speaking our being, of mapping the terrain, is symptomatic of the atrophication of deeper human faculties and potentials. As Pound said in The Guide to Kulchur, “…the one thing you should never do is to suppose that when something is wrong with the arts, it is wrong with the arts ONLY.” The convergent presumption is that our pandemic, and mostly unspoken, grief for the impending loss of a more complex sense of our being, in combination with poetry’s inherent trace of what it has always been for the race, the embodiment and enactment of that complexity (which is to suggest that the project of revivification is in part one of reclamation), will yield a more profound poetry which in turn will yield a more profound sense of our humanity.

      Healing rituals are a matter of life and death, of course, and the one proffered tentatively here, in all its relative simplicity given the size of the task, is for a culture. However, as no one’s health is static, so too the culture’s; and the cycle of death and rebirth, of de- and re-construction, must remain precisely that, a cycle. The human story is dynamic, and our poetry, our “tale of the tribe” (Pound), must be just as complex and vibrant and open to our evolving sense of ourselves in the universe.

                                                 THE TALE OF THE POSTMODERN TRIBE: NOTES TOWARD CONTEMPORARY VERSE EPIC

                                                                                                    Prelude

          It is the parable of a charred future
          that shimmers just beyond us
          against the empty field of invisible distance,
          the dialectical fulcrum
          between renaissance and ruin.
          From here all signs point to this dead end,
          end of the street, the century,
          of obscene time and its breath of putrid history…
          or else toward what?

          In one hand the parable teller
          holds horror and sacerdotal being,
          balanced, holds outcry
          and praise copulating wildly.
          In his other hand is stasis,
          death: a blind and contorted
          pup who would be admonition
          if it were not already too late.

          The singer himself is lame:
          the hand that holds the blind dog
          shriveled, his voice small
          and incidental as rubble,
          a broken tool, a bent weapon.
          He is drunk with fear.
          It sleeps, nameless, in his liver.

          He shifts from one foot
          to the other on the smoldering plain
          that holds the smoky stench
          of death itself like a rising demiurge,
          but also knowledge, ten-thousand gods,
          dancing, song…and the bodies
          that have melted to rings of bone,
          puddles of coagulated gore: testimony
          to a terror that is species-specific.

          The parable teller shakes like St. Vitus
          and whimpers until the plain echoes.
          Then there is a shriek, a roar
          that aspires to be living wind,
          aspires to sweep the field clean.
          The parable teller fails. He
          must settle for his own brutal song,
          for the field only slightly,
          but irrevocably, changed.
                                                                      Michael McIrvin, Dog

      This is where the contemporary verse epic begins: on the field of human action that is history, which is the accumulation of all human time, including the present moment where the individual is spun up out of this morass of forces, where he/she lives and evolves moment to moment, where he/she is the embodiment of history as it is made. This is where the contemporary verse epic begins, as self conscious allegory: the context declared hypermeaningful, the speaker in the text, in all his/her limited individuality, declared emblematic of the human condition in his/her time, the sign system tagged as multivalently significant and therefore difficult, therefore requiring the active participation of the reader as all shifts before his/her eyes, as the problem of the text, how to make an epic, how to speak at all in this aphasic age born of too much sound and too many images passively received, is worked out as the text proceeds. This is where the contemporary epic begins, with notification that what follows is ultimately a failure in its attempt to give the whole story, in its attempt to change the course of history by positing a new direction, in its attempt to hold off decay.

      The poem is nevertheless necessary if the speaker, who is also the reader, is to achieve any understanding of his/her place in time, their being-in-time. This has always been the poet’s job, regardless of declarations of either poetry’s death or its replacement in this role in modernity by the novel. The authors of Gilgamesh and Beowolf, Homer in the Iliad and Odyssey, Dante and Milton, Pound and Williams and Olson, to name but the most prominent, gave their respective peoples a dynamic view of themselves, an enactment of the values operative within their respective cultures as the poet perceived them, and, most obvious in the twentieth century version of the epic, a prescriptive analysis of the way-things-are. These poets gave the race much to think about and to discuss, to debate and to live by; and they gave each successive generation of poets a model to follow and to defy, to alter as the times demanded.

      As of this writing, poets of the present have recused themselves of this responsibility and left the void to be filled by a metanarrative that, although diffused across the culture and through many texts, although the slimmest shade of those former attempts by virtue of what little it offers the people in the way of a dynamized assertion of their being-in-time, is the conveyor of values that, in the absence of an active relationship to the sign system, keep the masses enthralled to the way-things-are. Poets of the present have left the masses at the mercy of the current metanarrative by failing to offer them an epic to stand in contradistinction to the stasis and death the anti-epic conveys, by failing to offer an alternative vision of what the race can be as their more immediate predecessors did, however deficient their attempts inevitably were, however different from those attempts the contemporary verse epic must be.

                                                                                                    The Anti-Epic

          If the new language of images were used differently,
          it would, through its use, confer a new kind of power.
          Within it we could begin to define our experience more
          precisely…. Not only personal experience, but also
          the essential historical experience of our relation to
          the past: that is to say the experience of seeking to give
          meaning to our lives, of trying to understand the history
          of which we can become the active agents.
                                                                                                    John Berger, Ways of Seeing

          Most of what passes for art, particularly narrative art,
          advertises mainstream values and culture. An ad for
          itself. Product endorsing product, creating a seamless
          web of resemblance and reinforcement. This art tells
          us that other peoples’ lives aren’t actually invisible, not
          intrinsically unknowable. We learn that anybody’s story
          can be reduced to familiar terms, our terms, the terms
          our way of living prioritizes. Black people are just white
          people in darker skins, aren’t they? In such art, disguise,
          illusion, technique, trickery, are displayed as delaying
          tactics, mystification that deadens our awareness of
          mystery.
                                                                                John Edgar Wideman

      Late in the 20th century, we all fell down. We fell into a psychic darkness wherein our self definition dissolved into a calculated hodgepodge of images controlled by others. The only light in this night is blue and flickering, a screen across which passes an endless series of images the vast majority of the populace perceives as transparent, each “a sign that simply means what it says and says what it means” (Mark Crispin Miller), but which have invaded our consciousness, become annealed there, helping to turn the active self pangenerally innocuous by planting messages to short circuit our actual experiences, to overwhelm our primal sense of what is humanly meaningful.

      This is the metanarrative of our time. Not an actualized epic or myth, those previous, frequently officialized, versions of our encoded cultural self image, but the seemingly inchoate, but nonetheless intentional and no less sanctioned, subtext that perpetuates our most beloved of illusions: America as the paradigm of freedom, as the land of opportunity, as meritocracy, land of the pangeneral desire for the common good of the species, land destined, by the intervention of God or via Darwinian principles of deserved domination, to be the only culture on the planet, land of the iconoclastic individual who stands up heroically for his/her hard won valuesthe biggest lie of all. This is the metanarrative that, nevertheless, undercuts those same illusions even as it professes them in barely veiled messages so diaphanous to the average watcher as to be invisible. However, in spite of their simplistic overtext, in the absence of critical analysis the constant encoded messages are subtle unto being invidiously subliminal. They say: conform, buy-to-be, want this and this and this, ad infinitum, and you will be ultimately human, the paradigmatic American, the pinnacle of evolution whose very desires, however manufactured, are sacrosanct and thus enough, sufficient reason for being.

      Consequently, the metasign system that is the media (movies, television, the internet, advertisements), operating as a kind of postmodern black magic, both illustrates and helps to perpetuate a status quo within which the average citizen understands his/her citizenship only in terms of consumption, and wherein, almost paradoxically given the relative simplicity of the signs and the obvious intention to modify the observers’ behavior, they do not recognize the forces at work shorting out their very sense of themselves as beings-in-time—which makes the current metanarrative both the epic’s surrogate and its antithesis, an anti-epic. Americans have become,

          automatons [w]ho because they
          neither know the sources or the sills of their
          disappointments walk outside their bodies aimlessly
               for the most part
          locked and forgot in their desiresunroused.
                                                                                                   (Williams, Paterson)

      As Mark Crispin Miller, critic of American popular culture, points out in what he calls an “intensive explication” of a 1980’s vintage television commercial for deodorant soap, the truth of the text is certainly there to be deciphered. He agrees with John Berger’s assertion in the above epigraph that “a new kind of power” is available in such deep textual analyses as both men perform, and can assert, regarding the sad state of relations between the sexes, a man’s symbolic emasculation in the workplace within the traditional paradigm of the sexual division of labor and his wife’s unwitting complicity as her anger at patriarchy is played out in the commercial’s sign system for the purposes of selling soap via an ersatz feminism:

          Of course, the ad not only illuminates this mess but helps perpetuate it, by obliquely
          gratifying the guilts, terrors, and resentments that underlie it and arise from it. The
          strategy is not meant to be noticed, but works through apparent comedy, which must
          therefore be studied carefully, not passively received. Thus, thirty seconds of ingenious
          advertising, which we can barely stand to watch, tells us something more than we might
          have wanted to know about the souls of men and women under corporate capitalism.

However, Miller and Berger’s work is steeped in premises that derive from Foucault and Derrida’s intense and accurate, but very dense, observations and assertions about language and power. The message is therefore, at least at present, only “readable” by an intellectual elite, and only available to the masses in as much as the elite are able to put the message into terms the masses understand; and, more importantly, the message is only available at a conscious level to the populace to the degree the elite are able to convince them of the veracity and palpability of the reading, to convince them that there is indeed a message beneath the veil. Rather than being the “active agents” of history, the majority of the population remains precisely passive before the subtext, its dark art entering the watcher over the “sills” he/she only barely recognizes as doorways to consciousness: the jingle, that will arise later unbidden, enters through the ear, and the subtly-to-overtly erotic image through the eye. The insidious rhetoric of a diminished and acceptable self is hatched out of this mix, lodging itself in the mind where it perpetuates the status quo as a set of prescribed-values-internalized, as a constraining and ersatz “truth.” At present, contrary to Miller and Berger’s hope for them, the masses are not actors in history, but its passive recipients and therefore its pawns. Male viewers of Miller’s soap commercial example, if his reading of the ad’s constellation of signs is accurate, will tacitly accept their position as docile/servile/men-diminished-to-pederastic-sexual-objects to be symbolically ravished by the powers to which they are beholden for their livelihood; and female viewers, via a “sad fantasy of control,” will accept their role in both men’s diminishment, which makes men good employees, and as the begrudging bolsterers of the embattled male ego. Their positive reinforcement is begrudged because of their intuitive recognition, and consequent disdain for, the American male’s weakness in this manipulative system, but that recognition is never conscious and therefore they continue to enable men to go on, to remain functioning workers within the capitalist system.

