Cross-Media Criticism: Postwar American Poetry-With-Cinema

 
Kane’s book partakes of the renewed interest in contemporary humanities for the study of cross-medium exchanges, particularly involving literature, pioneered in the 1970s and somewhat marginalized by the massive turn to language, semiotics, cultural codes and discourse analysis that occupied much of the literary humanities in the 1980s and 90s. We will return to what Kane makes of this further on. Within this new cross-disciplinary field focusing on exchanges between various mediums, poetry and cinema have been especially probed for two significant and interrelated reasons. First, they both share in today’s digital smorgasbord the unenviable distinction of being, or at least seeming obsolescent, in comparison to narrative on the one hand, and post-analog moving image media on the other. At the same time, recent scholarship has shown that poets and filmmakers were at the very core of the vanguard of 20^th-century cross-medium practices, which they often theorized as well (as in the work of Susan McCabe, David Trotter, Laura Marcus, and Wall-Romana). Hence, relations between poetry and cinema offer a paradigmatic and relatively bookended span of cross-medium practices that pioneered and, in crucial ways, remain subjacent to and resonant within current interdisciplinary humanities, including new media studies. Such early experiments also explain why studies in the relation of poetry and cinema have tended to concentrate on interwar modernism.
 
Kane’s aim is in part to complicate this archaeological argument by pointedly ending the book on very recent collaborations between poets and filmmakers: John Ashbery and Rudy Burkhardt; Lisa Jarnot and Jennifer Reeves. More broadly, the book provides a careful revision and innovative exploration of the crisscrossing historiography of the new experimental cinema and new poetry movements (particularly those showcased by Donald Allen in his anthology, The New American Poetry) which took place in the US between the 1950s and 70s.
 
After describing how postwar filmmakers such as Deren, Mekas, and Markopoulos#relied on poetry as a non-narrative model, both as a general framework for their films and by writing poems themselves, Kane sets up in subsequent chapters a series of pairings of one or several poets with one or several filmmakers: Robert Duncan and Kenneth Anger (chapter 2); Robert Creeley and Stan Brakhage (Chapter 3); Frank O’Hara and Alfred Leslie (Chapter 4); Allen Ginsberg and Robert Frank (with Charlie Chaplin, Chapter 5); Andy Warhol, Gerard Malaga, Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara (Chapter 6); John Ashbery and Rudy Burkhardt (Chapter 7). This original organization allows Kane to provide joint close readings of specific films and poems and/or poetry collections, and provides illuminating new interpretations of works such as Creeley’s Pieces, Burkhardt’s The Last Clean Shirt, Frank’s Me and My Brother (on Peter Orlovsky and his brother Julius, and of course Ginsberg). Kane couches such joint readings as “conversations,” to suggest we might recover from them as comparably rich and lively exchanges as those from his live conversation with Jarnot and Reeves transcribed in the concluding chapter.
 
The starting point of We Saw The Light is Kane’s painstakingly documented and convincing sense that, “to a surprising extent, film informed the content and form of much of the postwar American poetic avant-garde” (27). The surprise here is at least threefold, since it concerns first the breadth and depth of cinema’s influence on poetry, second its being overlooked by poetry scholars working until recently within more confining disciplinary purviews, and third, the fact that—contrary to other cases in various cultural areas and times—it is experimental rather than mainstream cinema that most deeply imprinted itself on the new poetry. Kane’s archival recovery of the social and spatial networks that explain how experimental cinema permeated the new American poetry, and his talent for reenacting them in elegant and critical writing are the most valuable aspects of the book. Not only do we get a sense of how local scenes (mostly in underground New York, San Francisco and Los Angeles) shaped cross-genre productions according to a Bourdieu-like logic of a force-field of ideas rather than individual innovation, but we witness the transversal exchanges in which, say, Brakhage met Anger at the home of poet Duncan (and that of his partner, the painter Jess) [52], or Ginsberg and Ashbery meet up on the celluloid of Warhol’s Screen Tests (153). We are not dealing simply with filmic notions migrating to poetry or vice versa, but with a complex aesthetic and sociopolitical circulation involving poets, filmmakers and other artists such as painters and musicians (who are not the primary focus of the book). With other recent works such as Liz Kotz’s Words To Be Looked At (MIT P, 2007), Kane’s book will contribute to renewing and deepening the focus on cross-media exchanges in American art and literature of the 1960s.
 
Before engaging with some of Kane’s arguments, which in my view he deploys problematically, it is worth giving some idea of the challenges coming from various horizons that face works such as his. Based on archival research, framed historically, analyzing sets of unknown or lesser known works from different disciplines, while offering detailed descriptions and/or citations of many works, such truly interdisciplinary studies often run the risk of being ignored by scholars in either of the two (or more) disciplines they tackle, and seeming too narrow or specialized to a broader academic audience. On the publishing side, highly focused monographs appear to have a diminishing appeal in spite of their trailblazing transdisciplinary criticism. Methodologically, transdisciplinary endeavors must find ways to negotiate the standards and practices of two (or more) fields, in the hope of doing each a modicum of justice, and must develop critical approaches that go beyond their respective limitations. Kane’s book does an excellent job at providing a thick description of the various underground nodes of the 50s and 60s—so precise indeed that it persuasively accounts for the fact that cross-pollination first took place between this and that poet and filmmaker. As to the challenge of publishing, my sense that each chapter comes to a close too quickly, sacrificing the development of some of the book’s stated theses and hypotheses, might result from strictures put on by the publisher, although it might also be due to an overall conception that came a little short. With this caveat, I emphasize that my scholarly sympathies lay squarely with Kane’s ambitious and immensely useful enterprise and that the shortcomings of his book may well be endemic to the pressures put on transdisciplinary work in the humanities today.
 
