Kevin Marzahl

English and Cultural Studies
Indiana University
kmarzahl@indiana.edu

 

Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain, eds. The Objectivist Nexus: Essays in Cultural Poetics.Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 1999.

 

Two sets of affinities underlie most contemporary American poetic practices. On the one hand, there is a surrealist genealogy which would include the New York School as well as the vatic or “deep” imagism of the sixties popularized by Robert Bly and James Wright and devolving into the much decried scenic mode. More recently, a more properly Bretonian neo-surrealism has been embraced by writers like Dean Young. On the other hand, there is what Rachel Blau DuPlessis and Peter Quartermain call the “studied affinities” (10) of a tradition now freed from the cautionary quotation marks given it by Louis Zukofsky on the occasion of the now famous 1931 “Objectivist” issue of Poetry. The tradition encompasses by way of precedent Gertrude Stein and William Carlos Williams and by way of descent the New American Poetry, Language writing, and a range of as yet under-theorized practices. The Objectivist tradition has arguably been more successful in staking a claim to avant-garde status in North America than surrealism (to which it has been hostile since Zukofsky’s programmatic essay “Sincerity and Objectification”). It is about time, then, that an anthology emerges that takes advantage of the considerable scholarship produced on Objectivist poets over the last two decades. DuPlessis and Quartermain have compiled just such an anthology. Theirs is an excellent collection of essays on the six core poets of what they call, quite deliberately, not a movement, a school, a generation, or even a group, but a “nexus.” Yet the book aspires to be more than a resource for studying or teaching the diverse work of Basil Bunting, Lorine Niedecker, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, Charles Reznikoff, and Louis Zukofsky. For in addition to arguing for “a central place in twentieth century poetry and poetics” for these poets (2), the editors also aim to invigorate the criticism of poetry by promoting what they call “cultural poetics,” or “readings inflected with sociopolitical concerns” (20). The editors contend that “in attempting culturalist readings of poetry, critics are struggling with and against accepted institutionalized paradigms for the analysis of that genre” (21), but the banner of “cultural poetics” risks allowing that struggle to resolve itself into a critical pluralism constrained by liberal humanist pieties and a narrowly discursive model of materiality.

 

DuPlessis and Quartermain distinguish three phases in the Objectivist tradition. The first or properly “Objectivist” phase runs from 1927-1935; a second “underground” or “dormant” period lasts through the late fifties; and what Ron Silliman has called a third or “renaissance” phase gives rise in the sixties to both renewed reception and production. The editors find this history more complex than is usually acknowledged, suggesting that “the linear, ideal literary historical narrative from production to reception gets disturbed, torqued, or folded upon itself” (5).¹ Rather than organize the anthology chronologically, then, they arrange it thematically in four sections to emphasize the complexity and breadth of both the object of study and the methodological principles of the project. The editors describe the organization best themselves:

 

Discussing poetics and form, the essays in the first section insist on poetry as a mode of thought; those in the second analyze and evaluate a generally left-wing Objectivist politics of the thirties…. The third section focuses on the ethical, spiritual, and religious issues raised, mainly in the post-Holocaust fifties and sixties, by Objectivists’ affiliations with Judaism…. The final section explores the sense of nexus directly…. Running through all four sections are two related threads: Objectivist writing as aware of its own historical contingency and situatedness, and Objectivist poetics as a site of complexity, contestation, interrogation, and disagreement. (6)

 

These two constant “threads” that bind the collection are implicit in the titular figure of the nexus. DuPlessis and Quartermain charge this carefully chosen figure with two tasks: to characterize links between writers in a manner that resists standard narratives of literary development and descriptions of literary formations, and to maintain a multifaceted critical endeavor around those writers. In a sense, the figure is a prophylactic against reification. What the editors want to promote above all is “a continued interest in the groundsfor debate” (22, emphasis added). But protecting the Objectivist’s studied affinities from calcifying leads to the nexus becoming a figure for tolerance:

 

Thinking about writers in a nexus allows one to appreciate difference and disparity among them, to pinpoint perhaps radical disagreements, to attend to rupture as well as continuity, and to dispersion as well as origin. The term ‘nexus’ is useful because it describes a relationship among writers based on their shared meditations, but not necessarily shared conclusions or even practices, about the particulars of their writing life and their historical position. It engages the actual material, social, psychological, and aesthetic circumstances of literary production and transmission. (22)

 

The nexus, in short, allows even the most serious disagreements to be diffused in the name of “appreciat[ing] difference.” Whatever one may think of this liberal piety, DuPlessis and Quartermain at least recognize the potential for conflict between the critical practices subsumed under their rubric of “cultural poetics,” a rubric with an unusually restricted provenance given their commitment to linking diverse practices.

