Eric Selinger

Department of English
George Washington University
SELINGER@gwis.circ.gwu.edu

 

Are the pleasures of experimental poetry important? ¹ William Wordsworth certainly thought so. The “experiment” of Lyrical Ballads was published, he tells his readers in the “Preface,” in the hope that it “might be of some use to ascertain, how far, by fitting to metrical arrangement a selection of the real language of men in a state of vivid sensation, that sort of pleasure and that quality of pleasure may be imparted, which a Poet may rationally endeavour to impart” (153). Such pleasure is not, he hastens to add, “a matter of amusement” or mere “taste.” Rather, the “immediate pleasure” that the Poet is to supply is an “homage” to “the grand elementary principle of pleasure, by which [man] knows, and feels, and lives, and moves.” The pleasure of poetry testifies to the beauty of the universe and the dignity of man; it inculcates the linked Romantic values of social comradeship and natural inquiry. “We have no sympathy,” the poet tells us, even with those in pain, “but what is propagated by pleasure”; likewise “we have no knowledge, that is, no general principles drawn up from the contemplation of particular facts, but what has been built up by pleasure, and exists in us by pleasure alone” (166-7).

 

It’s hard for me not to play Oscar Wilde to these earnest pronouncements. How are you, my dear William? What brings you to experimental poetry? Oh, pleasure, pleasure! What else should bring one anywhere? It’s still harder not to read them as historical artifacts, relics of an aesthetic and a psychology that Poe, Dostoevsky, Lautreamont, and Freud, among so many others, have debunked, and which research into the brain’s endorphin reward-system has yet to revise and reinscribe into general repute. But if his talk of pleasure sounds a little out of date, Wordsworth’s insistence on the social and political importance of “experimental” poetry still echoes in academic accounts of such verse (and prose) in the last decade. ² Peter Quartermain thus speaks of the “moral imperative” that underwrites a tradition of “disjunctive poetics” from Stein and Zukofsky to Susan Howe; and he quotes William Carlos Williams’s warning that while “It is difficult / to get the news from poems,” people “die miserably every day / for lack / of what is found there” (20). Jerome J. McGann, in a polemical moment, declares that the variety of experimental verse called Language poetry “does not propose for its immediate object pleasure,” but rather exposes the “illusions of pleasure” that capitalist culture has “constructed,” thus allowing readers to “gain a certain freedom from their power” (“Response,” 312). ³ Even the cheery and skeptical Marjorie Perloff, who opens her volume Poetic License by describing postmodern “poe(t)heory” as “a very pleasurable activity,” closes it with a stern reminder of the task at hand: “What [Susan] Howe calls the ‘Occult ferocity of origin’ is an obstacle only a persistent ‘edging and dodging’ will displace,” she tells her readers, “if we are serious about ‘Taking the Forest'” (5; 310). ⁴

 

There’s something suspect about pleasure, after all. The “text of pleasure,” in Barthes’ terms, “contents” us; it “comes from culture and does not break with it, is linked to a comfortable practice of reading” (14). Comfortable? The shame of it. Such a comfortable practice reduces poetry to what Wordsworth called “a matter of amusement . . . as indifferent as a taste for Rope-dancing, or Frontiniac or Sherry” (166), and what Michael Palmer has more recently disparaged as “a kind of decor in one’s life . . . the kind of thing for hammock and lemonade” (127). In an “age of Media” (Perloff) when pleasure has become a “cultural commodity” (Gilbert 249), in a period when “no writing,” so it’s said, “can offer a comfortable place to be” (Reinfeld 152), how much more important seems Barthes’ “text of jouissance, the text that imposes a state of loss . . . that discomforts . . . [and] brings to a crisis [one’s] relation with language” (14, my emphasis). ⁵ The pleasure one takes in such loss, discomfort, and crisis–such threat, anxiety, and terror, to borrow three terms from Palmer’s “Conversation”–seems less to be stressed than the “profound human risk” it involves, the way reading and writing return to sublime status as confrontations with “the mysteries of reference” (126-7). These are the pleasures of what’s difficult, a struggler’s just rewards.

 

I have a certain sympathy for this rhetoric of risk and mystery. But since Wordsworth justified the difficulties of Romantic experimental poetry by invoking the political and epistemological importance of pleasure, it seems oddly incomplete to justify the difficulty of postmodern experimental work through invocations of disruption, subversion, and mystery–threats to, overwhelmings of, our knowledge and our power–while leaving the matter of pleasure to languish, all-but unaddressed. ⁶ (Even Burke, after all, calls the test of the sublime delightful horror.) Not all experimental poetry gives the same pleasures, of course. Not all pleases, or even aims to please. But it seems time to reopen the question of pleasure, and not simply in the terms that the poets themselves have articulated. In this essay, therefore, I explore two texts, Michael Palmer’s Sun (1988) and Ronald Johnson’s long poem ARK (c. 1970-1990), which have not only given me pleasure, but also brought me to reflect on the sources and the implications of that enjoyment, the degree to which it comes from reading against the poet’s grain. Like Wordsworth’s “experiment,” with its violation of the “formal engagements” expected by the public, both texts require readers to “experience an evacuation and failure of their customary reading privileges,” at least those connected to straightforward syntax, narrative structure, and a coherent speaking subject (McGann, “Response,” 312). But I find that both also restore me, eventually, to a sense of my readerly capacity, though they do so in the names of very different, even opposed, aesthetic and ethical traditions. Palmer is a poet of the sublime, if of that limited sublimity of shock which Lyotard finds at the heart of the postmodern. Johnson, by contrast, is a poet of the beautiful. A rare vocation in experimental verse, at least in the last twenty years. And, perhaps, an important one as well.

 

What are the pleasures of Michael Palmer’s work? According to Mr. William Logan in his New York Times review of Sun, “reading Mr. Palmer’s poetry is like listening to serial music or slamming your head against a street-light stanchion. Somewhere, you’re sure, masochists are lining up to enjoy the very same thing, but for most people the only pleasure it can possibly have is the pleasure of its being over.” ⁷ Four years earlier, in the same publication, Palmer had found a more insightful and more sympathetic critic: perhaps one of the “masochists” that Logan has in mind. For while Rosemarie Waldrop found Palmer’s First Figure to be “a meditation on language that will not stay within the range of comfort,” she still finds that the poems there “seduce us immediately,” in part because of the way the poet attends to “the wounds inflicted by consciousness,” and to “the fault within our perception, our language, our mind.” The “acute intelligence” of his investigations gives pleasure, apparently, as does the poet’s willingness to confess and explore the way that language fails us. She quotes two lines from “French for April Fools”: “Once I could not tell of it / and now I cannot speak at all” (14).

 

In Sun the poet continues to seduce through his attention to faults and wounds and incapacities. But the unspeakable and dumbstriking “it” of the earlier book takes on a political cast, as Palmer moves to write a poetry as responsive, in some sense, to Adorno’s stern dictum about art after Auschwitz as it is to the horrors of war. This was, in retrospect, perhaps to be expected. Like the work of so many other poets in the 1980s, Sun evinces a “return to history, politics, and the social as vital concerns” for American verse after the well-mannered domestic epiphanies of the Ford and Carter years (Gilbert 247-8). And, like other poems written in the decade’s disjunctive “period style . . . with all its exaggerated dislocations and shifts of reference,” it displays an “urge to make the pleasures of poetry somehow answerable to the intransigent realities of the social and political world” (243). But unlike most of the poetry of “textured information” that Gilbert describes, Sun does not range a plethora of skittery local pleasures against a nagging political conscience, with pleasure “given the decided advantage” (265). The balance swings decisively in favor of concience, making the pleasure one takes in the resulting moral double-binds more nervous, more thoughtful, more significant.

