Poeisis, Poetics, and Morality

It is probably impossible to separate poetry, and art generally, from questions of morality, no matter how hard you try. And people have tried, for a very long time. When Oscar Wilde, at the end of the 19th century, famously stated “there is no such thing as moral or immoral books. Books are well written or badly written,” he staked out a post-Pater aesthetic territory that attempted to redefine the parameters of most of the thinking about the question that preceded him. It’s one of three possible relations that Tzvetan Todorov argues have held true over 2000 years of arguments: 1) poetry should be in the service of moral principles that exist beyond it; 2) poetry, art, should define morality, since beauty is the highest form of human activity; and 3) poetry and morality are autonomous from one another, and never the twain etc. Wilde weighed in after a very long time of art and morality being wed in a restrictive bond, with art cinctured by moral codes. Starting with Plato’s expulsion of the poets from the city and continuing pretty much until the late 19th century, that first relation dominated thinking in the West. Wilde makes the case that the two categories—Art/Beauty and Morality/the Good—are mutually exclusive. But Todorov goes on to argue that even though they are autonomous, Beauty and the Good are connected by three inescapable links—the immoral but necessary cruelty of the artist, the beauty poetry contributes to the world, and the increase of intelligibility it adds. Even at its most disconnected, art, it seems, is still connected to a moral discourse.

Poetry always speaks from the world, or just speaks the world (not to be confused with The World), formed in its originating energies, even as it resonates with its source in eternity. Drenched in the sense of the world, poetry utters the wild logos of our condition here at the end of some time we know that is also the beginning of some time we don’t yet know, or only have an inkling of. And in that speaking, that ordering/uttering of the tumult of the world, poetry necessarily touches on realities that are subject to moral judgement, though your understanding of what that means will depend on how you think morality, or in philosophy’s lingo, the Good, which flows from your imagination of the world. Wilde’s words invoke the frightening spectre of a world in which extraneous moral codes determine what art can and can’t do, regardless of the world it finds itself in and that speaks through it, a thought that is antithetical to modernity’s sense of art’s mission. And the agents of those codes, the censors, are never far away, animated by some frenzied idea of enforced obedience. I am old enough to remember when every film in North America had to be approved by an official Censorship Board, when D.H. Lawrence and James Joyce were banned, and when all married couples on TV slept in twin beds.

But censorship is never old news. In so far as there is always a Party of Return, the thinking of further will always meet resistance, and censorship is one of the main tools for attempting to hold time back, subject to a purified imagination of an untroubled past of real, recoverable value. In 2021 in the United States a record number of attempts were made to censor books in libraries, mostly by right-wing religious groups opposed, for instance, to immoral (realistic) representations of sexuality, or historical narratives that acknowledge the centrality of slavery to the development of USAmerican culture. But the political/religious right is not alone in this outbreak of censoriousness. A whole new totalitarian movement haunts the post-Wall left, dedicated to imposing a moralistic view of gender, race, and sexuality in the determination of acceptable art and language. Should you disagree with, or even question, their position, you will likely find yourself blackballed in some hellish social media madness for not toeing the ideological line.

But questions about morality and art are never simple, never limited to black and white, and as with many issues, much of the complexity (and confusion) arises from differing definitions of the same word, in this case what’s meant by “morality.” In the most general sense, it is the knowledge of the difference between right and wrong, the acknowledgement and acceptance of The Good. But depending on how you understand “knowledge,” not to mention “right” and “wrong,” the sense can shift radically. In the Judeo-Christian tradition, moral law is literally writ in stone, an immutable code bestowed on humans directly from God. Emerson challenged that idea of morality. He recognized the loss of a foundational ground on which to establish it. “Gladly we would anchor, but the anchorage is quicksand,” he wrote, as science, technology, and business rapidly ate away at the authority of religion and the spiritual knowledge that founded moral knowledge in the 19th century. Emerson proposed instead that morality is relational and arises in the necessity, the necessary struggle, to make ourselves intelligible to those we are addressed to, and in that sense to be committed to a further, better self. Stanley Cavell calls this moral perfectionism, where the perfection is not an achievement but a commitment to a process.

In Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, Huck is the embodiment of Emerson’s self-reliance. He faces a dilemma that arises from the moralist code written in stone, as well as various legal statutes, that states categorically, Thou shalt not steal. According to the law of the United States, since Huck’s friend, accomplice, and occasional saviour, Jim, is an escaped slave, he literally “belongs” to Miss Polly. The code holds Huck morally obligated to return her stolen property, and since he is struggling to be a moral person, that’s what he decides to do. But when he starts to think about it, when he looks in Jim’s face and recalls the times Jim has helped him, and saved him, and comforted him, Huck sees a friend, and that friendship is implicated in a moral sense of loyalty, love, and the recognition of a certain debt. Which will prevail? A code that demands Huck return his friend to a condition of slavery without consideration of the people and their actual relationship? Or Huck’s knowledge of Jim and his obligation to his friend, his commitment to a world of actual relation? Morality for Emerson is a deep experience of right and wrong that arises out of a relation between people. Moralism is not morality. It is founded on a code, an immutable set of laws etched in stone, utterly divorced from any human interaction. Grounded in a deep structural binarism, it divides the world into mutually exclusive categories, beginning with good and evil.

Think of it as a Compulsive Paralytic Binary Syndrome (CPBS). Because morality necessarily involves considerations of The Good, it also invokes The Bad, and then, if you are not careful, you will find yourself propelled into a perpetual state of terminal Binary-ism where the world divides endlessly into opposites—good/bad, moral/immoral, masculine/feminine—that proliferate, fractal-like, into every aspect of your thinking of the world—white/black, strong/weak, male/female, mind/heart, reason/imagination, feeling/thinking—each component an exclusive purity. William Blake pictured it as a man and woman tied together back-to-back—a marriage of perpetual isolations, of impossible (sexual) union. He called it a state of Generation.

Emerson confronted it in his reckoning as a minister with the emptiness of church rituals, and especially the ritual of The Last Supper where people mouthed Christian words in church but made no place for them in their workaday lives. It was form bereft of content. Once you separate the ritual act from the content of the act in the most sacred of gestures, the world becomes emptied, unoriginal, a place in which the thinking of truth loses orientation along with a point of origin that guarantees the honesty and virtue of the acts that arise from it or out of it. When general equivalence determines the World, exchange value overwhelms all other modes of value, especially thinking connected to spiritual values that mediate between the human and the divine. Degraded, those values—virtue, honesty, valor, integrity—eventually lose meaning. Morality, the moral life, becomes an empty form, much like the ritual of The Last Supper that motivated Emerson’s exit from a religious vocation.

Authentic is a word relevant to this thinking, though it is currently out of favour, even slightly scandalous, in sociological circles, especially in so far as it is associated with the troubled thinking of subject or self. That address, following Theodor Adorno’s The Jargon of Authenticity, defines authentic as the idea that an autonomous subject is in accord with it’s innermost, “true feelings.” Since in those circles subjective autonomy is seen as an ideological construct, authenticity, according to the Adorno view, is nothing more than a delusion, an ideological manipulation, designed to facilitate the operation of a free market economy.

But what if instead of thinking “self” as an abstract subject deluded by ideology, you think it as a relational worlded authoritative finitude with the potential to make grow, to create, to author and authorize. This is close to Emerson’s sense of authenticity, out of the Greek root, authentes, self-doer. In that mode of thinking, authenticity is not about the identity of an abstraction called a “subject” with another abstraction called its “inner feelings.” Authenticity is not about identity at all. On the contrary, it is about difference, the commitment to a further self. It is a measure of the self’s ability to authorize its own address to the furtherness of the world—as Emerson (and Cavell) would say, to make itself intelligible. Then the authenticity of a poem has to do not with the nature of some subject’s “voice,” but with the struggle manifested within the language to make the world’s furtherness intelligible. Arguably, to do that is a moral gesture.

