A Millennial Poetics

Kenneth Sherwood

Department of English
State Department of New York at Buffalo
sherwood@acsu.buffalo.edu

 

Rothenberg, Jerome and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and Postmodern Poetry (Volume one: From Fin-de Siècle to Negritude).Berkeley and Los Angeles: U of California P, 1995. Pp.xxvii + 811; 35 illustrations. Paper, $25.00.

 

The newest entry in the long-running debate over the scope of modernism and its relation to postmodernism is neither a discursive essay nor a scholarly book. Rather, Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris reveal the “experimental modernism” at modernism’s core via an anthology which, through its form and range, exhibits the continuity of poetries “that wouldn’t so much describe the world as remake it, through a vital act of language” (189). Their Poems for the Millennium maps out just this expansive a project, one certain to be transformative of criticism and the hermetic world of literature anthologies. With a “global” reach that transgresses the conventional narratives of aesthetic movements or national literatures, the book performatively demonstrates twentieth-century poetries’ exploration of language — the common term — in relation to: consciousness; desire; performance; dialect; technology; politics; and play. The resonance between these concerns and those of post-structuralist criticism illuminates the editors’ contention that “at the core of every true ‘modernism’ is the germ of a postmodernism.”(3)

 

This first of two volumes embraces poetry “from Fin-de Siècle to Negritude,” crossing more than twenty national borders and nearly as many languages. An unusually expansive project in many respects, Poems for the Millennium rejects the retrospective stance toward the literary canon typical of the standard anthology. It posits a formulation of new literary relationships rather than the further reification of accepted ones. Of its eleven sections, only half respect conventional historical movements: Futurism, Dada, Surrealism, Objectivism, Expressionism,and Negritude. These are interspersed with three “galleries” and bounded by sections of “forerunners” and “origins.” On either end, then, the temporal bounds of the anthology’s period frame are strained at — as if to recall William Blake’s “Poetry Fettr’d, Fetters the Human Race!”

 

In the initial “Forerunners” section, which begins fittingly with Blake, one first notes another aspect of this project’s effort to survey without succumbing to the homogenizing and containing habits of the conventional anthology. Instead of being presented in typeset “translation,” the poems of Blake and Emily Dickinson are presented in holograph. Partly as acknowledgement of recent scholarship emphasizing the significance of the visual materiality of these authors’ texts by Susan Howe and Jerome McGann, the visual reproduction respects the fact that Blake almost exclusively self-published his poetry in handmade, illustrated books and Dickinson meticulously bound her handwritten, eccentrically formatted poems into notebooks, holograph reproductions of which are the only adequate representation of her generally bowdlerized poems.

 

Representing these and many other works in their original and often visually striking typography does more than make for varied perusal. It more accurately reflects the divergent activities taking place within what is too easily termed Modernism. The reductive groupings of literary historians, their tracings of the anxious lines of influence, is aided and abetted by anthologies which themselves visually homogenize such writing. The materially conscious presentation here dramatizes the connections between nineteenth-century practice and the highly visual texts of Futurism and Dada, which are also presented in a sample of reproductions (leading in later years to the Concrete poetry and book arts sure to be represented in the upcoming second volume). Moreover, by reproducing something of the heterogeneous visual forms these poems originally took, the anthology argues for a consistent, historical interplay between poetry and visual art through the twentieth century while, at the same time, urging the reader to keep in mind the particularity of the remaining poems presented in the volume’s default, thirteen-point Sabon font.

 

The “Forerunners” section that introduces the volume forces the reader of modernism to bring Baudelaire, Whitman, Lonnrot, Hopkins, Lautreamont, and Holderlin into consideration, but the book’s closing frame, “A Book of Origins,” is even more frame-breaking. Consisting largely of “ethnopoetics” texts, it leaves modernism doubly open-ended. Perhaps the most often overlooked dimension of twentieth-century poetry, the traditions which ethnopoetics encompasses are simultaneously ancient and contemporary. Early efforts at ethnopoetics anthologies by Blaise Cendrars and Tristan Tzara (incidentally translated by Joris in the 1970’s) and its influence on poets like Apollinaire, Pound, Olson, and Rothenberg tell part of this story. Unlike the conventional account of modernist visual art’s appropriation of African traditional forms, “A Book of Origins” wants to see the poetries constituting ethnopoetics as themselves — apart from their important influence within Euro-American tradition — essential dimensions of modernism. Hardly meant to be comprehensive or even adequate, it points to the extensive body of Rothenberg’s previous anthologies.

