Rambling On: Latta, Notley, Art, Life
Sure hope I don’t count as the “self-satisfy’d constructivist” John Latta volleys against today, but it’s hard (& probably a mistake) not to read his quotation of Alice Notley on Steve Carey as a bit of gruff resistance to what I wrote here. From “Steve,” from Notley’s Coming After:
I write, in this essay, of the relation of poetry and life, the poet’s life: they go together and echo each other, sometimes one has depth when the other hasn’t (and vice versa). Steve (to continue in the present tense) lays his life on the line for and in his poetry, in order to write it properly. You have to give it something, everything actually, and I don’t know what the it is in that clause, which it is, poetry or life. Poetry isn’t a career, it’s much more exacting than that part of it…. If poetry isn’t, as the theory people say, or shouldn’t be about manufacturing a product, then poets such as Steve are the ones who should be given more attention. They aren’t, and not by the theorists. You can’t study him if you can’t easily get his books (products); if he doesn’t hang with a crowd of self-advertisers (theorists) telling you what his works mean and that he’s the only one; if his life is embarrassing or something, if it works according to its own (painful) rules. If you can’t separate the product from the producer, the poet from the life. I love Steve so I’m not impartial or detached or whatever that word; I don’t want to be that word; I don’t want to be a scientist about poetry—and I’m not just talking about my friend. I’m talking about poetry. It isn’t detachable. It’s mixed in with everything, even when it isn’t obviously being written; it’s consuming and if you’re a poet and you aren’t somewhat ravaged from that, there’s probably something wrong with your poetry.
Which is, as John notes, “a terrifyingly forthright crescendo and cri de cœur.” But I’d also call it a terrible confusion (amounting to slander) of the vices of professionalism with the virtues of manufacturing (from M.Fr. manufacture, from M.L. *manufactura, from L. manu, abl. of manus “hand” (see manual) + factura “a working”). The aim of the artist-as-maker is not to be “impartial” or “a scientist” about her work (unless you mean the kind of scientist who actually exists, and not the flimsy poetic effigy torched here.). The dream is unalienated labor, born out of everything you are, the kind that consumes and ravages before it lets you go. Professionalism is a whole other game: alienating one’s efforts for the sake of the market, whether that market is the collected listenership of NPR or a coterie of thirty on the Lower East Side.
> there’s probably something wrong
Wrong, no less for being said so forcefully.
And so we return to our discussion of be-ers, makers and knowers.
and so we return
Yes, that’s the point.
I’m intrigued that you don’t see her take on Myles as an application/development of the position you rejected in the selfsame paragraph. This is a very good question to ask about poems: “Why are some poets’ poems so much more alive than other poets’ poems?” But can you really accept this as an answer?: “Because the poet/person her/himself is always right there in the lines forever, at the time of the writing—there was no wall between the poet’s inmost self and the poem.” At best it’s begging the question (if you think a sense of the poet’s presence is what it means for a poem to be alive). At worst it’s an appeal to exactly the kind of blurring between artist and work she advocates in the Carey essay.
Maybe I’m trying to have it both ways, RPB, but (and “especially if you draw no conclusions”) I do accept AN’s account of candor or something like it as the source of the living quality O’Hara’s, Myles’s and Carey’s poems have in common.
If you’re starting a pool, I’ll put $0.50 on who’s the invisible designee of JL’s “self-satisfy’d.”
I do accept AN’s account of candor or some thing like it as the source of the living quality O’Hara’s, Myles’s and Carey’s poems have in common.
But do you accept it as a metaphysical, epistemological, or rhetorical account? I’d guess the latter: candor is a rhetorical quality/effect that makes us feel like the other person is “always right there in the lines forever.” It doesn’t work as epistemology, because every twelve-year-old poet writes with “no wall between the poet’s inmost self and the poem” and none of them are Frank O’Hara. I’d love it if you or she meant something metaphysical, of only for the stubborn weirdness of the notion, but I’d be surprised.
> rhetorical
As per below, I’d take candor as one of three qualities; I’m pretty sure b.s. detector maps to your epistemological quadrant. I have my doubts about mapping “evenly-hovering attention” to either metaphysics or phenomenology or morals even, though you could do worse than see it any of those ways.
One quality I love in Alice’s criticism is her insistence on the grounding of a poet’s work.
And now I want to back away from “candor” - which is part of it, but only when accompanied by what I think is known as evenly-hovering attention, as well as a strong bullshit detector.