Kane’s central argument, that the constitutive role of experimental cinema in the new American poetry has been overlooked by scholarship, is couched polemically:
 

In a larger sense, analyzing the conversation between film and poetry has led me to wonder if the academy’s dominant use of poststructuralist and postmodern theoretical/interpretive frameworks for innovative postwar art ends up freezing out, ignoring, or at times critiquing unfairly any number of productive sources—hermetic, heroic, mystically macho, religiously inspired—that were crucial to the creation of the various films and poems considered here. To use postmodern interpretative paradigms (particularly as they are linked up with feminist and queer studies to form a progressive triumvirate that more generally celebrates the decentered, denatured self as an ever-evolving site of freedom) results in the reader’s missing out on much of what makes the poetry and film I discuss here so fascinating.
 

(3)

As a parenthesis, let me say first that despite the alarming targeting of “feminist and queer studies” on behalf of “mystically macho” poets, Kane’s monograph is in point of fact both feminist and queer. He examines, for instance, with great precision the horrendously sexist treatment of Maya Deren by Arthur Miller and Dylan Thomas (13-17), and much of the “mystically macho” sensibility he foregrounds and celebrates comes from gay poets, who form the overwhelming majority of the poets he examines. The problem is not unreconstructed phallogocentrism at all, but indeed why he chooses as a polemical gambit to attack “postmodern interpretive paradigms,” ostensibly in favor of another interpretive horizon—”hermetic, heroic, mystically macho, religiously inspired.” For while assailing “poststructuralist and postmodern theoretical/interpretive frameworks,” Kane’s readings conclude by and large right smack within the vulgate of poststructuralism “that more generally celebrates the decentered, denatured self as an ever-evolving site of freedom.” The last sentence of the last chapter (on Burkhardt’s film about Ashbery’s poem “Ostensibly”), prior to the transcribed interview with Lisa Jarnot and Jennifer Reeves that forms the Conclusion, reads:

The conversation between film and poem takes us further out “Towards one’s space and time,” where both the poem and film urge us to confront our responsibility as interpreters and encourage us to enjoy the process of imagining “so many separate ways of doing.”
 

(190)

If that’s not a celebration of “decentered” subjectivity and “ever-evolving” freedom of interpretation, what is? Kane’s concluding statement is not a coda that might have been inserted at the behest of a worried editor: it is the crux of his readings in every chapter. Hence chapter 6 on Warhol, Malanga, Ginsberg, Ashbery, and O’Hara ends with the assessment that, “By the late 1960s, the way forward seemed to be an ever more playful, sexually polymorphous, and decentered aesthetic” (163). Also in that chapter, Kane glosses Warhol’s Screen Tests (1965) as “a practically minimalist approach to manifesting the failure of static art to embody presence” (158), the very same target as Jacques Derrida’s critique of presence in philosophy around the same time. Kane even appears to use poststructuralist jargon pointedly when he writes: “Ashbery in his screen test is practically a free-floating signifier” whose poetic persona is “consistently constructed and deconstructed” (155-6). Summarizing his chapter on Allan Ginsberg and Robert Frank, Kane writes that both artists aimed to counter “essentializing moves that would seek to use the discourses of ‘truth’ to impose normative readings of sexuality, family, power” (147). This is straight out of Irigaray or Butler. To take a last example, early on in the book, Kane considers that the key idea for a Robert Duncan poem from Bending the Bow on and around Kenneth Anger’s Fireworks was Anger’s filmic practice of “‘integrality,’ a state in which binaries are reconciled and ultimately synthesized” (34). This Hegelian notion coming out of German Idealism informs both the thought of much poststructuralism that transformed it (Georges Bataille, Derrida, or Gilles Deleuze) and that of the 20th-century avant-gardes, from Breton’s theory of Surrealism in the second manifesto to Peter Bürger’s Theory of the Avant-Garde predicated on the reconciling of life and art.