 

For readers from the English Departments certain to provide homes for many copies of this anthology, the “Negritude” section will be particularly important. Selections from Aime Cesaire, Rene Depestre, Leopold Sedar Senghor, and Leon Gontran Damas provide proof positive of the creative vibrancy of what Kamau Brathwaite subsequently termed “Nation Language.” Given the number of recent multi-cultural anthologies, most of which seem to assume that multi-cultural values require a narrative, formally “approachable,” identity-based poetics, the acquaintance or reacquaintance with Cesaire’s poetry will invigorate. Senghor’s polemical claim to write a “natural African surrealism” should productively raise some eyebrows. But the placing of “Negritude” against “Surrealism” as defining twentieth-century movements begins to perform the reimagining of modernism that has been Millennium‘s proposition.

 

The four largely European movements presented — Futurism, Expressionism, Dada, and Surrealism — are most familiar, if not canonic, as rubrics applicable to the visual arts. Believing that the “history of twentieth-century poetry is as rich and varied as that of the century’s painting and sculpture,” the editors emphasize the crucial roll of poetry in all four, exemplified by the work of painter/poets like Kandinsky, Schwitters, Picabia, Arp, and Duchamp; it turns out even Dali and Picasso wrote some poetry. With notable exceptions in Johanna Drucker’s recent work and that of Marjorie Perloff, it does seem that “the academic strategy has been to cover up that richness” (8). The special collusion between modernist art and poetry, through radical typography, is here convincingly illustrated through the careful reproduction of numerous typographical collages; works by Marinetti, Picasso, and Carra, and Max Ernst’s amazing visual/verbal collage “The Hundred Headless Women,” challenge the borders between literature and visual art. Not to let the visual dominate, Futurist performance poems and sound poems like Schwitter’s “Ur Sonata,” which have existed primarily as curious footnotes to literary history, or in the colorful anecdotes of Cabaret Voltaire performances, are thrown into the mix. Progressing by such contraries, the compilation of these divergent pieces substantiates experimental modernism, not as another monolithic “ism,” but as a constellation of varied and serious activities.

 

The devotion of a section to “Objectivism,” the primarily American 1930’s non-movement whose few verifiable members almost immediately denied the term’s application to themselves, may be the most controversial of this anthology’s gestures toward the canon. Zukofsky, Oppen, Reznikoff, Rakosi, and occasionally Lorine Niedecker are usually grouped among the Objectivists (though often, as here, the older Pound, Williams, and the British Basil Bunting are also included.) Their work shared an interest in the “historic and contemporary particulars of language,” notably influencing Black Mountain and Language poets as well as some contemporary French writers. Yet what recognition they have received came as late as the 1960s. Their early work, including Oppen’s first book Discrete Series, here reprinted entire, was often self-published and little circulated. The specificity of their language, the dense lexical and acoustical patterning of their work, particularly Zukofsky’s long poem “A“, are just now being engaged by scholars. The (re)introduction of an anti-symbolic literalism — an ordinary-language poetics conceptually if not formally comparable to that of Gertrude Stein — may be the single most important event of twentieth-century American literature.

 

The unsettling of established literary niches is just part of this anthology’s particular generosity. Ultimately, it is less interested in challenging the constructions of literary history than in presenting individual poems so that they can be read on their own terms. The three remaining sections, termed “galleries,” are interspersed through the book and together comprise nearly half its 800 pages. Taking a cue from Modernist collage, Rothenberg and Joris construct the galleries by placing poets in juxtaposition. Each gallery presents a series of poets arranged chronologically, but the galleries themselves are not sequential. So the first begins with Mallarmé (b. 1842) and ends with Huidobro (b. 1893); the second begins with Yeats (b. 1865) and ends with Lorca (b.1899); the third begins with Akhmatova (b. 1889) and ends with Paz (b. 1916). The resulting composition complicates any simple taxonomy of influence. Has any other anthology ever dared to place William Butler Yeats beside Gertrude Stein, following her with Rainer Maria Rilke, with an excerpt from James Joyce’s Ulysses beginning just five pages later? The arrangement and immense range take this anthology beyond the documentary presentation of what has happened to ask and begin to answer the question of what poetry is worth bringing across into the next century. In this sense, it wants to set aside genealogy to suggest the importance of interrelations and shared concerns among often historically disparate artists and traditions, as well as the larger, shared forces potentiating such works.