As Todorov pointed out, however, morality is sneaky and given half a chance, it will find a way to insinuate itself in some form even into otherwise seemingly anti-moralist stances. Art gets its comeuppance in a lot of different ways, even in discourses that claim to reject moralism. Judging work morally objectionable and banning or burning it is only the most obvious mode of attack. Moralism also sneaks in through assumptions about value that seem “natural.” Take the opposition between “virtuous sentiment” and the “virtue of intellectual imagination,” two mutually opposed modes of “poetics” recently proposed as part of a critique of the “moralism” of popular poetry that positions itself in line with social justice issues and identity politics. The distinction between these mutually exclusive modes of composition is apparently just technical with no moral judgment involved. But ironically, as part of a larger argument against “moral poetry” it ends up making its own moral judgement. In this anti-moralist aesthetic, “virtuous sentiment” is moralist in its outlook, which produces inferior poetry, while (the virtue of) “intellectual imagination,” free of morality, is paradoxically moral in its amoral stance which produces superior poetry. The conclusion is one ought to write poetry of imaginative intellect.

The options here are old and narrow, notwithstanding the updated vocabulary and clever word play. Something called “virtue” plays a role in both categories, though somewhat sneakily. Virtuous is an adjective, virtue a noun, and as the grammatical function shifts in the opposition, so does meaning. In days of yore, virtue meant something different than it does now. In the 13th century, virtue was the quality of a first-class Knight and had to do with strength, even manliness, which makes sense given that the Indo-European root of the word, *wi-ro, means man.  By the end of the 14th century, however, what constituted “moral qualities” had begun to shift as the last remnants of Feudalism and courtly culture faded away and the new market order replaced them with its own values. First, religious values replaced courtly values, and virtuousness came to signify the possession of excellent moral qualities as defined by religious authorities, especially chastity. And in so far as chastity became more and more a state imposed on females, you could say it became “feminized.” Its focus was on controlling women’s sexuality, including the notorious belts. There were never chastity belts for men. Even today, while someone might speak of a virtuous woman, it’s unlikely they would describe a man that way. Chastity is a tool of the patriarchy to control female sexuality.

For the Euro American radical intelligentsia who embraced intoxication and sexuality in the 19th century as a tonic for the hypocrisy and self-righteousness of bourgeois culture, “virtue” was a sign of duplicity and shallowness as they witnessed “upstanding” citizens claim to be virtuous by day, while indulging in drunkenness and lechery, and killing the occasional streetwalker, at night. Robert Louis Stevenson nailed it in Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde. That sense of duplicity remains, while the issue has shifted. Whereas 75 years ago it had to do with sexual purity and abstinence from intoxicants, these days it more often refers to political positions involving identity, race and gender, i.e., what is called “virtue signalling,” a negative label for a self-righteous social media behaviour, which, it seems to me, is the sense that informs the negativity of the phrase, “virtuous sentiment.” On the other hand, and this is definitely an on-the-one-hand-and-on-the-other-hand moment, as a noun in the phrase, the virtue of imaginative intellect, it signifies something very different, harkening back to the original sense of valour, something noble, even . . . manly.

Once the binary division is established (the virtuous sentiment vs. the virtue of intellect), moral value (good versus bad) immediately slips in to locate one half of the division as The Good. It introduces a valuation of two opposed modes of human knowledge, say “sentiment” and “intellect” (or to use an old literary recognition, heart and head, or even behind that, feminine and masculine) finding one wanting in relation to the other, at least as far as poetics are concerned, and poetics are a big deal these days, arguably bigger even than poetry. Partly that’s because poetics sounds kind of scientific, which is good if you want to be taken seriously by people who like measurable, scientific sounding stuff. It’s the ics at the end. ICS. It’s hard and precise, like mathematics, semiotics, axiomatics, probiotics, or athletics. You know something is there when you hear that. It’s serious.

The focus on what’s called poetics is relatively recent. It started around 1960 with Donald Allen’s anthology, The New American Poetry. Given the oppositional nature of his anthology, Allen knew he was in for some critical turbulence, that the Authorized Poetic Authorities would dismiss the poetry in his anthology as unworthy of serious attention because of its rejection of preconceived form and traditional conventions, and its embrace of improvisational techniques congruent with a shift in world view. In an era when the Poetry Professoriate made its living analysing how many kinds of ambiguity it could discern in a lyric poem, when the metaphor for poetic excellence was a “well-wrought urn,” and poets were expected to fit their “content” into some “form” that pre-existed it as proof of their expertise, the poetry Allen gathered was labelled “uncooked” at best, and at worst mere prose broken into lines—unworthy of serious consideration as poetry, in any case.

Allen sought to head that off some of that noise by including a section by poets on their modes of composition. In a final section of his anthology called “Statements on Poetics,” Allen located the poetry in relation to serious thinking that arose from and with the poetry about the nature of composition. It was meant as a support for the poetry. Most of the contributions are short excerpts from poets’ journals or previously written statements where they thought through and articulated the process of their work. The one exception was Charles Olson’s “Projective Verse,” a major statement about poetic composition and cosmology that became a rallying point in the poetry wars that followed.

First published in Poetry New York in October 1955, and then as a pamphlet by Amiri Baraka’s (LeRoi Jones) Totem Press in 1959, “Projective Verse” fused Olson’s thinking about poetry, philosophy, cosmology, mathematics, geometry and history into a wild exploration of our postmodern condition and poetry’s entanglement in it. He begins by displacing the “human” from the centre of the poem’s attention to allow in the world and prepare the ground for his emerging vision of the absolute immanence of the divine in the specificities of the mundane, “secular” world. His notion of the “projective” energy of the poem resonated with the same spirit that animated the improvisational work of contemporary jazz musicians. In an intellectual arena dominated by intricate analyses of formal elements, Olson’s essay dropped like a bomb—a stink bomb, maybe, but a bomb, nevertheless.

While Olson posed his open field poetics against the poetics of what he called “closed verse,” he did so to clarify poetry’s response to the profound historical changes we are caught up in. He did not locate it in a moral framework of right versus wrong, nor in a linguistic crisis of referential versus non-referential, but in an historical framework of temporal process (nowpast). And in a necessary cosmology. He did not attempt to make a moral judgement, because he had no theory to measure truth against, no wrong to his right, only a stance which he enacted in his work because of his recognition of the profound difference of our historical moment from what preceded it. All the work he had put into getting to the place where he could write the projective had gone into an actual spiritual ordeal and transformation rather than the development of a theory.

Olson’s trip to Yucatan in 1950 was central to the struggle as he sought a deep relation to meaning specific to the actual space of “America” and outside the box of European modernity. Look, he said, this is where we are now. This is how Time is moving, this is the turbulence we are all swept along in, this is what it means to our relations. What forces are in play? What can poetry do to measure that? In this cosmological process, poets need to transform, to become the transforming voice of that transformation, that process of emergence. Olson’s friend and companion, Robert Duncan, underwent a similar process of spiritual ordeal in quest for a “poetics,” though in his case the ordeal involved undertaking the epic work that became The H.D. Book. For both poets, achieving a “poetics” involved an actual struggle, and a change, a transformation that led to a new stance or mode of being. Poetry flowed from that. Poetics, from that perspective, is not a “theory” but a transformative struggle alive in every word.

Following Allen’s introduction of poetics as support for poetry, it soon became an independent focus of energy and attention. Poetics really came to its own in the mid-70s with the ascendence in the U.S. of what’s called generally Language Poetry. As has often been pointed out, Language Poetry was an ambiguous descriptor covering many different writers and modes of writing. But some things they arguably shared, among them a rejection of “representationalism,” a sociological critique of the traditional lyric “I”, and an attention to the thickness of language. Not unlike Richard Nixon’s contemporaneous suspension of the gold standard in 1971, the theorizers of Language poetry sought to divorce language from a referential ground that anchored it. Quickly colonizing a literary territory called avant-garde, Language Poetry thrived by taking up Olson’s practice of poetry based on scholarship, while substituting Adorno and Saussure for Homer and Melville, and sociology for mythology. They found theoretical support in the European intellectual address to language and developed a theory of poetic signification they buttressed with reference to contemporary post-structuralist and linguistic critics such as George Lakoff.

