Archive for the ‘literary criticism’ Tag
Amuse-bouche: Saturday 7 November 2020
Filed under: Amuse-bouche | Tags: Anita Lahey, Best Canadian Poetry, Beth Follett, Buckminster Fuller, Karl Marx, literary criticism, literary publishing, Marilyn Dumont, Matthew Arnold, Nobel Prize for Literature, Pedlar Press, T. S. Eliot Prize
Leave a comment Things have been quiet here for a number of reasons, but the most important one has been that I just haven’t had in me (for a number of reasons…) what I feel is needed to put into a worthwhile piece of writing. Some of that hesitancy is likely attributable to that vice of perfectionism, which keeps so many from doing anything, so, I’ve come to understand that one way to post here more regularly is to loosen up and just jump into the flow of the moment, however turgid or whitewater, and share here, more or less regularly (weekly?), tidbits that have caught my eye, caught in my craw, or otherwise.
Some of my detractors (well, one) have accused my writing (and not just my poetry) of being obscure, academic, or, at times, pedantic. Despite some of their more uncharitable assumptions, I never set out to bedazzle, confuse or belittle. It turns out my approach is shared by that monumental polymath Buckminster Fuller, who articulated his stylistic credo as follows: “I made up my mind as a Rule of Communication that I wouldn’t care if I was not understood — so long as I was not misunderstood.” I would add to Fuller’s unapologetically sincere stylistic credo Marx’s Hegelian pronouncement: “There is no royal road to science (Wissenschaft), and only those who do not dread the fatiguing climb of its steep path have a chance of gaining its luminous summits.”
And speaking of arduous climbs, more taxing than working at poetry is publishing poetry as a small publisher. Sadly, Beth Follet’s Pedlar Press will be shutting down operations in 2021. Pedlar’s aesthetic echoes the sentiments expressed by Fuller and Marx: “Making no compromise with public taste.” It will come as no small surprise that such an uncompromising stance comes at a price, especially in a society where nothing escapes the dictatorship of the commodity form.
Follet shares a pithy reflection on what happens to small press publishing under the current regime in her Thoughts on Pedlar recently posted at periodicities.
I had the very good fortune to spend an evening in 1996 talking with American poet Adrienne Rich about my vision for Pedlar Press. She said one thing I shall never forget: “Don’t fall in love with the boys’ machinery.“ And what would I say is the boys’ machinery? Media space given over to awards talk and Best Of lists instead of reviews. Five-hundred-word reviews instead of complex critical analyses. The politics behind dumbing down. Technology’s reliance on algorithms which dictate taste, habits, purchases, ads, etc. Dictate lives. Ignorance about how readers of literature read or live in the world, and resultant misdirected and wasteful promotional campaigns.
I’m unsure I agree with some of the assumptions underwriting what Follett refers to as “the politics of dumbing down,” but a not unrelated phenomenon, no less pernicious than persistent, has imposed itself on my sensorium a number of times this season.
In her Foreword to this years Best Canadian Poetry, Anita Lahey writes about the poems included in this year’s edition as follows:
These were poems: real, handmade (and handheld) forms built to hold, and simultaneously express, universal truths about the human experience.
Lahey is in “good”, as it were, company in valuing the way poetry, at least, expresses “universal truths about the human experience.” Lavinia Greenlaw, the chair of judges for this year’s T. S. Eliot Prize, recently said of the adjudicating process:
We had to be convinced by them as relevant in a profoundly changed world, which meant that we had to be able to connect with them at the level of essential human experience, which is where I believe poetry is really produced, and poetry is really received.
And the cognoscenti will surely remember that Louise Glück, this year’s winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature, was cited “for her unmistakable poetic voice that with austere beauty makes individual existence universal.”
Those who share my education, will remember such evocations of these “universals of human experience” from their high school, if not undergrad, English class, along with the Three Themes of literature, Man against Nature, Man against Man, and Man against Himself (sic, sic, sic, sic, and sic). That such an aesthetic can still hold sway in 2020 among people one would hope continued to live a life of the mind after completing their formal education is demoralizing. Lahey’s observation is especially ironic, given how Marilyn Dumont, this year’s editor, remarks how she proceeded with a keen sense of how “writers of colour, Indigenous writers, women, LGBQT2S, writers with physical challenges, have all been underrepresented in the publishing world”, namely, writers whose difference from that presumably universal norm has led to their being overlooked.
