A Conversation: Joshua Clover and Brian Ang

“The new poetry won't present itself to us because we have theorized it correctly, 

but because the situation is new and we have entered into it alive.” 

--Joshua Clover

"Riot Flowers" by Banksy

“I disagree with the dichotomy in “The new poetry won't present itself to us because we have theorized it correctly, but because the situation is new and we have entered into it alive.” Theorizing correctly is the aim to historical self-consciousness, to enter the present situation most accurately, including poetic practice adequate to the present.”

--Brian Ang 

Brian Ang: In a recent interview on Maisonneuve posted May 9, 2012, you express, "I think that politics may be a place of ought, of should. Poetry isn't [....] I wouldn't have [people] write a different kind of poetry, I would simply have them recognize [their poetry] as a minor task. I think that if everyone engaged in militant political action, we would have to stop worrying about whether our poetry is good for something, or has the right politics or something. Write poems about flowers and how they’re pretty in your spare time, and as long as you’re doing what needs to be done in the rest of your time, why should you feel bad about it? That’s great!"

I've observed you repeat this aesthetic openness in interviews for years, and I fully agree with the urgency for militant political action, enabled in recent years. The interview closes with, "If I was to make the strongest case I could for poetry it wouldn't be as a political intervention but as a mode of thought which I find to be well-tuned to thinking about our changing global situation—or something like that." This connects to your arguments for a renewed Marxist reading practice, most recently in "Georgic for theWorld-System," which includes the declarations, "Always totalize!", "there is no serious question for art or politics other than what stance to take in relation to this [long twentieth century's transition]," "We have no aesthetic mode whose very thought is the whole, a mode that can accommodate totality," and "Aesthetics and political economy will henceforth [from Mallarmé] have to be thought together [due to the twentieth century's annihilation of their separation]."

Given these potentials and urgencies and that the urgency to militant political action has been registered, why the contradictory reluctance to equally strongly theorize politicized writing practices adequate to the present? 

Joshua Clover: Well, if I were committed to rescuing myself from contradiction, I would perhaps develop the difference between what individual poets ought to do (about which I really have no prescription) and what I myself find interesting, or what tasks lay before us all. But I am probably just contradictory here. Certainly my own poetry, in the book I am finishing, is obsessed with the romance of value, "the real movement of history," economic crisis and the place of poetry within it, the question of militancy and the experience of revolution and counterrevolution. But these are my fascinations; people write about what they can't escape. 

If there is a real contradiction here, it is not between differing verdicts on what kind of poetry to write, or how to think about poetry. It is between poetry and political efficacy. The reason I would stand up for the flower poem is not because I am opposed to what you call "politicized writing practices," or don't find them interesting. I do. But I don't mistake them for political struggle. My own observations of the last couple-few decades are that the effort to "strongly theorize politicized writing practices" has, intentionally or not, functioned to legitimate the capacity of poetry for intervention. I am not convinced. Indeed, that's probably the worst thing to happen to poetry in the current era. It comes largely from a misreading of materiality routed through certain poststructuralisms (and now through the poststructural quasi-Marxism of people like Toni Negri) such that discourse is imagined to be a material thing, existing at the same substrate as political economy. It's not surprising the poets were enthusiastic about this "discovery." In train, the capacity of poetry to intervene in political struggle has been not a little overstated. 

If that has been a trajectory of the last, say, 40 years, one would both hope and guess that in the current conjuncture — as the crisis ramifies and openings for direct struggle present themselves — that inflation of poetry's political force would start to fade. I think that in some places it has. But not so much. Instead we get Bifo Berardi, who is in every way a lovely guy, saying "the revolution will be neither peaceful nor violent—it will be linguistic, or will not be at all." Or at least that's from the short description in his new book, which I assume he wrote or authorized. Really, it's embarrassing. 

Now I realize that the happy resolution that lets everyone walk away from this feeling okay is to say, well, we should all do both, should have a strongly politicized practice and also engage in more direct forms of struggle. This is always the magic resolution. It’s okay to vote for Obama despite knowing what we know because we plan to do all kinds of other political work, pressure from below, on the streets organizing. But in my life I haven't much seen this. The people who think voting matters think it matters enough; they don't do that much else, as best I can tell. Except for maybe take positions, say stuff. In practice, in my experience, it's most often one or the other. And if that's the case, I'd rather write flower poems or whatever all else, and get out there and fight, in Exacrheia and in the schools of Santiago, in Mahalla and in downtown Oakland. Better that than making mistakes about how much political force our poems have. 

Someone said that the act of pure poetry calls the unpaid debts of history back into question. I'm not sure that's poems, right now. It might have been at a different moment, but that's not my sense of the present. But here you are: convince me otherwise! 

BA: There is a difference between no prescription for writing and the position that people should write about anything they want. In the contradiction between poetry and political efficacy, no prescription for writing neither contributes to nor detracts from poetry's potentials for empowerment to political efficacy, while the position that people should write about anything they want detracts from poetry’s potentials for empowerment to political efficacy by encouraging depoliticizing pluralism. A politicized poetry requires immanent politicized direction: prescribing “[w]rit[ing] poems about flowers […] as long as you’re [engaging in militant political action]” is a “magic resolution” of this contradiction. In Chris Nealon’s lines, in the fraction you present as exemplary of “his masterwork ‘The Dial’” in your introduction to your recent portfolio, “The Insurrectionary Turn”: “let me mention what my friends were up against // First: other poets // the ones who’ve always said it was arrogant to have a politics […] Then: the police […] Finally capital.” From the position of poetry, poetry, the police, and capital are widening concentric circles of political confrontation.

In contrast to your experience that people either privilege politicized writing practices or more direct forms of struggle, leading you to decline theorizing the former, my recent experience has precisely been their mutual empowerment. Sublating the last 40 years of politicized writing practices empowered me to engage in more direct forms of struggle, enabled in recent years. Politicized writing practices adequate to the present begin with the insistence on extrapoetic political struggle. It’s mutually empowering to advance them dialectically.