In so far as poetics became more and more closely identified with theory, which can be studied and learned in classrooms, it opened itself to bursts of moralist judgement. Theory operates within a world of competing ideas that explain phenomena, and based on that explanation propose further practice: one ought to write poetry of imaginative intellect rather than poetry of virtuous sentiment. Unlike a spiritual ordeal that yields a stance in-formed by knowledge, theory yields an idea that competes with other ideas. The rejection of theories of the autonomous subject in control of representational language (meaning as the identity of word and object) gives rise to theories of a socially constructed self informed by ideology and of language as self-referential (meaning solely as a result of difference within the system). Hence the “virtue of imaginative intellect.” Ignore for a minute the way “virtue” in this formation not so subtly signals entrance to a moral zone. It’s implied that imaginative intellect is free of “self” contamination (as in self-expression and sentiment) where self is understood as created and manipulated by ideology and expressed in feelings. It is an exclusionary category.

By joining imagination and intellect, two pure, abstracted modes of mind, it implicitly rules out the impure “not-mind” of Western thinking: emotion, also known as heart, and in a “degraded” form, as sentiment(ality), or, in Adorno-speak, true feelings, which are seen as ideologically conditioned modes of a socially constructed self. It proposes a correct way of composing poetry, one that is free of the unconscious domination of ideology’s formation and manipulation of desire. Then, given the categorical imperative to write poetry of imaginative intellect, the value of the individual poem is lost to an abstraction that automatically excludes as unfit any work that doesn’t belong to the category. The specificity of judgement—the work of this poem or that poem—is lost to moralist categories such as “virtuous sentiment,” a morally degraded mode of writing implicitly identified with the “feminine” (heart, feeling, sentiment). I doubt that the author of this critical binary had any such sexist point in mind, but such is the power of the Compulsory Paralytic Binary Syndrome to sweep us into moralist lockdowns.

The issue is poeisis, or the relation to poeisis, the event of the making of the poem. Poeisis, from whence our word “poetry,” etymologically “to make,” names the process of the emergence of form/meaning. The question is, as a poet, what is your relation to that process? In a way, when it comes to poetry (which, given its name, has a special relation to poeisis) the difference between poeisis and poetics echoes Aristotle’s distinction between poeisis and praxis but reversed. For Aristotle, if poeisis is “to make,” its goal is oriented toward something beyond itself—a pot, a ship, a painting—unlike praxis which for Aristotle is action undertaken strictly for itself, for the value implicit in it—returning money you found, helping someone who fell get up. But the world has changed a bit, and poetry in early 21st century North America no longer bears the cultural value it did for Aristotle. Given the minor status of poetry in our culture of gene

Some poets, it’s true, find ways to use poetry for personal advancement: a limited kind of fame, prize money, status positions, departmental promotions, even, occasionally if they are lucky, sex. But for every one of those Players, a thousand other poets write neither for gold nor glory but simply because they must, even in the currently degraded world of poetry competitions and low-level prizes. They write because they know on some level poetry matters. Poetry calls them into its orders of language and attention. Some do it spontaneously and sporadically out of a deep impulse. Others do it studiously and regularly responding to the centuries of poetry that preceded them. Some write from deep feelings of anger over injustice or the ever-astonishing joy of love. Some write out of intellectual excitement. Some write in a scholarly frenzy. Some write for fun. Some are possessed. Some do it badly. Some do it exquisitely. Some bore you. Some excite you. Some teach you. The difference has to do with the nature of their poetearmind, the way the poet’s sounding of the poem thinks. That’s poetry—thinkingsounding.

The issue, then, is not this theory or that theory, this poetics or that poetics, virtuous sentiment or the virtue of imaginative intellect. Poetics has a goal in mind. It’s relation to poeisis is disciplinary, the production of a specific mode of composition. That can produce interesting poetry given the poetearmind of the writer, a necessity even for imaginative intellectuals. It also produces a lot of dreck given the rarity of the poetearmind. The kinds of composition I am thinking of here engage poeisis as an ordeal, an action, a struggle to achieve unprecedented truths in language events, say even, authentic language events, specific events that have no goal beyond their own transformative articulation.

I read somewhere that I have now forgotten that poeisis, to make, was first an action that transforms and continues the world. That makes sense to me. Morality enters in so far as the maker, through a spiritual ordeal, comes in touch with actual energies that she transforms or translates into language. It is not a question of technical production. Nor is it a question of linguistic theory. It is not even a question of creation in some Romantic sense. Poetry gives voice to thought reconciled with matter, time, spirit, locating person in their actual world. The poet’s soul is tuned to frequencies most people are unaware of, and her job is to transform those energies into language that remains true to them. This is where morality haunts poetry. Because there is no greater good than the virtue of truth.

The Interstices of Poetry Wars

for Jack Spicer

“Poetry lives in the interstices, not in the structures.”

—Robert Duncan

We inherit the somewhat contentious phrase, Poetry War, from intellectual conflicts that arose in the wake of the publication of The New American Poetry, 1945-1960. The new, post-war, post-modern energies that Donald Allen brought together ran into the wall of a conservative, formalist Establishment, and a poetry war broke out on multiple fronts, giving rise to among other things an alternative poetry culture of resistance, resourcefulness, and Emersonian self-reliance within living networks of mutual support.  Elsewhere I have argued that the war itself actually began in the aborted duel between Ezra Pound and Lascelles Abercrombie (figuratively speaking), and continued through the travails of the Objectivists before erupting into the self-proclaimed poetry wars of the 60’s and early 70s. More recently, the term applies to now notorious event that occurred nearly 40 years ago in San Francisco during the screening of a film on Louis Zukofsky when Duncan got into a confrontation with Barrett Watten. Patrick Dunagan reminds me that other fronts in the poetry war were also active at that moment and points to Duncan’s conflict with Denise Levertov, and the now near mythic events at Naropa immortalized in Tom Clark’s Poetry Wars. Robert Duncan was very much a part of these conflicts, and was central to the San Francisco event. And while some people, I know, have expressed ennui and irritation at the continued attention to the confrontation between him and Watten, which they apparently consider too old or lacking substance to be of interest, I think it remains central to an understanding of our situation and the situation of poetry today.

It began in 1978 when, after the screening of a film on Louis Zukofsky, Robert Duncan walked on stage during a presentation by Barrett Watten and took the microphone from him, symbolically asserting the continued precedence of the New American Poetry over what he saw as the re-emergence of the New Criticism’s formalism in the work of what came to be known as Language Poetry. This name (brand) came to stand for a diverse range of poetries responding to what is called the “linguistic turn” of the 70s and 80s, many of which did not share the same commitments to the formalism central to this discussion, and hence is meaningless in one sense. Nevertheless, the name became part of a marketing campaign by critics like Marjorie Perloff and linked to the identity of a number of poets, propelling them into the center of critical attention at that moment. Duncan had spent much of his artistic life battling one dominant, institutionalized formalism, and having won, he was in no mood to see it rise again from the ashes in the form of neo-Marxist materialism.

The war erupted into the open 6 years later when David Levi Strauss wrote an introduction to a showing of the Zukofsky film along with a film on Duncan. After detailing the history of the films, Levi Strauss related a story of the confrontation between Duncan and Watten in 1978 that outraged Watten’s cohort who, led by Ron Silliman, responded in kind. The barrage of letters to Poetry Flash, a Bay Area poetry news tabloid, that followed became the top poetry news story of 1978. Poetry Flash upped the stakes by inviting a contribution from linguistics professor George Lakoff, whose writing provided a theoretical support for Language poetry. That provoked poet Tom Clark, who responded with a piece called “Stalin as Linguist,” which, to say the least, further inflamed the debate.