 

Palmer has long been interested in the way politics might inhabit poetry as something more than subject matter, particularly when by “politics” we mean something like “atrocity.” In an interview from the mid-eighties, for example, Palmer disdains the “poets’ shuttle down to Nicaragua and so on to get material, everyone acting like La Pasionaria or something–which seems to me ultimately a complete betrayal of what is to be meant by the political,” since in such work the poets “appropriate” their material and are “more than anything else, announcing in stale poetic language, ‘Look how much human feeling and fellow feeling I have’–self-congratulatory in that regard” (“Dear Lexicon” 12; 26). We might think of Sun as a counterpoint to efforts like Carolyn Forche’s The Country Between Us, which however shocking in its subject matter may be said to soothe us in its familiar grammar, forms of reference, and moral compass; enough so, in fact, for the book to appear as a telling allusion on the series thirtysomething. ⁸ “There is pleasure and pain and there are marks and signs,” Palmer writes (84). Too easy, too descriptive a movement from the first to the second would seem, for him, to belie them both; too great a distance, as when the artist keeps his eye only on aesthetic reflexivites, “closing Mr. Circle with a single stroke,” and the project is equally worthless (83).

 

The book thus aches. It’s torn between the desire to “leave the initiative to words,” in Mallarme’s lovely phrase, and a sense that words are “dumb,” now, and “mangled by use,” although somehow, somewhere else they might yet find their power again (37; see Yenser 296). “What matters is elsewhere,” a voice here says: “is other fires, with words streaming from faces before those fires. Actual words elsewhere. Objects elsewhere and the words to revive them” (33). The reader often catches references to a horrific, political world “elsewhere”: “a necklace burning” (44); “a woman bent double in the street / screaming Money Money” (69). We read of what seem to be African famine victims– “the dead” who are “amid sand the few fragments / / bowl bread violet / curve swollen outward / / of flies gathered / at lips and eyes” (20)–and that desolate nature morte returns in a later horrific simile, where the pages of a book are, we’re told, “spread out / before you in the sun / curled like leaves / black as tongues” (43). But the relationship of tongues to pages spread out in Sun, the fragments of lives to the fragments of verse, is deeply vexed, both because of the way that such horrors are experienced by the poet, and because of what he has called “a certain level of violence in all areas of address”: that is, I take it, a certain guilty and appropriative aspect to naming and represenation itself (“Dear Lexicon,” 12).

 

Let me begin with the first of these vexations, the poet’s experience of “the political.” In many poems of the last decade, as Gilbert observes, “the world of social and political struggle presents itself . . . in a heavily mediated, prepackaged form, as information in a news broadcast” (268). While the primal scene of watching TV is rarely as visible in Palmer as in Gilbert’s example, Robert Hass’s “Berkeley Eclogue,” and while Palmer will not deploy Hass’s lyrical or self-critical “I,” the two Bay Area poets share a keen moral consciousness of the distance between their private lives and poetic work and those “other fires” and “actual words elsewhere” (Sun 33). Wanting not to “mis-appropriate” the political pain of others, Palmer has said, he tries instead “to allow them a presence that’s more reflective of the way they do occur in our–I don’t know if you’d call it image-bank or simply day to day experience, which is not an experience of those things but which is an experience of the images of those things” (“Dear Lexicon,” 13). The dead who “multiply / far from here” are piled “(as words this high)” (20); or they flicker into our lives through “the glass box” of TV, on whose screen “everything is named difference, and is always the same for that reason, since you’ve watched it many times before, counting the limbs” (35).

 

And the media’s mediation goes yet deeper, if one may use metaphors of psychological depth in this flattened postmodern context. For while Carolyn Forche can and will insist on a clear distinction between what Williams called “the news from poems,” in which the “stress on close reading, irony, and the fiction of textual depth” will “open up more complex visions of historical circumstance” than the “degenerate form of art, neither wholly fact nor wholly fiction, never true to objective truth or subjective reality” that is “the news” broadly speaking, Palmer cannot (12). Any would-be “poetry of witness” in Sun finds itself already infected by political and cultural cliches, the “words that come from within” inflected by, drawn from, entangled in a social and linguistic world that refuses to be held at a safe and critical distance (Bernstein, 39). The “impure poetry” of our messy media age must confront, not the sweat and smoke, urine and lillies, stains and shames that Neruda describes in his essay of that name (128), but a more troublesome impurity of self. In “the image-base / where first glyphs are stored,” Palmer observes, “Lucy and Ethel, the Kingfish / Beaver and Pinky Lee / are spoken, die and undie / for you”; and this linguistic and vampiric resurrection for our sakes is immediately compared to “a war viewed from poolside / by philosophers and sheiks, / / senators and dialectician-priests” (74)–a series of targets drawn, I find, from the entry for “Superior, Unaffected Observers” in a dictionary of images recues.

 

When we look into our hearts and write, what we see there was broadcast before. Indeed, part of the disdain that Palmer feels for the “Anglo-American empirical tradition” of poetry–that tradition where “a poem is a place in which you tell a little story” that “easily mirrors a shared emotional experience” in “a sort of consumer verse . . . where the function of the work and the mechanisms of the poem do not admit a certain level of mystery” (“Conversation,” 126)–may stem from the way that such “little stories” construct and constrict our emotional lives by invoking a series of “conventional affective signs” we no longer recognize as, in fact, conventional (“Dear Lexicon,” 27). ⁹ Those stories that surface in Sun are therefore quickly interrupted, often in order to draw the reader’s attention to the shared language and imagery that does not so much produce as replace “experience” when one tunes in to the externalized common consciousness of television (see Birkerts 61). “A word is coming up on the screen,” one poem in Sun begins:

 

In the meantime let me tell you a little something about myself. I was born in Passaic in a small box flying over Dresden one night, lovely figurines. Things mushroomed after that. My cat has twelve toes, like poets in Boston. Upon the microwave she sits, hairless. The children they say, you are not father but a frame, waiting for a painting. Like, who dreamed you up? Like, gag me with a spoon. Snow falls–winter. Things are aglow. One hobby is Southeast Asia, nature another. As a child I slept beneath the bed, fists balled. A face appeared at the window, then another, the same face. We skated and dropped, covering our heads as instructed. Then the music began again, its certainty intact. . . . (31)

 

What I learn about this speaker tells me mostly about my own familiarity with the skittering, flash-cut movement, not just of “channel surfing,” but of any televised discourse. “Flying over Dresden? Wait– I thought it was Passaic… What? Oh, yes, look at those lovely figurines.” The very eagerness with which I seize on “mushroomed,” as in mushroom clouds, “twelve toes,” as in mutations, “winter” and “aglow,” as in a nuclear winter, “Southeast Asia” and “dropped, covering,” a childhood in the sixties, suggests how pre-processed my ideas of what a baby-boomer autobiography would look and sound like have become. Later mentions of “the Union dead,” of Freud, of a Levi-Straussian “discourse in the tropics,” prompt the same unsettling response, as I note both the literary and critical references and my glad response at their discovery. “Does the central motif stand out clearly enough?” the speaker demands. Impatient for the restoration of certainty, for the music to begin again, one succumbs to the lure of words already on “the screen”: perhaps the same one through which, elsewhere in Sun, “words / pass unrecognized, thinking us” (73).

 

Facing the “34,000 words spread out before me / words like incarnadine, tide and cheer,” Palmer watches, as his readers do, the language of Shakespeare slip into the language of advertising (65). But unlike Eliot or Mallarme, he has no hope to purify the language of the tribe; and unlike Ashbery or Bernstein he will not revel in the “Klupzy” possibilities of cliche and mediate discourse. A poet who changed his own name after college, Palmer is instead haunted by the “mysteries of reference,” the problem of naming-as-such (see Reinfeld 96-7). Words in this book will say things on their own, as when “lace” whispers out of “necklace” (15), but words never say Things, in a Rilkean, Orphic sense of the phrase, and the fact that they do not is frequently remarked on and deeply felt. (Indeed, Rilke’s Dinggedichte, Thing-poem “The Panther” shows up in a quick, sad, snapshot address: “Panther, You are nothing but a page / torn from a book”; while the first imprecation “Don’t say things / (You can’t say things)” comes from Eurydice, who thus admonishes Orpheus in Palmer’s version of the Rilke poem “Orpheus. Eurydike. Hermes” [12; 24].)