My efforts in response to your “Georgic” arguments, agreeing with emphasizing political economy toward a reading of totality, is to advance the implications of that reading toward writing the presently absent aesthetics that can confront political economic totality, which I also agree is the only serious present question for poetry. My current poetic project, The Totality Cantos: An Investigation of Epistemological Totality, specifies in its title that it is not yet that absent aesthetics, yet has other politicized potentials including providing the scale and resources toward writing that aesthetics.

While declining to theorize politicized writing practices, you do make gestures to aesthetic value, as in declaring “The Dial” Chris’ “masterwork” for “captur[ing] [the] complicated and uneven shift [of the last year or two’s leaping of poets into direct political antagonisms and the global economic catastrophe] most eloquently.” I’m interested in an argument for its mastery, and given your portfolio’s emphasis on the contemporary and its turn, the poem’s dominant use of over-40-years-old Frank O’Hara technique ought to be addressed. Relatedly, I found it wanting that the portfolio’s poetries were ambiguously selected as products of “this exposure, this opening, this Insurrectionary Turn” without addressing why they are exemplary. 

JC: Ah, but I haven't done anything like "prescribing “[w]rit[ing] poems about flowers […] as long as you’re [engaging in militant political action]." 

I don't know how many ways I can say this. I'm not opposed to theorizing a politicized poetry. I'm not opposed to politicized poetry. I have watched, over the last 40 years, the political efficacy of poetry qua poetry be systematically exaggerated. To my measure, it has been at the expense of other political engagements. 

Now, there are good reasons for this. I wouldn't change that history. But history itself has changed—the situation has changed. There are openings for non-discursive interventions that weren't there in the United States in 1979, 1985, 2000. I believe in the possibility of those interventions. I'd like to see the poets fighting, and organizing, and engaging themselves directly in political struggle. I'd like to see that for non-poets too. It's certainly my ambition for myself. It's well and good to say, ah, politicized writing practices and direct antagonism advance together. If they do for you, Brian, that's fantastic. Most of the "poetry of Occupy," as they say, was written by people who were not much involved in the organizational work, the provision of food, the security, the building of barricades, the cleaning of pots. 

I love poetry. But I feel if we lose a few poems — of any stripe — and gain a few new political practices, I'm okay with that.  

BA: You expressed the position to “Write poems about flowers […] as long as you’re [engaging in militant political action]” in the Maisonneuve interview I quoted at this conversation’s beginning. If you advocated political struggle with no comment regarding writing, I wouldn’t have issue and I agree. But as I differentiated in my previous message, in advocating political struggle in the contradiction between poetry and political efficacy, which I’ll take up in your realignment of my initial presented contradiction regarding your own theorizing and lack of in reading and writing practices, you expose yourself to critique on those terms.

Diminishing poetry to advocate political struggle, repeating a position in your 2012 piece co-written with Juliana Spahr to “give a lot of our time to other matters, and […] write less poetry,” is uncompelling for bracketing poetry’s empowering potentials as its argument for extrapoetic political struggle is admirable. I want to emphasize statements in that piece embedded in service to that conclusion, that “a great deal of the thinking and the motivation that got [poets engaged in political struggle] came from being a poet” and that “writing poems is one possibility in trying to figure out what is needed.”

These statements are more closely related to your and Juliana’s 95 Cent Skool’s statement in 2010, which “beg[an] with the assumption that poetry has a role to play in the larger political and intellectual sphere of contemporary culture, and that any poetry which subtracts itself from such engagements is no longer of interest. ‘Social poetics’ is not a settled category, and does not necessarily refer to poetry espousing a social vision. It simply assumes that the basis of poetry is not personal expression or the truth of any given individual, but shared social struggle.” I agreed with this position and launched my magazine ARMED CELL at the 95 Cent Skool’s sequel, the Durruti Free Skool, in 2011: the magazine stated its aim “to be […] a site for the study necessary for executing political actions.” In my sustained editorial argument I’ve continued to publish the poetries I’ve found to be most empowering for being self-conscious of their writing practices in tandem with participations in contemporary social struggles. The last 40 years of politicized writing practices are to be sublated and should not detain us.

It seems that a difference between us is that in the contradiction between politicized writing practices and direct antagonism, I regard them as mutually empowering while you feel that you must choose direct antagonism. In your paraphrase “politicized writing practices and direct antagonism advance together” of my “It’s mutually empowering to advance [politicized writing practices and direct antagonism] dialectically,” I want to specify that dialectic as empowering for subjects, and not an autonomously advancing historical dialectic. The dialectic firstly empowers me, and I seek to manifest that empowerment in my writing, editing of comrades, and direct antagonisms in order to make contributions to test them socially and empower others, as others’ contributions have empowered me. Subjects construct history.

Since you seem to be more interested in extrapoetic political struggle than writing practices, I’m interested in what defines kinds of struggle as adequate to the present for you, as you’ve stated voting and poetry not to be, and specifics on your sense of present openings for struggle. 

JC: "[I]n advocating political struggle in the contradiction between poetry and political efficacy, which I’ll take up in your realignment of my initial presented contradiction regarding your own theorizing and lack of in reading and writing practices…" — I'm not sure I follow this. But I admire your inquisitorial zeal, your rage for a certain kind of internal consistency!

Actually, I want to turn things around. You've been generous in along questions and I should turn some back on you. I get how, if one assumes that some kinds of poetry are "empowering for subjects," one might then spend a good bit of time worrying over which is the right kind to do all that empowering. And I confess I want this to be true. But my own theorizing and historical analysis indicates to me a couple of things that I have tried to say as clearly as I am able. One, your assumption is not a break from but a continuation of the assumptions of the left-theoretical wing (if you'll allow me) of North American poetry in the post-Fordist era, the limits of which I have already discussed. Two, I think we find ourselves in a meaningfully changed political situation, where discursive interventions (or "empowerment") have less traction than they might have had before — because of the material character of the crisis, which is far more immediately one of political economy than was the period around 1968 in the west. So I have laid out why I am skeptical about the relationship between poetry and political efficacy just now. Why — this is my question, finally — why do you assume a relation? On what grounds? What is it about poetry and our present situation which leads you to believe it is "empowering" in ways adequate to our situation? How is your position different from the positions taken by the left-theoretical wing of North America since the seventies? 

