David Caplan

Department of English
Ohio Wesleyan University
dmcaplan@owu.edu

 

A response to Lori Emerson, Demystifying the Digital, Re-animating the Book: A Digital Poetics

 

As I write this response on my office computer, three uneven stacks of books threaten to tumble across my desk. On top of the piles perch Jack Spicer’s The Collected Books (for a conference talk that needs expansion), an edition of Shakespeare’s Sonnets (which I just finished teaching), and my MLA ballot (due soon). My computer runs Windows 98 because I am too lazy to have the information systems staff update it and because the program fits my needs just fine. This morning I entered the changes I made on a hard copy, revising the opening in a neighborhood coffee shop. Outside the large front window, tourists admired the cobblestone streets and small brick homes built for German brewery workers and rehabbed by lawyers. Soon–I hope–I will email my response to the editors of Postmodern Culture so they can post it online.

 

Like our neighborhoods, our desks, and our lives, writing commingles the old and the new. I type, I email, and I write by hand. Alert to such daily facts, contemporary poetry quickly learned to embody familiar dislocations: the white noise of overheard chatter, the experience of listening to a CD while driving down streets organized for walking or walking through a suburban housing development.

 

Young poets coming of age now also face a particular literary-historical challenge. They follow the generation born around the mid-century, including Charles Bernstein (born 1950), Ron Silliman (1946) and Lyn Hejinian (1941), whose groundbreaking efforts replaced “tradition” with “innovation” as the poetic culture’s keyword. Ben Lerner speaks for his contemporaries when, in his debut collection, The Lichtenberg Figures, he wonders what comes next:

 

The poetic establishment has co-opted contradiction.
And the poetic establishment has not co-opted contradiction.
Are these poems just cumbersome
or are these poems a critique of cumbersomeness?

 

To which Lerner offers a qualified solution:

 

Perhaps what remains of innovation
is a conservatism at peace with contradiction. (22)

 

Like the fussy noun, “cumbersomeness,” Lerner’s poetry dramatizes an awkward moment. It wryly recalls the contentious debates that the previous generation’s work inspired. Partisans wrangled over the terms Lerner reproduces, debating what constitutes “the poetic establishment,” co-option, and “critique.” Lerner, though, less refuses to take sides than realize the sloganeering’s acute limitations. “Willful irresolution can stabilize into a manner just as easily as facile resolution, right?” he asks in an interview, responding to a question about the “prevailing post-avant penchant for hyper-cool and fragged surfaces.” “Honk,” another poem more wittily concludes, “if you wish all difficult poems were profound” (23).

 

Instead of an attachment to “willful irresolution” or “facile resolution,” poets need curiosity–curiosity about the state of language, poetry, culture, and the world in which we live. A lyric’s structure shows the importance of the seemingly trivial–the sound that a syllable makes, a pause’s hesitation, an easily ignored quirk of language. A successful poem, then, offers a model of curiosity. It demands and rewards inquisitiveness, demonstrating less a discovery, a paraphraseable insight, than the process of discovery. To account for this dynamic, we might consider “curious” and “incurious” poetry, depending on the degree to which it attends to the contemporary moment and the art form’s venerable history, the past’s complex, shifting relationship to the present.

 

Loss Pequeño Glazier’s Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm follows Glazier’s Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries, which argues for the aesthetic stance that underpins the poetry. The two books are intimately connected. Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm includes passages from Digital Poetics as epigraphs, suggesting that the poetry illustrates the principles that the critical book espouses. According to Glazier, “innovation” marks the most important poetry. In Digital Poetics, he clarifies this point:

 

In general, the term "poetry" is used in this volume to refer to practices of innovative poetry rather than to what might be called academic, formal, or traditional forms of poetry. (181)

 

Earlier Glazier responds to his own question, “What makes it innovative?”:

 

Innovative work avoids the personalized, ego-centered position of the romantic, realist, or modernist "I." Such a sentimentalized 'I," often concerned with its own mortality, can be considered as having passed away. Innovative practice is practice that overcomes the "I" to explore material dimensions of the text. (174)

 

Lerner prizes an inconsistency that fuses seemingly opposed qualities. He implicitly answers Glazier’s question, “What is innovative?” by presenting “conservatism” and “innovation” as inextricably connected. The most “innovative” work, Lerner suggests, leaves behind the techniques and gestures most often associated with “innovation.” In my terms, such poetry is curious about the complications that literature inspires. In contrast, a defensiveness guides Glazier’s assertions, as he establishes a series of three oppositions, each of which bears some scrutiny.

 

First, Glazier opposes “innovative poetry . . . to what might be called academic . . . forms of poetry.” Glazier wrote Digital Poetics: The Making of E-Poetries as a dissertation for SUNY Buffalo; his acknowledgements page thanks his committee members Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, and Susan Howe. The University of Alabama Press Modern and Contemporary Poetics series published the book; Bernstein serves as the Series Co-Editor and Howe serves on the Series Advisory Board. Bernstein’s and Creeley’s praise adorns the back cover of Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm (the book’s two blurbs). Glazier has published two “academic” books: one a dissertation revised for a University Press series co-edited by his director, the other a poetry collection praised by two distinguished poets who served as his committee members.