At that moment the poetic energy unleashed by the New American Poetry split into a self-declared avant-garde who ran with the oppositional energy of the NAP but grounded it on sociology and philosophical materialism; and an unorganized rump circulating around the poetics of Duncan/Olson/Creely/Ginsberg grounded in Kali energy, the incommensurable creativedevouring plenitude of the world, and poetry’s articulating entanglement with its morphogenesis and its potential for transformative gnosis. I am using gnosis here in a non-specialized sense of knowledge that exceeds the bounds of “reason,” which Charles Olson going to the roots significantly located in the work of the ear (knowledge as gna) rather than the eye (knowledge as vid).

At the very beginning of his essay “Man’s Fulfillment in Order and Strife, “ written 10 years before the incident at the Zukofsky film screening, Duncan stated: “I find myself a prejudiced member of a very small community of belief in strife with other poets about what the poem is.”  It was a moment in the poetry wars when the established, university based poets of the New Critical movement dismissed and shut out the poets of the NAP, and Duncan was a self-admitted combatant in the poetry war that followed. The stake, as he articulated it, was a determination of what the poem is, and what the poem is, he goes on, is a World Order, as it is also of an order of all poetries. The poetry war, the strife as he calls it, develops because of “incompatible ideas of what world and order are.”

In a late clean-up operation, the forces levelling the world through the cultural economy of general equivalence and universal commodification—what I call The Doom Program—successfully reoccupied poetry’s upper social orders in the US and integrated them into its institutional structure. The difference between worlds and orders here circulates around this occupation of poetry which integrated it into economies of use. Let me be absolutely clear about one thing. The war is not about this kind of poetry or that kind of poetry, and certainly not about anyone who ever got a teaching gig, or won some prize money because someone recognized their terrific work. The war is about resistance to the displacement of becoming-with(in)-poetry by being-over-poetry, a change that quantifies it, turns it into a product that, if it meets certain understood standards and regulations, can be exchanged for a variety of rewards. Nor is it about some us vs. them scenario. This occupation of poetry touches us all, entangles us all. It is a struggle each of us must confront in our own lives as poets.

Duncan, who saw it coming early on, understood the challenge it presented to his sense of poetry’s work. You could even argue that he occupied the center of a moment of mythic origin, a moment of conflict between orders that gives rise to an origin, a new ordering or relation of orderings. Duncan sensed the significance of the moment that night in San Francisco, and came prepared. As David Bromige relates, “. . . Robert appeared in his full, Romantic poet regalia, the Spanish cape, the Spanish hat. . . . It was for effect. But it was also the effect on him too. He had his manna when he was in that garb. He could fight off evil magic.” Duncan walks on stage to fight evil magic, takes the mic from the yielding hands of a stunned Barrett Watten, and sets in motion—or materializes—a conflict that continues to play itself out 40 years later.

But of course that wasn’t the first time, although every time is also always the first time. It’s a wave in a pattern that echoes in time. It marks a moment in recent literary history even as it reveals within its folds layer on layer of homologous events, a morphological nest, a palimpsest, a form of event that resonates out of Nothing to reveal itself in Ovid’s erotic, metamorphic challenge to Virgil’s structural empire of words, or the challenge implicit in the Pearl Poet’s rugged alliterations to the colonizing iambic pentameter from the south. Not to mention the poetry wars between the Provencal and the Dolce Stil Novo poets, and the entrenched Latin verse they wrote against. Or Whitman’s barbaric yawp aimed in part at the genteel poets of Cambridge Mass. Or Emily Dickinson’s rhythmically broken psalms directed at the chorus of sanctimonious voices pouring from the church down the street. You may be squeamish about the word war, but the conflict is undeniable and universal. It is the energy of renewal.

At the time of our mythic origin conflict in 1978, the issue was declared (by Duncan) to be fun versus tedium: “I just want to get some sense of fun in this,” he says of his interruption. But that fun rests on an entire world order that rejects formalism and the quantification of poetry, whatever name it goes by. Watten proposed to split Zukofsky “down the middle” separating considerations of the poem from his life and reading the work as a thing, arguing that Zukofsky’s “structuring devices” were mathematical and that he, Watten, was attempting to get the words to interact with themselves. “Structuring devices” is Watten’s name for his materialist displacement of myth which arguably was the secret agenda of his presentation. Echoing New Criticism’s dismissal of biography in the pursuit of a quantified text, he asks Duncan, “How are words your life?” To which Duncan responds, what we are reading is life, not math—it has something to say. And he proceeds to call into attention the swarms of meaning that circulate in Zukofsky’s poems, dancing through them, drawing out the allusive, illusive worlds they weave from sound and mind. He offered this as alternative to Watten’s analysis of phonemic progression and graphed curves. In that sense, the issue was not about personalities, not about Duncan and Watten. Or it was only Duncan and Watten in so far as they were the bearers of worlds and orders that were and are incompatible.

As Stan Persky once told me, poetry is a unique linguistic mode of knowledge, a mode that dwells, as Duncan says, in the interstices. The knowledge that poetry bears, the thinking that it opens, its transformative gnosis, ruptures the given separations, activating bodymind, opening it into disOrders of meaning within and beyond the habitual orders that hold us in the clutches of the Doom Program’s isolating structured categories. Writing of Hölderlin, Jean-Luc Nancy locates the exactitude of the poem’s calculation in “touching” of the transmitting body, so that the voice of the poem “is not phonation alone: it is the transmitting body, the body open to the outside as the transmitter of its ‘inside,’ which is only given in the transmission. . . . The point of contact, the touching-of-the-opposite, is the opportune exactitude of the calculation that delivers sense or that delivers up to sense, by suspending the uninterrupted course of sense.”  William Carlos Williams puts it somewhat differently to the same end: “for everything/and nothing/are synonymous/when//energy in vacuo/has the power/of confusion//which only to/have done nothing/can make/perfect.” Confuse, suspend, to have done nothing, render inoperative— you could call it, as is popular in some circles who like scientific sounding words, defamiliarization, but only if defamiliarization is understood as the shaking of the Sistrum, that magical act Plutarch describes in Isis and Osiris: “The sistrum also makes it clear that all things in existence need to be shaken, or rattled about, and never to cease from motion but, as it were, to be waked up and agitated when they grow drowsy and torpid.” It’s what George Quasha calls poetry’s healing principle. One minute you are walking into a lecture hall with 300 other students. The next you are swept up into the mysterium of the tremendum by the glaze of rain water on a red wheelbarrow beside the white chickens.

The poetry wars exist and are important. They force us to pay attention, to think of the struggle to keep alive and active the knowledge of the interstitial space of poetry’s dwelling within the poet. The poetry war at this moment involves a fight for a space for an un-commodified relationship with its transformational gnosis. Duncan was absolutely clear and unequivocal—the poetry war begins within the poet and the stake is the world. It is projective, to use the word of his friend: “In the struggle to undo all the particular claims to order in Poetry, the critical battles, the movements that ruled for a period, setting up laws and definitions to establish what is in order and what is out of order, and then are replaced by other movements . . . —these battles carry into the public field the inner battles of the individual poet’s soul.”

For Duncan, the heart of the war involved keeping at work “contending forces and convictions” so as not to lose sight of the world’s divine mongrel excess, its prodigious antagonisms, contra-dictions, and differences, to avoid, as Emerson said, binding your “eyes with one or another handkerchief, and attach[ing] [yourself] to some one of these communities of opinion,” as most men do. “This conformity,” he goes on, “makes them not false in a few particulars, authors of a few lies, but false in all particulars.” 