And maybe a sub-question, or terminological one. I don't think we are using the word "dialectical" in the same way. When I use it, I refer to the relation between two elements in a contradiction that constitutes them as a unity, such that one can't exist without the other — but always, as Marx says, "a moving contradiction" wherein the dynamic of the two pushes in a direction, has a tendency internal to its contradiction. I can't really see how that's at play in "It’s mutually empowering to advance [politicized writing practices and direct antagonism] dialectically" — since, for example, one could do away with politicized writing practices without abolishing political antagonism, and moreover the relationship there isn't one of will, wherein one chooses to "advance" these elements together. So you see I am just asking my question again: is the relationship dialectical, in a materialist sense? If not, how do you understand that relationship? 

(best on a rainy Sunday,  

Joshua) 

BA: The contradiction in your theorizing and lack of in reading and writing practices is as much your work in itself as its accentuation in my relation to it: having taken up your concern with totality, I needed a more systematic writing practice than “people write about what they can’t escape.”

I have a different reading of the “limits [you’ve] discussed” of “the left-theoretical wing […] of North American poetry in the post-Fordist era” in “legitimat[ing] the capacity of poetry for intervention” as “com[ing] largely from a misreading of materiality routed through certain poststructuralisms […] such that discourse is imagined to be a material thing, existing at the same substrate as political economy.” I don’t observe in this poetry a dominant poststructuralist imagining of discourse equating political economy so much as an underemphasis on political economy and that the imagination for intervention concerned social ideological composition rather than extrapoetic direct antagonism.

In “The Political Economy of Poetry,” Ron Silliman, emphasizing cultural production over capital proper, wrote, “The potential contents of the text are only actualized according to their reception, which depends on the social composition of the receivers [….] Poetry […] reflects struggle […] as much [as] between audiences as […] between poets (or, to be precise, it is one between social formations).” Bruce Andrews is the poet of this era most concerned with totality but emphasized ideology over political economy: for instance, in “Total Equals What” and the recently made available “Rewriting Society:Poetics, the Self, Ideology,” in which he most directly registers his antipathy with poststructuralist anti-totalization. The concerns with social composition and totality continue to be essential, but to be adequate to the changed political situation’s crisis, more immediately one of political economy with openings for direct antagonism, poetry’s social composing needs to be in the provision of resources for subjects empowering direct antagonism and totality needs to be read through political economy. Poetry that can empower direct antagonism in this situation becomes more important rather than less: I regard poetry as useful study materials for engaging in direct antagonism and not merely direct antagonism’s products. My first attempt to theorize this and distinguish my position from positions since the seventies was in 2011’s "Poetry and Militancy," reflecting on the University of California protests that began in 2009 in their inertia and my first books written while a participant: “Poets must become militants themselves [….] [W]hat operations of poems might be useful for militancy? […] Provision of arsenals of theory and experience to form a saturated structure from which to issue attacks.” Advancing the presently absent aesthetics that can confront political economic totality would be included in this theoretical arsenal, the most urgent work in poetry to do.

I agree that my use of the dialectic above is not quite right: I only want to emphasize that concerning politics, poetry can empower subjects to direct antagonism and that direct antagonism is to be the principal aspect. 

JC: Those are useful statements, and I think they bring us toward some clarifications. But I must note that my fundamental question remains open. You again assert, "poetry can empower subjects to direct antagonism and that direct antagonism is to be the principal aspect." But what is your argument for believing that assertion? And is it a universal argument, about the intrinsic nature of poetry? Or is it a historical argument; is there something about this present moment that lends poetry that capacity? 

I find no fault in Language writing for being directly poststructuralist. I think that the heroic attempt to square the circle, to synthesize poststructuralist propositions and historical materialism, was in almost every sense the necessary intellectual path in that post-68 moment. But the limits of that synthesis are something I have tried to be thoughtful about. I actually think you affirm my position, though you reformulate it slightly. In your words, there was "an underemphasis on political economy" which allowed "the imagination for intervention concerned social ideological composition." Ron SIlliman "emphasiz[ed] cultural production over capital proper." Bruce Andrews "is the poet of this era most concerned with totality but emphasized ideology over political economy." I guess I would just say, yes, that is a way of saying what I meant to say: that their analysis of poetry's political status, of the political effects of certain formal practices, exaggerated those effects to give them a kind of primacy they don't in truth have. I think this exaggeration is routed through a political-economizing, as it were, of poetic form — I hardly need to cite the passages in which semiotic categories are aligned with commodities and etc. I know you know them well. 

And for all that, I would not have Language writing be any different. I think it more or less rescued US poetry, with its inventions, its commitments, and its thorn-in-the-side-of-banality zeal. I'm just registering the specificity of a break with that moment (rather than a modulation). For me the break is in the world. 

And that's the position to which I'll hew. I believe in thinking the totality. But that's a great distance from thinking the totality into being. The totality is the form of the unfolding of the contradictions of class society at any given historical moment. In your model, thought (for which poetry seems to be exemplary) necessarily precedes action: "Provision of arsenals of theory and experience to form a saturated structure from which to issue attacks.” Now in many ways I like this formulation. It's pretty deft in gesturing at the entanglements of thought and action, how we can't help but produce a false separation between the two but should rightly grasp the ways that each is always arising out of the other. I see that you are not intent on providing recipes for action, but something like an intellectual ambience from which actions are more likely to leap in effective ways. I like that. It's optimistic, but I like it. 

And yet, it still seems abstract to me. It still has an odd priority. The kind of theorizing you prefer still seems to me to do a lot of predeciding. It says theories are already in place before the action. It still generates "poet" as an autonomous role; in this model, a poet's contribution could still be this provision of theory, this production of a saturated structure, from which others could then "issue attacks." Now I know you will want to say, well, in our model, it should be the poets who are also engaging in the direct struggles, having done their assigned homework saturating structures. But in reality this doesn't necessarily happen. This kind of division of intellectual and manual labor happens. You get a lot of poets saying, well, my poems are my contribution — poetry retains a certain elite status.