      However, the thin surface of humor and harmony and goodwill in the images media produces serve a more complex purpose than as inculcation and recapitulation of the way-things-are. These loaded images also level all experience to a drone of familiarity, even to cliché and stereotype as the marketing moment warrants. Miller offers the situation comedy, “The Cosby Show,” now in syndication (which means its pathetic portrayal of America runs on, like a ghost, after the actual series was euthenized) as an example of the paradigm of consumption as a way of life, “the show’s mise-en-scene…deliberately contrived to glow, like a fixed smile.” He also suggests, however, that the show’s largely white audience is reassured, via the show’s “lunatic fantasies of containment,” that racial violence will not erupt in America in spite of the well documented poverty of the African-American population, in spite of the premature death of black men whose mortality rates are second only to American Indian males, and their over representation in the prison systemin spite of the L.A. riots of two decades which would suggest to anyone not sleeping through their tenure on earth that African-American rage is real. The family of protagonists in this sitcom are the model of American success: ambitious, but not in an untoward fashion that would betray black desperation under white rule; self assured as if royalty among the gewgaws of the American market, which shine like the promised land but without the need of being polished or vacuumed, or of being grossly purchased for that matter since the context must indeed seem Edenic, the miraculous reward for being good. Who could fear black faces so blessed with carefree beauty and the happiness we all must certainly aspire to: the deliriously proud owners of it all?

      In short, the metanarrative of postmodern America is, on its glossy surface, less exclusionary than before. In truth it incorporates all experience in the service of the capitalist ethic while simultaneously making all experience the same, however outside the parameters of the mediated depiction those actual experiences might fall: if the dream of affluence that the media projects is not your reality, it is a fault of conformity that one must address. The new anti-epic, however disseminated the signs over the airwaves, is an invocation of the mainstream capitalist values that say all other values are wrong, that say subscribing to any but those values proffered is a failure to be quintessentially American, a failure to participate in the good of us all, is to not be. The values the new anti-epic professes take root in the uncritical watcher who then, in turn, becomes an agent of conformity: ridiculing the man who drives an old car, the woman who is not thin and wears last year’s fashions, the child who cannot afford Nikes, blacks and Hispanics and American Indians and those of Asian descent for not being more white, more “American.”

      As John Edgar Wideman asserts in the above epigraph, artists, especially narrative artists, are complicitous in this sad perpetration of simplistic but omnivorous capitalistic values on an uncritical audience. In 1920 the novel was touted by George Lukacs, in a critical study entitled The Theory of the Novel: A Historico-Philosophical Essay on the Forms of Great Epic Literature, as a fundamental form of the epic in modernity. He justifies this assertion by saying,

          The epic and the novel, these two major forms of great epic literature differ from one
          another not by their author’s fundamental intentions but by the given historico
          -philisophical realities with which the authors were confronted. The novel is the epic of an
          age in which the extensive totality of life is no longer directly given, in which the
          immanence of meaning in life has become the problem, yet which still thinks in terms of totality.

Although the assertion still has merit as regards some rare narrative art (Delillo’s Underworld comes to mind, its vast and allegorical portrayal of America), the majority of novels are produced only with the market in mind and thus do not aspire to be the truth of a people, however limited the end result of that effort must inevitably be. In part, the values promulgated by media have been internalized by writers, an ominous sign indeed given their role in telling the tale of the tribe as Lukacs defines it. But more than that the lure of big advances and royalties, in combination with the new publishing environment where 15% return on investment is not seen as an unrealistic expectation (whereas 2% was acceptable not that long ago), yields an art that now purveys the same domestic capitalistic values of conformity that the other forms of media push. Which is to suggest that even if the true epic novel is being written, by-and-large it cannot be published because it would not fulfill marketing expectations by appealing to the media-created values of the macro-audience.

      As Wideman says, the so-called art that currently masquerades as fiction is “product endorsing product,” the story pushing the values that allow the story to exist as product in the first place, albeit in a more complexly masked form than television or movies. A publishing company’s marketing analysis yields middle class backdrops for an inane exploration of relationships (like those on television) as salable. It yields exotic backdrops, often ethnic and peddled as an example of our much touted cultural predilection for diversity in the marketplace, for a voyeuristic reading. It yields catch phrases that will appeal to a niche audience in jacket blurbs that are simplistic unto being cliched misrepresentations of valid stances toward the world, stances the corporation assumes most potential readers only shallowly associate themselves with, committing themselves to the same degree they do to any other “product” and its purported inflection of who they are, thereby reducing what readers claim to believe in to identification as members of a target audience: a feminist portrayal of abuse that will enrage you and keep you on the edge of your seat, a picture of disappearing wilderness that will make you cry, a portrait of the traditional American family that is at once poignant and heartrending, a study of the black experience that reveals the humanity and love at the core of one man/woman’s desperate search for self amid the ruins of the inner city. All experience is fetishized, commodified, turned into a potential made-for-TV movie, and only rarely offered up as the tale of a people, as the historical milieu as it impinges upon the individual, as it is actually lived, let alone as it exceeds the experience of a singular man or woman to become the allegory of an age and place.

      The net result of this inchoate, veiled anti-epic, at the core of which are the values of the marketplace, its constellation of signs a means to co-optation and control, is the infantilization of the masses. In general, like children, and not uncoincidentally like the characters on television and in the movies, Americans no longer question the veracity of authoritative assertion let alone the values that are enacted in the metatext that is the media. If the television says it, whether the message comes from the mouth of a politician or a pitch person or the character in a television show, it must be so by virtue of its very presence, the market being its own justification. In America, as Charles Bernstein says, fashion and the market are “ascendant as the arbiters of value,” the only arbiters.

      Miller relates the story of an unnamed woman, a fan of “The Cosby Show,” who confided to her psychiatrist that when her husband did not react to a situation in their household as she thought the character Bill Cosby plays would to the same situation (and she, tellingly, confabulated the character with the actor) she grew angry with him. The provisional “hero” of the story portrayed for her the values that all men should possess, and, as traditional epic did for earlier civilizations, defined the perameters for possible versions of self and behavior which she had internalized. If Odysseus was proof for the ancient Greeks that cunning and resourcefulness are as important as strength and courage as masculine qualities (the latter attributes, which he had relied on solely in the Iliad, having become insufficient in the Odyssey); if Dante’s audience is reminded that justice in this life and the next must be attained through means which God has placed at man’s disposal (i.e. all decisions are at root moral as defined by Christianity); and if Milton’s Paradise Lost offers up man’s pilgrimage through history as every bit as arduous as Satan’s through Chaos, albeit more noble by virtue of its end goal, to remind 18th century Englishmen/women of the rigors of the Christian path and the dangers of hubris; Bill Cosby, as Miller tells us, is proof to contemporary Americans that conformity is to be the goal of all good citizens, that a man’s job within the household is to help his family achieve that goal through a subtly fascistic manipulation.

      This example may be extreme in as much as the woman could identify the “hero” whose actions she expected to see enacted in the world, but in the absence of a critical relation to the sign system, the new anti-epic that is the pangeneral product of the marketplace via the media, whether electronic or bound and replete with glossy photos of the author, is controlling and constraining and exclusionary in the extreme, not to mention false in its portrayal of the human condition. And the present metanarrative (if the anthropomorphic move can be forgiven) does not even pretend to seek to explore our relationship to history, to help us make meaning of our place in the here and now, as is the purview of a true epic. In fact, the metanarrative seeks to diminish the very desire to do so since the slightest notion of a hunger for meaning, even at a rudimentary level, could be counterproductive to the capitalist enterprise: what do large breasts and slender feminine hips have to do with a particular brand of beer, or freedom with any brand automobile, those black holes to swallow one’s hard-earned money, or the brand of one’s clothes with how frequently the opposite sex makes provocative overtures, etc.? Although those who have a vested interest in the present situation probably do not equate the asking of such simple cause and effect questions as tantamount to revolt, but only as a failure to properly encode the message.

      Obviously, at the end of the twentieth century poets fell down along with everyone else, and they fell all but silent as well, abdicating their traditional role as tellers-of-the-truth as we can understand it at any moment in time, as the bearers of epic into the world, in favor of a domestic ennui and a subjective dissolve before our very eyes. In their well-founded desire not to participate in our incarceration by metanarrative, not to be responsible for holding readers to specific values as epic was traditionally used in its most limited and limiting role, and their desire not to either exclude or control the other via an officialized version of our cultural metaself, the poets’ collective vision narrowed to the tiny “I,” to the domestic and solipsistic, to nil. Thus John Ashbery emphasizes art as artifice in his poetry, but in its tiniest representational sense, recording the minutiae of the world as it moves through the mind unimpeded by any attempt to achieve significance:

          To be able to write the history of our time, starting with today, It would be necessary to
          model all these unimportant details
          So as to be able to include them; otherwise the narrative
          Would have that flat, sandpapered look the sky gets
          Out in the middle west toward the end of summer…
                                                                             “Houseboat Days”

      Only on the surface (which is all there is in the poem, a variety of surfaces) is this an assertion for a totality of representation. The details of the present poetry are merely small in the absence of any desire to speak for anyone beyond this tiniest version of consciousness. There are no ideas proffered, except perhaps small ones as in Ashbery’s poem, no meaning assumed to arise from the constellation of signs, as if there were no force in the universe: no night or day, no cold or heat, let alone any actual allegorical fluctuation of the self under the forces of time and power and our own presence in the world, which is presumed and presented as so tenuous as to be illusion any way.

      The poets of the present have largely reneged on their unspoken, traditional responsibility to tell the truth of-and-for the people, to tell the tale of the tribe. For fear of failure and/or complicity, they chose not to write an epic at all, and that genre has become supposedly obsolete, something the moderns loudly attempted but failed to achieve, or so says critical consensus. I will not proclaim a possible centrality for poetry in America that would rival mass media; but in the absence of a conscious attempt at verse epic, the poem containing history as Pound famously defined it, which is to say a poem that not only incorporates the past but is the record of how it impinges upon the living moment, the now, there is no alternative to juxtapose to that invidious metanarrative of our market driven present. Ironically, lacking the critical skills necessary to discern the message, the populace has fallen under the power of precisely what poets feared participating in if they attempted an epic: an overarching assertion of values that manipulates, only narrowly defines, and therefore controls those same masses.

      Experience, it is presently assumed in America, is not the stuff of history, but only momentary gratification or its lack, both as defined by the messages that wash over us endlessly, even entering our dreams where they take on the force of myth. History, if it exists at all, has become something “back there,” something reenacted on PBS or that serves as backdrop for a Danielle Steele novel, as a minimal context for entertainment. And we, the embodiment of history as it is lived, as the forces of history impinge upon and inflect our being, are perceived as all the same, mere markers for nothing but an agglomeration of media generated images, variations on a standard that we either achieve or fall short of and therefore must strive harder to reach. The real work of the epic, the attempt to understand our humanity relative to this place and this time and to tell the truth however provisional and imperfect, is going largely undone. Poets will not save the culture from such a banal ending as seems its destiny by again seeking to tell the tale of the tribe, but in their abdication of that responsibility and in their failure to provide a viable contrarian tale as counterpoint, they are complicitous in the diminishment of the masses to their present sad state.