Which reinforces my sense that you see candor as a rhetorical effect. Which, if true, suggests a real complication for any appeal to authenticity. As this episode was for Myles:
So, to paraphrase, if candor is merely rhetorical, then it is therefore a betrayal of authenticity.
Time to reach for my Adorno…
Or to put it another way, if you see a quality in common to O’Hara’s, Myles’s, Carey’s (and Notley’s) work, what is it, and how do you account for it?
No, candor is not a betrayal of authenticity. I’m simply saying that it’s not trustworthy as an index of authenticity.
I account for the common quality of FOH’s, EM’s, SC’s, and AN’s work in the same way I account for common qualities in all kinds of art: it’s a mixture of shared sympathies, shared social conditions, and (particularly in this case) the direct influence of a strong precursor.
> only when accompanied
Be-er, maker, knower - world without end, amen, amen.
I take your point about professionalism and coterie, by the way, though it seems a bit chilly - what writer doesn’t want attention? Or as it was put recently chez Don, who besides Bill Knott has completely forsworn praise?
Nah, it’s not about forswearing praise, not at all. The be-er/maker division is about what you want to be praised for: being a good person (who somehow writes poetry “even when it isn’t obviously being written”) or making good poems.
I also don’t want to be read as suggesting that there’s an absolute division in fact between the two positions. Even the most committed makers can be (and often are) helped by a little persona and stagecraft. I’m more interested in how the matter appears from the inside looking out.
As for professionalism, the question is whether the artist lets the demands of the market/coterie/etc. take over to such an extent that she feels the work to be dishonest (alienating). Obviously this is where some sense of authenticity sneaks back in, but in this case I’m okay with it because it’s nothing available to the outside world, is only perceptible to the artist at her desk.
“Candor” can be quicksilver, tricky…
it takes a crafty skill to MAKE an image of beer-drinking be-ing… the art of the storyteller, around the fireside or at the bar or dinner table… to speak the language of men & women, the lingua franca, the language of experience…
& then again how often do I read such poems & sense a sort of complacency of experience, analogous to the alternative complacency of Latta’s obsessive toy-frigate makers (like myself)…
how do you balance the necessary estrangement of the made thing - as an opening to new understanding, a new angle on experience - with the absolute necessity to “be real”?
Gosh.
I like the late Rachel Wetzsteon’s poems for making the effort, in that regard (of balance); despite what often seems like over-reaching, or a sort of wobbly balance, of experience & echoing the poetizing of her mentors.
>If you’re starting a pool, I’ll put $0.50 on who’s the invisible designee of JL’s “self-satisfy’d.”
Jeez, I’d a thunk “constructivist moment” gave away the whole pot, no?
Sure, but he’s always in the crosshairs. Maybe it’s just my hypertrophic ego, but I thought the timing too significant to ignore.
Timing is just me getting disgust’d with half-assing it about Pound day after day (faute de temps). I’d say it’s precisely Watten (and ilk) who’s in Notley’s crosshairs there, that “crowd of self-advertisers (theorists).” But that’s probably obvious to all. I don’t think her “ravaged” has to be, you know, like Baudelaire. Just a life one couldn’t slice any way differently.
Duly chastened.
As I just wrote to someone in private, the reason I keep flirting with this little being/making division (which is old as Aristotle, no claims to novelty here) is that it seems to cut the usual divisions crosswise. I’d even venture to claim that it lands Silliman and Watten on opposite sides of the fence, however the former might claim otherwise. Or, alternately, if I were Kent, I might argue that they stand together, but with the faultline neatly cleaving their theory from their practice, as betrayed by items like Leningrad and The Grand Piano.
And, btw, I think you’re right about Notley’s targets. I was more interested in yours.
Suppose, though, one makes because one is incapable of not making? Romantic slush, I know, but where landeth one then? Amongst the pigmies or the elephants? (I admit it: I tend to pretend to remember some unfulfill’d urgent errand whenever I hear talk of ethics and aesthetics.)
Well, I guess I’d say it would depend on what she was incapable of not making. If it’s Stefani Germanotta incapable of “making” Lady Gaga, that’s one thing; if it’s Patti Griffin incapable of making Children Running Through, that’s another thing.