 

Palmer’s exploration of “the sign itself” is, in part, political. In its exploration of “the mystery of how words refer and how they can empty out of conventional meanings and acquire meanings that threaten the very way that we talk to each other,” he has said, poetry can expose a deep and conflicted level of language, thus “giv[ing] the lie to political rhetoric” and enacting a form of liberation, “even when [the poem] is not thematically a ‘Workers, throw off your chains’ poem” (“Conversation” 127; 136). One might argue with the logic here: a scrupulous, demanding, naive faith in reference gives the lie to political rhetoric far more quickly and effectively than this deconstructive strategy, although it pays for that efficacy with risks of its own (see Argyros 81). But in his concern Palmer exposes one of the central shames of contemporary poetry: a sense that the old Romantic ideal of authentic naming, like that of Wordsworth’s “real language of men,” has become the facile lingua franca of the talk show; or, worse, that it simply reinforces the old master narratives and their “discourse of power” (“Interview” 6). ¹⁰ As he worked on the “Baudelaire Series” which makes up the second part of Sun, Palmer observed a growing “recognition of a certain level of violence in all areas of address . . . whether that be erotic address or a more discursive form of address and so on . . .” (“Dear Lexicon,” 12). Against Rilke’s hope that “perhaps we are here in order to say: house / bridge, fountain, gate, pitcher, fruit-tree, window,” to “say them more intensely than the Things themselves / ever dreamed of existing” and thereby display “how happy a Thing can be, how innocent and ours” (“The Ninth Elegy,” 201), Palmer might thus be said to pose the familiar qualms of Foucault. “We must conceive discourse as a violence that we do to things,” Foucault writes in “The Discourse on Language,” “or, at all events, as a practice we impose on them” (229). We may make Things “ours” through words, as Rilke says, only in the guilty mode of appropriation (229).

 

Palmer locks horns with this dilemma in a number of ways, but most notably by insisting on the incorrigible arbitrariness of the sign, of “words / the opposite of names” (“Sign,” First Figure, 43). In the place of Rilke’s intimate, authentic naming here we find an ungrounded “calling.” What “we” have written is “something called the Human Poems” (5); “clouds” are “called crescent birds” (9); “This is a hazardous bed / called perilous night” (14). The long penultimate poem called “Sun” begins with insistant and slippery callings, and closes with equally pluralized signatures:

 

     Day One is called Tongues (62)

     Day One is called Trace (63)

     Call it Alpha in Lyre
     Call it Ceterae or Last Nights,

     The Blue Guide, Grid, The Private
     Experience of the Blinking Man

     Call it Ones (split open)
     Call it A Scratch Band from Duluth (63-4)

     ................................

     because the words disgusted me why write?
     signed Schelling, signed An Arm or A Door, signed
          The Desert to the West

     ________

     This is how one pictures the angel of history
     signed Series B, signed A or letter of A, signed
              Bakhtin's Names

     ...............

     This was the trouble with the sun-dial or saint
           dial
     signed Writing Itself  [77]

 

The poem that follows, also called “Sun,” may thus begin with stark commands to name one’s acts: “Write this. We have burned all their villages / Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them” (83). But within a few lines what Palmer calls the “mysteries of reference” reassert themselves, complicating both the act of writing and our sense of what is to be named.

 

     Write this.  We have adopted their customs and their manner
               of dress

     Write this.  A word may be shaped like a bed, a basket of
               tears or an X

     In the notebook it says, It is the time of mutations,
     laughter at jokes, secrets beyond the boundaries of speech

     I now turn to my use of suffixes and punctuation, closing 
     Mr. Circle with a single stroke, tearing the canvas from its
     wall, joined to her, experiencing the same thoughts at the
     same moment, inscribing them on a loquat leaf (83).

 

The poem cannot simply indict, or witness to, American actions in southeast Asia–a location signaled by the loquat leaf, the burning villages, and later references to a “Plain or Jars of Plain of Reeds” and “Neak Luong”–for to do so, to name them, would be both to “mis-appropriate” them for the poet’s purposes and to collaborate in a mode of representation in which naming and power are uncomfortably allied. Yet the text cannot interrogate writing itself, the very shapes of words, without risking mere evasiveness, its linguistic turn from the burnt villages to the use of suffixes revealed as a form of escape. The trace of self-loathing in that reference to “closing Mr. Circle” echoes similar moments from elsewhere in the text, as when, in the previous poem called “Sun,” a speaker’s direction “Let’s call this The Quiet City / where screams are felt as waves” soon turns to smug self-congratulation: “My speech explaining the layers went very well” (61).

 

To name the damage, to “Say Things,” is perforce to speak the language of the Fathers. To be silent, or simply aesthetical, would prove just as complicitous (see “Dear Lexicon” 13). The affective appeal of Sun, at least to me, lies in its teasing-out of this uneasy double-bind. I find the heart of the volume in a short poem, the tenth section of the “Baudelaire Series,” that takes the ambivalence of Palmer’s project as its subject. The poet calls it, in an interview, “the Adorno poem” (“Dear Lexicon,” 31), but I read it as his “Mozart, 1935”: a poem written to investigate his deep suspicion of beauty, for which his recurrent trope is music. You’ll recall Wallace Stevens’s original: “Poet, be seated at the piano. / Play the present, its hoo-hoo-hoo, / Its shoo-shoo-shoo, its ric-a-nic, / Its envious cacchination.” But where Stevens implores the poet to “Be thou . . ./ The voice of this besieging pain” (131-2), Palmer sees no such option:

 

     A man undergoes pain sitting at a piano
     knowing thousands will die while he is playing

     He has two thoughts about this
     If he should stop they would be free of pain

     If he could get the notes right he would be free
         of pain
     In the second case the first thought would be
          erased

     causing pain

     It is this instance of playing

     he would say to himself
     my eyes have grown hollow like yours

     my head is enlarged
     though empty of thought . . .

 

Do the “enlarged” head and “hollow” eyes mirror the swollen bellies and hollow eyes of the suffering, or simply display a vapidity “empty of thought” because the notes have been gotten right at last? Would an end to the performance not negate the pianist himself? Would a halting, stumbling performance, which would end no pain at all, somehow redistribute it, perhaps more justly? “Such thoughts destroy music,” the poem concludes; “and this at least is good” (19).

 

Palmer’s mistrust of music, of beauty, allies him with a broad range of postmodern aesthetic theory, for which Jean-Francois Lyotard is perhaps the most eloquent spokesman. For Lyotard beauty lapses into kitch, while all true art is known by shock and contradiction, by its limping imperfection. “Every writing worthy of its name wrestles with the Angel and, at best, comes out limping,” he writes in Heidegger and “the jews” (34). Adorno, too, according to Lyotard, “understands well that to make beautiful art today is to make kitsch; that even authenticity is precluded. . . . It is important, very important, to remember that no one can–by writing, by painting, by anything–pretend to be witness and true reporter of, be ‘equal’ to the sublime affection, without being rendered guilty of falsification and imposture through this very pretension” (34; 45). ¹¹ What we have, in effect, is a sad sublimity, an art boiled down to that simmer of deprivations from which we “do not experience a simple pleasure,” but rather at best “an ambivalent enjoyment” (Lyotard, “The Sublime and the Avant-Garde” 206). Palmer’s repeated references to jazz, especially to pianist Thelonious Sphere Monk, suggest the bluesy, sweet and sour pleasure to be had. If Sun features divided characters called “A-against-Herself” and “G for Gramsci or Geobbels,” after all, it also claims a character called “T. Sphere” who “speak[s] in the dark with [his] hands,” perhaps playing the tune that Palmer cites whose “name is Let’s Call This” (85).