                                                                                                   Interlude

          The birds of meaning have flown
          forever south, and myth of eternal return
          died, Dog says from the cab’s back seat
          to the driver who pretends he has no ears.
          All that remain are wing-clipped chickens,
          domestic turkeys on low limbs…
          all roosters become rooted, as flight
          is tamed out of them, as wings tighten
          and shorten with each generation
          until even the notion of sky fades
          and the immediate dirt in shade
          of their own bulk is all they know to say.
          Shut up, says the driver,
          and Dog falls asleep as the taxi careens
          like a split atom through traffic. In a dream
          Dog peers south waiting for the return
          of meaning, for soarers with bright wings
          pounding over the edge of Earthhonking,
          screeching, demanding, pleading… .
          But the sky remains a blank page,
          beautiful blue, vacant of any sign.
          In his dream Dog knows what he has always known
          wheel of the word is broken
          and the singers will never again land
          on this land….
                                                                      “Dog and the Myth of Eternal Return”

      The despair that has lead contemporary poets to silence in the form of utterly constrained poetry, in the form of the tiny “I” which does not achieve the level of a being-in-time, is understandable if unforgivable. That despair, however, must be included as part of the tale: our abiding sadness that language is being dismantled as the boat of meaning, but more than this that meaning itself is suspect in our age and that language has been used against us, co-opted, made into subliminal messages that attenuate our being. The protagonist of the lyric sequence I am offering in this interlude, and elsewhere in the essay, as a tentative example of the next permutation of the epic, is on a quintessential hero’s journey. But, as in Eliot’s Wasteland, his search is more apparently psychological and at least borders on mythology more than the protagonists’/speakers’ “journeys” in the modernist epics of Pound or Williams. His search is for meaning; but, given his place in history, it is also a search for the validation of meaning as possible, as more than a fool’s errand.

      He is also looking for a way to speak his place in time, for a way to understand and to communicate his existential longing, his postmodern loneliness that borders on madness, which is offered as a trope for the condition of the culture at large. He is searching for a way to sing the world that will make sense of the world. In the poem “Dog and the Burning World,” he is visited by an apparition, his American Indian grandmother, who gives him the message all contemporary poets need to receive, that if nothing else he must sing the disintegration of civilization. However, Dog cannot fathom a voice to equal the horror of that picture, of the present:

          What can I sing, Grandmother,
          in this singularly sick moment?
          Of the kiss that devours?
          Bayonets and rockets? Fear
          and dullness in human eyes
          as men and women stumble
          like prisoners through their tiny
          spot of time? Of their necrophilious
          love of the mechanical?
          Of their terminal desire
          to become the machine?
          How can I erect towers of air
          on the wind to say: children
          are tortured here in the name
          of belief, raped before their
          mothers’ eyes, forced to watch
          the murder of their fathers,
          then slaughtered too, so that
          their last vision of Earth is hell
          and the demons who rule,
          of diminished simians self-
          assured of their place in heaven
          at the right or left hand
          or in the lap of a God with blood
          in his teeth….
          No, I must look away,
          Grandmother, or at least
          look with eyes of glass
          like the rest
          that only reflect
          the world back
          at its nightmaring self.

He cannot imagine the language to contain this terrible vision (in this case, taken from news reports of the war in Bosnia, which was raging when I wrote the poem), but nevertheless he speaks it, nevertheless (echoing Oedipus) he “sing[s] the savagery of God” as it is made manifest in human action, as history. The world has not changed because he/I have offered this bleak list or because he/I have stated the poet’s/reader’s conundrum: how to speak the unspeakable, and why speak if to say the world in all its terror is not to change it? Except, perhaps, a reader cringed, maybe looked at the dark side of the race squarely and wept, and cursed, and swore to make the world better in any way he/she is able.

          The narrative is…to be regarded not as an end in itself
          but as a vehicle of the tribal encyclopedia which is…
          dispersed into a thousand narrative contexts.
                                                                             Eric Havelock

          And although such a claim runs counter to most of our
          present assumptions, the effort to formulate a convincing
          “tale of the tribe” still seems an undertaking of enormous
          value, one not only central to the continuing authority of
          verse, but to the very possibility of making sense of the
          conditions of our common history.
                                                                             Michael Bernstein

          That is to say poetry begins in the domain of the epic.
                                                                             Edouard Glissant

In a recent interview, the poet Clayton Eshleman offers this advice:

          …in the spirit of Charles Olson’s idea of the “saturation job”…, I would propose that the
          novice create a big project for himself that will not only test his resolve but possibly be a
          service to the poetry community at large.
                                                                                                   Rain Taxi

Eshleman’s own contributions have extended from his translations of Vallejo’s European poetry in his youth to explorations of what he calls “Upper Paleolithic imagination,” using ancient cave paintings like those at Lascaux as the source of his inspiration. Although his continuing contributions to poetry and its community are unquestionable in terms of opening new ground and offering outlets for poems of vision and psychological depth in his editorship of literary magazines, Caterpillar in the 1960’s and Sulfur until recently, limiting the responsibility of the poet to the genre seems short sighted. Olson said of William Carlos Williams’ work, it reveals that “the ego is responsible for more than itself,” which is an assertion at minimum in line with Eshleman’s, but also true of Eshleman’s work as poet and translator on a much larger scale in as much as the Paleolithic imagination encompasses the whole of human kind and human time. As Eliot Weinberger has insightfully said of Eshleman’s poetic practice: “It is an immersion in the [lower] body; not the body of the individual, the ‘bourgeois ego,’ but the body of all: the ‘brimming over abundance’ of decay, fertility, birth, growth, death…” (quoted in Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two). In spite of the fact that he tends to write what would generally be classified as personal lyric, Eshleman strives to not only locate himself as a poet within the “poetry community at large” but also within the human communitywhich is perhaps the same move.

        Ezra Pound’s assertion of responsibility is much to the point: “it is the business of the artist to make humanity aware of itself,” which is to suggest that the poet brings to the level of consciousness, makes manifest in the form of a poem, what the race would otherwise not know about itself. However, and only seemingly paradoxically, for Pound the artist’s intent is irrelevant:

          It does not matter whether the author desires the good of the race or acts merely from
          personal vanity…. In proportion as his work is exact, i.e., true to human consciousness and to
          the nature of man,…so it is durable and so it is “useful”; I mean it maintains the precision and
          clarity of thought…in non-literary existence, in general individual and communal life.
                                                                                                   (Literary Essays)

In other words, responsibility to one’s art is, of necessity, responsibility to one’s community and to one’s fellow human beings, clarity and the lack of preciousness or posturing leading inevitably to truthful assertion. The increased complexity in postmodernity of this responsibility is in some sense the gist of the remainder of this section of the essay, but for the moment the assertion stands as a simple equation: the attempt to achieve poetry that is humanly authentic is an act of responsibility toward both poetry and the world, which is to say that the poet who writes beyond his/her solipsistic cocoon is of use to his/her culture.

      Whatever the final outcome, or more accurately our postmodern response to the final outcome a posteriori, for Pound the ultimate act of responsibility the poet could perform for the race was to write a verse epic a la his Cantos: possibly a life long work in line with what Eshleman prescribes but, contrary to Pound’s previously quoted assertion as regards intention, precisely intended to be a dynamic record of the poet’s historical milieu, and as honest an appraisal in language as language itself allows. As Michael Bernstein notes, “For Pound, there is no radical separation between his text and the world, between the language of poetry and society’s public discourse, except when one or the other suffers a ‘falsification’ and becomes diseased” (The Tale of the Tribe). Pound’s own misguided affiliations with fascism may be proof of the decay of both his poetry and its covalent discourse, and it could be argued that at present both poetry and the greater discourse are deathly ill, but perhaps the greatest lesson the moderns bequeathed us was precisely the poet’s responsibility, as the premiere users of the language, to both. In the eloquent words of the contemporary poet C.K. Williams,

          We are in history, like it or not. The question is how conscious we will be of how history
          is affecting us, and how we are possibly to affect it… . The grounds of our despair are
          compelling, our sense of impotence and hopelessness insidious and debilitating. But what
          is asked of us then is a greater consciousness of our plight, for human history is, finally,
          consciousness; it is the ground for our experience and our despair, but it is also the
          recognition of our triumphs over that despair. What our poetry cannot allow itself is a
          perfunctory acceptance of experience as it is received, however elegantly that experience
          can be expressed, for this is to slight both history and ourselves, the selves we are and the
          selves we might become, both as individuals and as nations, peoples and humanity.

      A heightened definition of history as the consciousness that is forged of events, that apprehends and depicts events and thereby changes history even as consciousness itself is changed, is also part of our bequest from the moderns. Present generic definitions still tend to separate the lyric from the narrative epic, however, along precisely these lines, the personal and the public, to poetry’s great loss. For example, Michael Bernstein offers Stephane Mallarme’s idea of the “Grand Oeuvre,” or Great Work, as an “illuminating antithesis to the ambitions of epic verse.” He says that,

          rather than expressing the fundamental struggles and beliefs of a society, the “Great Work”
          would absorb the entire, anarchic raw material of human life into its own depth,
          transforming it into a sacred text, self sufficient and autonomous. The words of such a
          poem would themselves contain (or rather “be”) the noumenal meaning absent from the
          concrete realm of human activity, and the relationship between text and values would be
          not one of embodiment but rather of absolute identity.

Bernstein’s assertion is that at one poetical pole is the tale of the tribe, the narrative of its audience’s cultural, historical or mythic heritage, the work that attempts to offer up models for behavior in the form of voices that enact the people’s shared values, while at the other pole is the subjective assertion of the poet’s life as lived. On the surface this remains a useful distinction in as much as the idea of absolute responsibility to the culture on the part of the poet is inherent in the former but may or may not be present in the latter, perhaps according to Pound’s criteria stated above but certainly relative to any assertion of intent. However, while as types the narrative epic hardly exists in postmodernity and the personal lyric is so rampant as to be epidemic, or more accurately the lyric-as-function-of-the-bourgeois-ego is epidemic, the distinction between history and personal experience, at least that beyond the merely solipsistic, is not necessarily an easy argument to make. It is especially difficult to separate the life as lived from purely objective narrative in the wake of poststructural assertions about language and our subjective relationship to it, about authorial certainty or the malleability of history based upon who gets to tell it. Absolute identity, to use Mallarme’s term, is not even a possibility within the parlance of poststructuralism, of course; but, that quibble aside for the moment, the identity of the speaker in the poem is an inflection of that speaker’s time and place: the shared assumptions of speaker and audience including what both know about the human project at large. Which is of course only to speak the obvious, that no text is “self sufficient and autonomous,” but also that Homer’s famous epic and Pound’s famous epic are two totally different animals: the former, at least as we currently simplify it in our pangeneral imagination, a portrait of the known world and the latter of the world as one man knew it and attempted to convey it to the people.