 

DuPlessis and Quartermain deploy “poetics” in a narrow sense which relegates to the periphery the kind of metacommentary about the nature of literary discourse that, however unpopular that project, many readers may associate with the term.² By “poetics” they mean “discussions of the vocation of the poet, the functions ascribed to poetry, the explicit or implicit reading list of worthwhile practitioners, the motivated defenses of poetic technique, form, and diction, the constitution of an audience, and the puncturing or harrying of an opponent poetics…” (21). By “cultural poetics” they mean to inflect this writerly³ sense with a consideration of “the working assumptions, the premises, the ideologies of practice of any discursive system that gives rise to texts….” (21). In this they follow Stephen Greenblatt, from whose Renaissance Self-Fashioning (1980) they have adapted the rubric. The sense of a “discursive system” does bring a more rigorous sense of “poetics” into play, but, as the editors must know, Greenblatt derives that rigor from an anthropological tradition, which, largely under the influence of Clifford Geertz, models cultures as texts (Greenblatt 4).⁴ Buried in the term “cultural,” then, is a merely discursive model of culture that, because it does not take into account sociological or even biological models of matter and mind, is seriously constrained in any attempt to “engag[e] the actual material, social, psychological, and aesthetic circumstances” of writing (22, emphasis added).⁵

 

I have thus far had to neglect the essays in The Objectivist Nexus themselves in order to show how DuPlessis and Quartermain’s Introduction overreaches the more modest goal of synthesizing much needed scholarship. Let me now make amends for this unfortunate necessity. The concept of a critical nexus makes it difficult to cite any particular nodule as representative; nonetheless, I will take Ming-Qian Ma’s excellent remarks on Carl Rakosi as exemplary of the typical strategy of grounding the value of the Objectivists in the critique of epistemology implicit in so much of their poetry. To counterbalance this attempt at representativeness, I will then turn to essays by Peter Middleton and Stephen Fredman, which most test the tolerance of the nexus.

 

Ming-Qian Ma’s “Be Aware of ‘the Medusa’s Glance’: The Objectivist Lens and Carl Rakosi’s Poetics of Strabismal Seeing,” relies on familiar critiques of Occidental ocular privilege to argue that Rakosi’s “critique of phenomenology as epistemology… finds its philosophical counterpart in Adorno’s ‘metacritique’ of Husserl” (81). To call this procedure typical is by no means to denigrate it; the series of readings produced are meticulous. The strongest arguments for the value of the Objectivists seem to me precisely those that show, as Ma does, how the discrete images characteristic of the poetry guard against aggrandizement, allowing objects to retain their integrity rather than serving as vehicles for Romantic mirages. Thus a poem like “Objectivist Lamp” “frustrat[es] any attempt to see beyond the appearance” (69), while the syntax and grammar of “Cenozoic Time” refuses “a hierarchical, military control based on subjection and subordination” (71). Of course, as this last example suggests, such arguments are open to charges of overstating the power of linguistic phenomena; that is, there is a frequent slippage between grammatical subordination and social control in much theorizing about and within the Objectivist tradition, one which tends to reduce mind to language, much as culture is reduced to textuality. But if one looks to cognitive science rather than philosophy for critiques of epistemology, much of the rhetoric of violence and militarism begins to appear unnecessary.⁶

 

If the value of their poetry is generally grounded in its philosophical acumen, the status of the Objectivists as an advance guard in the revolution of the word tends to be tied to urban experience. It is most refreshing, then, to find Peter Middleton, in “Lorine Niedecker’s ‘Folk Base’ and Her Challenge to the American Avant-Garde,” showing how the deliberate isolation of this most marginal Objectivist highlights the male authority with which radical poetics has usurped the experiences of the working class, as well as how such poetics can remain bound to the intertwined assumptions that “the poet is engaged in some transhistoric poetry competition” and “that poetry is a transferable utterance” (163). Middleton persuasively argues that Niedecker’s experience as a folklorist for the WPA during the thirties sharpened her “self-conscious… folksiness” (173). Her dedication to the local points up the readiness with which the avant-garde has accepted “alienation” as “the necessary predisposition for innovative art” (180). Niedecker’s marginality has always been more than geographical, of course; aside from her gender, her affinity with surrealism–accented by Middleton’s occasional recourse to psychoanalytic concepts–distances her from the otherwise metropolitan Objectivists.

 

Finally, Stephen Fredman’s “‘And All Now Is War’: George Oppen, Charles Olson, and the Problem of Literary Generations” is, although rather short, probably the contribution that most fully seeks to challenge accepted categories. As he puts it, “I would like to throw a wrench into the narrative of succession that posits an Objectivist generation, launched in 1931, followed by a Projectivist one, launched in 1950” (287). That wrench is nothing less than the claim that both Oppen and Olson can just as easily be understood as existentialist as either Objectivist or Projectivist, owing to a shared “resistance which extends from the political to the epistemological and is grounded in the inexplicable actuality of people and things” (290). Fredman is quite clear that this need not lead to the abandonment of familiar terminology, however; his point is that even radical poetics has its shibboleths which can obstruct the most well-intentioned revision of literary history.

