Richard Quinn

Department of English
The University of Iowa
Richard-A-Quinn@uiowa.edu

 

Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry. Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium. Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

 

Talk-poet David Antin got it right when he argued that “it is precisely the distinctive feature of the present that, in spite of any strong sense of its coherence, it is always open on its forward side” (98-99). That the present is always unfinished, needing the future to provide closure, is a fact that has led to both anxiety and optimism as the millennium turns. Y2K paranoia and nostalgic recitations of old-fashioned values jostle with enthusiasm for economic expansion and explosions of alternative culture. Antin’s own poetics consistently points to the “open” nature of moments like ours, doing so with excitement rather than ennui. Consequently, it makes perfect sense that a piece of Antin’s “Endangered Nouns” would make it into Poems for the Millennium, Volume Two, a decidedly exciting anthology of modernist and postmodernist poetry edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris. Nothing short of a celebration, the anthology returns to the past, peruses the present, and speculates about the future of experimental poetic practices without ossifying either history or poetry. The experience of twentieth-century life, tempered by the horrors of war, genocide, and cultural revolution, meets the cyberpoetic future in the works of over two hundred poets included in this 850-page book. In its totality, such a book can only be called what the editors themselves recognize as “a mapping of the possibilities” (13).

 

Picking up where volume one left off, volume two continues the project of constructing a millennial poetics outside traditional canonical frameworks. Such a poetics, first and foremost, includes both the oft ignored “experimental” wing of modernism and the international postmodernisms of nations like Japan, Iran, Russia, the United States, and Italy, to name a few. As the editors put it, the anthology

 

is the celebration of a coming into fullness--the realization in some sense of beginnings from still earlier in the century. And yet the poetry like the time itself marks a sharp break from what went before, with World War II and the events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima creating a chasm, a true aporia between then and now. (1)

 

Of course, one result of an anthology like Poems for the Millennium is the continued questioning of monikers like “modern” and “postmodern.” While the disjunction between modernity and postmodernity (epochs) and modernism and postmodernism (aesthetics) has been theorized and historicized by artists, philosophers, and scholars since at least the 1970s, the editors doubt whether such a decisive rift truly exists. Despite their claims that the included poetry represents both a “realization” of prior processes (modernist becoming postmodernist) and the actuality of new art (uniquely postmodern), wisely the editors avoid indicating which poems fit within which framework. Words like “modern” and “postmodern” may apply to the whole of the anthology but certainly not to the constituent parts. It would seem that the question of where experimental modernism ends and postmodernism begins remains deliberately unanswered.

 

Nevertheless, the editors ask that we consider the relationship between poetic practices, whatever their aesthetic status, and the world with which they interact. Rothenberg and Joris state that much of the poetry included within the anthology is driven by “a renewed privileging of the demotic language” and “the exploration of previously suppressed languages” (11). Moreover, the poetry attacks “the dominance in art and life of European ‘high’ culture” leading to an “exploration and expansion of ethnic and gender as well as class identities” (12). In this sense, poetry is part and parcel of the fight for human recognition, but with a “shifting connection to related political and social movements” rather than firm ties to rigid ideologies (12). Joining cultural critics like Paul Gilroy and Charles Bernstein then, the editors argue for artistic practices that reflect both millennial openness and reflective linkages to particular human identities, though such linkages are always “shifting.”

 

And it is within the realm of language itself where such links and shifting occur. Much of the poetry included herein participates in the twentieth-century work of interrogating the mediational function of language. Included work, ranging from Lyn Hejinian’s My Life to Ian Hamilton Finlay’s “Poster Poem,” attacks the notion of language as purely indexical, and suggests the possibility of language entering into new configurations. But of course much of “European high culture” raised similar questions. The difference revolves around divergent perspectives on the relationship between language, art, and the world at large. High culture, in what the editors call “the Age of Eliot (T.S.) and of the new critics,” turned away from romantic notions of spirit and began debating the intellectual authority of art (3). Art, in new critical assessments, duplicates neither world nor identity but maintains its status as a separate material entity. High culture presented the world, but only through “a dominant and retrograde poetics” which sought to create distance between poet and subject (3). Through the use of aesthetic distance, high modern art diminished life’s complexity in order to report from on high what it perceived as the universal principles driving life itself.