      The proposed postmodern epic will be yet another animal, one in which subjective identity is a paramount question, in fact, given this premise: that subjective being both inflects the story told and is inflected by it. But the question of identity will also be central given our present problematic and diminished notions of what subjective being is. Consequently, the purposes of the lyric and the narrative epic as traditionally defined must merge in the next permutation. The life as lived is emblematic of the historical moment, is its encapsulation. Thus Dog is an emblem for our mongrel American selves (Sioux, Cree, Navajo and white European) and a product of violenceengendered in an act of rape to represent our colonial and colonized selves, forged as a man by loss and the desire to overcome his/our atomization. In “Dog’s Apocrypha,” he says, “heedless of irony”:

          I have no words. Voice
          itself is a burden I carry
          in my throat as the tubes
          pass through, as I lie
          on the terrible white field
          of over-bleached hospital
          sheets, as skin of my chest
          tingles under impeccable
          catgut stitches that hold
          me together, body to soul.
          Where in this mournful
          mortal dream can I find
          language to equal resurrection?
          This pain—to breathe, roll
          over, to bark at a comesome
          nurse whose hands rouse
          me to desire even as it hurts
          to breathe—is precious
          beyond anything else of earth.

      Another important gift from the moderns is their realization of the limitations of the epic that coexist with its pretensions to speak for a people. Pound initially referred to the Cantos as the “tale of the tribe” in The Guide to Kulchur, a term for which he gives Kipling credit. Pound’s original plan was that his tale be inclusive, a totalized version of modernity in verse that, like Homer’s for his era, would be “a sort of encyclopedia of ethics, politics, history, and technology which the effective citizen was required to learn as the core of his educational equipment” (Havelock). However, he discovered relatively early in the process of the writing that any poem as cultural totality was impossible and thus settled for, famously, idiosyncratically chosen exempla.

      Williams made a like discovery regarding the difference between the Homeric and the modern epic in the process of writing Paterson. As Pound had earlier in the century, in Book Four Williams “awakens from the dream of the whole poem” (IV, iii: 200), which in his case, however, is also a recognition that there could never be closure to the epic given the ongoing and dynamic nature of history (which Pound perhaps also realizes in the final fragment to the Cantos, where he poignantly laments, “I have tried to write Paradise…”). But Williams larger realization is that it was impossible for a singular poet to tell the tale for the tribe, that the tribe must somehow “speak for itself,” which could never happen in any unified fashion, but must be dynamically polyvalent and polyvocal. Hence the myriad voices in Paterson in the form of dialogue, epistle, and recounted history, in the voices of the actors as well as the voice of the historian and the poet.

      The result of both poets’ realizations are important in discerning the possible shape of a new epic. Pound’s response to the impossibility of totality became increasingly rhetorical, not so much as in a method of overt argumentation (and there are, of course, notorious instances of this), but as regards his stridently inclusive and stridently exclusive choices in terms of historical data and ideas. In places he is, again famously, didactic unto propagandizing; but at its best the Cantos, regardless of what one thinks of the concept, is an implicit argument for an eclectically assembled high culture. His exempla become the premises, but also the models for, societal change, his attempt to hold off decadence and to transform it. Pound’s definition of an epic as a “poem containing history” thereby takes on multiple meanings, hinging on the multiple possibilities in the word “containment”: the text seeks, without hope, to hold this semi-totalized vision of the race and its time, but also to convey an argument for the poem’s shape as the potential form of history, to contain an alternative view, a potential version.

      Williams, however, chose to “reject historical positivism in handling documentary material and instead [to] existentially embrace the drama, rhetoric, and artifacts of history to fuel a finely textured vision of the present” (Doreski, The Modern Voice in American Poetry). Although a less than transcendent version of the concept than he would approve of, Mallarme’s vision of the Great Work as the project of absolute being here collides with the traditional version of the epic as the embodied Zeitgeist. This is not to suggest that the epic’s premiere goal is to display an ego as it is spun out by the forces and within the fabric of history, but that history (as in the past but also the present moment as lived experience) is indeed reciprocal. History as the living construct of individual human actions includes what is written in and out of the epic and by whom, and individual human actors are inflected by the time and place within which they act. As Jose Ortega y Gasset famously said, “tell me the landscape in which you live, and I will tell you who you are.” Which is to say, a man/woman is the product, of his/her “terrain,” of history. But the further implication for the next permutation is that as its idiosyncratic compiler he/she is also the maker/shaper of history. Thus the epic becomes an active agent in the culture, both as process, as it acts upon the poet, and as dynamic artifact acting upon/within the world.

      One result for a new vision of the epic in both Pound and William’s realizations is that the tale of the tribe must be protean and provisional. Pound, whose realization as regards the individual’s relationship to history is, in hind sight, only partial, ultimately deemed his argument a failure of his own will-to-order, the failure to make it cohere, and in that single assertion of failure perhaps constrained his poetical progeny, who might otherwise attempt an epic, unto silence. But Williams chose to enact the historicity of human consciousness itself. Hence Paterson is a multitude of voices, sometimes unto cacophony, the flow of history as it moves by the poet observer and the reader one moment at a time. And the protagonist is ultimately protean as well, a fluid identity in response to the changing conditions of his being, which is to say he is a historical being and, consequently, inevitably, “[in] Paterson no ideal form, whether of individual human relations or of communal ethics, is allowed to stand unchallenged by time and, whenever the poem seems to arrive at a fixed position, that certitude is dissolved in the continuing flux of lived experience” (Bernstein).

      For our delineation of the perameters of the next epic, the situation becomes more complex still. The poet’s responsibility becomes not merely a function of being true to one’s art, “to human consciousness and the nature of man,” although the assertion still holds as far as it goes, but a function of giving voice to the voiceless, the traditionally dispossessed of history, because “the true subject matter is articulated in the labor of an entire people.” The poet’s responsibility is also a function Charles Olson deemed “methodological,” its implications “as much moral as technical, and as much political…as aesthetic”(Bernstein). In other words, all choices as regards presentation, the what and the how and the who, have ethical implications for which the poet must accept accountability. The paradox for the moderns was of course that an epic can only be the response of a particular man/woman writing from his/her own limited experience, but which nevertheless gives voice to historical forces that exceed any single consciousness, which of necessity means that the verse epic will be a limited document aspiring nonetheless to totality.

      What was paradoxical for the moderns, however, has become a seemingly unassailable enigma for contemporary poets. It is presently accepted as a given that any report of history, of any single moment in history, is inflected by the person giving it. Strangely, however, any report becomes not merely partial in the hands of too many poets of the present, but pathetically so: unabashedly incomplete unto being false. In concert with their poststructurally engendered distrust of language generally as a vehicle of truth and the culture’s currently diminished notion of subjective being, many postmodern poets have chosen not to assert anything beyond their own solipsistic cocoon, chosen not to report on the world-at-large, not to make an epic. And thus they have chosen instead to offer so attenuated a version of our complex situation that their meager attempts at least border on being lies. Given their constricted interpretation of these premises, the picture they offer of their small world is incomplete too, of course; but who will know, and, more pointedly, who will care? The result is an abdication of responsibility, and silence where there should be a vivacious and dynamic, multivalent and polyvocal, tale of the tribe. The result is an impasse that disallows us an opportunity to better understand our common historical condition. The result is the current metanarrative operative in America that not only fails to broach such large questions but that disavows the necessity in favor of a benign acceptance of the shallow ethos of consumption, along with whatever invidious circumstances are necessary to allow that ethos to exist.

      Given the dynamized vision of history and the truth that the new epic must contain, and although there are constituents that must be excluded and some modified and some added to the poem as simple model, of the epics under discussion Williams’ Paterson comes closest to a kind of archemodel for our contemporary version in the way that the poet works out the paradox in the poem’s symbology. The text’s premises change before the reader’s eyes, and the speaker changes as well: history moves, the text moves, history, the text… . The subjective identity of the speaker moves toward an ever receding destination, Mallarme’s absolute identity (one that would encompass all that the poet is or will be), as the text moves toward an equally impossible ideal: the totalized vision of the race in an absolute present. All certainty dissolves as it arises. It melts into the great morass of the text as the falls represents the morass of all sound, all utterance, as it represents history itself which is omnivorous and swallows not only any human action but any presentation and any interpretation of human action. History refuses to be contained for but the moment it takes to utter it: “…and the imagination soars, as a voice/ beckons, a thunderous voice, endless/ that has ineluctably called [us]/that unmoving roar!” Williams’ poem is, ultimately, the enactment of history as it is lived and imagined by a single poet, a task he was drawn to, and believed his successors would be drawn to as well. The poem is not a reiteration or recapitulation, but history’s activated energy let loose in the text a la Olson’s reenacted “kinetics” of psychic experience, a dynamic allegory set loose upon the reader who must come to terms with the complexly “textured vision of the present” the poem offers.

      Williams’ Paterson is testimony to the fact that the indeterminacy and problematization of truth, and the dynamization of history and individual experience, are not the demise of either history as it is manifested as panhuman force or individual lived experience. Thus the responsibility to speak remains, daunting as that role has become. There are multiple vectors, economic and political and as regards class to name but a few, that influence what the poet will say and how he/she will say it, but it must all be saidhowever impossible the task of saying it all will always be. The true tale of the tribe is:

          Like history itself…both a process and a communal task.
          It is a process because the tale of a living culture can never
          be completed, and a communal task because, from the
          examples of his predecessors, every new poet learns how
          to define the contributions his own perceptions and
          technique can bring to the evolving tradition.
                                                                             (Bernstein)

In short, many voices must make up the tale of the tribe, the voices of many poets but also of the various people the poet presumes to speak for (and to explore the experience of history through). And even then the tale will always be incomplete, part of an impossibly large and dizzingly shifting mosaic. If there is to be a next permutation contemporary poets will have to, as Williams did before them, feel at home in the current morass, to accept the facts of history as provisional, shifting even within the moment they are uttered, accept the effects of the facts on the individual as dynamic and ongoing. Then speak with authority, as out of fashion as that concept is at present.

[space=5] Michael Bernstein relates a story told by Rudyard Kipling at a Royal Academy Dinner in 1906:

          A man who had accomplished a most notable deed…wished to explain to his Tribe what
          he had done. As soon as hebegan to speak, however, he was smitten with dumbness, he
          lacked words, and sat down. Then there arose—according to the story—a masterless
          man, one who had taken no part in the action of his fellow, who had no special virtues,
          but who was afflicted—that is the phrase—with the magic of the necessary word. He
          was; he told; he described the merits of the notable deed in such a fashion, we are
          assured, that the words became alive and walked up and down in the hearts of all the hearers.