According to Duncan, keeping the war alive is the poet’s calling, the very essence of the poet’s vision. But if the poet projects the poetry war as the manifestation of her understanding of her responsibility to what Duncan calls What Is, a further fold lurks in the plies—the commitment to discord and disorder within the work itself as crucial to the poet’s responsibility to keep language true to the emergent world, to remain open to the myriad vibrations at the foundation of morphogenesis. Only that way can you meet the poem halfway, allow it its freedom to introduce you to what you hadn’t anticipated, hadn’t known about, permit it to lead you through  the transformative gnosis which occurs in relation to the exact calculation’s suspension of the uninterrupted course of sense and the in-voca-tion of the tremendum.

According to Duncan, the poetry war is archetypal and projective. And it’s important because in a profound existential sense, poetry matters. Poetry war, discord, disorder, general pain-in-the-assness, preserve and activate potential resistance to the epochal tidal pull toward the reduction of all value into some specific weight of imaginary metal in its myriad forms, Moloch’s final victory. Poetry war agitates the knowledge of what a poem does beyond some mechanical measure having to do with curing social ills or doing away with injustice, as if those issues could only be addressed in one way, on one plane, from one direction. There can be no justice without beauty, any more than there can be beauty without justice. And that work takes place on many different planes. While occasionally under certain conditions, poetry can have a specific material effect, as it did in the U.S. in the 60s, or the USSR and Eastern Europe in the 70s and 80s, mostly we have no idea what it does or where it does it. We can say definitively that it’s presence alone makes the world different. And better. Try to imagine a world without the Bhagavad Gita, Popol Vuh, The Book of Psalms, Enuma Elish, or  the Kalavala, without the Iliad, Beowulf, The Pearl, the Sundiata Epic, The Canterbury Tales, without Dante’s Commedia, without Rumi, without Shakespeare’s or Wyatt’s or Sidney’s sonnets, without Donne . . ..

At a recent meeting of a group of young writers, mostly former students, someone raised the age old complaint, why do we bother, no one reads poetry. To which, as everyone else nodded in jaded agreement, a new member of the group demurred—everybody has a favourite poem, he said. And he’s right. Poetry occupies our worlds in ways we forget about or don’t recognize, lingering in corners of the mind maintaining unperceived channels of sense. Poetry wars are crucial to keeping in mind that point of contact where the opportune exactitude of the calculation occurs in the suspension of the uninterrupted course of sense, shaking the sistrum, reminding us of our further responsibility.

Apocalypses Now

The Apocalypse, a long standing event of ongoing fascination, is going through some significant changes. A ubiquitous entertainment presence over the last few years, the Apocalypse has come a long way from the God fueled hallucinatory prose of John of Patmos with its Dragons, Lakes of Fire, Great Harlot and Scarlet Beast. For one thing, at some point in the last 200 years, the End lost its God and had to rely on microbes and/or extra-terrestrials for its eschatological punch. That’s a game changer. God occasionally still makes an appearance as an offstage character intervening in battles between winged super heroes with angels’ names, Paradise Lost retold by Stan Lee, but mostly The End has done away with him. Blame it on secular humanism or science or corrupting consumerism, but the fact is, God just can’t sell corn flakes the way that zombies do.

Zombies have been the #1 agent of Apocalypse for a while now, having displaced vampires who had become far too infected with angsty adolescent sexual fantasy to threaten civilization with more than an aching groin. Young adult fiction undid Bram Stoker’s subversive, erotic critique of Christian moralism, turning it into a prolonged teen romance. Zombies were the cure for that. You couldn’t get much further from well-dressed sexy young bloodsuckers negotiating the subtle complexities of high school social politics than the Undead.

There are plenty of reasons for that. First of all, zombies don’t screw. They are really dead even though they are undead. And even if they did screw, which dead people don’t do, no one, not even other zombies, would want to screw them because they are ugly, rotting, suppurating pieces of stumbling meat. Secondly, they would rather eat your brains than suck your blood, so the whole sublimated sucking thing is out. Thirdly, they don’t dress well, being garbed in the tattered remnant of whatever they died wearing which no doubt smells even worse than it looks.

Read the rest at Dooney's Café

Mythos Americanos: Who Took the Grit out of Integrity?

The invocation of integrity in the mouths of perennially duplicitous officials and politicians has contributed significantly to a general, at best mistrust, at worst downright disbelief, about the continuing relevance of the word in our daily lives. The revelation of outright government duplicity—the Pentagon Papers, or Watergate—has only intensified general mistrust and a deep feeling of the loss of any (perhaps illusory) sense of integrity, other than in reference to marketing communications and brand integrity. As a concept applicable to current USAmerican public life, integrity has become meaningless, a view widely shared, as was evident in the response to the Coronavirus (COVID-19) public health crisis. We live in the midst of the disarray, if not breakdown, of modernity’s array of meanings and its components, components that also include democracy and equality, and that extend to the institutions based on them.

I found myself thinking about this in relation to my response to a television show called Yellowstone. I did not begin to watch it until its fourth season when I heard it was the most-watched show on television. Not knowing anything about it (other than it starred Kevin Costner), I was surprised by the intensity of my emotional response. Almost immediately, I was swept up in a roller coaster of feelings that started with excitement at the action. I was stunned by the embrace of deep moral ambiguity. I grew fascinated with the characters and my reaction to them (especially Beth and Rip, and Jimmy). I admired the treatment of animals and the humans’ relation to them. I was impressed by the representation of Indigenous people and their struggles, and I increasingly recognized an intellectual dimension to the narrative that spoke to a long USAmerican conversation about the origin and meaning of the idea of America. Trying to nail down the source of the intensity of my response, I kept coming back to a sense of a deep, existential nostalgia for what I could only think of as integrity.

Read the rest at Merion West

How Does a Poem Mean

A  brief primer for the curious and stumped

—for Frank Aiello

“. . . art [poetry] is always the art of not saying it, of exposing that which is not to be said (not an unsayable, but the not-to-be-said of sense) along the edges of all that is exposed, as the sayable itself, and further, as saying itself, as all of saying in its fragmentation.”

    —Jean-Luc Nancy, The Sense of the World

There was a time, not that long ago, say, a hundred years, when nearly every house in North America contained at least a few volumes of poetry. People read it for refinement and moral edification. Tennyson was a favourite, and a bowdlerized and sweetened Emily Dickinson. Longfellow and Whittier were big. But also moderns like Edna St. Vincent Millay, Sara Teasdale, Edgar Lee Masters, and Robert Frost. And Shakespeare, of course. Every home had a collected Shakespeare, a Bible, and a copy of Emerson’s essays. T. S. Eliot and Ezra Pound with an assist from Gertrude Stein, have been accused, rightly or wrongly, of putting the boots to that fabled moment, crashing the genteel poetry party with their rude and rowdy ways, ruining everything with obscure scholarly allusions and fancy paratactic assemblages. People were stupefied, even outraged. Instead of being left with an elevated moral understanding or a fine sentiment, they were left stuttering, What does that mean? And things have only gotten worse since then.

Poems aren’t the only things whose meaning escapes us. If someone says to me, “to complicate matters further, cotton is a fungible commodity,” I might respond, what does that mean?, in which case, I am asking Mr. Smarty Pants Interrogator to explain his big words so I can understand what he’s saying. Ditto, if you are talking to someone about some stupid thing you did without thinking, and she says, “The development of all natural and spiritual life rests solely on the nature of the pure essentialities which constitute the content of logic,” you might very well reply, “What on earth does that mean? Talk English.” In that case it’s not just a word that’s the problem, it’s an entire idea. Or, even more weird, if a stranger walks up to you on the street and out of the blue says, “Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe,” you might either slap him or demand that he explain what that means. In this case it’s not a word that’s the problem, or even an idea. It’s language itself which has become a puzzle in need of explication, clarity. What does that mean covers a lot of territory, perhaps more even than we can think of, and getting to know how a poem means requires thinking a bit about meaning first.