 

Rothenberg and Joris succeed in presenting work which dismisses high modernist notions of a life/art distinction. Much of the writing anthologized here concerns not universal principle but rather the foregrounding of language itself as a constructive tool. Poems from Paul Celan’s “Breathcrystal” to Bernard Heidsieck’s Canal Street dismantle “the more tyrannical aspects of the earlier literary and art movements” in order to create a freer matrix of poetic reference, untethered to ideas of absolute source. Rothenberg and Joris include poetry that rejects “totalizing/authoritarian ideologies and individuals” through the use of linguistic fragments, chunks of thought, and streams of sound. Such poems, they argue, question established connections between word and world by emphasizing a language that goes beyond what is intended. Nevertheless, the writing included herein does not deny meaning. It merely asserts that meaning is generated through the processes of its creation rather than through the deciphering of particular poems. In a sense then, reading no longer takes a back seat to writing and becomes Barthes’s “writerly” text even without the text. In short, in order to explore the complexity of late twentieth-century life, the texts and artists in Poems for the Millenium seek to embrace the subversion and irrationality which European high culture pushed away.

 

Despite such an embrace of the radical, readers will find many poets comfortably familiar from anthologies past. The text’s first two sections of poems, “Prelude” and “Continuities,” include writings by canonical artists like Charles Olson, Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, and William Carlos Williams just to name a few. Nevertheless, expect the unusual even here. The piece by Williams is not about wheelbarrows but is taken from the third book of Paterson (“It is dangerous to leave written that which is badly written”). Similarly, the editors bypass Tender Buttons in order to present the “Concluding Aria” from Stein’s The Mother of Us All. But it is not in its inclusion of the canon’s unrepresented works that the anthology gains strength. Rather its most compelling turn is toward what we once termed the “non-canon” but which makes more sense as the “anti-canon.” The goal is not to establish another privileged grouping, this time of “alternative literature,” but to banish such groupings altogether. (Rothenberg and Joris themselves state in their introduction that “it would be foolish… to view what follows as an attempt to set up a new canon of contemporaries” (13).) No matter how well read a person is, it would be a remarkable reader indeed who had more than passing knowledge of each writer represented here.

 

The “Prelude” section presents poets coming out of World War II who envision both devastation and promise. Out of Toge Sankichi’s image of atomic destruction: “Loud in my ear: screams / Soundlessly welling up, / pouncing on me: / space, all upside-down,” Olson asks us to “Put war away with time, come into space” (29, 23). Following the war, life space seems both “upside-down” and inviting (“come into space”). The poets following in “Continuities” provide just that: connective tissue between poetry of the past and that to come, what Muriel Rukeyser, a poet in this section, calls “Resurrection music,       silence,       and surf” (70). From the World War II wasteland comes a redemptive music, pointing readers into a poetic future, serenaded by the siren’s song. Pablo Neruda invites us to join him: “Come up with me, American love. / Kiss these secret stones with me” (64).

 

Following “Prelude” and “Continuities,” the book is divided into two expansive “galleries,” separated by a section entitled “The Art of the Manifesto” and followed by “Postludes.” The galleries, making up the major portion of the text, include works by individual writers and mini-anthologies of poetic “movements.” In the first gallery, The Vienna Group, The Tammuzi Poets, Cobra, concrete poetry, and beat poetry have their say, while the second gallery includes collections of oral poets, postwar Japanese poetry, Language Poets, the Misty Poets, and finally, cyberpoets. While the editorial apparatus is minimal, the editors open each mini-anthology with a brief but extremely helpful introduction. They also include short commentaries, usually a paragraph or two, following some selections. Many of these commentaries include insights from the poets themselves, offering fascinating insider views.

 

While all of these mini-anthologies deserve mention, three stand out: “Cobra,” “Concrete Poetry,” and “Toward a Cyberpoetics.” While anthologists past, victimized by space restrictions and the demands of uniform presses, have been forced to reduce the visual aspects of poetry to limited form, Rothenberg and Joris present the visual excitement inherent in much experimental writing. One reason for doing so is simple, along with a burgeoning “intercultural poetics” seeking to “break across the very boundaries and definitions of self and nation” upon which corporate globalism is based, comes the concomitant investigation of “poetry-art intersections in which conventional boundaries between arts break down…” (12,11). In essence, once one boundary is breached, all bets are off. Rothenberg and Joris respect the linguistic-visual nexus through the careful reproduction of spatial poetry by Cobra poets Asger Jorn and Christian Dotremont, concrete poets Emmett Williams, Ilse Garnier, and Pierre Garnier, and so-called cyberpoets Abraham Lincoln Gillespie and Steve McCaffery. Add to this list work by Susan Howe, Maggie O’Sullivan, John Cage, and Tammuzi Poet, Adonis (not to mention at least a couple dozen more included herein), and you understand why this anthology is such a significant accomplishment. Certainly the editors face the limitations of page size and are forced to shrink some work (a black and white photograph of Duchamp’s “Rotative Demi-Sphere,” for example), but such complaints are petty when faced with such an overwhelming collection of visual writing.