I still want to affirm that poetry, just like theory, is immanent to given struggles. Poetry isn't the saturated structure from which they arise — though history is, history containing some poetry, to invert old Ez — but arises from struggle. As a proposition, what I am saying is not particularly new. But the situation is new. The situation we are living through now is new. The new poetry won't present itself to us because we have theorized it correctly, but because the situation is new and we have entered into it alive. 

And my optimism is that we can get to a place where there is new poetry, but no poets. People will write poetry. But the autonomous role of the poet, which as it exists now is a consequence of this historical division of manual and intellectual level — that role won't exist. Now I should say, at last, that you keep insisting this account of poetry, where it is immanent to struggle, is a "lack of" theorizing poetry as political practice. I'm not sure I agree. It's actually a pretty explicit theorizing. It simply isn't prescriptive. It's a theory of poetry and political antagonism and their relation, not a theory of what kind of poetry poets should write.   

BA: I’m more interested in an historical argument than a universal argument for asserting that “poetry can empower subjects to direct antagonism” because I’m most interested in the political novelty of recent years for present practice. My argument arises from my own experience of being motivated to direct antagonism by poetry and its historical political concerns cultivated in capital’s margins, and my consonant observation with yours in “The Insurrectionary Turn” that in recent years “there has been a striking leap of poets into direct political antagonism,” to which I would add that poets have frequently been key actors. “Poetry and Militancy” is an historical argument situated in “the post-2008 market crash’s systemic re-exposure of capitalism’s brutality at the level of everyday life and resultant re-ignition of political imagination and praxis for the efficacy of activism, call[ing] for a greater insistence on poetry to contribute to militancy.” As you emphasized, theory is immanent to struggles, my theorizing first arising from the experience of the University of California protests. Due to these historical experiences and observations, it seems worth theorizing their intuitions to advance the novel contributions poetry may have for subjects in contemporary struggles. It’s possible that its contributions are limited to a certain abstraction: accurately delimiting its potential enables its full utility and the exceeding of it for other activities as useful.

I don’t observe an alternative theorizing tendency for writing adequate for wholly breaking with Language writing: more is lost in forcing a break than modulating at this time. Potentially useful tendencies should be mastered as they arise. I agree “in thinking the totality” and not “thinking the totality into being”: I’m not advocating the latter.

I agree that “in reality” the “division of intellectual and manual labor happens […] [that] [y]ou get a lot of poets saying, well, my poems are my contribution”: may those tendencies be ceaselessly criticized to the dustbin. “Poetry and Militancy” includes, “If elements of poetry posture to be concerned with politics at all, they need to contribute to thinking and acting toward [militancy] or they are useless at best and reactionary at worst,” as a contribution to their critique and a motivating self-critique.

I disagree with the dichotomy in “The new poetry won't present itself to us because we have theorized it correctly, but because the situation is new and we have entered into it alive.” Theorizing correctly is the aim to historical self-consciousness, to enter the present situation most accurately, including poetic practice adequate to the present.

My insistence was on your lack of theorizing writing practices, which you confirm as a lack of prescription. So your theorizing of poetry as political practice is toward a future post-poet society. Orientation toward the future is only useful insofar as it directs present practice: my advocacy for prescription is that it is agency for present practice, part of a writer’s activity toward historical self-consciousness.  

JC:  Thanks for extending the generous offer to close this conversation. I worry we have gone on a bit long trying to surmount a real impasse. It may be (warning: here comes the Easy Way Out) that we are simply using the term "theorize" differently. But maybe not, as I still can't see it.  

From here, you still seem to be offering a prescription based on an assumption about the political efficacy of poetry which is in turn based on anecdote, on "[your] own experience of being motivated to direct antagonism by poetry and its historical political concerns." You then announce a "historical argument situated in “the post-2008 market crash’s systemic re-exposure of capitalism’s brutality at the level of everyday life and resultant re-ignition of political imagination and praxis for the efficacy of activism.” That all sounds right, descriptively: economic catastrophe, intensified exposure to immiseration among the poetried classes, new or restored politicization and practice. We have both stood somewhere in the midst of that, for sure. But then you conclude, "call[ing] for a greater insistence on poetry to contribute to militancy." That's a call. An affirmation.

But it doesn't tell me how poetry does this, or why we should believe poetry empowers anyone, or contributes to militancy, aside from your personal account. Perhaps more significantly, it doesn't speak to the particulars of the present situation, and whether it bears an underlying relationship to poetry's efficacy. Instead, basically, you offer a historical invariant: poetry does this. Things are especially intense now, you indicate, so poetry should do this especially intensely. As far as I can tell, that's not a theory. 

The theory on which I hang my hat is a version of that good ol' hat-rack, historical materialism. This theory suggests that theory itself is immanent to struggle, and so is poetry — that politicized, political poetry will arise from antagonism, from its development. Theory doesn't prescribe, in that sense. Theory is the opposite of prescription. I think we share the idea that poetry can itself be a theory of the historical moment, and perhaps even of the struggle. But this will be true in so far as it arises immanently. 

And I feel curiously optimistic in this unfolding. Which is to say, while I am open to all kinds of poems, including the dread flower poem, I believe that if we involve ourselves directly in the central antagonisms of our time, that it will change our poems. Probably not so many flower poems, or maybe really excellent flower poems. We will get more and better politics in our poems not because we should, or because that's a desirable goal, but because we have so involved ourselves. We are seeing this already, I think. That said, what a pleasure to take a break from that involvement, and from the miserable shit of labor, and the lovely scraping work of friendship and of love...what a pleasure to take a break from that to read poems with you and Lyn!

Friday, Februray 1st with Lyn Hejinian, Joshua Clover, and Brian Ang

Studio One First Fridays presents 
Lyn Hejinian, Joshua Clover, and Brian Ang

Join us for a reading on Friday, February 1st, beginning at 7:30 PM. Snacks and beverages will be provided at the event. 

 Many thanks to our emcee for the evening, Robert Andrew Perez!