[And it occurred to me upon reflection not long after writing and publishing this post the sharp irony of Lahey’s, Greenlaw’s and Glück’s all being women, that one class of human being that has had and must continue to fight to have its experience recognized as belonging among those universals poetry and art supposedly address…]
I’ll pass over in silence here the admitted dialectic at work that would both undermine my critique and harmonize Lahey & Co.’s retrograde aesthetic sentiments with Dumont’s more progressive ones, a dialectic, being a lively one, that would also overturn itself again, in turn, merely to note that the thesis that poetry is concerned with “expressing universals of human experience” was, in the anglophone world, at least, most forcefully articulated by Matthew Arnold. He, along with the architects of English as an academic study, weaponized English literature into a means of persuading those disenfranchised at home (Arnold writes Culture and Anarchy in the wake of the Chartism, that working class movement that agitated to expand the vote to include working class men), not to mention those in the colonies, that, despite appearances, the upper and lower classes, and the rulers and ruled, were really, deep down, just the same….
Against the zombie aesthetic sentiments skewered above, I’ll finish off here, today, with a quotation and, of all things, a meme.
Theodor Adorno makes in his “On the Crisis of Literary Criticism” (1952)” a characteristically demanding but no less morally scrupulous (and so much more pithy) claim: “Criticism has power only to the extent to which every successful or unsuccessful sentence has something to do with the fate of humankind.”
And, finally, words to live by, some wisdomorty of Rick:
Critical Fragment
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: critical fragments, literary criticism
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If we judge a writer’s worth in the first instance on their identity or character, we avoid, evade, or void the work (and, arguably, reward) of reading (which is trouble enough) and engaging the work, which is to short circuit the critical task.
Writing on and conversations with Bruce Andrews and Amiri Baraka
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: American poetry, Amiri Baraka, Bruce Andrews, Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich, literary criticism, poetics
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Back in 2008 (!), I had the good fortune to meet (among others) a then-younger scholar of Amerikanistik, Dennis Büscher-Ulbrich.
Now, the rest of us are lucky enough to get to know his work: the Electronic Poetry Center has made available as a PDF download his dissertation on American post-avant poet Bruce Andrews, Dissensual Operations: Bruce Andrews and the Problem of Political Subjectivity in Post-Avant-Garde Aesthetic Politics and Praxis, you can download and read, here.
Admittedly, reading through a theoretically state-of-the-art dissertation on a notoriously difficult poet can be a challenge. Interested readers can jump straight to a wide-ranging and penetrating interview that is appended to the dissertation, here.
Büscher-Ulbrich also conducted one the last interviews with Amiri Baraka, one no less lively, you can read, here.
Marianne Dashwood and the Nobel Prize Committee, or how historical comparisons are ahistorical
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Jeremy Noel-Tod, literary criticism, poetry criticism, Seamus Heaney, William Cowper
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The Véhicule Press Blog has posted a short extract from Jeremy Noel-Tod’s upcoming book of criticism The Whitsun Wedding Video: A Journey into British Poetry that’s woven a snarling thread on Facebook where it was shared. It’s a thread I don’t want to get caught up in, as what concerns me, the extract’s main rhetorical ploy, comparing William Cowper’s reputation to Seamus Heaney’s, has so far gone unreflected, and to remark the ironic ahistoricism of Noel-Tod’s gesture requires more space than a Facebook comment thread.
Noel-Tod’s point is that, because Cowper and Heaney are both “rural, reflective” poets who ironise “poetry’s grand manner with conversational self-consciousness and modest domesticity,” it is imaginable that just as Cowper’s reputation has waned, so might Heaney’s. Noel-Tod seems to present as evidence of Cowper’s status, either naively or tongue-in-cheek, the passionate enthusiasm of Jane Austen’s character from Sense and Sensibility (1811), Marianne Dashwood, almost “driven wild” by Cowper’s “beautiful lines.”
