Susan M. Schultz

University of Hawaii-Manoa

 

“Postmodern Poetries: Jerome J. McGann Guest -Edits an Anthology of Language Poets From North America and the United Kingdom,”Verse 7:1 (Spring, 1990): 6-73.

 

Postmodern poetry, especially Language poetry, is coming in from the cold. Not so long ago, postmodern poets published their work exclusively in small journals and disseminated it through small presses. Their radical differences from members of the Deep Image, Confessional, New York, and New Formalist schools probably condemned them to the margins of the publishing and the teaching worlds. But so, it seems, did their desire not to take part in (or to be co-opted by) that world. The climate is changing, however; a poetic greenhouse effect has lured well-known Language poets, among them Bob Perelman and Charles Bernstein, into the academy. Susan Howe has a book forthcoming from the well-established Wesleyan University Press. And the generally conservative pages ofVerse, a journal published in Great Britain and the United States, have opened to their “neonew” (the word is Perelman’s) attack on traditional versifying. The shepherd for this latest assault is Jerome McGann, long a lobbyist (or apologist, depending on your sympathies) for Language poetry.

 

Language writing is at once post-structuralist and interested in history, power, and leftist ideology. Language poetry bears an acknowledged debt to the Modernists’ style, if not their substance; it also shores fragments against ruins, although it means to revel in that fragmentation. This issue ofVerse seems geared more toward the demands of the initiated than toward those of the merely curious; as McGann notes in his introduction, no anthology of postmodernist poetry is complete without postmodernist prose (these writers, like the Modernists, are poet- critics). The lack of a critical background hurts, as does McGann’s teasing introduction. I will dwell a bit on the introduction, because its paradoxes seem to me central to the movement that McGann describes in it.

 

If editors are a species of literary parent, McGann is a benevolent father who neither instructs his progeny nor leaves them to fend entirely for themselves. His introduction takes the middle ground between these options, hinting at purpose, yet refusing at all turns to name it. And a tenuous middle ground it is, at least for readers not already privy to postmodernism’s concerns–and perhaps also for those who are. For McGann does not so much mediate between the reader and the texts that follow as write an introduction that consistently fails to introduce. His various indeterminacies would not be so frustrating were he not to promise something more specific. “[T]he aim here is to give a more catholic view of the radical change which poetry has undergone since the Vietnam War” (6). “From a social and historical point of view, this collection aims to show certain features of the contemporary avant-garde poetry scene which are not apparent in [other collections]” (7). McGann never makes clear what he means by “radical change” and the “certain features” that distinguish his anthology from those that come before (Ron Silliman’sIn the American Tree and Douglas Messerli’s 1987,Language Poetries, An Anthology).

 

McGann’s prose imitates the postmodern poetries he has chosen, and begins to define them by unravelling the kinds of definitions that we still like to believe govern the selection-process for any anthology. Curiously, however, McGann subscribes to his own set of definitions. According to McGann, these are not just Language poems, though “all the writing here is language-centered, whether the work in question is ‘Language Writing’ properly so-called (e.g., the selections from Hejinian, Bernstein, and McCaffery) or whether it is not (e.g., the selections from Howe, Bromige, or D.S. Marriott).” The secret to the difference between Language writing and language-centered writing lies, one assumes, in the names here mentioned. Rather than witness the move from the “authority” of Blake and Shelley to the nonauthoritative postmodernist realm of language, we move from one set of Big Names to another. The proclaimed gulf between “vision” and “language,” the Romantics and the postmoderns, is not so wide after all.

 

McGann’s introduction, then, for all its principle of uncertainty, violates its own code. For McGann describes postmodern poetry as poetry in which “The [decentered] I is engulphed in the writing; not an authority, it becomes instead a witness, for and against” (6). This jibes with Charles Bernstein’s attack on poetic voice in “Stray Straws and Straw Men,” inThe L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book: “‘The voice of the poet’ is an easy way of contextualizing poetry so that it can be more readily understood . . . as listening to someone talk in their distinctive manner” (LB 41). This emphasis on voice “has the tendency to reduce the body of a poet’s work to little more than personality.” And finally, “Voice is a possibility for poetry not an essence” (42). Several of the poets in this issue go to fascinating lengths to disrupt our expectation that we will be hearing poetic voices. Their strategies are often formal; the disjunction between form and content has become as much a critical standard these days as the New Critical junction was some forty years ago.