One thing for sure—we like to know the meaning of things. It’s satisfying. The meaning of things, the intent that shapes, informs, and directs them, the sense of their significance, relieves us of the anxiety of uncertainty and locates us in and connects us to a world of meaning. It settles the unsettled. Before we faced an aggressive blankness, a kind of implicit chaos, then suddenly . . . Light. We fall into a clear order, the order of the understanding of a word, an idea, a burst of nonsensical language. Suddenly, it makes sense. I carried around a line from a poem by Jack Spicer that stupifued me for 25 years, turning it over and over in my mind, trying to pry some meaning out of it. It was like a Zen koan for me: “Sable arrested a fine comb.” For years it teased me, irritated me, tested me, would suddenly run through my mind as I was cooking or out for a walk. Then one evening as I was about to start a one night workshop for school teachers on “difficult poetry,” it suddenly made sense, the meaning – a meaning – or meaning, anyway, popped into my mind out of the proverbial blue and I felt the world fall into an order. Of which more later.

It gets more difficult when the stake is not just the meaning of a word or an idea, but of, say, life. Does life have meaning? Most of us like to think so. And if it does, how? Does belief in the existence of a Supreme Being give our lives meaning? Does work give our lives meaning? Does family give our lives meaning? Or is meaning an illusion we cleave to in order not to face the fact that we are just random atoms randomly assembled and living in a random world that has no meaning, no intent beyond what we project? Do we just make it up? Without some sense of meaning, how can we know what’s right and what’s wrong? How can we orient ourselves so that our actions are moral?    

This is the point, traditionally, where religion steps in with the idea of God and an order of God’s design, the transcendental ground of existence, the Unmoved Mover, the stability at the centre of the Tumult. God (Whichever One) guarantees meaning, grounds existence in divine Truth and Order beyond the flux of the workaday world, the profane and the mundane. Philosophy does that too, but philosophy always tags along behind religion, even when it pretends not to, because it lacks religion’s access to emotion. Reason will only get you so far over the void before urging caution and sober second thought about the original plan. Think Wiley Coyote here, running off the edge of a cliff and getting half way across a chasm before realizing what he has done and falling. Religion says to Hell with it, throws caution to the (divine) wind and goes for it because God wants you to—means for you to—and may even hold you up—though you can’t count on that second part, which is the point. Do you believe or not? Belief is nothing without a bit of uncertainty.

The trouble is we find ourselves in a modern world in which the authority to say what’s real and what the meaning of that is was passed from Religion to Science a long time ago. Business followed up on that by using Science and its child, Technology, to make a world where everything has been turned into something, at least potentially, for sale and the only value left is exchange value. Religion may claim that water can be turned into wine, and the dead can be raised from the grave, but science knows better, can prove it, and business can use that knowledge to manufacture a cheaper wine than you could make from water if you could make wine from water. This doesn’t mean that people don’t hold to belief in a Divine power. But it does mean that that belief no longer determines the orientation of the culture, which makes some people extremely upset and gives rise to a lot of noise about culture wars. Belief has become individualized. Plus, science deals only with truth and falsity, never with meaning.

In the Medieval world, everyone shared the experience of the sacred which shaped and determined the experience of time itself. Every moment was sacred and informed by divine presence. Each hour had an angel. Each day had a saint. The year circulated around sacred, holy days, days that returned time to the originary energies of Creation. In what was called Christendom, everyone shared in the profound experience of the birth, death, and resurrection of God as those eternal events manifested in the calendar year. Now instead we have “The Christmas Shopping Season” whose profound importance is that something like 80% of retail business takes place during that time, thus maintaining the health of “the economy.” Whereas Christmas once meant that the eruption of the Divine into time disrupted the profane world pulling people out of their workaday lives into the sacred Story, now it means a lot of shopping and the anxiety of massive credit card debt in January. Now, you could say, it means nothing, at least nothing of value.

But of course it means something, just not what it once meant. And that’s the crux. What does it mean to ask what does it mean? This is not just a cute puzzle, but an entrance into the maze where meaning dwells, proliferates, hides, metamorphoses. If Christmas once literally meant that the birth of God was immanent in our lives, now it means that the commercialization of the world has superseded that other sacred reality and replaced it with a shopping season, the ultimate sacred experience of the world transformed into stuff, commodities for sale in a Mall that has swapped out the cathedral as the center of people’s lives. The “meaning of Christmas” shifts from an experience redolent with something called sacred value to an experience of sociological facticity. Both are modes of meaning, but of different orders. So when we ask, what does it mean? we may think the answer is simple, but it is not.

People argue about whether or not language is the source of our experience of meaning which is a pertinent question when thinking about how a poem means since one definition of “poem” is a thing made out of words. Both sides of the argument make reasonable points, but, origins aside, there can’t be much doubt that meaning is always tied up with language to some degree. Our particular sense of meaning is deeply implicated in its rhythms, structures, and references. It may even be that our desire for meaning begins with meaning itself as desire. Robin Blaser, quoting Charles Olson on Alfred North Whitehead points out: “’The condition is hunger,’ ‘mouth,’ and I note that the hunger – the appetition to use Whitehead’s more abstract term – is of both body and mind. Meaning in this sense is an aspect of desire.” Some deep drive in our being propels us beyond ourselves, and a sense of meaning is part of that. Whitehead say, “Appetition is immediate matter of fact including in itself a principle of unrest, involving realization of what is not and may be.” Is meaning, a sense of meaning that must always precede meaning itself, implicit in the dynamic “realization of what is not and may be”? We first form in the rhythms of speech that resonate through our mothers’ bodies, vibrating, calling us. We are conceived, born into, and dwell in language and the meaning that preceded us. And desire forms in the mouthandthumb.

The idea of the meaning of a poem gets mixed up with the fact that meaning is a singular noun, the same as ball or racquet or egg. For most of us, that translates into an object or object-like condition, some thing out there where objects dwell. Asking “What’s the meaning of that poem” implies that there is an answer that begins, “The meaning of the poem is . . .,” in the same way “Where is the ball?” gets answered, “The ball is in the basket.” In that sense meaning is either there or it isn’t, in which case the poem is meaningless. This is frequently a complaint about some poetry written after 1910. People read it and don’t understand it and decide that it is meaningless. Blame Ezra Pound, T. S. Eliot, and especially Gertrude Stein.

In addition to the singular noun problem, we have another—the transformation of human beings from their various roles into a Universal Consumer, Humanity as Bezos’s Gimp. Desire, the great mystery of our lives, desire, desiderare, de sidere, is from the stars. What Whitehead has as that hunger that drives us beyond ourselves, meaning itself, has been disciplined into the bottomless need for a new sweater, a new car, a new blender, a new book. Cigarettes are the perfect commodity in this world. You want it? You need it? Just light up and get 5 minutes of guaranteed satisfaction (addiction is useful that way), something akin, arguably, to meaning. Click on Jeff’s handy link which already holds your name, address, phone number, clothing brand preferences, taste in books, credit card number, facially identified mug shot, and DNA. Click (one click shopping) and it’s yours, just like when you snort that line or hit that needle. Or spark up your next smoke. So why not meaning? What’s so special about meaning it can’t be had like peanut butter or the new, improved iPhone 238?

But that’s an impoverished understanding of meaning’s possibilities. It imagines meaning as something you get, with its implied clutch. What if we think about meaning not so much as a thing that you understand or get, but, say, as a multi-dimensional field you enter into relation with, or just enter, a field of sense alive with interconnected energetic micro-events (rimes) that resonate in the bodymind of the listener with various flashes of coherence? What if differing modalities of language formation (images, similes, metaphors, metonymies, etc.) resonate with the rhymes between sounds and rhythms enlivening measure with multiphasic overlays, vibrating palimpsests? Meaning in this sense in a poem arises out of the interplay of multiple linguistic devices and components which create an event of complex, energetic relations. You could even see the poem as a receiver as Jack Spicer did, or step transformer, an arrangement of words that channels energy from the cosmos into a form of meaning humans can deal with. To experience meaning is to participate in the event as you can, which will never be the same twice. And some events are much richer and more complicated than others. Which means 1) there is no meaning to “get”; there is an experiential event to enter; and 2) meaning comes in quanta, and though each quantum is whole and coherent, it is never the Whole; and 3) you can never get all the meaning, so savour the meaning you’re with.