Noel-Tod’s historical comparison is risibly insensitive to history. It is two very different things to be a “rural, reflective” poet in early Nineteenth Century England and in modern Northern Ireland, as the relation between country and city and the nature of that country-side itself undergo radical changes over the course of the hundred-and-fifty years the comparison elides. It is equally two different poetic gestures to ironise the grand manner of England’s Augustan poets and to write in the aftermath of Yeats, whose cold, hard late poetry had already brought to earth the self-confessed Romanticism of his early verse. Finally, to imagine that a poet’s “reputation” in 1811 is comparable to a poet’s “reputation” in 2015 is to overlook among many, many changes the crisis of High Art thematized by literary Modernism. The problem with Noel-Tod’s comparison is that it seems to assume that history, temporal distance and the difference in context this distance registers, doesn’t exist: his “Authors are in Eternity.”
The converse to Noel-Tod’s abstraction are those schools of criticism that would explain an author’s reputation in purely sociological or ideological terms, an approach that is no more true to its object than Noel-Tod’s. Marx, famously, raised the question of how art from historically and socially distant cultures, e.g. Greek tragedy, can still possess undeniable aesthetic power. Neither appeals to some transcendent human condition nor the workings of ideology satisfactorily extract us from Marx’s quandary or the claims that art can make on us. What is interesting is precisely this curious power of art in and over time, a question of perhaps more value and promise than that of “reputation.”
Why “you can’t teach writing”
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: creative writing, literary criticism, literary theory, poetry, poetry criticism
Leave a comment “We never hear that music cannot be taught, painting cannot be taught, filmmaking cannot be taught. Writing is fraught with more industrial insecurities, I fear, than some of the other disciplines.”
Paul Vermeersch writes these two sentences in a passing response to “The Persistence of the Resistance to Theory”. The distinction that troubles him between “writing [and] some of the other disciplines” may be accounted for by some arts being more mediate than writing. Music, painting, filmmaking, photography, and sculpture, for that matter, all demand acquaintance with an instrument: obviously in the case of music; brush, pigments, palette and other implements in the case of painting; and so on. Writing, however, appears to the layperson to require only literacy or in the case of oral language arts even only the voice. It might be objected singing and dancing are as immediate as the voice and body, but both seem special occasions of each, speaking and writing more basic, as thinking, the dialogue of the soul with itself or what one attempts to merely attend in meditation, appears to intimate. Of course the writer and writing teacher beg to differ: the poem or story are not just thinking or talking; creative writing is an art or craft where language is the medium worked. No matter how spontaneous or plain spoken a poem, say, may appear—and even if it is in fact spontaneous or improvised—its language is organized in an artificial manner.
The very words “creative writing workshop” imply—and its practice is premised upon the assumption—that creative writing is a teachable, learnable craft. If the master is to teach the apprentice, they must share a metalanguage, a discourse that articulates the materials and practices of that art and that expresses value judgments. This discourse may be called a “poetics”, not of the theoretical kind typified by Aristotle’s Poetics—a description, analysis, and evaluation of the art by a non-practitioner—but more akin to Horace’s Ars Poetica, practical guidance of an acknowledged master offered to an aspiring neophyte. Ironically, while creative writing teachers will vehemently defend the artificiality of literary language, too often (in my experience, at least) they assume the language of their poetics is somehow natural and its value system intuitive. Worse, too often, precisely because the terms of their poetics is assumed to be natural, they assume it is as unproblematically shared with the apprentice.
Despite the distinction between theoretical and practical poetics, the practical language of the workshop is heavily indebted to the theoretical language of the English class, i.e., literary criticism. Of course, the corollary is also true: the language of the master informs that of the teacher: the poetics of Horace, Wordsworth, Coleridge, or Henry James are fed back in to the merely scholarly study of literature. But creators learn their terms in the classroom. Neither scholarly nor creative discourse can claim priority; they are mixed at the source, because the art of writing assumes what the ancients called grammar, literacy, and one’s taught reading and writing in school. Not only are the languages of criticism and creation impossible to disentwine, they are also diverse and relative. The notion of poetry as craft was energetically applied by the Russian Futurists before the Great War, for example, with their doctrine of “the self-sufficient word” and their emulation of the factory worker or craftsman, an approach summed up neatly by the painter Dmitriev: “the artist is now simply a constructor and technician.” Their poetic, as articulated by their scholarly co-workers the Russian Formalist critics, spoke of “materials” and “devices” with a dispassionate, scientific technicality and precision that makes the terminology of most criticism or poetics seem quaint. This approach to the craft of poetry finds analogues in anglophone poetics, in the “bald statement” William Carlos Williams makes in his introduction to The Wedge (1944), “A poem is a small (or large) machine made of words,” and in creative writing pedagogy where the Russian Formalist concepts of “defamiliarization” and “device” are used alongside exercises in proceduralist composition in the manner of the OULIPO or present-day Conceptualism. That such poetics also find inspiration and conceptual resources in literary theory should not go unremarked.