 

The broken beauty of Monk’s playing is an apt model for Palmer’s acheivement. And yet my pleasure in catching this musical allusion, like that I have taken in pointing out his references to Rilke, to the “Human Poems” of Peruvian poet Cesar Vallejo, and, in a faltering allusion to someone “by the name of Ceran / or Anlschel,” to the Jewish poet Paul Celan (whose “Death-Fugue” appears in a later reference to “black milk, golden hair /. . . / and a grave in the air” [21; 78-9])–all this pleasure in context is remarkably unmixed, which suggests that, as a reader, I’m at home here after all. ¹² This is, perhaps, a problem. If the “text of jouissance” that Barthes describes “unsettles the consistency of our tastes, values, and memories” (14), Sun, for me, does nothing of the sort. Instead of “that other music, sort of gasped out now by the synthetron” (35) I hear the myth of Orpheus, broken but replayed throughout the text; I hear the saving humor, get the jokes, I thematize discontinuities. The “we” that confesses “Write this. We have burned all the villages and the people in them” doesn’t really implicate the poet or his readers, I can’t help but feel, but rather people like the “Senator . . . proud and erect” who “want[s] desperately to read” certain moaning poems, but will not let himself (32), or like the speaker who objects to Palmer’s gestures at the unpresentable in a condescending tone: “How lovely the unspeakable must be. You have only to say it and it tells a story” (37). ¹³ And as Rosemarie Waldrop intimated of the poems in First Figure, even Palmer’s sense of the failures of language, of poetry, give pleasure. There’s a pathos to them, as though he were the rightful ruler of some troubled land, who tells us how he’d love to help, just with a word– but can’t.

 

My reading of Sun is admittedly partial. I have made little of the two central sections, the poems called “C,” and, more important, I have hemmed in much of the possibility that Palmer’s poetic struggles to maintain, collapsing the expansive and mysterious wave of significations here into a single and quite limited performance of the text. In so doing I have, in effect, transformed Sun from a resistant, disjunctive text, one that offers a sublime intensification of the sense of being through its elements of shock, into a source of what Pierre Bourdieu calls “cultivated pleasure,” which “feeds on . . . intertwined references, which reinforce and legitimate each other, producing, inseparably, belief in the value of works of art,” including, in this case, works of art which ostensibly unseat cultivation and intellectual privilege (499). I have, more than likely, displayed that “paradoxical relationship to culture made up of self-confidence amid (relative) ignorance and of casualness amid familiarity, which,” as Bourdieu remarks, “bourgeois families hand down to their offspring as if it were an heirloom” (66). Be that as it may, my reading has also, I hope, revealed something else. In addition to the pleasures of Palmer’s diction–the way, for example, he plays off a resonant (not to say portentous) hoard of words like “house” and “sky” and “rain” and “sun” and “words” against unexpected addresses to “King Empty,” “Mr. Duck and Mr. Mouse,” and “Fred who fell from the trapeze / / into the sawdust / and wasn’t hurt at all” (6)–and alongside the pleasures of aesthetic liberation that are so great a part of any experimental art’s appeal–the sense that restraints on one’s own conceivable new work have been lifted, including restraints one had not known were there; the pleasures of “permission given,” as Grenier says of Stein (204)–Sun offers a pleasure that even William Logan might appreciate: that of inventing coherence and assigning value, of exercising those mental faculties that allow one to build and inhabit a meaningful world.

 

This stress on explicatory and contextualizing readings, on matters and pleasures of “meaning,” may seem to go against Palmer’s experimental grain. (Somewhere at my back I hear Ed Dorn’s laughing Gunslinger: “Mean? / Questioner, you got some strange / obsessions, you want to know / what something means after you’ve / seen it, after you’ve been there…. / … / How fast are you / by the way? [28-9].) On the one hand, Palmer seems to call for such a reading, so long as it does not aspire to closure or absolute authority. “When that structural rigidity of a closed form begins to tremble and we begin to feel the anxiety of losing structure,” he says in his “Conversation” with Lee Bartlett, “it can be a terrifying experience. To be resolved, it calls for a dwelling in the poem. You have to decide what your relationship to the poem is. It is a kind of poetry that insists the reader is part of the meaning, that the reader completes the circuit” (127-8). I take it that he means, therefore, that the terror is to be resolved, the circuit thus completed, though not closed. Sun itself, on the other hand, takes a more critical stance toward my (admittedly) traditional and academic reading: my picking out of references; my efforts at explication; my displacement of local language events in the name of “central” themes. As I savor the final lines about a “village . . . known as These Letters–humid, sunless,” I may quickly note in the margin one last evasion of Rilkean naming (“known as”) and a bit of wordplay that reinforces the distance between signs and signifieds (even those villages known as “These Letters” are “sunless,” unreached by Sun itself). But such marginalia, and the critical ease they suggest, sit poorly with the evident longing and unhappiness of the text. The resonant Biblical allusion that closes out the book weighs this sort of “relationship” between reader and text, this sort of resolution, and finds it wanting. I am judged for my very ability to know that I am judged, and certainly for any pleasure I may take in that recognition. Is it only such worry and unsettlement that proves one’s readerly “dwelling”? “The villages are known as These Letters,” Palmer writes. “The writing occurs on their walls” (86).

 

I’ve said that Sun aspires to the sublime–at least to that sublimity described by Lyotard, which “does not say the unsayable, but says that it cannot say it” (Heidegger 47). Yet how fallen, how changed a sublimity this is! Lyotard’s definition gives no sense, as in Longinus, that sublimity “is a kind of height and conspicuous excellence in speeches and writings,” and that emotions like “lamentation, pain, and fright” stand far below it (8; 50). For Longinus, a sublime passage shows its author’s greatness, and rather than passing judgment on listeners might lead them to greatness as well. Asyndeton, hyperbaton, abundance, breaking off in the middle of a statement–all of these rhetorical techniques, familiar from Sun, have their place in this older conception, but angst is not their object, however much it may lead to a chastened, desirable “dwelling.” We need not look back as far as Longinus for examples of this older and encouraging sense of the sublime, in which terror leads to a resurgent and invigorated, rather than chastened, brio of being. In this strain Emerson writes of the sublime poet Milton that “The Fall of Man was the subject of his Muse, only as a means whereby he might help to raise man again to the height of his divine nature and proportion” (“Ethical Writers,” Early Lectures 362). That lift would be a rather different pleasure from the sorts I’ve explored so far, its importance clearly different as well. And we may find it in the work of Ronald Johnson.

 

I introduce Johnson through Milton because in the last twenty years he has written an epic called ARK over which his poem Radi Os, a rewriting-by-excision of Paradise Lost, rests like a cathedral’s dome. In Radi Os and the Foundations, the Spires, and the Ramparts of ARK we find an experimental poet still committed, for all his difficulties, to coherence, completion, a blend of sublime “too-muchness” and a beauty of resolution. Where Palmer is a “versionary” poet, uneasy with naming and reference as they take part in the discourse of power, Johnson is an unabashed visionary: one who finds that language and art do not impose on human or even inhuman nature, but rather grow out of the world of “things” themselves, since “lawful utterance is a natural as well as human phenomenon” (Finkelstein, Utopian Moment, 92). “Matter delights in music, and became Bach,” Johnson explains in one “Beam” of ARK: The Foundations (Beam 7). Or, as he plucks his theme out of Milton in Radi Os: “O / Tree / into the World, / Man / the chosen / Rose out of Chaos: / Song.”

 

Johnson is only eight years Palmer’s senior, but his epic strikes one as something closer to a generation older, a fine example of the “immanentist” postmodernism of the 1960s. It shares that older faith in a Wordsworthian “high argument” for the exquisite fit between the mind and external world; it remains untroubled by the “urgent and deeply anxious desire” to reconcile pleasure and politics characteristic of the 1980s (see Altieri 29-49; Gilbert 243). Indeed, its most urgent and axious desire seems to be to answer to the world that Johnson sees described by contemporary science: a world as occluded as that of politics by the “scenic mode” of the later 1970s. As he wrote Radi Os, the poet explains, “I was taken over by Blake, but with my vision of the physical universe and . . . able to try to figure out how we order the universe now. Blake couldn’t even look at Newton. I felt if I were to do this I would have to be a Blake who could also look at what we know of modern cosmology.” The results, which I have explored at length elsewhere, bear out the poet’s sense that “instead of being a rather flippant work of just simply putting lines and cutting out words,” it is “a cosmology of the mind”; but it is in ARK: The Foundations that the poet most clearly brings together his passions for the natural and the human sciences (“Interview,” 84).