Poetry, good poetry, is an Opening, and it has no specified form or formal commitment. It is not a feature of this poetry or that poetry. Dividing poetry into binaries made up of antithetical components such as mainstream and avant-garde, aesthetic justice and aesthetic illiberalism, meaningful and meaningless is a favourite pastime of academics staking out claims for their authority over poetry but will not yield any useful meaning. The language event called poetry opens new realms of sense rather than narrowing them down to a choice between two. Binaries will never yield a sense of poetry’s Opening into a further world, a wilderness of sense where elements of wild meaning circulate in a fecund turmoil—phonemes, syllables, individual words, phrases, concepts, rhetorical devices (rhyme, metaphor, metonymy, etc.), feeling tones, sonal oscillations, rhythmic patterns, all resonate in relation to each other at and across various frequencies and scales. Resonance beats at the heart of this experience, the vibrations of rhythm and rhyme (both rooted in measure and number)—creating the spontaneous synchronization of oscillating systems to neuronally entrained rhythmic stimuli, also known as grooving. That’s one way of thinking how a poem means.

Jan Zwicky, who wrote a good book called The Experience of Meaning, approaches the question phenomenologically—she investigates the experience of meaning rather than meaning. That is, she only finds meaning in human experience as if it did not exist otherwise. She says, “This is what the experience of meaning is: the perception, in challenging circumstances, of a gestalt.” That certainly seems reasonable—up to a point. In that sense, wanting certainty is tied up with the desire, the hunger, to feel the revelation of wholeness, completion, the satisfaction of seeing the pattern emerge. Why the hunger? She calls it an “evolutionary pleasure” and says “it’s what the mind is for.” It’s a habit that we picked up a few eons ago while adapting to the often hostile, changing world. It may be, as Zwicky argues, inherent in the ordering of the creature, the physical structure of our brain. It may also be, as Blaser proposed, an aspect of desire, where desire is understood to be a divine manifestation. It may also be an adaptation of the creature not just to the threats from the world, but also to the world of meaning it finds itself in.

Perhaps because of this, Zwicky embraces the possibility of a poem being meaningless. A friend of hers leveled this criticism at a poem, and Zwicky was concerned to address it in her thinking of the experience of meaning. As it turns out, she kind of wants to have her cake and to eat it too when it comes to meaninglessness. On the one hand she equate meaninglessness with bad poetry. The real (good) poem is resonant, and the meaningless poem has no resonant relation to a resonant world. On the other hand, she finds the beginning of meaningless poetry in the work of Dada early in the 20th century, and sees it expand from there. I may not fully understand Zwicky here, but I would argue that even the work of Dada was not meaningless. Kurt Schwitters, one of its founders, described himself as someone who “cultivates nonsense.” Nonsense is a very different kettle of bicycles than meaninglessness. Nonsense operates in relation to sense, and that relation is meaningful. No one, I think, would accuse Lewis Carroll’s Alice books of being meaningless. Their nonsense roils with meaning. Talking about Merz, his own post-Dada practice, Schwitters wrote:

The word ‘Merz’ had no meaning when I gave it form. Now it has meaning I attached to it. The meaning of the concept ‘Merz” changes with the changing understanding of those who continue to work in the spirit of the concept.

As Schwitters presents it, meaning is not a Given, a fixed quality. It’s not either/or. meaning or meaninglessness. Meaning is alive. It is created, born, given form, which changes as it becomes part of a conversation and ongoing work. Schwitters’ meaning is a deferred event that displaces meaning as presence, but never becomes meaningless even as it oscillates between sense and nonsense, or takes up residence in nonsense.

Zwicky is critical of what she sees as a tendency or belief among some poets and artists that “art is supposed to be unintelligible.” And while I do not think that art should be anything, much less unintelligible, isn’t a certain unintelligibility a necessary part of the poem’s meaning? If the poem is to be responsive to the world of its address, shouldn’t it harbour some inaccessible secret, some unintelligibility along with its clarities, revelations, and transformations? The world is not transparent. It’s full of confusion, secrets, opaque complexities. If the poem is accurately to reflect or entertain the world, that impenetrability needs to be part of it.  The indigestible serves as essential reminder of our finitude, of our service to language which always is more than we are and always finally escapes our uses into meanings beyond us. Or you could say it serves as an opening within the poem to that which is always beyond it even in the midst of its precisions. The unintelligible is an essential part of intelligible life.

And the poem’s relation to life is always at stake in its articulations. Poems don’t represent life. Nor are they “rent” from it in some act of avant-garde faux heroic violence. Poems teem with life which cannot be encompassed, with language animated by life, with the energetic evidence of compositional choices, and with linguistically coded fragments of that life. Teeming with life means the language of the poem is composed in such a way that the world of its address enters into the field of the poem’s sense and becomes part of the energized meaning, the resonance which dances with coherence.

The poet’s life, the forms of her presence in the world, figure in that activation in multiple ways—sometimes through fragments of re-presentation, but also in modes of selectivity, diction, emotion, and compositional strategies and choices that arise in relation to the event of that life and the determining world of its occasion. The poet’s intent, what she means, reveals itself furtively, appearing and disappearing in the play of language.

No reductive opposition between, as some have proposed, “life experience” and “aesthetic experience” can approach the complexity of the poem’s linguistic entanglement with the stuff of the poet’s life. They are both part of the energetic field of sense that generates a rich meaning. The poem may be a balm or a provocation or a revelation, or all simultaneously. It may be a centre of contemplative attention. It may play with joy, or dwell in anger, locating them in a world of deep form. It may indulge the jouisssance of word play or aim to arouse emotions in the pursuit of the instigation of resistance. Yeats was great at that. One thing for sure—the poem is never Just This or Just That, and anyone who tries to sell you that line is a huckster, no matter how many poetry medals they have pinned to their puffed out chest.

The meaning of a poem, then, is not easy to put your finger on, so don’t despair if you find yourself stumped by a poem. Treat it like the person it deserves to be treated as. When you meet someone, especially someone you anticipate to be interesting, you don’t expect to understand them in 10 minutes. You savour the revelation of the person unfolding over time.

Ditto with the poem. If you don’t immediately “understand” it, carry on the conversation and see what unfolds. It’s not that there is something wrong with the poem. It wants to teach you something and you haven’t learned it yet. You think just because the poem is in English and you speak English, you ought to be able to understand its meaning, and if you can’t, there’s a problem with the poem. Wrong.

The problem is not that the poem is meaningless. The problem is you are approaching it in the wrong mood. Instead of trying to understand the meaning, trying to get it, relax and listen. Then you may hear something, a little thing, and think, wow. That’s an encounter with meaning. You may not feel that you “understand” the poem, but that’s OK. You don’t have to understand it in order to encounter meaning. Do you understand the Grand Canyon? Do you understand the Pacific Ocean, humiliating in its disguises as Spicer has it? You got a flash of meaning and there’s more where that came from. The poem is not going anywhere. It’s not that it’s teasing you, although a good poem is seductive. But the poem doesn’t give it all up just because you want it to. It doesn’t even give it all up to the poet who wrote it. It has integrity. It has secrets. But it does want you to share in its meanings. Maybe it’s a rhyme you hadn’t expected, then, bam, there it is. Or a rhythmic phrase that repeats and varies with a beautiful twist. Maybe it’s an image that stuns you, or a brief flash of insight into a moment of the poem’s thinking. All these are meaningful encounters with meaning. They can never be the Meaning. But there’s plenty of meaning to go around.