Regardless of the impossibility of a purely practical poetics, the knotiness of poetics, criticism, and theory being snarled together, or debates about the merits of competing creative writing pedagogies, doubts remain whether writing can be taught. Such skepticism cannot be dismissed as easily as pointing out it depends upon an outmoded, questionable notion of genius. Who can deny that the increasing plethora of creative writing programs results in an increasing homogenization of literary practice? My own experience is telling: every year I teach the latest Journey Prize Stories and invariably I find the creative-writing-school-trained jury members award first prize to the story worthy an A+ in a creative writing class while the edgy, lively work, worthy an A for Art, is overlooked, precisely because of the prejudices inculcated in the course of the jurors’ educations. What can be taught is technique, but technique without the natural gift of talent is merely mechanical or at best competent. The art of writing (or music, or painting, etc.) can be taught, but not what might make it Art.
That’s not typing, that’s écriture
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: écriture, Clark Coolidge, Jack Kerouac, literary criticism, Ron Silliman, the novel, Truman Capote, Visions of Cody
Leave a comment Truman Capote famously quipped regarding Kerouac’s writing, “That’s not writing, that’s typing!” Happily, thanks to the heightened serendipitous dimensions of cyberspace, I happened on a closer reader of Kerouac, Clark Coolidge. One can mouse around the links from the original Jacket2 posting, but what caught my attention was Ron Silliman’s remark that
One test of Coolidge as a critic – you can find some other non-Kerouac samples as well on his EPC web page – is that he gets the importance of Visions of Cody, not just as a central work in the Kerouac canon, but quite possibly the Great Novel of the past century, right up on a par with Ulysses & Gravity’s Rainbow & the best of Faulkner (who is not unlike Kerouac in that his best work often comes in passages, rather than entire books).
I’ve long admired Kerouac’s achievement in The Legend of Dulouz, his novels taken as one multivolume work, but I can’t recall having encountered anyone else who appreciated what happens when the novel taps into its original energies as the genre that is by definition novel, as “the genre that contains all other genres,” when the narrative becomes écriture and one doesn’t know what one is reading anymore, only that one is reading. I’m glad to have chanced on someone else who gets it.
Twits in the Twitterverse: Ellis, Munro, and the Nobel
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: Alice Munro, Brett Easton Ellis, literary criticism, Nobel Prize for Literature
Leave a comment One splash Alice Munro’s winning this year’s Nobel Prize for literature made stirred a teapot tempest in the Twitterverse, proving again, if any further evidence were called for, just how anathema Twitter is to thought. To wit, Brett Easton Ellis tweeted “Alice Munro is so completely overrated,” then expanded on his judgement an hour later: “Alice Munro was always an overrated writer and now that she’s won The Nobel she always will be. The Nobel is a joke and has been for ages….” The cacophonous reaction was as swift, overwhelming, and damning as it was puerile.
First, I unreservedly applaud Munro’s winning the prize and the well-deserved attention the award will bring to her oeuvre. What interests me is why Ellis, given the kind of prose he writes, might be moved to remark what he does about the regard given Munro’s writing and the character of the Nobel Prize.
Even a passing familiarity with these writers’ works prompts an initial answer: Ellis is a satirist of modern, urban life, whose writing is intimately bound up with the present, sociocultural moment, so much so his novels have been adapted to the screen and subject to virulent denunciations. Munro, on the other hand, is characteristically described by The New Yorker magazine fiction editor Deborah Treisman: “Her work is very provincial in that it’s based in small towns and rural parts of Canada for the most part. At the same time, what she does with the characters in those places is show us their universality, their humanity.” The same CBC article goes on to sum it up quite nicely:
Munro… has been called Canada’s Chekhov. Similar to the work of the Russian short-story master, plot is usually secondary.