 

Beam 1 of the Foundations thus begins with this sunrise:

 

                        Over the rim

     body of earth                      rays exit sun
rest to full velocity to eastward pinwheeled in a sparrow's

                             eye
          --Jupiter compressed west to the other--

    wake waves on wave in wave striped White Throat song

               ...............................

                   as if a several silver
                       backlit in gust

 

The centering of these lines, their evident poise, their less-evident numerical balancing (three lines of three words, one of ten, one of one, one of six, then ten once more), enact a world of more than just bilateral symmetries. They invite, also, those basic questions of meaning that Dorn’s Gunslinger mocks one for. Why the paradox of rays that “rest to full velocity”? Well, photons will “rest” at the speed of light, and must be hindered or slowed to keep them from doing so; and the sun will fire out photons when electrons in its constituent atoms, raised to a higher quantum level by the impact of one photon, “rest” to a lower energy level as the atom sends out another. Some sunrays are “Pinwheeled” because they enter the pinwheel-shaped iris of the bird’s eye, while others, reflected back to Earth from Jupiter, are “compressed” or refracted by the earth’s atmosphere as the other planet sinks below the horizon. (Since a sparrow’s eyes are on the opposite sides of its head, “able to see the seed beneath its bill–and at the same instant the hawk descending,” as Beam 4 explains, the bird may see both eastward and westward sights at the same time.) The “wake” of those rays, which are themselves waves, or wavicles, wakes an answer in the sound waves of the White Throat song, so that as each bird joins in separately–“several” meaning “relating separately to each individual involved”–it is as though spots of silver “backlit,” or reflected, lit-back the sunlight. They do so “in gust,” or keen delight, as well as in gusts, or surges of melody; and human song, poetry, which sings from the electrically sparkling “nervetree,” is by extension an equally natural and reflective pleasure, since “out of a stuff of rays, particles, and pulses” comes the poet who notes down and writes up the scene, himself “the artificer of reality” (Beam 12). ¹⁴

 

It’s from such links and correspondences, sometimes direct, sometimes a poet’s licenced stretch, that Johnson builds his ARK. They are not new connections. His little rhyme, “Perceive, perceive! Reality is ‘make’ believe” (Beam 8) puts “make” in quotes to remind us that the real is what makes us believe in it, as well as what we make through our belief; but that’s a thought we find in Coleridge. Though the biology and physics he invokes will mark him as of our time, this invocation is itself predicted by Wordsworth’s “Preface,” with its insistence that the Poet “converses with general nature with affections akin to those, which, though labour and length of time, the Man of Science has raised up in himself” (168). Finkelstein calls Johnson an “unquestionably traditional, even derivative” poet (Utopian Moment 91); and indeed, he finds he can draw on other visionary poets and mystics with only minor revisions, as when his vision of a holy fire “where the inner regions, tangled along polarized / garland, run faster than the outer” (Beam 3) gives a Copernican and atomic cast to Dante’s cosmology, revising with a quick, corrective twist.

 

Like Palmer, Johnson eschews both the grand, Romantic “I” and the oral, organic forms Romanticism sponsors. But where Palmer dwells on, or in, the “mysteries of reference,” moving through threat, anxiety, and terror on his way to the ambivalent enjoyments I have already discussed, Johnson turns to such modes as concrete poetry, quilt, and collage in order to celebrate a different mystery: the way that “things” may be “said” or sung or troped into being. In ARK: The Foundations we find any number of shattered words and squared off blocks of print, that is to say, but none prompt much threat or fret. In Beam 5, paradoxically entitled “The Voices,” we find

 

                      o
                     moon

                %in%m%in%d%in%

            a e a e a e a e a e
           w v w v w v w v w v

 

while in Beam 13 we find a vision of creation-as-division, of flux transfigured by the efflux of a fiat lux, embodied in the luxurious and luminescent square–

 

     f lux f lux f lux f
     lux f lux f lux f l
     ux f lux f lux f lu
     x f lux f lux f lux

 

–and in Beam 24 we warm ourselves at the comforting strobe of

 

     earthearthearth
     earthearthearth
     earthearthearth
     earthearthearth
     earthearthearth
     earthearthearth

 

where the eye picks out “hearth” and “heart” and “ear the art” in what the curmudgeonly William Harmon calls “a harmlessly moralizing telegram of values” (221). I’ve already mentioned Radi Os, in which Johnson writes a poem by erasing, or etching away, in an “infernal reading,” most of the first four books of Paradise Lost. In “Beams 21, 22, 23” of ARK: The Foundations, subtitled “The Song of Orpheus” and opening with seven lines from Radi Os, Johnson similarly ventilates the Book of Psalms in order to discover an Orphic tale hidden within. ¹⁵ In Beam 25, subtitled “A Bicentennial Hymn,” Johnson plays Charles Ives, stitching snippets from the “Battle Hymn of the Republic” into “I have seen Him in the watchfires / full sail, the Ruffles and Flourishes / sifting out a glory / loosed lightning to answer / arching on.” To match a Spire of Prospero’s songs to Ariel, “snipped from Roger Tory Peterson’s A Field Guide to Western Birds” (ARK 37) there is an answering “invisible spire” of Ariel’s songs in response, which “consists of a tape recording” of spliced and altered birdsongs, including “a nocturne for loon and full orchestra” and an “adagio for thrushes and woodpecker quartet” (ARK 38). Despite the poet’s desire to build “a poem which needs no reference except itself,” other “invisible” elements to be found outside the poem include surprisingly relevant illustrative quotes in the OED (“Planting,” 2). Look up “caryatid,” for example–since light’s angels are in Beam 1 named as “caryatid / to the tides of day”–and you’ll find a quote from Tennyson: “Two great statues, Art and Science, / Caryatids, lifted up / A weight of emblem”: a fit figure for Johnson’s work. Look up daimon (from Beam 10’s Kabbalistic cum Leibnitzian couplet “daimondaimond Monad I / Adam Kadmon in the sky”), and you’ll find Thoreau: “It is the same daimon, here lurking under a human eyelid.”

 

At a somewhat lower level than its announced architectural design, ARK is structured, like Palmer’s Sun, along a highly decentralized network of connections. The hand-print that forms Beam 18 displays the whorls of fingerprints, a “rhyme” for earlier references to the whorl of galaxies and to a snail’s spiralled shell. The first stage of a cell-division diagram, found in Beam 25, the “Bicentennial Hymn,” looks like a sunrise, and ends with twin cells pressed against each other like two hemipheres of the brain, or like the “balanced dissent” of the United States, of matter and anti-matter, and of other divided, procreative pairs mentioned elsewhere in the text. “Prosper / O / cell,” that Bicentennial Beam begins: a bit of wordplay that reminds one of, among other things, the many lions in the text, each one an Ari-el, or Lion of God. These are linked to the initial figure of the sun–the lion’s mane recalls the sun’s corona–and they are linked to the many flowers here as well, both because “where the bee sucks, there suck I,” and because many flowers have a corona of petals which unfold in answer to sunlight, so that the “answering chrystanthemum” of Beam 12 is as much a reflection as birdsong and the poet’s verse. The “Beast” of “SPLENDOR” is “mil- / lion-hued” (Beam 14); and near the end of the poem Johnson mentions the Leonids, a shower of shooting stars that fall in mid-November from the constellation Leo: a reference that looks back to and glosses lines from the start of the book, where falling stars were said to “comb out” the moon’s “lumen / horizon / in a gone-to-seed dandelion” (Beam 1).