 

Like the collection of poetry-art and mini-anthologies, the text’s galleries range widely. Olson, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne Rich, and a number of others are represented by more than one poem, though their texts are frequently dispersed throughout the book. Rothenberg even organizes his own work this way. His “That Dada Strain” and sections from Khurbn and The Lorca Variations surface in the second gallery, while his “Prologomena to a Poetics” closes out the anthology as the final piece in “Postludes.” The effect of such dispersion is to minimize the poet’s power, in essence putting poems before poets. Readers looking for poetry as an expression of individual authority best look elsewhere. The editors dispense with lengthy sections of individual poets for the same reason they dispense with biographical blurbs. In an anthology so dismissive of boundaries, individual ego should not compete with the interpersonal flux streaming through the pages. My only complaint here is the predictable one: without biography or context, historiography suffers. Knowing something about Amiri Baraka such as his relationship to civil rights struggles, the Black Arts movement, and black nationalism can enliven “Black Dada Nihilismus” in ways that formalist readings alone cannot.

 

The central section, “The Art of the Manifesto,” includes “Black Dada Nihilismus” and breaks yet one more convention through its dismantling of the practice/theory antinomy. I have already indicated how the post-structural ideas of authorial demise and the mediational function of language interact within Poems for the Millenium. In “The Art of the Manifesto,” theories are stated directly as poetry and poetry as theory. Included here is a selection from Charles Bernstein’s now famous poem-treatise “Artifice of Absorption,” discussing the interaction between “absorptive” and “impermeable” poetic techniques, considering their relationship to a disempowering and “absorptive” politics. Similarly, an equally well-known portion of Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Otherhow: Feminist Poetics, Modernism, the Avant-Garde wonders about avant-garde writing, the very writing comprising the anthology within which her own work appears: “Does it secretly lovingly to itself hold the idea of poet as priest, poem as icon, poet as unacknowledged legislator?” (433). If so, the text argues, “turn yr. back on it. Or, not to tell you what to do, My back” (433). The fact that such statements appear between galleries (the simple fact of their appearance in a “poetry” anthology makes the text unique) speaks to the value such thinking places on interaction over hierarchy. The poetry-theory included in “The Art of the Manifesto” responds to and with the writing which surrounds it.

 

Ultimately, anthologies like Poems for the Millennium will be judged on questions of inclusion. Anticipating such, Rothenberg and Joris offer a rationale for their selection process: “the question of inclusion and exclusion, which can never be properly resolved, was less important with regard to individuals and movements–more with regard to the possibilities of poetry now being opened” (15). Furthermore, “[w]here a choice was to be made… we put ourselves deliberately on the side of what we took to be the ‘experimental’ and ‘disruptive’–in U.S. terms the ‘new American poetry’…” (15). That Rothenberg and Joris see their text as revolutionary rather than reformist is laid bare here, and my own feeling is that careful readers cannot help but take up the flag. To include Eduardo Caldersn, Miss Queenie, Robert Johnson, and Tom Waits in a section on “oral poets” dismantles all notions about what an anthology is about or should be. More revolutionary would have been the inclusion of sound (particularly given the intermedia focus of the book), since printed versions of works like Johnson’s “Hellhound on My Trail” fall a little flat without the blues progression ringing in one’s ear.

 

Such minor complaints aside, the two volume Poems for the Millenium stands alone in the history of literary anthologies. It addresses questions of completeness through a celebration of the incomplete and runs roughshod over boundaries established to protect and preserve established aesthetics. In doing so, it participates in a process once described to me as “the maximization of the principle of non-exclusion.” As such, the book not only includes the unrepresented of the poetic past, but through its foregrounding of an “open” poetics, it includes the very principle of inclusion we hope will reign in the next millennium. Poems for the Millenium is nothing short of heroic.

Works Cited

 

• Antin, David. “Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the Present in American Poetry.” Boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 98-133.
• Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 1: From Fin-de-Siècle to Negritude. Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.