Meaning fills the poet’s mouth and the reader’s as well. The sound is tactile. She sounds the energy that fills her and she transforms it into vibrating flesh using words as a medium. Meaning is not an answer. Meaning is an event, and like all events it goes on and can’t be encompassed. As long as the poem exists, the event of its meaning continues and changes. But the way a poem means may ask more of you than you knew you had. It may ask you to rethink your idea of reading for instance. One reading is never enough, which is anathema in today’s culture of tweets and instantaneous connection where speed and more speed has become the Given. The poem stops you in your tracks, refusing to inform and communicate even as it radiates meaning that requires you to engage it. If you want to know what it means, you will have to slow down, look stuff up you are unfamiliar with, and read the poem over and over, say every night for a week, maybe two weeks. It will reward you for that with prodigious gifts of meaning.

Poetry resists the rush to transparency by meaning too much. A poem that means too much requires not just two readings, but many readings. Give it what it asks of you and it will yield to your fidelity. In a world dominated by instant “information” that doesn’t inform and instant “communication” that communicates only instructions, poetry offers a door into another experience of what we call meaning. It offers you a world beyond anything you think you know.

Big Bitch at the OK Corral

Camille Paglia has long been a self-professed bitch. In a typically over-the-top, in-your-face display of female machismo, she seized a male-centered term of derision and turned it into a post-feminist exercise of female power. The bitch, or more properly, The Bitch, is the nightmare incarnation of the terrors of all moralists. She is nasty, bad tempered, and does not suffer fools at all. Elevating the Bitch to the status of a pagan divinity, Paglia has waged unrelenting war on the proper, the correct (politically and otherwise) and pretenses of all shapes, colours and sexual preferences. At her best, she is capable of genuinely challenging the moralist banalities that pass for politics in too many circles, right and left, today, not to mention the often-preposterous assumptions we all tend to harbour in unexamined corners of our lives. Occasionally, she can even make you laugh at yourself, a genuine political contribution to the health of the polity. On the other hand, more often than not, she’s just what we used to call a shit-kicker.

Not there’s anything wrong with shit-kicking. Having spent a few years in the Teamsters, I’ve been known to kick a bit myself once in a while. But as fun as it is to be a provocateur (and it can be really fun to watch the moralists pop a gasket at your command), it’s a mistake to confuse shit-kicking with thinking, as Paglia’s 1999 talk to the McLuhan Institute demonstrated. Published as “The North American Intellectual Tradition” in Salon in 2000 and in her 2018 book, Provocations: Collected Essays), Paglia’s essay attempted to define some uniquely American mode of thinking stretching from Emerson to her own heroes of the mind, Marshal McLuhan, Leslie Fiedler, and Norman O. Brown. There’s nothing really new in that aspect of her proposal. It’s the same compulsive influence anxiety that’s been convulsing through American thought for at least 200 years. Paglia’s contribution is to attempt to link it to the energies of American pop culture. And it’s not that she’s wrong, though she isn’t right either. As Stanley Cavell made evident, Emerson, and after him Thoreau, redefined the possibilities of philosophy in a new mode of thinking tied to their understanding of the unique energies of the ordinary world emerging in USAmerica. What she misses or ignores is the interconnectedness of the thinking of that new common world with the thinking of Romanticism, especially as it was being written and practiced in Jena.

Embracing the liberatory energies of pop culture and elevating them to almost philosophical status, Paglia neglects to pay attention to the cosmology it drags along behind it. This is what happens when you take your McLuhan straight with no chaser. The medium (and its admittedly Dionysian energies) so totally overshadows the content that it’s simply forgotten. Paglia’s argument is a case in point. How else explain how she starts off proposing a critique of contemporary continental philosophy and ends up at the OK Corral?

On one side of her archetypal gunfight are the Clantons (the Clintons?) in the guise of three Continental scumbags—“Black Jack” Derrida, “Ladyboy” Foucault, and “Iron Jacques” Lacan­—spiritually sick refugees from a ravaged, post-war Europe, lurking in the shadows of the barn waiting the bushwhack the Earps with a blast of incomprehensible prose. The Earps, marching three abreast down the sunlit streets of Tombstone with their scatterguns nestled lovingly cross their broad, homo-erotic chests, take the form of upright Marshal Marshall McLuhan (or is that Marshall Marshal?), lovable old “Lightning” Les Fiedler with his grizzled beard and his pot belly, (ah! the body, he seems to say with each sure step) and cantankerous “Nobby” Brown wearing a dress shirt, cut-off jeans and black street shoes, and sporting inked knuckles that read “Love” and “Death”.

As Paglia stages the showdown between the slick Euro-trash philosophers reeking of last night’s overindulgence in Heidegger, and the lovable old Yankee cowpoke theorists, their eyes lit up with the immense blue skies of Montana, one thing becomes glaringly obvious. This is not a discussion about ideas. It’s a classic American pop-culture confrontation between the forces of good and evil. We could be in any Arnold Schwarzenegger movie of the last 25 years. Our Bitch, it seems, has something of a moralistic streak to her after all, and ideas are the first thing out the window when moralisms break through the door.

It’s too bad, too, because the territory Paglia stakes out is interesting and full of fascinating complexities waiting to be explored. One by one, though, they fall like innocent bystanders beneath the fullisade of gunfire from the shootout. Paglia states at one point that her good guys derive from “the encounter of British Romanticism with assertive North American English.” She neglects to mention, however, that British Romanticism derives almost wholly from—gasp!—German Romanticism via S.T. Coleridge, and that German Romanticism was one of the great inspirations for Paglia’s arch-villain, Martin Heidegger. Add to that the fact that “pragmatic English” has strong roots in German, and you’re faced with a universe of marvelous, even awe inspiring, connections, relationships, derivations, and cross-pollinations.

Even more confounding to Camille’s vision of philosophical Armageddon is “Black Jack” Derrida’s debt to one of Paglia’s boys in white, R.W. Emerson. Emerson was a chief inspiration for the post-philosophical thinking of Friedrich Nietzsche (you can read Nietzsche’s enthusiastic comments and even cribs in the margins of his copy of Emerson’s essays), and Nietzsche, contrary to Paglia’s apocalyptic vision of philosophical collapse after his work, was a major source for both Heidegger and Husserl (who, incidentally, were far from being “narrow French thinkers”—when did Heidegger and Husserl become French, anyway? Or is it just their “thinking” that’s French?) both of whom were struggling to find a way out of the impasse of European philosophical rationalism. Derrida, who was indebted to them both, can in that light be seen as a kind of Talmudic, post-holocaust oracular Emerson returning in disguise to haunt his own source.

These are fascinating connections, offering a world of fruitful contemplation and scholarly detective work into the intricate intellectual filiations that extend back and forth across the Atlantic, taking on different casts and emphases, but confronting common historical realities. But Henry James Camille ain’t. All these obscure and obscured relationships lead to a sense of complexity, sometimes a source of illumination and clarity, sometimes a sea of confusion. And confusion, we know from all those movie westerns has no place at the OK Corral when the guns are blazing and everything decent and wholesome and American is on the line. The glory of simplicity and certainty light up the purple mountain’s majesty. The Bitch single-handedly clarifies all confusions with a dramatic gesture of unexpected common sense—don’t leave your keys on the car.

It’s interesting that much of the thinking of the bad guys in this staged shootout—the Euro-trash scum bags—has consistently moved to lay bare the structures and dynamics that lead to the kind of knee-jerk dichotomizing that Paglia seems happy to wallow in, drawing out the ways in which that binary thinking upholds certain structures of power. One fact haunts their thinking: the death camps of World War II, and the minds that could conceive, build, and operate them by mobilizing all the institutions of the Enlightenment. This may be what Paglia refers to when she speaks with contempt of war-ravaged Europe. What the scumbags found there was a ubiquitous demonic us against them that eventually permitted any horror. Maybe that’s why Paglia is so upset with them. She doesn’t want to have to think about what she might meet there.