 

I could run a riff like this from Sun as well. Stephen Yenser all but does so in his review for Poetry. But it wouldn’t be as satisfying, since, while Palmer’s net is set to trap the Fathers, Johnson’s threads out past the bounds of his text, connecting with the “link and bobolink” of the world at large (Yenser 298, 300). ¹⁶ Even when it is not a comfortable read–and many passages, especially in the later or “higher” sections, still keep me at a distance, at least when I read to trace connections and work up “meanings” ARK is nonetheless an unabashedly comforting one. This self-described “darkling Lion” of a poet, like Thomas Hardy’s “darkling thrush,” gives “Carolings of such ecstatic sound” that we may well think there “trembles through / His happy good-night air / Some blessed Hope, whereof he knows” and Palmer’s unaware. That hope seems less specifically religious than it is a faith in the coherence and complexity of the world described by the physical sciences, where “trees, coastlines, and clouds” share their fractal structure with our lungs, bowel-linings, and neural networks, where “the golden mean appears to describe bronchial architecture as well as it does the proportions of the Parthenon,” and where other biological forms are built from the pattern of a Fibonacci series (Argyros 341-2). The threat and anxiety one may confront when faced with the mystery of reference are matched here–overmatched–by a possibility more “truly deserving of our awe and terror”: “the possibility,” as Alexander Argyros observes, “that beauty may be a perfectly natural occurence,” and that the perceiving and reflective mind may itself be a “real, emergent feature of a resourceful universe” (287; 352, note 2).

 

Argyros speaks of awe and terror, both elements of the sublime. Yet “what we gain from such an understanding,” he goes on, “is a deeply satisfying sense of connectedness with the rest of the natural world” (287): a sense more properly associated with the beautiful. It is just this vision of nature as a Cosmos, of a world where beauty and complexity bootstraps its way out of chaos, that overwhelms and (in a crash of thunder and flash of lightning) spurs the poet, mid-life, into song:

 

           The circumambient!

          in balanced dissent:
     enlightenment -- on abysm bent.

              Angels caged

             in what I see,
           externity in gauged
               antiphony.

     (Mid-age.  Brought to my knee.)
                 1935-70

              The altitude
                 unglued

            A god in a cloud,

                  aloud

          Exactitude the flood.
                 (Beam 2)

 

The lawfulness and “exactitude” of lightning, and our ability to know and describe it, is as dazzling as the bolt itself. And such lines implicitly promise that our experience of the poem to come will be a similar interweaving of shock and comprehension, of brilliant and even excessive immediate impressions that will answer to reflection and systematic inquiry. But such rational activity, such successful efforts to know and to describe, do not pluck us out of the transient material world into a supersensible realm, or show the supersensible to be our final destination, as Kant tells us that sublimity will do. Rather, the sublime here seems not opposed to, but a constituent part of the experience of beauty: a conjunction that, of classic theorists, only Wordsworth will allow.

 

So far I have dwelt on the Foundations of ARK, for in them the poet sets out “all themes necessary to the work ahead, to have room to turn around in over the years” (“Planting,” 3). As ARK goes on, its movement seems increasingly self-referential, with less space given to reflecting on specific matters of perception and more to publishing the banns of this engaging spousal verse, with its “Strains / legion and ingenious / put to the uses of blessing” in which “s h / a p e / s / abound enobled” (ARK 46, Fountain I). The earlier concern with cosmic and evolutionary detail has hardly been abandoned–we are, are we not, the ennobled “a p e / s” who abound near the fountain–but as we ascend through the Spires to the Ramparts we also find a number of poems in the imperative mode, instructions to us and to the poet himself compressed into such elegant depictions of the project as the Herm of ARK 40:

 

         Man-
        oeuvre
       artillery:

     (hand-work &
      art-skill)
       askance

       full act,
         exact
       as skull.

         Dance
        howbeit
       about us,

          ply
       'nocount'
         Abyss

         plumb
         crazy
         core

 

Such moments help keep ARK from foundering on its own Romanticism, if only by reminding one of Johnson’s commitment to the poem as object: a pattern of sound to which what I have called “meaning” is, if not irrelevant (that does the poet a disservice), then certainly only a partial experience of the “hand-work & / art-skill” at hand. (Johnson’s teacher in this is Zukofsky, rather than Wordsworth.) Their frequent vernacular humor reminds us that linguistic self-reference need not be at the service of disruption or anomie, but may rather be a form of self-creation, a fractal flowering.

 

Like few other contemporary poets, Johnson seems to me what Robert Duncan called an “artist of abundancies.” He has built a poem in which “every particular is an immediate happening of meaning at large,” and in which “the old doctrine of correspondences is enlarged and furthered in a new process of responses, parts belonging to the architecture not only by the fittings . . . but by the resonances in the time of the whole in the reader’s mind, each part as it is conceived as a member of every other part.” Certainly Johnson “delites in puns, interlocking and separating figures, plays of things missing or things appearing ‘out of order'”; and as Duncan would lead us to expect, he does so not because these throw us back on the enforced mediation of language or force us to confront the mysteries of reference per se, but because such strategies “remind us that all orders have their justification in an order of orders” beyond the poetic work (ix). What Johnson adds to Duncan’s vision, drawing his faith from the world of physics, is that this “order of orders” has its own methods of self-reference, which the poet’s most self-conscious and reflexive work may thereby faithfully address. Palmer’s Sun is still invested in a version of the Fall, in which consciousness and nature, language and being, are at odds. This is a lasting myth, one that answers to an evident and ineluctable psychological fact that we may call alienation, nausea, or melancholia, depending on our theoretical bias. But as ontology it may have run its course. Nature, far from being mute and mournful (see Benjamin 329-30), may be more-than-metaphorically linguistic, as self-organizing and self-referential, as woven from airy nothing, as we are.

 

I have been, I recognize, essentially uncritical regarding Johnson’s use of science. The poet’s tone invites such naivete. Johnson can be corny as Kansas in August, as when he builds an Arch of the names for groups of animals, “a tribe of goats / a sculk of foxes, a sett / of badgers, riches of martens,” and so on, and then in a charming and inevitable gesture ushers them into his ARK: “a shrewdness / of apes, labour of moles / all in the same boat” (ARK 83, Arches XVII in ARK: The Ramparts, 185). He can’t resist a pun, it sometimes seems, or the way one word can turn to another with a flip of vowel or consonant. “No mapped puddle skipped a pebble,” he writes in ARK 47, and we watch the doubled “p” of “mapped” turn a series of playful cartwheels. I suspect that these two immediately recognizable features of his work are linked, and that what joins them is a willingness to embrace both a shameful, infantine joy in rhymes and tongue-twisters, and the equally somatic pleasure children find in having their expectations, including their expectations of order and coherence in the world, raised and answered, even surfeited. In the same issue of Acts as Palmer’s “Dear Lexicon” interview, after all, appears a little poem called “My Cat,” taken from Johnson’s “The Imaginary Menagerie”: “I have a cat named Chaos / I teach to dance / crisscross, toss, and loss / across expanse. / / Chaos in the corner, / Chaos on its head. / / Order out of Chaos — / hanging by a thread” (106). This is not one of Johnson’s major works. But it exemplifies the older poet’s lack of embarassment over both nursery-rhyme simplicity and a child-like love of the enticingly coherent.