The stories of heroic deeds in the classical sense aside for the moment, the “magic of the necessary word” is a grave responsibility, which is what makes it an “affliction.” In the absence of a multivocal, dynamic tale of the tribe, the culture has one less means to understanding, one less route to the ever evolving truth of our humanness. Whatever the moderns’ shortcomings from our vantage in time, and however limited their perception of the world as individuals, their attempts at verse epic gave us this: a map that is also a mirror made of runes we must decipher to understand, that alter and shift as the days pass. Poets of the present, if they can exceed the impasse that is the poetics of the present embodied, still have access to the tools to offer the race a dynamic alternative to the deadening metanarrative we are currently subjected to, an epic to stand in opposition to stasis and conformity by attempting, however vainly, to give voice to us all.

                                                                                                   Interlude

          Dear Dog, Dog reads on the last page,
          his hands trembling. If you hear this I am dead
          and you refuse to follow.

          I forgive you, but remember,
          the compulsory work of the imagination
          has become a necrophile’s paradise.

          Humans have humped the dead earth
          to engender here the machine,
          and now they hump the machine

          like a cross-eyed stray
          humps the unsuspecting leg.
          Our fellows have downloaded their dreams.

          The sizzle and crackle of desire,
          of purpose, has become the static wave
          of soulless metal and wire.

          I cannot live in a land
          where no tragic poet sings.
          Farewell, and may you find a way.

      The next permutation of the epic will contain the voices of the many, including the lost and the outcast and even the dead, not merely to mimic the dynamic of history as multivalent experience but to articulate the multiplicity of perception as it both interprets and seeks to alter the human condition. Dog made a suicide pact with his unnamed friend, and indeed witnessed his horrific death. They both despair over the demise of human purpose and the failure of language to articulate their dark realizations and as a tool to seek significance. But they represent two diametrical responses: the suicide, whose impasse yields madness, and the searcher who turns from the descent to battle upward toward the light of understanding and communication.

      But the various voices in the epic are not merely the polar choices lurking in the poet as regards his/her own internal struggles in/with the world. Via an act of creative empathy, the poet must attempt to enter the skin of the other, in order to tell it all, however hopeless of an absolute accomplishment of the task. Assertions by other speakers in the poem are inevitably tied to the concerns of the perceiver, the poet, but they will spin in ways he/she never imagined. Because Dog has a reputation as a seeker for meaning (an early poem is entitled “Dog Hunts God”), a gang leader asks him to serve his “people”:

          We are in a holy war
          of sorts, says the man,
          a struggle for ground
          and identity. We need

          a priest, someone to bless
          the warriors, to bury
          our dead. I am a gimp
          and a drunk, says Dog.

          Not a holy man, barely
          a man. His voice, no longer
          trembling, trails into silence.
          The men in bandannas rise.

          That is the point, Dog.
          When a Mac 10 barks in my hand,
          sacred sparks flying from its rude

          mouth, neither am I…

          not holy, not a man.
          Neither am I animal,
          but an extension of the machine
          in my hand and I am praying

          to the only things of worth
          left on the planet:
          power and survival….
                                                                                        (“Dog and the Tigers of Wrath”)

      The recognition is one of community on the outskirts of mass culture and of personal identity within it, but also of the perverse ramifications of poverty and exclusion at the juncture of the machine and information ages. How does one achieve power, participate in the national obsession with hierarchy and prestige, if one is without access to the socially acceptable modes of being powerful? The answer lies in an ethos t

                                                                                                   The Next Permutation

          …the question is not whether a contemporary
          epic exists or why writers keep manipulating
          the genre. What remains to be seen are the
          dimensions of the next permutation.
                                                                             Robert Hamner

          This is the morning, after the dispersion, and
          the work of the morning is methodology: how
          to use oneself, and on what. That is my profession.
          I am an archaeologist of morning.
                                                                             Charles Olson

          This Rhetoric is real!
                                                                             Williams, Paterson

      If for Pound the inevitably subjective creation of the verse epic was a matter of purposeful choosing among received ideas and synthesizing them into a coherent whole, that is implicitly rhetorical; and if for Williams that included the acceptance of the dynamic of history as a reciprocal flux for the speaker-of-history and for his text; for Charles Olson the epic poet reenacts the “kinetics” of psychic experience in the poem, the subjectively inflected, ongoing change that is the speaker and the tale. In other words, he took both his predecessors assumptions to the next level: the epic is not only a dynamization of experience as it is inflected by both the historical moment and the historical past (and hence his slipping from one time domain to the other in the space of a line), but it is overtly rhetorical as well. Olson’s goal in the Maximus poems is not merely an aesthetic or representational rendering, but to persuade in order to achieve societal change. The opening poems which take the form of epistles are, especially, frequently overtly political, “overtly committed to social and economic measures of ‘polis,’ which for Olson constituted the full and determining company of the social body” (Robert Creeley). In the critic Jeffrey Walker’s terms, Olson reappropriated the rhetoric he inherited from his predecessors and presents his readers with a version of “the myth of untransacted destiny” wherein he offered himself as “a voice of long suppressed, redemptive identity.” That is, in Maximus the poet speaker becomes the active embodiment of history.

      In postmodernity the word is recognized as a weapon, specifically in Olson’s case, as Paul Metcalf said of the first volume of Maximus, “as a political weapon.” Pound intuited the fact that language had repercussions beyond traditionally defined literary ones of representation, of course, but lapsed into allusive pedantry and propaganda. Williams, in his tropes that capture the terror of the modern world (i.e., the bomb), also seemed to understand that language is not merely descriptive or the innocuous conveyance for ideas, but in Paterson the political remains sublimated in the personal. Consequently, although Olson’s attempt at epic is not as powerful as art as Pound and William’s poems (and it would seem that he was enough an intellectual but perhaps not enough of a poet to pull it off), he is our bridge to the next version of the epic in his unabashed attempt to convince the reader of the truth of his polemic: “Gloucester too// is out of her mind and/ is now indistinguishable from USA.” The traditional role of the epic as a model of “good” human values has therefore been consciously extended to a critique of the status quo and assertions for the necessity for reconstruction.

      What was once within the range of the traditional lyric voice again encroaches on the traditional ground of the epic. However, the epic so defined, as an explicitly subjective assertion, demands a recognition of new or revived (in the case of Olson) or modified psychological, ethical, emotional, political, and aesthetic imperatives. The verse epic here becomes a tool for both critique and change, a polemical representation that is meant to serve as a heuristic as well, wherein dissent is expected because it is part of the human function. The epic as classical metanarrative, a conservative monopoly of extant but also ideal values, gives way to epic-as-provisional-assertion, becomes a field of dynamic signification wherein history is enacted as subjectively achieved experience: explored, railed against, deconstructed, and perhaps reconstructed in more positive terms as an alternative to what is generally accepted:

          an actual earth of value to
          construct one, from rhythm to
          image, and image is knowing, and
          knowing, Confucius says, brings one
          to the goal: nothing is possible without
          doing it. It is where the test lies, malgre
          all the thought and all the pell-mell of
          proposing it. Or thinking it out or living it
          ahead of time. (Maximus, III)

      This is not to suggest that the next epic cycle need be expressly didactic nor the poet tenaciously political (although that may well be in order). However, it is an assertion that in order to be heard, in order to have one’s portion of the tale become part of the dynamic mosaic that is the tale of the tribe, it is not only necessary that the poet strive to include his/her voice in the chorus of voices but absolutely necessary that he/she have subjective gumption before the status quo, which is in the end a conservative and exclusionary version of the overarching discourse, the tale of the tribe as currently constituted. As previously stated, a multitude of voices are necessary in order to approach anything like an adequate tale of the tribe, but those voices will have to vie for contention among the other versions of the tale that (in spite of the culture’s lip service to the contrary, our false homage to diversity) must strive to be accounted worthy and, in some cases, struggle for a place within the extant version of things by virtue of the lack of Ur-epic material available. In some cases, where a whole people may have been displaced, their past stolen, a co-optation of the dominant epic is necessary in order to write themselves into it.

      In Omeros, for example, Derek Walcott appropriates the myth of the conqueror and peoples it with the conquered. All of his protagonists are castaways (in both senses) with names like Philoctete and Achille (pronounced A-sheel). This version of the tale of the tribe is what Robert Hamner calls a “ ‘foundation epic,’ one that inscribes a people’s rightful name and place within their own narrative.” Such an epic, however, is not merely an attempt by the other to locate him/herself within the dominant mythology, but an attack on their original exclusion. The formerly dispossessed by/of history become the actors in the reader’s imagination. They become the makers of their own history and the rhetorical figures within an assault on those who have excluded them, or rather those who have forced their own history upon them. Their experience is not only made real by being depicted but struggles toward meaning, an explanation. For example, Walcott gives us the common plight of all dispossessed peoples, including a summation by the “hero” Omeros, who has been named after a creolized wanderer appropriately named Homer, and thereby links dispossession to the history of civilization, to colonization; but he also links all the displaced and absorbed into a single symbolic people whose shared culture is their shared slavery:

          “This was history. I had no power to change it.
          And yet I still felt that this had happened before.
          I knew it would happen again, but how strange it
          was to have seen it in Boston, in the hearth-fire.
          I was a leaf in the whirlwind of the Ordained.
          Then Omeros’s voice came from the mouth of the tent:

          ‘We Galloped towards death swept by the exultation
          of meeting ourselves in a place just like this one:
          The Ghost Dance has tied the tribes into one nation.’”

      Which is also to suggest that the classical figure of the hero as the center of the epic, the Odysseus whose values as they are reflected in his actions are the culture’s idealized core values and self perception, is ultimately modified: the center of the next permutation is an everyman/woman who is nonetheless heroic precisely for not being the culture’s paradigmatic icon, who have become the keepers of the status quo: politicians, actors, soldiers, and sports figuresall having become so-called “personalities,” which is to say they are products endorsing products. The new “heroes” are such by virtue of their willingness to battle for recognition of their experience and its inclusion in the mosaic that is the tale of the tribe, by virtue of their attempt to give meaning to their experience within the context of history, and their attempt to alter the core values of the culture to include them, by speaking the truth.

      Once again, the next epic cycle must be polyvocal, but it must also be value laden in a dynamic fashion as opposed to merely being representational, a heuristic that incites further explorations of our place and time, especially relative to the dominant assertions by the dominant voices. The poet’s responsibility is to the whole truth, of course, the partial tale a lie and the totalized tale impossible, an ideal, which is the paradox the epic poet works within. However, history is an argument as much as it is a reiteration, and the attempt to tell the tale ongoing and brutally dynamic. The next permutation is in some cases an argument for the speaker’s own existence but always for the validity of the speaker’s experience as an historical manifestation. As Walcott says: “the good poet is the proprietor of the experience of the race, …he is and always has been the vessel, vates, rainmaker, the conscience of the king and the embodiment of society, even when society is unable to contain him” (“PoetryEnormously Complicated Art”). Perhaps more accurately, however, the master poet’s assertion could be changed to “especially when society is unable to contain him.”