Munro’s stories focus on striking portraits of women living in small-town Ontario. They revolve around small epiphanies encountered by her characters, often when current events illuminate something that happened in the past.
Clearly, the ends and means of Ellis’ and Munro’s writing couldn’t be more different. However much resentment might be blamed for Ellis’s tweet, the terms of praise for Munro’s work are revealing and illuminate the second part of Ellis’s second tweet concerning the Nobel Prize’s being “a joke.”
Munro’s stories are praised for focussing on character more than plot, on her characters’ “universality, their humanity.” The universal humanity of these characters is revealed in their experiencing “epiphanies” that illuminate their and by virtue of their universality our little slices of shared life. The critical idiom here is hardly as spontaneously universal as Munro’s characters’ epiphanies. Rather, it’s the discourse of a conservative, humanist, classicist aesthetic, the same operative, for example, in Yeats’ and Eliot’s being awarded the prize (despite their respective dalliances with fascism and antisemitism) but not Joyce. The drama and prose of the late Thomas Bernhard remain second to none in their stylistic bravura and social and existential profundity, but they would never have been considered for the prize precisely because of their obsessive style, pitiless intelligence, and relentless truthtelling. Examples could be multiplied.
The most telling judgement is Munro’s being called “Canada’s Chekhov.” But the Chekhov invoked here is the tamed, canonized caricature of the writer
who amazed his audiences in the early 1880s. He was particularly interested in the absurd, and repatterned the anecdote and vignette forms of the popular press into innovative forms of writing: pieces in the guise of National Census questions, a test set by a mad mathematician, a proposal to the board of a medical school, the twisted “questions and answers” of popular women’s magazines….
The smug propriety of the praise showered on Munro is arguably as shallow as Ellis’ dismissal and the subsequent brainlessness of the backlash to his tweet. The bitter grain of truth in Ellis’ second tweet is that prizes, however much they materially further even a deserving writer’s career, are perhaps more revealing of literary values than of a writer’s worth.
The Role of Scholarship in Contemporary […] Poetry
Filed under: The Brouillon | Tags: contemporary poetry, Johannes Göransson, literary criticism
Leave a comment The Role of Scholarship in Contemporary […] Poetry
Johannes Göransson has posted over at the Montevidayo blog the first of some spirited observations and reflections on the role of scholarship in contemporary American poetry (and, by extension, Canadian, at least, though certainly with provisos…). His critique of PhD poets or those scholars who deign to approach contemporary poetry is one with which this writer (despite the blog’s name, Poeta Doctus does not hold a PhD…) is in some agreement…
We have to talk: Poetry on the Brink at Boston Review
This forum now on-line at Boston Review, though a little overwhelming with its nineteen participants, is exemplary of just what we could use more of, the more varied the participants, the better! Poetry on the Brink | Boston Review.
Everything you already know about poetry
Filed under: Praise and Polemics | Tags: literary criticism, poetry criticism, slam poetry, slam poetry explained, spoken word
Leave a comment A Canadian poet, whose disdain for Slam Poetry and Spoken Word is well-known, recently posted this clip on his blog under the title “‘Slam Poetry’ explained”:
Regardless whether you agree or disagree with the “pointlessness” of Slam Poetry, the clip does express a truth, but one more general, I think, than what the blogger or the clip’s writers had in mind. For what, exactly, is the clip mocking? One way of putting it would be that Spoken Word is a generic manner, one so stereotypical it is of no more importance to what is said than an accent.
However, it doesn’t take too much familiarity with contemporary poetry to realize that the same holds true for wide swaths of every school of poetic composition, whether “Official Verse Culture”, the present-day institutionalized Avant Garde, Neoformalism, or what have you. Indeed, it is precisely these characteristic, generic mannerisms around which their respective appreciative readers, reviewers, editors, publishers, and practitioners hover.
The problem is not any one empty manner but schematized production—and consumption—as such, whether of poems or Big Macs. What is rightly slammed in the clip is the vapidity cultured by the need to ingratiate oneself or one’s product, cultural or otherwise.
Maybe that’s why I HATE POETRY.
Poeta Doctus 