 

Johnson’s ability to make the sublime serve the purposes of Beauty, rather than standing as an end in itself, may have something to do with this embrace of the embarassing or shameful, as opposed to the abject (see Turner, Beauty, 1-2; 17-32). It certainly puts him at odds with much modern experimental verse. “Beauty is difficult,” says Beardsley to Yeats at several points in the Cantos (see 74 and 80). “Beauty is easy,” Johnson reponds. “It is the Beast that is the secret” (Beam 14). He can have a hard time with that Beast, with making his poem, as he himself puts it, “a mirror held / to the horror.” If he gives us Prospero and Ariel, there’s no Caliban or Sycorax in sight, and the monsters that Thoreau says we must dare to suckle–this in Beam 15, a quoted “Cornerstone”–seem to me rather few and far between. Guy Davenport finds a “brave innocence” in the poet’s willingness to avoid the roles of “conscience,” “political guide,” and adviser on “contemporary and fashionable anxieties.” “Mr. Johnson might just as well be writing in any century you might arbitrarily name,” he observes,” for all the mention he makes of his times” (“Geography” 194). Other critics have been less approving. ¹⁷ In either case, here too he is unusual. We need to look beyond Anglo-American poetry to find his spiritual kin, since the modernist he most calls to mind, as Palmer recalls Rene Char, is the Spanish poet Jorge Guillen, whose Cantico (Canticle) is, like ARK, at once a hymn to light and to the triumphant pleasures of finding oneself “invented” by a world that makes us its “legend,” a “well-made” world that calls us to its praise (see “M_s all_” [“Beyond”] and “Beato sill_n” [“Blessed Armchair”], respectively). Cantico and ARK have both been accused of a tendency to slight the social, to sidestep history–a charge that Guillen responded to in poems and essays for much of his later career (see the “Introduction” to Affirmation, 22), and one that Johnson steadies himself for when he explains that “unlike other long American poems of the century, ARK was conceived to be a poem without history. A dangerous undertaking . . .” (“Planting” 2). Dangerous, at least in part, because without personal or social history for ballast, the poem may seem merely aesthetic, not important, a pleasure with nothing at stake, since by and large we no longer trust with Whitman that “passionate friendship” mirrors a “harmonic universe” (Davenport, “Whitman” 15) or with Coleridge that “‘Tis the sublime of man, / Our noontide Majesty, to know ourselves / Parts and proportions of one wondrous whole!” and that “This fraternises man, this constitutes / Our charities and bearings” (“Religious Musings,” 107; ll. 44-48).

 

We may be wrong in this mistrust–it may yet prove, as Frederick Turner claims, that “what William James called ‘the will to believe’ is written in our genes,” that “teleology is the best policy,” and that, “paradoxically, it is utopian to attempt to do battle against our natural idealism,” the instinctive itch that leads us “to expect more order and meaning in the world than it can deliver,” and therefore to change the world to meet our expectations (100). With its faith in the order and beauty of the world Johnson’s poem leads the reader to expect more coherence and meaning in it than the poem often allows at first glance, and as the text is “changed” through annotations and efforts at close reading it more than requites one’s patient, puzzling scrutiny. I doubt that this aesthetic exchange has much of a social effect, just as I doubt Palmer’s meditations on the mystery of reference have; but ARK rewards, rather than judges, a reader’s effort to make it cohere, leaving the mouth and ear satisfied in its music, and the intellect, also, new and tender and quick. Two stanzas from Guillen’s “Mas alla” capture this surge of narcisstic satisfaction:

 

     Todo me comunica,
     Vencedor, hecho mundo,
     Su brio para ser
     De veras real, en triunfo.
     Soy, mas, estoy.  Respiro.
     Lo profundo es el aire.
     La realidad me inventa,
     Soy su leyenda.  -Salve!18

 

Such pleasures are certainly utopian, as Finkelstein explains, offering a critical purchase on the world (98-101). But I suspect that breathing in that “brio para ser” is its own reward, that it corresponds to a movement through a crisis when the world felt as inalterably other and abject, a crisis Palmer and Lyotard help us envision, into the exaltation and confirmation of self that Longinus describes, where one feels that “nature did not decide that man would be a low or ignoble animal; but leading us into life and into the whole cosmos as if into a kind of world’s fair to be, in a way, its observers, and to be lovers of the esteem which comes to those who compete” (177)–in this case who compete by “wrestling the old ineffable” into experimental verse (Johnson, Beam 30).

 

Palmer and Johnson often seem to me halves of a single, greater poet: one who would unite, not Innocence and Experience, that old Mutt and Jeff, but Emerson’s duo: Experience and Intellect. “Every thing is beautiful seen from the point of the intellect, or as truth,” Emerson writes in “Love.” “But all is sour, if seen as experience. . . . In the actual world–the painful kingdom of time and place–dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy” (328). Dante wrote from in both worlds, as did Eliot, Pound, and Guillen. Chartres to Johnson’s Watts Towers, James Merrill’s epic of love and science, The Changing Light at Sandover, is the nearest that contemporary poetry comes to this inclusiveness. (I suspect that its use of narrative is central to that accomplishment, although it would take another essay to make the argument.)

 

But we need not push for such a synthesis. If there’s little of Johnson’s holy light in Sun or Palmer’s sweet, Hebraic ache in ARK, the aesthetics of the second book suggest that we may yet have an experimental poetry that aspires to Beauty, to the reader’s satisfaction–a poetry that starts from something remarkably close to the world-view of the Natural Classicists, that is to say, without yielding their New Formalist results. This seems to me, whatever its ethical import, an important aspiration, for it gives a ringing answer to Barthes’ sense that we are kept at a distance from the “keen” pleasures of reading “the work,” as opposed to those of playing out “the text,” by the “rather depressing knowledge” that “today, one can no longer write ‘like that'” (80). In its assurance of a link between the self-referential construction of the poem and the mathematical coherence of the natural world, Johnson’s work reminds us that the stochastic, “shit happens” poetics of what Gilbert calls “textured information” may be at least as much of an imposition on the ordering impulse of the human mind as linguistic structure and closure are a human imposition on the buzzing, booming chaos of events. And in its restoration of pleasure as a “grand and elementary principle” nearly thirty years after Lionel Trilling declared that “the ideal of pleasure has exhausted itself, almost as if it had been actually realized and had issued in satiety and ennui,” leaving an ideal of experiences that lie beyond the pleasure principle in its wake, ARK nags us with the thought that the pursuit of sensations of self-awareness, though they lie in pain, may be as specialized and privileged a pursuit as the one it disdains, the Enlightened, echt American pursuit of happiness.

 

On the news this early evening, after all, I will hear about villages burning. Out my window, by nothing but an accident of birth, I will see a scene far closer to Johnson’s Spire on the Death of L.Z. (ARK 34):

 

           bees purring a
              cappella
     in utter emerald cornfield
         till the cows come
             purple home
          this is paradise

 

The “mysteries of reference” in Palmer’s poetic can better accomodate my experience of imaged awfulness than the revelatory epiphanies of Johnson. Yet somehow the mysteries of construction invoked throughout ARK offer a way through my not-uncommon sense of shame at such juxtapositions, into a response equally proper to the world I inhabit, to the work I have at hand, and to the life and work those burned-out villagers ought also by rights to enjoy. Perhaps we need not, like the proverbial Englishman, mistake discomfort for morality, as though only through guilt and struggle could our pleasures be excused (85). To say at death that “head wedded nail and hammer to the / work of vision / of the word / at hand,” the L.Z.elegy goes on, “that is paradise.” There is still work–beautiful, wild work–to be done.

 

Notes

 

1. This essay grows out of my discussion of Johnson and Palmer at the 1992 MLA Poetry Division panel, chaired by Robert van Hallberg, on the question, “Are the Pleasures of Experimental Poetry Important, and When?”

 

2. I will leave aside, for now, the history of this anhedonism. But it is worthy noting that in 1965 two essayists remarked on its importance. “Our contemporary aesthetic culture does not set great store by the principle of pleasure,” Lionel Trilling writes in “The Fate of Pleasure,” “and it may even be said to maintain an antagonism to the principle of pleasure.” Susan Sontag, thinking of a slightly different set of artists, observes that “in one sense, the new art and the new sensibility take a rather dim view of pleasure,” since “the seriousness of modern art precludes pleasure in the familiar sense–the pleasures of a melody that one can hum after leaving the concert hall, of characters in a novel or play whom one can recognize, identify with, and disset in terms of realistic psychological motives,” and so on. She hastens to add, however, that in another sense “the modern sensibility is more involved with pleasure in the familiar sense than ever,” since it “demands less ‘content’ in art, and is more open to the pleasures of ‘form’ and style” (302-3).

 

3. The key tension in McGann’s “Response to Altieri” seems to me not that between capitalism and Language work, but rather between pleasure and freedom: a distinction that places him in a broad tradition of thinkers for whom, as Trilling says of Dostoevsky, “disgust with the specious good of pleasure serves as the ground for the affirmation of spiritual freedom” (76).