      The very attempt to write an epic as it has been here defined is a radical act, an attempt at the tale of the tribe as a strident assertion: one that grows outward from the poet’s subjective experience, which is a culmination of “history, politics, geography,…religion and metaphysics,…music and language” (Paula Gunn Allen, Off the Reservation), toward a provisional synthesis that transcends our postmodern alienation without denying it. Such a work is Pound’s ideal vortex incarnate, continually taking in and spinning out ideas, transmogrifying before the reader, transubstantiating into dynamic meaning before us all, “a series of chrystalizations or illuminations, vitally bound to the particular concerns of the perceiver” (Michael Bernstein), but that extend to the concerns of the race. In fact, in the environment of the current metanarrative, to write an epic may be more than simply radical, but a necessary act of hubris if we are to again to have any sense of ourselves as beings-in-time, as radically alive.

                                                                                                   Postlude

          You have wakened me from a dream
          of self-immolation wherein flames
          turn to words that flow from me
          hot as fire, the smell of my flesh
          burning given up as smoke offering
                to heaven.
                                                                                                   “Dog’s Apocrypha”

      “Poetry is power,” as C.K. Williams reminds us, and perhaps “it is a power that we are a little afraid of… .” We know from our experiences in the contemporary world that power is a synonym for manipulation, and our heightened use of language, that tool we must have mislaid once to allow the dark magicians who wield it now to pick it up, becomes a burden. If poets abjure that responsibility, or make light of it by writing trivial poems that deny our historicity, there is one less assertion of human worth in the vortical swirl of history. It all becomes simpler, to be certain. We all become what we are told we must become, and sleepwalk through time.

     As Dog says over a dead and nameless man to an audience of the passive and the dispossessed:

          Some archaeologist of the future
          will find runes, tales
          of pestilence, a curse
          on this man’s scapula, incised
          there by the teeth of the universe
          as it devoured him…
          will read there the text of his suffering.

          There will be no script
          of your passage…our passage…
          left to decipher. Our husks,
          brittle exoskeletons filled with nothing
          but stifling air, will rot
          to dirt in the blink of an eye
          without a single tooth mark. I
          would damn you, but you
          have damned yourselves.

The failure to speak, to argue hard for inclusion of us all in the tale of the tribe, is to not be, despite all assertions to the contrary streaming from the blue and flickering screen.

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By: CHARLES P. RIES and ELLARAINE LOCKIE

I became curious about women in the poetry small press when I noticed there were almost no female poets among the Beats of the 50’s and 60’s. I then found equally few female poets in a review I’d written poetry anthology which focused on poets in the 70’s. So I wondered, “How far have we really come?” When an e-mail query I sent to sixty poets, publishes and editors got me almost forty pages of replies, I thought I was on to something, but wanted see what a first rate female poet made of it all. Ellaraine Lockie was nice enough to jump into the gender equity hot tub with me and we agreed to disagree. Here is what we had to say about the current status of female poets in the small press. ~ Charles P. Ries

Are Women Underrepresented in the Small Press?
By: Charles P. Ries
Word Count: 1, 372

I had recently completed reading a poetry anthology entitled, Baby Beat Generation & The 2nd San Francisco Renaissance when I noticed how few women contributors were represented. I didn’t understand why this would be the case, so I asked Kaye MacDonough whose work was featured about the status of women in the poetry small press, North Beach and the 70’s:

“I think the North Beach lifestyle itself was hard on women. You had to be able to live poor and like it — handle yourself in a bar, walk alone on the street at any hour, and rely on no one. You had to take care that you weren’t an alcohol or drug casualty — and that you could keep up with all those poets and what they read, and they read plenty. You had to be able to read your poetry to rooms full of mostly men who were not shy about giving you feedback. The womanizing was a definite minus. Where I came from, women did not go about unescorted at night, let alone into a bar, so North Beach wasn’t exactly a place to settle down and start a family– I’m not sure I knew what in the heck I was after – alcohol certainly played a role. I think I wanted to live like a man – a man who was a poet.”

Maybe MacDonough’s experience was just North Beach and the 70’s, but when I looked at the popular Beat poets of the 50’s and 60’s almost none are women. I wondered if things had changed? I believe some sectors of our poetry world are still dominated by a male ethos. Yet I also believe women, write, read, and buy more poetry. I see a growing number of female editors; particularly in the booming electronic magazines sector, but it seems to me that men are more aggressive about submitting work and getting work published than women. I also believe that women are better represented in the academic MFA side of poetry, but still, I had this feeling there are fewer female voices in the poetry small press than male voices. So I invited poets, publishers and editors to send me their thoughts about what I felt was a race, gender, sexual orientation and socio-economic free zone called the poetry small press. As you might imagine, the replies were varied. Some agreed, and some didn’t agree with my assumption. Here are a few observations that I pulled from over forty pages of responses:

Our first few issues featured more female than male poets. The reason for this is that we solicited female poets heavily. In recent issues, we haven’t solicited as much and the result is that we’ve gotten more male poets over the transom. What does this mean? Women aren’t sending us poetry unless we ask for it. So why don’t women send us poetry? If I use the model of myself (a male) and my fiancée (a female) then I notice that I will send work any and everywhere, and she is much more selective. I also tend to write more than she does, though her work is often stronger and more polished. Many women writers I know are very selective about where they send their work. The idea of social roles has been brought up; that women are still often relegated to the home and many women have children and so can’t send work out/must be more selective. But the thing I find much more disturbing is the lack of minority submissions. CL Bledsoe ~ Ghoti Magazine.

We all have trouble getting published regularly (who doesn’t I guess), but most do get published from time to time if they send their poems out! And there I think is the issue. Many of the women I know who write poetry either don’t send their poems out, or don’t send them out as regularly (let alone relentlessly) as most of the male poets I know. Laurie Rosenblatt, M.D ~ Poet.

So many women got their foot in the door with the vigorous feminist press movement of the late 70s/early 80s. Some of those journals are still in existence. On the other hand, the beat poet movement was largely male. What tradition is more influential to today’s independent literary journals? The question is complex/nuanced and far reaching into the history of women in literature and society. Liz Bradfield ~ Broadsided
Several years ago, as part of my master’s thesis, I interviewed four women poets: Stellasue Lee, Denise Duhamel, Naomi Shihab Nye and Shara McCallum. Stellasue Lee spoke about this very issue. This interview was published in Margie, The American Review of Poetry, issue two and can be found online at Error! Hyperlink reference not valid.under the link: Chautauquas. Lee told me that as poetry editor of RATTLE, she would publish more women writers, but fewer women writers submitted. When I asked Lee recently if this were still true, she said that the overwhelming number of submissions to Rattle came from male writers. I do think that some women are happy to just write and not play the whole publishing game. I’ve never encountered malicious bias. If it’s out there, I may be naive to it. Karla Huston ~ Poet.

I don’t believe that women are better poets, but I do believe that women poets need to get off their collective asses and start submitting work in greater numbers. The ratio of women to men submitting work to poetic diversity is 1 to 3. I also don’t believe that women improve their craft with age just because they are women. What I do believe is something my mother Michelle Lecrivain (a painter and quilt artist) once told me: “Women have been creating art in their everyday life since the beginning of time. It’s as natural to our sex as breathing, but we’re not taught to look at our creation as art. We’re only taught to look at our creations as ‘labours’.” Marie Lecrivain ~ Poeticdiversity.

Maybe it doesn’t matter that women are less represented in poetry small press if they don’t want to be. After all, the genders are different; and getting published may not matter as much to women as it does to men. But the number and variety of replies to my query – forty of the sixty poets, editors and publishers I contacted responded – suggests equal opportunity is on people’s minds.

In the mid-70’s an act of congress called Title Nine required schools to invest as much in girls athletics as they did boys athletics. Not surprisingly the numbers of girls participating in athletics has grown to numbers never imagined in the 70’s. Equally interesting to me is that enrollment of women in universities is rising steadily and has now outpaced men. Maybe when we give a generation of women the same access and the same belief in themselves as we have traditionally given our men, they will not hesitate to compete, even in the poetry small press – if they choose to.

I am not sure we have arrived at a time when we can just write well and forget about gender (or race for that matter), when it comes to equal representation. The Beats hardly had women in their ranks. The poets of the 70’s didn’t do much better. Today we can look around and say we’ve made progress, there are more female poets getting published, but have we arrived? I don’t think so. I don’t believe that in 2006 the doors to well written poetry are as open to female poets as they are to their male counterparts.

So what do we do about it? To those of you who think we have arrived and good writing has prevailed over sexism – nothing. To those of us who feel there is still a ways to go, doors to open, and opportunities to give; we must take an active role to make sure the poetry of talented men and women is brought before the widest audience possible. Talent alone is not enough to create equal opportunity. We must all participate in leveling the playing field.

NOTE: I would be happy to send the over forty pages of responses to my query about women in the small press as an e-mail attachment to anyone requesting it.

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Are Women Underrepresented in the Small Press?
By: Ellaraine Lockie
Word count: About 1620

When Charles Ries queried why there are so few women represented in the small press, I didn’t have a clue what he meant because that has been neither my personal experience nor my observation. But then, I don’t generally think in terms of gender, and maybe I just hadn’t noticed. The sociologist in me was curious, so I did a statistical analysis of the last issues of publications that ran my work. Here are the results. (Contact me at elockie@comcast.net for a list of the publications, if interested):

In 20 hard-copy publications, 374 women were represented and 334 men. There were 13 men editors and 7 women editors.

In 15 online publications, 113 women were represented and 109 men. There were 13 men editors and 10 women editors.

Of course, this is by no means a definitive study, as it reflects empirically only one poet’s work and style of submitting. Yet the publications are very diverse, and plenty of responses to Charles’ query support my findings. Liz Bradfield from Broadsided says she has received a fairly even distribution of submissions from men and women. Since her retirement, Rhina Espaillat reports a “nice even balance between men and women” among writers she encounters.

Lee Vowell, Editor of Underground Window, says it never seemed to him there was a large minority of females in poetrydom. He’s published over 150 poets, and roughly 45% of them are female. To counterbalance that, John Amen, at Pedestal Magazine, gets probably 60% submissions from females.

Ken Gurney, Editor for Tamafyhr Mountain Poetry, reports that submissions there split about 50/50 between men and women and that his acceptance rate is about the same. At March Street Press, Editor Robert Bixby says that he, too, gets a nice mixture of men and women. Jennifer VanBuren, Editor of Mannequin Envy, says they get more submissions from men but publish about 50/50.