 

The most pernicious of these shibboleths is also the one most threatened by the fullest implications of the concept of a nexus. I can think of no better way to demonstrate this final point than to close with a few brief remarks on the work of Charles Altieri, who is accorded the privilege of an Afterword in which he reflects on his 1978 touchstone essay, “The Objectivist Tradition,” reprinted at the beginning of the book. In that essay he draws a distinction between what he calls two “modes of relatedness,” symbolist and objectivist. These “modes” designate, in Altieri’s usage, “the ways in which the basic elements of poetic form… offer models for the mind’s means of adjusting its dynamic properties to features of experience” (25-26). In other words, poems model cognition, where “model” most likely means “offer an exemplar,” although the word is not entirely free from the dual senses of “represent.” Altieri’s Afterword, however, does not revise this foundational claim; in fact, it plays as central a role as ever in his argument for the political efficacy of poetry, which depends for him upon “establish[ing] provisional exemplars for imaginative emotional economies” (312). From the point of view of contemporary cognitive science, however, the main problem with this representationalist scheme is that the “features of experience” are implicitly given and static, while dynamism remains the exclusive property of mind.⁷ And while Altieri clearly values “observing observation” (307) and “second-order self-consciousness” (308), such reflexivity remains for him precisely grounded in a self. But if poems are produced in a nexus, is it too much to suggest that they are produced by that nexus?

 

There is perhaps no area of North American literary study so in need of vitalizing as twentieth-century poetry, which seems to have waned in academic popularity with the New Criticism, as if the object had been discredited along with the method. DuPlessis and Quartermain’s is a welcome contribution to the attempt to inject the field with theoretical sophistication, but while it may prod a complacent institution, it is ultimately more successful in securing a continued hearing for the Objectivist nexus (freed once and for all from its orthodox quotation marks, just as, in one of the last significant critical anthologies on poetry, Language writing was “lower-cased” by Jed Rasula⁸). It is doubtful whether all of the volume’s contributors subscribe to the loosely Foucauldian framework that the editors sketch out in their Introduction under the heading of “cultural poetics,” which, unlike the figure of the nexus, may not prove very useful, or, put differently, is constrained by a textual culturalism. Even the strongest arguments for the centrality of Objectivist poetry can only benefit from exploring avenues of epistemological critique outside the domain of philosophy, to which literary study can no longer afford to automatically defer.

 

Notes

 

1. Without disagreeing with the editors about the complexity of Objectivist development, it should be said that the “dormant” second phase would not seem so if, embracing such “torquing” or “folding” more fully, one linked William Carlos Williams to the Objectivist tradition as more than simply their precursor. Williams learned from Zukofsky, after all, and it could be argued that his transitional lyrics of the Forties–not to mention Paterson itself–have a place in the Objectivist tradition.

 

2. Tzvetan Todorov’s is a convenient definition of this sense of the word: “Poetics breaks down the symmetry… between interpretation and science in the field of literary studies. In contradistinction to the interpretation of particular works, it does not seek to name meaning, but aims at a knowledge of the general laws that preside over the birth of each work” (6). Neither Bakhtin nor Jakobson nor Todorov are cited in the collection.

 

3. DuPlessis herself, of course, as well as half of the contributors, are poets.

 

4. Interestingly, the nexus already contains a powerful poetic critique of Geertz’s culturalism; in Coming to Jakarta, IV.viii, Peter Dale Scott takes Geertz to task for understating, if not misrepresenting, the Indonesian military’s role in the Balinese massacres (118-122).

 

5. The field of literature and science is fast making such narrowly textual models outmoded. For an analogous critique of treating materiality in discursive terms, see Hayles; her discussion in Ch. 8 of “discursive analyses within the humanities, especially the archaeology of knowledge pioneered by Michel Foucault” (192) is particularly salient.

 

6. I am thinking here of the work of Varela, Thompson, and Rosch. They argue that the self, or what Ma calls the “eye/I” (81), is the product of a habitual “grasping” which can, through what they call “mindfulness/awareness,” be interrupted, much as Rakosi hinders the occidental predatory gaze. My point is simply that the rhetoric of their semi-Buddhist cognitive science might forestall exaggerated claims about the role of grammar in social control, while simultaneously bringing biology into play to counteract the construction of self as mind and mind as language.

 

7. See Varela, Thompson, and Rosch.

 

8. See von Hallberg 317n6.

Works Cited

 

• Greenblatt, Stephen. Renaissance Self-Fashioning: From More to Shakespeare. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1980.
• Hayles, N. Katherine. How We Became Posthuman: Virtual Bodies in Cybernetics, Literature, and Informatics. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1999.
• Scott, Peter Dale. Coming to Jakarta: A Poem About Terror. New York: New Directions, 1989.
• Todorov, Tzvetan. Introduction to Poetics. Trans. Richard Howard. Theory and History of Lit. 1. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1981.
• Varela, Francisco, Evan Thompson, and Eleanor Rosch. The Embodied Mind: Cognitive Science and Human Experience. Cambridge, MA: MIT P, 1991.
• von Hallberg, Robert, ed. Politics and Poetic Value. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1987.