 

With respect to teaching, other anthologies may sometimes seem to satisfy the requirements of a given class. This is the only one I know which might actually stimulate the design of a course to fit it. For students and many teachers of poetry, the wealth of this book will bewilder. Readers of modernist poetry will have heard of the Dadaist Tristan Tzara’s Cabaret Voltaire performances, but few if any will have considered the near-Dada poetry of Yi Sang (Korean) or J.V. Foix (Catalàn). Langston Hughes’s poetry is almost always addressed in relation to the jazz idiom or Black English; but how many anthologies facilitate a comparison with the transcribed blues lyrics of Doc Reese, or with the complementary efforts of Hugh MacDiarmid to reinvent a Scots dialect?

 

This raises the question, who is competent to teach such an expansive book? Perhaps only Rothenberg and Joris. But the question itself highlights the guiding principle of more conventional anthologies: the transmission of a stable, contained network of representative and teachable texts. That it might raise such issues is this book’s, shall we say, insouciant charm. It is not, of course, a perfect book. Certain poets are badly represented, and many critics will want to descry the travesty done their favorite. A sadly out-of-print Mina Loy is represented by a hacked-up version of the “Love Songs” sequence; worse, the ubiquitous and tin-eared misprint of “Sitting” in place of “Sifting the appraisable /Pig cupid” is again perpetuated. One has to wonder, if Langston Hughes’s Montage of a Dream Deferred innovates the “segue,” a serial motion between riffs and poems (as the commentary has it), why did the editors choose to present a scattering of ten poems from various points in the book instead of a sequence, without even indicating the ellipsis or otherwise giving indication of the classic repetition of riffs throughout the volume? And while we’re at it: Are “Negritude” and “Objectivism” — each given a section — more legitimate or significant movements than the Harlem Renaissance? Is Hughes the only “Harlem Renaissance” poet worth inclusion? How about Sterling Brown or James Weldon Johnson? Williams’s Spring and All (excerpted) makes remarkable use of prose and poetry; but so does Jean Toomer’s Cane, published in the same year.

 

The book’s critical apparatuses are minimal; no intrusive and condescending footnotes clutter the text or waste space. Poets are instead accorded a brief commentary (often partial quotes from period criticism or the poet’s own statements) after the work. The section introductions and brief commentaries appended to most selections carefully eschew a sense of scholarly comprehensivity to turn back toward the work itself. The saved pages allow the quiet, white space of Mallarmé’s A Throw of the Dice Will Never Abolish Chance to play out over a full twenty pages; “The Prose of the Trans-Siberian Railroad,” a two-meter-long poem/painting collaboration by Blaise Cendrars and Sonia Delaunay (designed so that its original 150 copies would reach the top of the Eiffel Tower) appears in reduced facsimile.

 

While granting the value of an uncluttered format,any reader without Motherwell’s Dada Poets and Painters, all of Marjorie Perloff’s books, the full run of Sagetrieb, and a healthy selection of Rothenberg’s previous anthologies next to their desk will experience frustrated moments. Was Oppen’s Discrete Series originally printed three poems to a page, each separated by horizontal rules? Who was/is Maria Sabina? Where can I find further translations of Catalan experimental poetry? Why not mention that Joris’s complete translation of Tzara’s proto-ethnopoetics anthology (here excerpted) appeared in the journal Alcheringa? For readers fascinated by the tantalizing two pages of “Ur Sonata,” why not mention that the complete translation of Schwitters (by none other than Rothenberg and Joris) is now available? Since all the selections are necessarily meager and these editors, more than most, want to avoid the illusion of “comprehensivity,” basic bibliographic and critical “links” to further resources should have been provided, at least to help the newcomer find more of the poetry. In an anthology as determined as this one to open up the domain of poetry,it is a shame the reader is not given more of a roadmap.

 

Inevitable defects and petty complaints aside, as anthologies go, this book can fairly be called “revolutionary.” Its international scope reflects the global aspiration of poetry; its visual presentation testifies to the beautiful pragmatism of recent textual theory; the unconventional organization enacts a concern for the life of poetry, to conserve not embalm it. All told, it is a book unique among its kind. Just to look at it is invigorating. To read it is an intellectual pleasure. No one who seriously engages it will leave the encounter with their view of poetry or modernism intact. In fact, this reader is on the brink of springing for the clothbound copy!

 

To be able to say: "I am in the book.  The book is my
world, my country, my roof, and my riddle.  The book is my
breath and my rest." . . .  The book multiplies the book.

                            -- Edmond
                            Jabés