Lyn Hejinian is the author of numerous books, including most recently The Book of a Thousand Eyes (Omnidawn Books, 2012) and The Wide Road, written in collaboration with Carla Harryman (Belladonna, 2010). In spring 2013, Wesleyan University Press will publish A Guide to Poetics Journal: Writing in the Expanded Field 1982-1998, co-edited by Hejinian and Barrett Watten, an anthology of works on key issues in poetics first published in Poetics Journal. And in fall 2013 Wesleyan will republish her best-known book, My Life, in an edition that will include the related My Life in the Nineties. In addition to literary writing, editing, and translating, Hejinian has in recent years been involved in anti-privatization activism at the University of California, Berkeley, where she teaches.

Joshua Clover is a writer and political antagonist living in the Bay Area. Recent work includes essays on Alain Badiou's The Rebirth of History, the relationship between riots and strikes, and "Georgic for the World System," on the poetics of geo-economic transformation. He teaches contemporary literature and Marxism at UC Davis.

 

Brian Ang is the author of Pre-Symbolic, Communism, Paradise Now, and the poetry generator THEORY ARSENAL. His current poetic project is The Totality Cantos: An Investigation of Epistemological Totality. He edits ARMED CELL in Oakland, California.

Memory as Motion: A Reflection by RJ Ingram

Memory as Motion: A reflection on Rusty Morrison’s After Urgency (Tupelo Press, 2012) and giovanni singleton’s Ascension (Counterpath Press, 2011)

by RJ Ingram

The best word I’ve found to articulate the conversation between giovanni singleton and Rusty Morrison’s poetry is devotional. As both poets spend an entire book meditating and ruminating on personal topics, interesting and inviting connections draw themselves between the ways singleton and Morrison use poetry as a daily practice. 

Ascension, singleton’s first book is built around a daybook “Ear of the Behearer,” written immediately after the death of musician and spiritual leader Alice Coltrane. This particular sequence, with much variation in form, never seems to scatter too far from the meditation singleton is having. The fourth poem/day ends with “one part winter. one part parting. // leaves far from gathered.” While contemplative in tone, this passage evokes the complicated desire to piece reason into death, an instinct that singleton seems to be trying to eschew later in the sequence when she says “let me tell you / where i’ve been // before the / tide turns.” (poem/day 13). Here singleton has assumed more of a passive role in the meditation process, letting events happen and recede without distress or a refrained desire to undo, while still retaining the poet’s desire to record and replay.

As Coltrane’s transition through the bardo (states between death and rebirth) nears end (or beginning?) the shapes of singleton’s poems continue to restructure their possibilities and constraints. When challenged to write daily, the poet either finds solace in repetition or inventing new ways to see, speak. Short lyrical columns grow into steadier squarer stanzas— aphorisms, prose, and concrete poetry are all present—and as “Ear of The Beahearer” comes to a close, the I Ching instructs singleton to “write what you know.” But singleton is writing what she knows: absence, memory, and identity.

singleton’s devotion leaves her to record the arcs between the stages of Coltrane’s journey. As a daily practice, poetry can inhabit a an awareness of multiple times in a single space, as well as challenge multiple spaces throughout a single lapse of time. Here, a daily poet’s notebook records the journey of both the poet and the world. singleton’s “Ear of The Behearer” not only records her journey with Coltrane, but record’s the devotional poet’s journey into the inner realm of craft and connection with the Other. As the devotional poet travels further inward, memory and identity become the modes most accessible. 

Rusty Morrison also wrote from these modes of mourning in her book After Urgency (winner of Tupelo Press’ Dorset Prize, selected by Jane Hirshfield). Like singleton, Morrison’s devotional practice led her to explore absence. The entire book occupies the spaces left after the deaths of Morrison’s parents. While singleton’s meditation process led her to craft a daybook, the forms recycled in Morrison’s After Urgency resemble more of a series of ruminations. After Urgency is a tapestry spun from five occasionally similar serial poems that can be read either individually or at the same time, as the book suggests. Just as Morrison is left wandering between the particulars of her daily life, her poems wander around spaces unwilling to let memories pass.

Examples of Morrison’s recursive desire to revisit and remain revisited by space can become haunting; moreover as the sections layer onto themselves like days just after the loss of loved ones, the poems double back, slowly becoming seemingly ‘the same.’ In the re-occurring poem “Aftermath,” for instance, readers are brought to not only the right margin, but to the bottom of the page as these frequent single line stanzas weave through major sections of the book. Here, Morrison reminds us that breaking also leads to growth, to splinters that spread the self. Take the poem “Multiplication,” for example, in which Morrison is reminded of her mother in the space between self and her mother’s scarf:

A fabric shot through with veins.

As black lint curls, embryonic,

from the black knit scarf on my mother’s shelf.

As the scarf becomes a friction that hurts my eyes.

As the past’s frequency and the future’s finality—the always

and the never again of my mother wearing her scarf—coexist here.

Not a hiddenness. Not a warning, like “touch” or “don’t.”

But a taunt, from the purity of isolation,”

The friction of the scarf’s stitches inhibits the image (or lack of image) of the speaker’s mother wearing her scarf just as the stitches of “Aftermath” bring the reader in and out of Morrison’s self in absence. Wreckage is a word to use to describe the scarf here, but it isn’t the correct word. Morrison isn’t wrecked in her absence, she is simply surviving, and survival for the devotional poet coexists with creation.

The title of another of After Urgency’s cycles invokes singleton’s desire to record her own journey with Coltrane’s. “An intersection of leaves not likeness” seems to summarize what both poets return to poem after poem: the desire to record in that space just after.

A Conversation: Dora Malech and Michael Leong

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Conversation

Dora Malech & Michael Leong 

discuss experimentation, loneliness, and play

Michael Leong: I was looking at your book Say So and was struck by the cover image, which comes from Laurel Nakadate's photograph "Heart Shadow." The image seems a particularly apt introduction to Say So since the word "heart" and its cognates appear at least nine times in the first twenty pages of the book. I was wondering if you can talk about your relationship to Nakadate's vision of contemporary society or the ways in which your writing is informed by either the visual arts or non-literary sources.  