 

4. To be fair, I should mention Perloff’s essay on “The Word as Such: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Poetry in the Eighties,” which stresses the aural enjoyment of “Language” work: “Words, that is to say, are not dependable when it comes to signification, but the play of their sounds is endlessly pleasurable” (The Dance of the Intellect, 232). In her most recent book, Perloff returns to the discourse of pleasure, since if we are willing to “‘go with it'” we may be “amused” by Language work, and find such poems “elaborately sounded . . . appealing in their music” (Radical Artifice, 205). Yet I am struck, once again, by the way Perloff feels impelled to close out Radical Artifice on a horatorical note, describing John Cage as “preoccupied with . . . ultimately political topics.” As her clinching comment on his work this observation anticipates an audience for whom the “aural,” “visual,” “dialectic,” “semantic,” “or for that matter, literary” paths through Cage’s work are less important than his underlying political concern.

 

5. “Pleasure / Bliss,” writes Barthes: “terminologically, there is always a vacillation I stumble, I err. In any case, there will always be a margin of indecision; the distinction will not be the source of absolute classifications, the paradigm will falter, the meaning will be precarious, revocable, reversible, the discourse incomplete” (4). That said, however, Barthes makes good use of his perpetually faltering paradigm; and handled with all due lightness, the pair prove a useful heuristic.

 

6. This inattention to pleasure is hardly limited to those who write about experimental verse. As Barbara Packer has argued, “the analysis of mechanisms of delight, which used to be as important a part of the old rhetorical education as moral improvement, has been pushed to the margins of critical discourse,” so that professors of English lack a sophisticated and respectable language for deliberating the pleasures of Chaucer, as well as Charles Bernstein (26). When pleasure is mentioned, as when Roger Gilbert finds that the sentences of Ron Silliman’s What “give pleasure . . . through their wit, their allusiveness, their visuality, their phonetic texture, their descriptive precision, or their sheer unlikeliness,” delight is still writ small, a matter of local “fun” rather than a “grand elementary principle” (261).

 

7. I quote this in the knowledge that Palmer can give as good as he gets. In 1987, when Sulfur published a review by Sven Birkerts critical of John Ashbery’s Selected Poems, then invited masthead members to respond, Palmer called the article “diffuse and pointless,” and wrote that he heard in its accusations of an Ashberian “nihilism” “the all-too-familiar whine of the bourgeois subject, threatened with the loss of its delights, its constituted meanings and its empty identity” (154).

 

8. The fact that Michael Steadman had been too busy with his job at the advertising firm DAA to read Forche’s collection was meant to reinforce our sense that he was being drawn inexorably away from the political concern of his youth in the 1960s–and also from his emblematically named wife, Hope.

 

9. Palmer’s distrust of telling a little story–his distrust, it is safe to say, of narrative–may also be illuminated by McGann’s comments on the non- and anti-narrative impulse in Language poets. “Narrativity is an especially problematic feature of discourse, to these writers, because its structures lay down ‘stories’ which serve to limit and order the field of experience, in particular the field of social and historical experience. Narrativity is, in this view, an inherently conservative feature of discourse, and hence it is undermined at every point” (“Contemporary Poetry” 267). For a convincing counter-argument in favor of narrative, however, see Argyros’ chapter “Narrative and Chaos” (307-322).

 

10. Perloff’s chapter “The Changing Face of Common Intercourse: Talk Poetry, Talk Show, and the Scene of Writing” (Radical Artifice 29-53) is perhaps the best available exposition of the first of these embarrassments, especially in her withering reading of Philip Levine’s poem “To Cipriano, in the Wind.” I am not sure, however, that a poetry of moderate artifice–say a poetry that embraces the traditional artificialities of meter, rhyme, and theatrical or performative selfhood, of the sort we find in Merrill or Pinsky–would prove less cogent a response than Perloff’s radical poetics to this “changing face.”

 

11. In the “Acts” interview, it is worth noting, Palmer calls “A man undergoes pain . . .” the “Adorno poem” (“Dear Lexicon” 31).

 

12. Palmer has written and spoken of Vallejo and Celan as poets who evince “a politics that inheres” (“The Flower of Capital,” 164). They are vital proof that “political significance can manifest itself in the most deeply privatized–apparently–work,” and that one can write a poetry in which the political world does not become “decor” and which is itself not “ultimately self-congratulatory, in that you get to say you’re on the right side, and then sell it” (“Dear Lexicon” 14, 12). Although I attribute these “Human Poems” to Vallejo, since a collection by that name was translated by Clayton Eshleman and published by Grove Press in 1968, according to Eshleman’s 1978 retranslation of the same posthumous texts “there is no evidence that Vallejo himself even contemplated such a title as Poemas humanos” (xx): a buried slipperiness of naming that echoes a key theme in Palmer’s text. In Celan, it is also worth noting, Palmer finds “a kind of . . . rebuke to Adorno” (“Dear Lexicon” 14). The poet discusses his work as a “network of quotation” in the “Dear Lexicon” interview: “I don’t go around expecting everyone to have a footnoted edition of my works. On the contrary, I could footnote it myself if that were the intent. I’m not just setting up an industry of ‘seeking out,’ though I’m delighted by the surprise of someone . . . finding out where I’ve stolen this or that” (18).

 

13. While I’m tempted to add that Senator to my earlier list of easy targets, Palmer has been subject to absurd objections from those in power, his poetry “officially condemned by a committee of Texas congressmen as pornographic” (Reinfeld 99).

 

14. Johnson does not segregate his literary and scientific ranges of reference. The line “All night the golden fruit fell softly to the air” interweaves Yeats’s “golden apples of the sun” and the fall of photons into the gravity well of the earth, and takes note of the fact that the silver apples of the moon are the golden ones, reflected. In this “reeled world” (Beam 1) all things pun one another, and poets, who get to know and articulate their correspondences, are themselves shaped from “Linkings, inklings, / around the stem & branches of the nervetree–/ shudder and shutterings, sensings,” beings for whom “SENSE sings” (Beam 8).

 

15. This ventilation, called “PALMS,” composed from at least one word from each psalm, quoted in order, retells the myth of Orpheus and Euridice as it recapitulates a number of key images and passages from the rest of the Foundations. For example, the opening imprecation to “Be / the man that walk in the way of day and night / like a tree of water . . .” helps us gloss an otherwise obscure reference to “one” who is “water to touch, all knowledge” in Beam 1. Since the brain’s “wrinkled lobes of flesh are more sensitive than the surface of water” (Beam 12), it seems we are that aqua-tocatta. Johnson’s Bible, like “Orpheus’ Sermon” in Dickinson’s poem 1545, has “a Warbling teller” in more ways than one.

 

16. I take this phrase from John Shade, in Nabokov’s Pale Fire, for whom “It sufficed that I in life could find / Some kind of link-and-bobolink, some kind / Of Correlated pattern in the game, / Plexed artistry, and something of the same / Pleasure as they who played it found” (ll. 811-15; 36-7). In the last beam of Ark: the Foundations, we find a “bobolink / sphericling the hereabouts” (Beam 33).

 

17. Norman Finkelstein notes that Johnson’s work can “seem too naively exalted, lacking in an awareness of specifically social conflicts” (Utopian Moment 94). Harmon, too, comments that “given Johnson’s cosmic scale, the human race . . . hardly registers in any historical, political, social, or psychological details” and “shows up only as the inventor of language” (219). Wordsworth once more: “The knowledge both of the Poet and the Man of Science is pleasure,” we read in the “Preface” to Lyrical Ballads; “but the knowledge of the one cleaves to us as a necessary part of our existence, our natural and unalienable inheritance; the other is a personal and individual acquisition, slow to come to us, and by no habitual and direct sympathy connecting us with our fellow beings” (168).

 

18. Julian Palley translates these lines as “Everything yields / to me — victor, made world — / its determination / to be triumphantly real. / / I am; I am here and now. / I breathe the deepest air. / Reality invents me. / I am its legend. Hail!” (31).

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