 

The most dramatic attempt to deflect us into language, away from the poet, is by Tina Darragh, in her sequence, “Bunch-Ups.” Darragh gives us four rectangular boxes in which she has drawn long pipe-shaped lines; it’s as if the reader looked at what she knew was the page of a book, but found that the lines were empty of words. At the bottom right section of each page, the lines “bunch-up”; below them one sees the portions of several lines of what looks like the OED: a number here, the beginning of a Latin term there, parts and wholes of English words. The piece effectively dramatizes the way in which the reader of a dictionary becomes–at random–the writer of an incomplete text. As she has written elsewhere, “Reading the definitions is like reading a foreign language developed specifically for English” (LB 108). And yet readers suspicious that nothing any writer sets down is, in truth, random will note that the seemingly haphazard glimpses from a dictionary that she gives us are in fact fragments about the self, about a network, a definition that includes a reference to “sense,” and one that reads “post in a statio” and is the 17th, archaic sense of a word. She makes connections, in other words, between dictionaries and selves, between networks of language and of people; her final fragment also suggests historical depth, even as it argues against the possibility of understanding history.

 

There are other notable attempts to foreground language and downplay the author, instances when, as Bernstein puts it, “the writing itself is seen as an instance of reality / fantasy / experience / event” (LB 41). Christopher Dewdney, for example, whose “source text” is a museum catalogue, describes his method as follows: “InThe Beach,The City,The Theatre Party andThe Self Portrait source lines alternate with interference lines which are generally permutations of the adjacent source lines. The permutation lines echo the line before at the same time as they preview the line after them. This profoundly skews the semantic valences of most of the reading subsequent to the first interference line (which is the second line in these four poems) [two of which are printed here]” (21). The two poems printed here reminded me very much of John Ashbery’s “Finnish Rhapsody” (fromApril Galleons), which Ashbery based on the repetitive style of theKalevala. But Dewdney’s procedure is, in its way, more radical; where Ashbery writes, and then rewrites his own text, Dewdney’s contribution to a pre-existing text is his “interference” in it.

 

Bob Perelman’s poem “Neonew” experiments with stanzas, the shapes of which are reflexive of the shape of history. Each section, until the end of the poem, is numbered “1,” which reminds us that history exists always in the present. In the second section “1” Perelman writes about the way in which a change in spelling affected the “poor Tatars.”

 

backwards into the body into the body of the poor
the body of the poor Tatars
body of the poor Tatars Roman
of the poor Tatars Roman history
the poor Tatars Roman history intercalated an
alphabetic letter
Tatars Roman history intercalated an alphabetic
letter they continue Tartars
Roman history intercalated an alphabetic letter
they continue Tartars of fell
Tartarean nature to this day (41)

 

Political power does not just give the victors the power to rewrite history; it also governs the empire’s spelling books. As Foucault knew, power operates everywhere, even when its effects seem accidental. Perelman’s limited text is also an open one, because it eschews poetic “voice” in favor of “writing” (like Derrida, Language poets reverse the traditional narrative, according to which voice precedes writing). In his talk, “The Rejection of Closure,” Perelman notes that, “The open text often emphasizes or foregrounds process, either the process of the original composition or of subsequent compositions by readers, and thus resists the cultural tendencies that seek to identify and fix material, turn it into a product; that is, it resists reduction and commodification” (quoted in Hartley, 38). This conception of the text is radically utopian; are we not able to describe the passage about “poor Tatars” in story-form? Can we not “interpret” this poem as we do “closed” texts? I suspect that we can, and that what Perelman–like any good poet–gives us is a new style in which to say what we already know. That the style is impersonal–that it does not reflect back on a subjective “I”–aligns it with the Modernism of T.S. Eliot and Marianne Moore. That this impersonal style works in the service of leftist politics does distinguish Perelman and his cohorts from the “great Modernists.” Thus, the line: “‘polis is eyes’ ‘O say can you see’ ‘police is eyes’,” conveys the sweep of history from the Greek polis to the United States, and joins them through the connection of sight and authority.