When Pris Campbell counted the poets in Mipo’s last issue, she found more than half of them to be female. During the nine years as Poetry Editor for Poetic Voices, Ursula Gibson found no lack of submissions from either males or females. Ray Foreman, Publisher of Clark Street Review, has the same opinion about the small press in general. Louis McKee at One Trick Pony, indicates that 60% of his blind submissions are from men, but yet he tries to publish balanced issues.

Charles Coe says, “Maybe certain publications–either because of editorial focus or name or whatever–just aren’t appealing to women contributors. But I just don’t see that as an industry-wide issue. Charles take the issue one step further and informs us that, “The Council of Literary Presses and Magazines is a service organization for independent publishers funded in part by the New York Council for Arts. If you go to their home page (http:www.clmp.org), click on the “Member Directory” and poke around at random, you’ll see women editors and contributors all over the place.”

A few editors indicate they do go out of their way to publish women’s work, giving their gender more exposure in the small press. Editors CL Bledsoe, Jillian Meyer and Donna Epler at Ghoti Magazine say they “solicit the hell out of female poets” because they have learned that if they don’t, female submissions drop.

Louis McKee at One Trick Pony indicates that 60% of his blind submissions are from men, but yet he tries to publish balanced issues. Gordon Purkis, Mastodon Dentist Editor, says twice he’s had to seek female submissions or the issues would have been completely male dominated.

Karla Huston submitted an excerpt from an interview in Margie, The American Review of Poetry, where she interviewed Stellasue Lee, Editor of RATTLE. In the interview, Stellasue tells of a writing workshop she conducted with a few years ago with 39 women, after which she invited them to submit to RATTLE. She even called each of them on the phone after the workshop with the invitation. Fifteen did not submit their work. Of course, who knows if men would have reacted statistically different? Also, this interview took place several years ago and may not result in the same consequences today.

Editor Jonathan Penton says if he didn’t actively pursue submissions from female authors, fewer and fewer would show. He goes on to say, “To prevent UnlikelyStories.org from becoming a complete boy’s club, I try to publish a certain percentage of women in every issue.”

Jonathan is also one of the few responding male editors who claimed to have a preference for the “masculine aesthetic.” Joseph Farley at Cynic Press, who has published two books by women and ten by men, says that maybe he too has an unconscious bias toward “male qualities” in writing. Louis McKee is another who identifies more with perceived male writers’ themes and points of view, although he believes that, “. . . the good poems cannot be denied, and the good, persistent poets will find an audience.”

But is this perceived gender subject preference the norm among male editors? I doubt it, based again on my personal experience and observations. Of my four published collections, two address women’s menopausal years, and I found no reluctance in men editors to publish the individual poems in these collections or to write enthusiastic and positive reviews of them. Karla Huston reports that she also feels her work has never suffered gender bias.

However, I believe the style of writing between men and women might affect the quality of their poems and result in a different gender statistic. I know many excellent women poets who pull away from using words like fuck or asshole when those words are appropriate to the poems they’re writing. It’s as though they don’t realize those words are not a personal reflection on them but rather an accurate depiction of something or someone they are depicting. Respondent Anita Wynn hit on this when she wrote, “. . . people seem to forget that a poet doesn’t always use his/her own voice, and that the speaker is not necessarily representing the writer.”

Even the opinion that women’s subject matter drastically differs from that of men’s is open for debate, until it is scientifically studied. But several poet and editor respondents feel that there exist definite gender content differences. In addition to the men mentioned above, Ken Gurney notices it. He says, “The majority of rants and experimental poetry I receive as submissions are from men. The majority of healing, life affirming poetry I receive is from women.”

There are also some women who express their affirmative opinions that gender content differences exist. Ursula Gibson thinks that women’s poetry deals more with their life circumstances and their relationships and men’s more with protest, anger or politics.

Laura Stamps feels the reason she gets a much higher rate of acceptance from magazines that are edited by women is simply because she writes about what interests them. She says, “Men tend to write about. . . their current depression, bars, heavy drinking, their girlfriends/wives or the one that just dumped them” and that they are more likely than women to curse and less likely to write about feminine topics like nature. Laura also thinks that most of the women poets who get published a lot in the small press do so because they write “like men.” However, Ania Wynn says her “masculine style” has been a constant criticism.

On the other hand, Gordon Purkis prefers women’s writing. He thinks it’s superior in many ways and says that the highest percentage of “junk” coming to Mastodon Dentist is from men who don’t know when to quit.

True, there are some responders who either just accept Charles’ assumption that women are underrepresented in the small press or who enthusiastically agree with it, making this topic one of complexity and one ripe for a full-fledged study. (Too bad I left sociology for poetry.) One conclusion that I strongly draw from these responses, however, is that the number of published women in the small press has increased dramatically in the past few years.

Rosemary Cappello from Philadelphia Poets best summarizes this with her publishing history. She tells us: “When I first started writing poetry back in the 70s, I received enough acceptances to encourage me, but here are some of the rejections I’ll never forget. “Why don’t you try the women’s section of the newspaper?” “Your poem is quite acceptable, but in it, you mention a famous woman. If you change her name to a [certain famous] man’s, I’ll publish it.” She goes on to say that when she first founded, edited and published Philadelphia Poets in 1980, she received more poetry from men than from women. However, now she receives an equal amount of poetry from women, and in her next issue, women will have the edge.

We women have clearly come a long way in the small press world, and there’s no reason to think the journey is slowing. Mostly what I see indicates that we are at least close to an overall satisfactory 50/50 publication percentage with our men poetry friends.

We’re all in this world of poetry together, and some good advice in these varied query responses came eloquently from Rhina Espaillat, who says, “Certainly there’s a need to watch out for injustices and under-representations in any field, but the sooner we can move away from that to a consideration of artists as artists, undifferentiated by sex, religion, national origin, political ideology or any other such category, the more we can concentrate on doing what we do as well as we possibly can, and judging the resulting work on its own merits.”

Charles Potts sums up perhaps the best and most succinct conclusion to the matter when he says, “Write well and forget your gender.”

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Ellaraine Lockie lives in Sunnyvale, California. She writes poetry, nonfiction books, magazine articles/columns and children’s stories. She is a well-published and awarded poet who has received nine nominations for Pushcart Prizes in poetry and has four published chapbooks: Midlife Muse, Poetry Forum; Crossing the Center Line, Sweet Annie Press; Coloring Outside the Lines, The Plowman Press; Finishing Lines, Snark Publishing. Ellaraine also teaches a poetry/writing workshop on the creative process for schools, writing groups and libraries. Her nonfiction books are All Because of a Button: Folklore, Fact and Fiction, St. Johann Press; The Gourmet Paper Maker, Creative Publishing, and The Low Lactose Kitchen Companion and Cookbook forthcoming in 2007. Ellaraine is also a professional papermaker and teaches workshops on the craft. You may find more information about her books and workshops at:
www.musesreview.org/ ellarainelockie.html.

Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over one hundred and forty print and electronic publications. He has received three Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing and most recently read his poetry on National Public Radio’s Theme and Variations, a program that is broadcast over seventy NPR affiliates. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory. Ries is also the author of five books of poetry — the most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press in Tucson, Arizona. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org) and on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. Most recently he has been appointed to the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission. You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literarti.net/Ries/

Word Count: 2,948

I have tried to honor the submission guidelines the editors of both print and electronic magazines have created for me. I have stumbled only a few times—this mostly due to my being reckless and in a hurry. To those editors whose guidelines I have stepped on (and you know who you are), I apologize.

As a form of therapy and self-education, I wanted to understand why submission standards are necessary and who benefits from them. I invited fifty editors of electronic and print magazines to explain their submission philosophy. Twenty-two were good enough to reply. Of these, sixteen accepted simultaneous submissions and previously published work, five were strongly opposed to it, and one was open to both, but not simultaneous publication.

Although the concept of what can be submitted is simple (if one reads the rules), there is surprising variation with regard to expectations. Some wanted to know who accepted the piece first so credit could be given to that publisher; another was willing to run interviews, reviews, and essays that had appeared elsewhere, but not poetry. Still others would make exceptions for exceptional work. The majority that weighed in on this issue just wanted the best work to be published and read as often as possible.

No one representing an academically funded publication responded to my query. This may be more a reflection of the kinds of magazines I tend to work with than academic unwillingness to reply.

The circulation of the print magazines responding ran between “a few” to thousands. The electronic magazines ranged from hundreds of visits per month to many thousands per month.

The magazines that opposed simultaneous submissions or the practice of publishing already published work were equally divided between print and electronic. One might think that the lower cost of putting out an electronic magazine would make for more benevolent submission guidelines, but this didn’t seem to be the case.

Here is a sampling of the comments I received from various editors. As you will see (and I hope, enjoy), these reflect a wide variation on the theme of what work may be submitted to a literary magazine:

“I do print work that has been published elsewhere. I don’t think a magazine should feel so ‘precious’ as to only feature works never seen before. In Asia, where many of my readers come from, there is even less concern about reading new work because, for example, any poetry from the States featured in the journal is new to, say, readers in Hong Kong.” Cyril Wong, Editor, Softblow.

“My goal is to publish and circulate work, not control it. While I wouldn’t choose to reprint a work that has been published many times, I actually encourage the multiple publication of works that have only been printed by small mags because of the limited audience and print runs for each mag. Although the small press can be a cozy little world, I would be willing to bet that if you matched up the subscriber lists of, say, Bathtub Gin, Poesy, Main Street Rag, and Heeltap, you would find very little overlap. I see reprinting as a way of helping an author find a larger audience.” Christopher Harter, Editor, Bathtub Gin.

“We seldom reprint anything anymore, especially with a good chance our subscribers will see it elsewhere. There’s also too much good material out there for a duplicate printing to take the space of someone else’s possible lone chance. The Pushcart anthology is supposed to reprint deserved pieces, though I personally think Bill Henderson favors big budget, established university publications over ‘zines,’ and the famous (does Joyce Carol Oates need yet another credit?) over deserving unknowns. Someone should take him on with a true small press anthology/annual—but it’s probably impossible nowadays without the backing (on many levels) of influential people willing to be altruistic.” Phil Wagner, Editor, Iconoclast.

“I don’t have a problem with previously published work or simultaneous submissions as long as the person is upfront with me about it. As a poet who submits her own work, I understand wanting a piece published in more than one place, and because of the long waiting period with some zines/magazines, wanting to send it out simultaneously.” Kathleen Paul-Flanagan, Editor, Remark.

“We don’t have a problem with simultaneous submissions, but we don’t consider reprints. In the words of another editor— if you can write one good story, you can write another. Instead of sending the same piece out over and over, get off your ass and write something new. The goal of most literary journals is to promote new work. If it has been published, it isn’t new. If a writer is trying to build a reputation for him or herself, the best way to do this is to present a variety of work, not rehash the same piece over and over. The pool of readers of literary journals is pretty small.” CL Bledsoe, Editor, Ghoti Fish .