Dora Malech: I believe that Laurel and I share overlapping obsessions in art and life (and art as life and life as art). I certainly wouldn't presume to speak for her (though there are some great interviews with her in The Believer, The Rumpus, and elsewhere, in which she speaks for herself), but I relate to the balance she strikes between humor and heartbreak, as well as her returns to the tensions between observing and being observed, and the body as locus (of power, betrayal, pleasure, strength). I had an amazing conversation with my friend (and wonderful poet) Marc Rahe a little while back about the "gaze" and the "stare." I think of the gaze and the stare quite often. 

As far as visions of contemporary society, I could go on and on, but in relation to Nakadate's work, I think an element of our work certainly explores a media-saturated culture. We're really in a constant state of rubber-necking, gaping at the catastrophe(s) on our televisions, our computers, our phones. "Smart" is a kind of phone. "Reality" is a kind of television. What effect does this have on the contemporary "gaze," the contemporary "stare"? How does this constant attention (or inattention) bring us closer or pull us apart? As for the heart, I certainly return again and again to that unfashionable site of unfashionable sentiment. My consciousness is located in the body as much as the mind (or the body as mind and mind as body).

My writing is quite informed by the visual arts and non-literary sources. I make visual art (painting, drawing), and I'm currently engaged in a project in which I'm trying to bring my poetry and my drawing into conversation on the page. I feel like my poetry (or really poetry in general) is a conversation, whether that's a conversation with the self, with an imagined reader, with a beloved, with another text, with ghosts and demons, or all of the above. I'm glad you brought up Laurel Nakadate's work, because she's both a good friend and an artist whose work I respect. I love that I look at her work and I can experience it aesthetically, but it also feels a little bit like a family photo album. Why should life and art not blur together like this, and become a back-and-forth conversation? I wrote poems in Say So that, while not directly addressed to Laurel, certainly incorporate moments of our shared life. Choosing a photo of hers as cover art seemed like a natural choice. And then she made a video piece that features poems of mine from Say So, so the conversation continued and continues. Lately, I've been engaged in a number of collaborative projects (with poet Kristin Kelly, filmmaker Jason Livingston, composer Jacob Cooper) and I find that I always return from my work with them with a different perspective on what poems can be and why I try to write them.

Thinking about poetry as conversation makes me want to ask you about your new book Cutting Time with a Knife, which uses T.S. Eliot's seminal essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" to begin its conversation, "etherizing" (as you say, echoing Eliot), the text and grafting on text from articles about the chemical elements. You call this work an "experiment," and I love that you're playing with our (I believe overly binary and reductive) literary distinctions between "experimental" poetry and "traditional" poetry by creating an actual "experiment" with the essay as your Frankenstein and you as the literary mad scientist. I'd love to hear your thoughts both on "experimentation," as it relates to your work, and also the question of "poem as conversation." With whom (Eliot?) or what (the "tradition"?) do you see this book as being in conversation?

ML: Great response.  The gaping at mediated catastrophe reminds me of Claudia Rankine’s hybrid text Don’t Let Me Be Lonely: An American Lyric, which begins with Césaire’s powerful admonition that “life is not a spectacle, a sea of grief is not a proscenium.”  Certainly the rampant proliferation of monitors (on TVs, on computers, and on phones) has raised spectatorship to a new level.  And your question of whether our hyper-attention to mass and social media “bring[s] us closer or pull[s] us apart” makes me think of the title of Sherry Turkle’s recent book Alone Together: Why We Expect More From Technology and Less From Each Other.  Turkle suggests that new media technologies (such as smart phones) and social networking tools (such as Facebook) are creating the illusion of constant connectedness, though, in actuality, they are inducing a kind of computerized autism, a withdrawal from meaningful social relations.  As a consequence, our media-saturated culture and the virtualization of our social lives are eroding what Turkle calls "the rewards of solitude."  Such rewards are, of course, connected to play and to artistic activity.  The capacity for play--in D.W. Winnicott’s somewhat paradoxical formulation--is predicated on “being alone in the presence of someone else.”  It seems to me that writers, poets, and artists are exactly in this (more rewarding) position of aloneness-yet-togetherness.  And even though writing tends to take place in isolation, language is a resolutely social and collective medium.  Writers, in this sense, are always already participating in some kind of collective conversation whenever they put one word next to another.  I’m thinking about how your writing plays with and transforms idiomatic phrases in such an interesting and clever way—to take up your notion of poetry as conversation (which I like very much), it seems to me when you say something like “K.O. to my O.T. and bait to my switch, I crown / you one-trick pony to my one-horse town,” you’re not only in conversation with the poem’s specific addressee but with the delicious demoticism that keeps language fresh.  I would be interested to hear you say more about the various idiomatic registers and idiomatic torquings that are possible in poetry when it is in conversation with the self, with an imagined reader, with a beloved, with another text, with ghosts and demons...

My publisher, John Yau, wrote an interesting (and creative) review of Laurel Nakadate’s 2011 “Only the Lonely” show that was at PS1; he said, "By and large, Americans cannot stand solitude, which is why they hate people who are obviously misfits and most likely deeply lonely. We prefer narcissists, people who overcome their emptiness by being self-serving, ambitious, and obsequious. They can only be productive if they are around people. We like greasy palms rather than the dirty hands of those who spend most of their time alone (artists and poets, for example).”  It seems to me that the fun part about collaboration is that you are able to get your hands dirty, as it were, with someone else and that the “presence of someone else” (in a Winnicottian conception of art-making as play) is more specified and delineated.  It sounds like you’re involved with a lot of wonderful-sounding collaborative projects…do say more about those if you want, about the different perspectives that collaboration affords. 

I actually see all writing as collaborative.  In a talk I gave last spring, I said, “whether we like it or not, before we open our mouths to speak or put pen to page, all of us are already caught up in a vast tissue of intertextuality, in shifting networks of discourse. This is to say that all writing is fundamentally collaborative whether or not such writing is explicitly imagined as an intentional act of multiple authors.”  I think Eliot’s “Tradition and the Individual Talent” was groundbreaking in its acknowledgement that texts are better understood not in themselves but intertextually, and he anticipated Bakhtin, Kristeva, Barthes, Bloom et al in significant ways. 