 
So what is going on? Kane is not an ironist and although his characterization of poststructuralism is rather hasty, I don’t believe he is unaware that his arguments feed its mill. The problem, in the end, is that the major premise and promise of the book, i.e., “that the material considered here is telling us that much of what we consider to be first-generation postmodern art is grounded in a practically visionary tradition” (4), remains quite sketchy. The telling never becomes a tale. What is the visionary tradition and in what ways could criticism based on it alter the current paradigms of postwar modernist studies? I waited in vain for the case to be built, while keeping in mind Kane’s strong rejection of the current “aggressively secular interpretive approach” (4) of the work of Anger, Brakhage, Creeley and Duncan. We would expect that such a stringent rejection would lead him to shore up his point with many sources: puzzlingly Kane mentions very few such works, and most notably he omits Peter O’Leary’s Gnostic Contagion (Wesleyan 2002), which investigates Robert Duncan’s derivative ties to and conversations with a variety of mystical sources. Kane does engage sporadically with the visionary dimension of his material, particularly with regard to the importance of queer ritual for Anger and Duncan in a context of police repression of queer films in pre-Stonewall New York, or Frank’s film on Ginsberg and Julius Orlovsky’s treatment in psychiatric hospitals. But again, his conclusions either fall in line with the poststructuralist framework they were meant to displace or else merely gesture towards the visionary. Hence Kane’s conclusion of Chapter 2 that “Duncan used the Passages series in an effort to effect, if not successfully or finally, something we can call transcendence” (50), will seem glib to readers who have grappled with Duncan’s multi-faceted poetics anchored in derivation, myth, the sacred, “magick,” modernist history, the figure of H.D., queer militancy, Whitmanian intersubjectivity, linguistics, French poetry, etc. What transcendence might Kane be referring to? The godhead? A sense of the divine? A turn away from immanence? The invisible?
 
We are left to gather the few clues of what Kane means by “visionary tradition” (as distinct from P. Adams Sitney’s understanding of the term in his Visionary Film: The American Avant-Garde, 1942-2000), which we might reconstruct as follows. First, he understands “revelation” in the sense of physical immediacy (Brakhage’s Two: Creeley/McClure “reflect[s] their practically physiological poetics” [70]) and non-logical thought (“the act of viewing was in the service of revelation independent of reason” [77]). Both point to contingence, corporeality and experience, of which transcendence is usually considered the opposite. Likely because of Brakhage’s allergy to so-called structuralist cinema and postmodern aesthetics (63-4, 79), Kane shies away from using thinkers such as Georges Bataille and Maurice Merleau-Ponty, who might have helped to better frame his interesting views on this poetics of corporeal revelation and artistic immediacy. Indeed, Kane’s skillful and exacting analyses of seriality, materiality, and mobility between various perceptual positions (rather than a theoretical ‘subject position’) in Duncan and Creeley’s poems, would seem to warrant some thinking about the foregrounding of sensation in cognition, perhaps as directly informing the “essentially mystical understanding of serial form” (77) he recognizes in both poets. This could also help account for the importance of what he rightly terms the “extreme realism” (38) in Brakhage and Creeley, but which he does not attempt to reconcile with transcendental aspiration. Kane emphasizes the reconciling of opposites in the first part of the book (34, 73), on an axis implicitly linking Coleridge to Jung, but this is replaced in the second part by the foregrounding of mediation and media, particularly in Ginsberg’s shift from an inner prophetic to an outer cultural dictation, and in the ways Warhol, Ashbery and Burkhardt play with the gap between filmic and linguistic representation in the production of meaning. Hence by his own account, Kane appears to reconstruct a progressive shift (if not a continuum) rather than an opposition between revelatory and “postmodern” frameworks.
 
Take away these two hazards (but also potential rewards) of cross-disciplinary research—polemical bent and theoretical thrust—and what remains is a sharply investigative and very well written book that insightfully proposes new foci for the study of poetry and its relations to cinema from the 1950s onward that may be summarized as follows: conversations and collaborations among poets, and between them and filmmakers, were essential to and cannot be left out of accounts of contemporary poetry; mystical stances among postwar poets and filmmakers must not be sidelined to fit extant modernist models, although the work remains to be done to see how exactly they may alter or inflect these models; gay poets were very active in seeking in both cinema and visionary sources original inspiration for a new poetry reflecting their sexuality and sociality; central notions of poetry studies such as inventiveness, aesthetic pleasure, materiality/immateriality, address, and social/technological autonomy were significantly transfigured by the interactions Kane describes.
 
Two snippets from the book give a sense of Kane’s elegant critical voice, which made his book a pleasure to read. The first is about viewing Alfred Leslie’s The Last Clean Shirt:
 

Emphasizing the ethical nature of the film, the final intertitle we read before the second repetition of the car journey reads, “It’s the nature of us all to want to be unconnected.” Yes, we want to be unconnected—free—but the film has already begun to suggest, however lightly and humorously, that perhaps we resist that part of our nature in an effort to be connected members of a community, one which delights in the possibilities of urbane love, laughter, and a casual interracial accord.
 

(102)

The second is in the chapter on Duncan:

As Duncan conceived of words as a kind of hieroglyphics (in evidence especially in his extensive use of puns), so film too contains within it a hidden language that can potentially be unlocked by the enchanted poet.
 

(31)

These excerpts show the remarkable range of Kane’s critical ken: from the measured unpacking of an intertitle in a film from 1964 in the context of the Civil Rights movement, to a trenchant reading of Duncan’s punning as directly spliced to the notion of cinema as language—but rather than the old cliché of this language being universal and explicit, it is an esoteric and potential language. Despite its shortcomings, Kane’s is a must-read book for anyone interested in the cross-pollination of poetry and cinema in the 1960s American underground.