"We will take previously published work on a case by case basis. We are much more interested in previously published work if the author is deceased and/or marginalized, neglected, or banned. Pemmican is likewise open to considering simultaneously submitted work. As sometimes publishing authors ourselves, we understand how hard it is for writers to send to a magazine, wait around for months for a reply only to get a rejection slip, and then have to repeat the whole process. You’d be hard pressed, however, to find many magazines that look favorably on simultaneous publication, especially when the magazines involved are not aware of the simultaneous publication and discover it, say, by accident or by a tip. Writers who publish broadly without informing the respective magazines of such seem to be under the assumption that all magazines exist exclusively to promote their particular work and are only ‘good’ to the extent that they serve as useful stepping stones. Most magazines insist that authors, once accepted for publication in their pages, do not continue to send the work in question out for further publication for a specified period of time.” Robert Edwards and Ben Howard, Editors, Pemmican.

“The limiting boundaries of the small press preclude many readers from being exposed to work that is bound by the exclusiveness of some publications. No one can afford to pay for, or read, all of the many fine venues that exist. Therefore, it is unfair to the writer as well as the reader to put them away once they have been exposed to a rather limited audience. Publication of previously published work gives each publication a chance to vote on the quality of work submitted and the poet writing it. Each time a work is published, the press publishing it is voting on it. And thus adding to their editorial prowess and judgment.” Thomas Conroy, Editor, The League of Laboring Poets.

“When I see in my favorite magazine the same poem that I just published, or planned on publishing, it is sort of a let- down. Like, okay, there is one page of my magazine that someone will skip over if they just read it in Free Verse or Blind Man’s Rainbow that same month or the month before. It detracts from the beauty of the magazine, so I stopped accepting simultaneously submitted work. But, there are always exceptions. If it blows me away, I will publish it even if it appeared somewhere else. But as a standard, I prefer not to look at recent simultaneously submitted work. I guess there is a fine line. Reviews and articles should always be simultaneously submitted. Poetry is a different ball game altogether…” Brian Morrisey, Editor, Poesy.

“We put a lot of effort into pulling together the content for both a print and online edition each quarter; we feel we owe it to our readers as well as to our writers to choose the best of the original work we receive, and it is a vexing problem to deal with undisclosed simultaneous submissions or previously published work. Given our tight schedule, we prefer not to read work that falls outside of our submission guidelines.” Eric Lorberer, Editor, Rain Taxi.

“Really? You want to read the same thing over and over again? Why not just read the same magazine over and over again? And what about the writer? Should he never write anything new? Just publish the same piece repeatedly? As a reader, I don’t get it. A publisher is eager to find that newcomer who hasn’t seen print before, whose work the publisher may have interacted in, making suggestions for changes, tightening it up, building suspense, correcting spelling and grammar errors. You get the kid still in college (or even high school) who has finally gotten the guts together to venture out and place his work before a critical stranger and you publish the first thing he’s ever sent out, or the second, then you’ve fulfilled some kind of higher purpose. You’ve given more sincere praise to that kid than any professor’s marginal note could. Keeping an already-published piece in circulation is the purpose of the anthology. Finding and presenting new work or promoting new work in whatever way possible is the purpose of the magazine. The cost of publishing is a pittance now compared to when I first got the publishing bug back in the 60s. There is no reason why anyone with his own slant on writing shouldn’t be publishing a magazine and gathering anthologies. There is a way for everyone to win in this situation, as long as everyone sticks to his or her mandate. There is no reason for magazines to become anthologies or anthologies to become magazines. There’s a good reason we have both.” Robert Bixby, Editor, Parting Gifts.

“I’ve always thought that the purpose of a mag or ezine is to be a vehicle for the writing, not the other way around. Here I’m also writing from the perspective of poet myself, so I know the frustrations of submitting work to mags only to have them sit on a poem for months, if not years sometimes. I used to follow the rules when it came to submitting work, but now I confess that I have sent out poems that I think are really good to any number of mags and not advised the editors that they are simultaneous subs. I want my work to be seen by as big an audience as possible. I know that this isn’t such a good plan, but I’ve grown tired of playing the game and being taken advantage of by this ‘first time published’ rule. In fact, it was this limitation that was partly an inspiration to start the Lummox Journal in the first place.” RD Armstrong, Editor, Lummox.

“Poems deserve to be seen, heard, and read by a wide audience. If this means a poem is printed at the same time in two or more magazines or online zines, then that is legitimate as far as I’m concerned.” Irene Koronas, Editor, Wilderness House Literary Review.

“My opinion with regards to reprints is probably not typical because I run a print magazine in South America, and my readers are mainly South American. For this reason, I can and do use reprinted material (even material that has appeared online) since my readers are unlikely to have read the pieces previously. And this is important, since, in the end, editors are mainly interested in keeping our readers happy. If we give them bad stories, they won’t be happy, and if we give them stories that they’ve read before (and make them pay for the privilege), they won’t be happy. The trick, in my opinion, is to try to sell it to an editor who has a different market from that in which the story has previously been seen. If this is the case, and you are honest about the publication history, many editors will give a good piece a home. Despite popular misconceptions, truly good stories are not all that easy to find—especially for the small press.” Gustavo Bondoni, Editor, Buenos Aires Literary Review.

“I don’t believe that a single reader has ever been harmed by reading a good poem twice. Furthermore, I believe that publication by small journals has all too often been the ‘kiss of death’ for poems. A poet puts all his inspiration, skill, and craft into a poem. The poem is read by a handful of readers and then is consigned to the literary graveyard called ‘Previously Published.’” Michael R. Burch, Editor, Hypertexts.

“As for the legality of publishing poems that have already been published and for which other publishers have taken first rights, and that have been returned to the poet (which is almost unanimously the case), the attorneys I’ve consulted about this, two of whom were literary attorneys, agree that there is no copyright problem.” Ellaraine Lockie, Poet.

“I’ve been duped multiple times by some of the biggest names in the small press who ignore the fact that we are not interested in previously published material. Since they MUST sign a Publishing Agreement to have their work featured in Main Street Rag, they have shifted the burden of responsibility for copyright infringement back to themselves, meaning if someone sues MSR, all we have to do is show the signed agreement and they must then go after the author because the author lied on a legal document. I am a legally registered business. I pay payroll, state taxes, federal taxes—and all the other crap that comes along with being a legal business. Many small press people do not register as a business, don’t collect and pay sales taxes or income taxes. It is among these folks that you will find the most prevalent attitude of sure, we don’t care if it’s been published before. And why would you expect anything else: they’re flying beneath the legal radar for everything else, why expect them to abide by copyright laws? Is that good for the author? I don’t think so. It means their work may not be protected by copyright laws.” M. Scott Douglass, Editor and Publisher, Main Street Rag.

“The rule for poeticdiversity is that, as long as you include the name and date of WHERE and WHEN the work previously appeared, we will more than likely republish it—at least 80% of the time. Unfortunately, the rule for ‘exclusivity’ creates a dishonest chord between the poet/writer who isn’t willing to commit 100% to their work by omitting this relevant information to the editor of the publication in question. As a poet and writer who submits her work to a variety of journals, I understand the frustration of running up against the ‘status quo’ rule of ‘no previously published work,’ and I choose to take my chances with more sympathetic journals. On the flip side, while I do believe that a poem/story/article should be read by a wide audience, disseminating it to as many journals as possible in a short space of time undervalues the work. It’s like hearing the same batch of poems from a poet at an open mic six weeks in a row. I’ll stop listening after the second time.” Marie Lecrivain, Executive Editor, poeticdiversity.

“We have no restrictions. We believe the property belongs to the writer. If a work has been previously published we only require permission from the publisher and writer, and take care to mention its previous publications in our journals and chapbooks.” Diana E. Saenz / Marshal L. Harvey, Co-Editors, Boston Poet Journal.

I subscribe to over twenty-five small press literary magazines, but given the pace of my life I can’t read them all—I don’t even come close. Most I scan, and a few I will read from cover to cover. But I think we all realize at some point that there are more things to read than hours in the day to read them. This is why I believe that great work should be allowed to be submitted again. With thousands of outlets for writing, the chances of reading the same published work of one writer twice in separate publications are slim to zero. Even if this should happen, why make the exception the rule?

As for the imperative that writers who can’t continually generate new and exciting work are failures, well I think that logic is flat-footed. Over a nine-year period, I produced about 300 poems. Right now I am not writing much poetry and have begun to focus on other writing forms. So when all of my poems have been published, do I cease to submit them? Maybe there is a middle ground; perhaps an editor can accept already published work if it has not been published anywhere within the last year?

Regardless of how we feel about submission guidelines, we must honor them and those who publish us. If editors insist on a once-and-done code of acceptance, then I would ask that they explain the philosophy along with their submission rules. Such explanations would allow the writer to become a participant in the ethos of the publication. Phil Wagner’s simple statement that, “There’s also too much good material out there for a duplicate printing to take the space of someone else’s possible lone chance” resonated with me not because of its logic, but because of its goodness.

I have sympathy for the publisher who has no university backing and/or must live on subscriptions. I can understand why they might begin to feel the pressure to publish only the “first,” the “original,” the “breakout piece of prose” when sales matter. But do such restrictive submission guidelines serve the work or do they serve the publisher?
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Web Sites of Magazines Noted in This Article:

 Buenos Aires Literary Review: www.baliterary.com.ar
 The HyperTexst: www.thehypertexts.com
 Main Street Rag: www.MainStreetRag.com
 Lummox Journal: www.lummoxpress.com
 Remark: www.remarkpoetry.net
 Softblow: www.softblow.com
 Bathtub Gin: www.pathwisepress.com
 Ghoti Fish: www.ghotimag.com
 Poesy: www.poesy.org
 Rain Taxi: www.raintaxi.com
 Wilderness House Literary Review: www.whlreview.com
 Poetic Diversity: www.poeticdiversity.org
 Boston Poets: www.geocities.com/bostonpoet2000
 Pemmican Press: www.pemmicanpress.com
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Charles P. Ries lives in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. His narrative poems, short stories, interviews and poetry reviews have appeared in over two hundred print and electronic publications. He has received four Pushcart Prize nominations for his writing. He is the author of THE FATHERS WE FIND, a novel based on memory and five books of poetry — the most recent entitled, The Last Time which was released by The Moon Press in Tucson, Arizona. He is the poetry editor for Word Riot (www.wordriot.org), Pass Port Journal (www.passportjournal.org) and ESC! (www.escmagazine.com). He is on the board of the Woodland Pattern Bookstore (www.woodlandpattern.org). He is a member of the Wisconsin Poet Laureate Commission and a founding member of the Lake Shore Surf Club, the oldest fresh water surfing club on the Great Lakes (http://www.visitsheboygan.com/dairyland/). You may find additional samples of his work by going to: http://www.literati.net/Ries/