 

Yet McGann’s reliance on names to define postmodern poetries is revealing–not for anything it tells us of McGann, but for what it tells us about this –and other–anthologies of postmodern verse. Many of these poets do have recognizable styles. In that sense, to paraphrase Stevens, every disorder depends on there being an ordering consciousness in the background. If not voices, then, these poets have idiosyncratic ways of placing words on the page, individual means to distort syntax and to break “the basic assumptions of bourgeois subjectivity,” as George Hartley phrases it in his cogent book on the Language poets (34). As Bernstein writes, “The best of the writing that gets called automatic issues from a series of choices as deliberate & reflected as can be” (43). Or, one might add, the best of postmodern writing issues through the filter of a mind that makes choices.

 

Charles Bernstein and Lyn Hejinian, identified by McGann as “proper” Language poets, and Susan Howe, an “improper” Language poet, all write with a lyricism that argues against the “decentered I”–or at least works in tension with it. Bernstein’s “Debris of Shock/Shock of Debris” is a collage of mixed cliches (like mixed metaphors) that engages political concerns:

 

   Never
burglarize a house with a standing army,
nor take the garbage to an unauthorized
junket. (69)

 

He satirizes the capitalist’s conflation of art with money, authority with seductiveness, as well as his “style,” which formalizes capitalist politics:

 

Yet it is the virile voice of authority, the
condescending
smugness in tone, that is thrilling. What
does it matter that he hasn’t any . . .
“Creative
goals and financial goals are identical: we
just
have different approaches on how to research
those goals, and we have different
definitions
of risk.” (71)

 

Yet the comedy of pastiche that Bernstein creates melts into a lyricism that recalls John Ashbery’s “Soonest Mended,” where that poet moves abruptly from talk of brushing one’s teeth to a lush Keatsian conclusion. We move from satire to a sense of loss:

 

   The salt
of the earth is the tears
of God, torn for
penitence at having created this plenitude
of sufferance. So we dismember (disremember)
in homage to our maker, foraging
in fits, forgiving in
forests, spearing what we take
to be our sustenance: belittling to rein things
in to human scale. A holy land parched
with grief & dulled
envy. The land is soil
& will not stain; such
hope as we may rise from. (73)

 

Here lyricism operates against what we think of as lyrical vision; this is a post-apocalyptic, post-Romantic vision. It is not Bernstein’s only register, and yet the elegiac tone of the poem–the poet’s grief for a wasted earth–suggests a new direction for postmodern poetry. Such poetry might acknowledge more fully its double desire to be jarring and lyrical, iconoclastic and reverential, skeptical and faithful to what land we have left. It might at least tease us with the possibility of an integrated self, even as it testifies to its loss, and the dangers of our nostalgia for it.

 

Let me add that there are moments of good fun in this anthology. After all, the deconstruction of established canons and styles is more often Dionysian than Apollonian. Consider David Bromige’s “Romantic Traces,” which proclaims its purpose in empurpled Keatsisms:

 

It is time I pledge some vows,
apart from those, that is, I’ve taken to the
lyre,
to be as true to it as chainsaw is to boughs
ready to make a widow the next forest fire–
and suddenly I hear I’m to be retired
for failing to accumulate sufficient fans
and denied a seat with the Olympians
because I sang and wrote when by democracy
inspired! (51)

 

Now that poets like Bromige and his fellow postmoderns are “accumulating sufficient fans,” anthologies such as this one should provide an important link between poets and whatever “common readers” remain.

 

Works Cited

 

• Andrews, Bruce and Charles Bernstein, eds. The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E Book.  Carbondale: Southern Illinois UP, 1984.
• Hartley, George.Textual Politics and the Language Poets. Bloomington: Indiana UP, 1989.