Cutting Time with a Knife started simply as a conversation with Eliot. I was thinking, late at night in bed, about Eliot’s phrase “the mind of the poet is the shred of platinum”—it occurs in “Tradition and the Individual Talent” at the point when Eliot reaches for a chemical analogy to explain his famous theory of impersonality. Just as the catalyst platinum is able to effect a tremendous reaction (the creation of sulphurous acid) when in the presence of oxygen and sulphur dioxide, the poet’s mind, so the logic goes, should be able to spark a unique fusion of feelings and emotions yet remain unchanged. I had thought: “Why just the poet’s mind?” and “Why just platinum?” So I started to create those variations: “The heart of the poet is the honeycomb of hydrogen,” etc. But the cutting up of the Wikipedia articles about the chemical elements put me in dialogue with a variety of traditions—not only the legacy of avant-garde appropriation (from Tzara to Burroughs) but to our general culture of remixability, which includes (obviously) DJ remixes, YouTube mash-ups, and pulp parodies like Pride and Prejudice and Zombies. And because of its typographic play and mise-en-page, CTWAK is in conversation with traditions of visual and concrete poetry.     

I wholeheartedly agree that the binary between "experimental" and "traditional" poetry is a reductive one (Eliot, after all, taught us that the old and the new, the traditional and the innovative, exist in a dialectical relationship). I tend to enjoy and seek out poetry that’s labeled as “experimental,” though “experimental” is a tricky word in terms of literary history—I’m less interested in, for example, Zola’s appropriation of “experimental method” than in traditions of modernist experimentation. My own sense of experimentation has to do with putting things together that shouldn’t go together…or things that go together in odd and oblique ways—like mixing Eliot with the periodic table, mixing the language of literature with the language of science. I’m interested in what we can call a practice of radical concoction and a certain aesthetics of extremity.   

I’m also struck by the various synonyms for the term “experimental” that currently circulate—“innovative,” “avant-garde,” “postmodern,” or “post-avant.”  All of these terms have particular contexts whether they are scientific, literary historical, political, or sociological. “Experimental” certainly applies well to CTWAK because of the scientific connotations of the term, though I, in general, like “innovative” and it’s meaning of “to alter or renew.” I’d be interested to hear your own thoughts about the matter of experimentation/traditionalism as it relates to form.  You use, for example, the sonnet, one of the most traditional of forms, but in your hands, it seems like a great vehicle for linguistic experimentation.      

DM: The capacity for "play" that you brought up earlier ("predicated on 'being alone in the presence of someone else,'" a turn of phrase I love), and the erosion of "'the rewards of solitude'" are definitely ideas that dovetail with my concerns right now. It made me think of psychologist Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi's idea of "flow"; I've noticed that I can let the constant state of plugged-in so-called "interconnectedness" really affect my writing process, and usually not for the better. Rather than immersing in a state of creative flow, I can end up in a kind of holding pattern, refreshing my browser, both literally and figuratively. In my own process right now, form--both "received" form and nonce form--can be a way for me to move through the electronic noise and tap back into a state of flow. It's form as a way of combating my own frayed attention span, as a return to immersion and obsession. For example, right now, I'm working with anagramming in my poems, finding lines inside of lines and phrases inside of phrases. It's definitely a kind of "play," but I hope to enact a kind of "alter[ing] or renew[ing]." I love form because it lets me tap into language; I'm not trying to "say something," I'm just talking to language and letting language speak back. 

I've been reading Franco "Bifo" Berardi's new book The Uprising, and it seems related to some of what we've been discussing (although I do have a tendency to relate whatever I'm talking about to whatever I'm reading right now!). He's discussing the global economic crisis, and calling for a kind of linguistic revolution, calling for "poetry" (I think he's using the word more broadly than we usually do): language that "cannot be reduced to information." I remember a Q&A I attended recently, at which Kenneth Goldsmith said that he doesn't have a "readership," he has a "thinker-ship." I think that Goldsmith's position is really interesting and provocative, but I can't help but feel more affinity with the somewhat romantic (Romantic?) sense of poetry as an irreducibility. (That said, I think that Bifo's scope is much broader than any one "poet"; I don't want it to sound like I think that I personally am taking up the charge!) Correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe you're defending (or just defended?) for your PhD. Orbiting around these questions of the irreducibility of poetry vs. the "thinker-ship," can you talk a little about how your critical work or thinking relates to your "creative" work? If this is all too nebulous, let me know and I'll clarify.

ML: Yes--I defended my dissertation (at long last!) in October and just had it accepted, in fact, by the graduate school today.  My critical work relates to my creative work in various ways...sometimes both endeavors don't match up easily and seem antagonistic, but my creative work is definitely informed by the vast and diverse amounts of reading I do as a literary scholar.  I've learned a lot of different ways to read (and interact with) texts and that has really broadened my conception of what's possible when fashioning a literary artifact.     

The Berardi sounds interesting.  I like the idea of language that "cannot be reduced to information." It reminds me of a quote from Wittgenstein that Marjorie Perloff likes to cite: "Do not forget that a poem, although it is composed in the language of information, is not used in the language-game of giving information." And, of course, the very notion of a "language-game" is what allows Goldsmith to present a work such as Day, which is composed completely in the language of a newspaper, as poetry, as literature. It's interesting that you bring up Goldsmith--not too long ago I published a somewhat polemical piece on conceptualism in Modern Language Studies that engages with some of his ideas. I agree with you that Goldsmith is a great provocateur, and he's right to challenge the cult and ideology of creativity.  But I think what he means by "thinkership"--and "thinking" in general--is quite narrow. What Goldsmith calls "thinking" (which is linked to his "non-interventionist" conceptualism) is in actuality a version of critique--and critique is only one aspect of thinking. I like how Rodolphe Gasché, who works in the tradition of continental philosophy, conceives of thinking as a variegated activity that draws on not only critique but theory and philosophy as well. My ideal version of reading involves not so much a clear-cut critique ("critique" comes from the Indo-European root "skeri-" which means "to cut, separate, or sift") but a more polymorphous thinking. I also think appropriation and conceptualism can coexist with a kind of Romanticism (which is why I'm interested in surrealism, which Breton called the "prehensile tail" of Romanticism)...I'm interested why you have the question mark after the term "Romantic" ... And I love anagramming as well, by the way...