When I met Notley, in college in ‘82, when she came to teach a workshop, “Slow Train Coming” or something had just come out, and some student was dissing it, and she was defending it, saying that if you love Dylan you have to love ALL Dylan, just as in her then-fairly recent poem, from “How Spring Comes,”, “Jack Would Speak Through the Imperfect Medium of Alice,” which declares the same, that if you love Kerouac you have to love ALL Kerouac. Don’t know what AN would say about it now, but these statements are firmly in the Be-er side of things.
If that’s the Be-er side, sign me on the Maker side.
AN’s declaration that aesthetic love must be unconditional aside, I love a lot of her work. Like Jordan said (on his linked-to piece) — one of the most thinkful poetic thinkers.
Didn’t Silliman say at one point that one *should* be judged by the quality of one’s poetic friends? I could’ve sworn he’s said it on his blog. So, that would be, artist as Shmoozer?
Be-er, Maker, Knower, Shmoozer. (Confess that I don’t get the “knower” distinction.)
>Or, alternately, if I were Kent, I might argue that they stand together, but with the faultline neatly cleaving their theory from their practice, as betrayed by items like Leningrad and The Grand Piano.
Some of this discussion is beyond me. I went to Bowling Green.
But I just found out today that I’m quoted in the Introduction to this new book Life of Crime, which Ron S. posted about yesterday (the post that has all sorts of nice character-smashing stuff about the late Darrell Gray’s chemical addictions). And I know almost nothing about the Actualists.
>Nah, it’s not about forswearing praise, not at all. The be-er/maker division is about what you want to be praised for: being a good person (who somehow writes poetry “even when it isn’t obviously being written”) or making good poems.
Do poets write for praise, one way or the other? May seem like a dumb question. Simonides wrote for money - maybe Pindar, too. As for lil ol’ me… I’ve been writing since I was very young. Honestly can’t put a finger on it. I fell like I write “because it’s there”.
>It isn’t detachable. It’s mixed in with everything, even when it isn’t obviously being written; it’s consuming and if you’re a poet and you aren’t somewhat ravaged from that, there’s probably something wrong with your poetry.
Will the bullshit actually cover us all eventually? Someone can say something as self-evidently, teeth-gnashingly, ignorantly STUPID as this, & people will just nod & chew their fucking cud.
Actually I just blinked, felt guilty about not feeling particularly ravaged, and ate an olive.
“chew their fucking cud” — you say that as if it’s a bad thing! The confusion of sex and food is delicious. There have been few lyrics more salacious than “Sugar Sugar” by the Archies, in which the “sugar” of “pour a little sugar on it, honey,” is the “girl”’s self, her body; and the “it” of the same phrase, is, by inference, the singer’s own self, his body, not excluding his cock.
I am a commenter, and I made this comment. Praise me, please!
Nice job, John. Now go back to the cow shed, please, & shovel manure. You’re gonna love it; a fine mix.
Eagh. Sir. I (chokes, makes wet sound) protest! Sugar me no sugars, i beg of thee.
I am not opposed to cud-chewing in general. I am of the cud, & I chew of the cud, & I sing of chewing of the cud. I am ravaged by the singing of the chewing of the cud.
But does the hare chew the cud?
sounds like a talmudic question to me …
Funny you should say that.
The correct answer, which seems rather germane, is: no, but it eats shit, which amounts to the same thing.
You Romantic!
(Me too.)
(I know you’re kidding, but AN’s position is Romanticism Large.)
And now I find out that quote of me is in a footnote.
Footnote #13.
I am in footnote #13 to a book on the “Actualists.”
Within a paragraph, apparently, about an anarchist internet group called “Fuck You and Die.”
I am not kidding.
There you go changing the topic again, Kent. We’re talking sex and food (Archies!), not sex and death (boring old Wagner).
My next opera is going to be about food and death, the pivot-image anchored in the notion that EVERYTHING WE EAT IS DEAD!!!!!
Didn’t mean to change the subject.
I thought we were chewing the cud…
One word: yogurt.
Cy — good point!
I guess my opera is dead.
:-(
That’ll be from a past Silliman comment stream on Flarf, as I recall - unless you have written on “Fuck You and Die” elsewhere.
O god. I have one of those people in my miniature Facebook coterie (friend of my Dad’s I rush to assure - I would rather Fuck Anyone Willing And Live, and my archys are pretty much mesh’n'meld when they aren’t non).
also, I’m finding it hard to believe there is a perspective from which it matters to anyone what Barrett Freaking Watten thinks about anything. fish, barrel.