I like what you said about "flow"--I was thinking about that longer piece that you read at Studio One earlier this month and if you wanted to talk about your "frayed attention span" in relation to sustaining a more extended form.    

DM: Congratulations on your successful defense! And I'll have to check out your piece on conceptualism. The longer piece I read at Studio One felt like it pointed me in a direction that I'm still pursuing in some of what I'm working on now. I wrote that poem over a long stretch of time by a kind of process of accretion, collecting fragments of language and images without pushing them to be in conversation. I just collected. Then, I ended up finishing the poem in a really concentrated few days staying at a friend's house. I became totally immersed in introducing these bits and pieces of language to each other, and trying to find the order in the chaos, without forcibly imposing some arbitrary order. I felt like I learned a lot and stretched myself when I stopped trying to make my language "be a poem" too soon. So the process of sustaining that more extended form seemed to let me tap into two different kinds of flow. There are so many more directions I could take this conversation, and I've really enjoyed talking with you, but it's probably about time to wrap it up. Could you talk a little bit about what you're working on now? I was curious as to whether you're working on another book-length project like CTWAK? Thanks again for your insights.

ML: I’m a collagist by nature so I tend to write even short poems by a similar process of accretion and collection. I have a student right now who is very good at this method that you’re describing…I think it’s a good way to go. Certainly it can be inhibiting to sit down and try to self-consciously write “a poem” or to want certain language to “be poetic.” I had another student last year that accidently submitted several pages of notes to the workshop instead of the actual poem but that wound up being a fortuitous mistake since the notes were actually more compelling than the poem itself, precisely because the notes drew on a looser, aleatory energy and allowed the reader to discern the order in the chaos; that made for a richer aesthetic experience. I recently finished putting together a new poetry manuscript so right now I’m more focused on my critical writing (I’m working on some scholarly articles and revising my dissertation into a book project, and I also write book reviews for Hyperallergic). But I have a new poetry project that’s in the germination stage. In my mind I’m calling it “Li Po meets Oulipo.” It involves taking English translations of the Tang Dynasty poet Li Po and running them through Oulipian procedures. It’ll be book-length or chapbook-length. It was very nice talking about these issues with you, Dora…thanks to you as well!     

Friday, December 7th featuring poetry by Rusty Morrison, giovanni singleton, and Sarah Valentine plus music by Alberto Madueño

Come join us on Friday, December 7th at 7:30 PM 
for a night of poetry and music with poets Rusty Morrison, giovanni singleton, and Sarah Valentine, plus music by singer/songwriter Alberto Madueño!

Snacks and beverages will also be served at the event. 

Thanks for reading and we hope to see you there!

 Photo by William Bagnell

Rusty Morrison's -After Urgency- won Tupelo’s Dorset Prize, -Book of the Given– is available from Noemi Press, -the true keeps calm biding its story- won the Academy of American Poet’s James Laughlin Award, the Northern California Book Award, Ahsahta’s Sawtooth Prize, the DiCastagnola Award from Poetry Society of America. –Whethering- won the Colorado Prize for Poetry. She has received the Bogin, Hemley, Winner, and DiCastagnola Awards from The Poetry Society of America. Her poems and/or essays have appeared in, or are forthcoming from A Pubic Space, American Poetry Review, Boston Review, Kenyon Review, Lana Turner, Pleiades, VOLT. She is co-publisher of Omnidawn Publishing (www.omnidawn.com).

  Photo by Sarah Collins

giovanni singleton is founding editor of nocturnes (re)view of the literary arts, a critically acclaimed journal dedicated to experimental work by artists and writers of the African Diaspora and other contested spaces. Ascension (Counterpath Press), her debut collection, received the 81st California Book Award Gold Medal for poetry. She has been selected for inclusion in the Poetry Society of America’s biennial New American Poets series. Her work was featured in San Francisco’s 1st Visual Poetry and Performance Festival, on the building of Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco), and in Angles of Ascent: A Norton Anthology of Contemporary African American Poetry, Kindergarde: Avant-Garde Writing for Children, What I Say: Innovative Poetry by Black Writers in America, and I'll Drown My Book: Conceptual Writing by Women. She has taught poetry at the de Young Museum, Saint Mary's College, and Naropa University.

Sarah Valentine’s first book of translations, Into the Snow: Poems by Gennady Aygi, is a collection of poems translated from the Russian-language poetry of Chuvash poet Gennady Aygi (1934-2006).  Individual translations have been featured in the Two Lines anthology Some Kind of Beautiful Signal, as well as in journals such as diode, Circumference, and Redaction: Poetry and Poetics.  Sarah has a BA in Russian Studies and Creative Writing from Carnegie Mellon University and a PhD in Russian Literature from Princeton University.  She has received a Templeton Foundation grant for her research at Princeton University’s Center for the Study of Religion and a prestigious Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship in the Humanities at UCLA.  Sarah lives and Los Angeles and is currently a Visiting Assistant Professor at the University of California, Riverside, in the Department of Comparative Literature and Foreign Languages where she teaches Russian literature, comparative literature, film, and critical theory.  

 

Photo by Vicente Peñuela

Alberto Madueño has been playing and recording music for over a decade. Not concerned with advertising or satisfying any genre, his methods, instruments and techniques remain in a state of constant motion and redirection. Most recently, he has been active as a sound scrapper and creative adviser for the El Gato Film Collective, a teleological experiment group focused on blurring painting past what is still. He wants to be better than he is, always, he says. And that, the only way to do that is to keep working, long beyond the point of reason or explicit intent. He is affected by light. He wants more, and he often still wonders. Is there life on mars?