 

Glazier, then, is an “academic” author, if we understand “academic” as a descriptive term, neither honorific nor derogatory. (To add an obvious example, I enjoy certain “academic” scholarship and poetry, including several titles published in the Modern and Contemporary Poetics series and by other university presses, and dislike others.) Glazier, though, defines “academic” and “innovative” poetry largely as period styles. “Innovative” poetry, he maintains, “overcomes the ‘I’ to explore material dimensions of the text.” Such elements, though, might be classified as “givens” rather than “discoveries,” as Lyn Hejinian writes of Jena Osman’s collection, The Character:

 

Ethical density, political ambiguity, shifting subjectivity, multifold social terrains, multicultural identities and interrelations--these are givens rather than discoveries in Jena Osman's work, and as a result the work doesn't stop there. (xi)

 

An “innovative” poem goes beyond the “givens.” It cannot remain content to reproduce established stylistic techniques and pre-existing accomplishments; it must not “stop there.” Glazier’s understanding of “innovative” poetry strikes me as insufficiently dynamic, inattentive to the terrain that such poetry traverses. In Hejinian’s terms, it confuses “givens” with “discoveries.”

 

Finally, this separation of “academic” and “innovative” poetry oddly echoes the assumption that so many “innovative” poets dispute (and Glazier himself would dispute in other contexts): the denial that “creative” and “scholarly” work inspire each other. “Various voices speak in my poems. I code-shift,” Rae Armantrout observes of her poetry. Setting it in a broader context, Armantrout observes, perhaps a little too bluntly, the affinity that “innovative” poetry shares with contemporary scholarship. “In the last decade or so,” she continues, “academics have been raising the question of who speaks in literary works and for whom. There is a contemporary poetry that enacts the same questions, a poetics of the crossroad” (24-25). Glazier’s poetry similarly explores the “poetics of the crossroad”; it is “academic” in the sense that it pursues questions about identity, culture, and language that academic scholarship raises.

 

Second, Glazier opposes “innovative poetry . . . to what might be called formal . . . forms of poetry.” All poetry is formal; otherwise it is not poetry. As the redundancy, the “formal . . . forms of poetry” suggests, no informal forms of poetry exist. There are only informal styles. Terza rima is no more “formal” than poetry written under aleatory or newly developed procedures. To call a sonnet “formal” and not poetry written under aleatory procedures is to deny the complexity of contemporary poetics.

 

Third, Glazier opposes “innovative poetry . . . to what might be called . . . traditional . . . forms of poetry.” When Jena Osman re-ordered language from press conferences conducted by Bush, Cheney, and Rumsfeld, her “Dropping Leaflets” claims a tradition, as well as a method: Tristan Tzara’s cut-and-paste procedure. She sets the Dadaist technique in a specific political and literary-historical context. This manipulation of tradition might strike readers as more or less curious; partly its effect arises from the manner it extends the past into the present, using a nearly century old technique to address contemporary realities. Glazier’s simple opposition of “innovative” and “traditional” poetry does not account for this process of synthesis, development, and invention. Poets bear no responsibility to develop an adequate critical vocabulary for their work. While Glazier expands our understanding of poetry to include digital poetics, my concern is that his conception of print-based poetry limits his work in that medium.

 

An author’s note relates that many of the poems in Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm “have had digital versions, have grown, have been ‘sounded’, or have been co-developed within the digital medium” (97). In a conspicuous gesture, Glazier, the director of the Electronic Poetry Center, borrows from the vocabulary of computer software for his print-based poetry. “Windows 95” ends:

 

Artists tend to left-click while
Republicans tend to the right. If the period might've once
been called "Error & After" it will now be known as "Eudora &
after". Thorn and sing-shrub or Subject: I know I shall have
awful DOS pains in the morning as a result of this. (61)

 

Reviewing Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm for the online technology site Slashdot, Dylan Harris declared his dislike for “a lot of avant-garde poetry’s excess use of strange words.” Glazier, Harris charges, has

 

succumbed to the usual academic habit of filling his poems with obscure incomprehensibility, like http, chmod, EMACS . . . hang on a second, I know these words. They're not literary jargon, they're software babble, the words I work with.

 

Harris’s witty reversal demonstrates nicely his experience of reading Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm. Because Harris does not expect to see “the words I work with” in a poem, it takes a few moments to recognize them. Such moments of recognition possess a certain charm, as the poetry accommodates unexpected sources of language. Glazier organizes them with his favorite device, the pun. As in this passage, he introduces the puns gently, with an opening phrase suggesting the notion that the second phrase will complicate. The line breaks after “while” and “&” separate the two parts, building the reader’s expectation over how the poem will resolve the syntactical and rhetorical structure. The first pun grafts a spatial cliché (“Republicans tend to the right”). The second pun, “Eudora & / after” addresses the first word in the phrase it echoes, “Error & After.” Following the line break, the second half of the phrase “after” simply confirms the reader’s expectation.

 

This kind of “word play,” Lori Emerson observes, “becomes perhaps too typical, the puns bearing more amusement value than performing the kind of multi-leveled work that Glazier seeks to install as a centerpiece of his writing.” It is “typical” in another sense; it constitutes the favorite device of much contemporary poetry. Harryette Mullen’s most interesting examples develop intricate sound structures; as in a poetic version of a vaudeville routine, Bernstein’s juxtapose high and low. Glazier’s puns are earnest and well mannered, neither groaningly “bad” nor comically charged and inventive. In this respect, they recall the technically competent sonnets written by the mid-century generation.

 

Glazier’s favorite pun is his own name, a tendency that Emerson and I interpret differently. She sees such gestures as part the “disintegration of ‘Loss Glazier’ as a coherent and locatable author.” The puns, though, project the author relentlessly onto nearly everything he describes, witnesses, or imagines–places, languages, and creatures. This tendency strikes me as the expression more of poetic narcissism than of authorial disintegration.

 

Glazier’s interest in the exterior world is most vividly displayed in the sequence, “White-Faced Bromeliads on 20 Hectares (An Iteration).” The author’s note sets the scene:

 

As to the pumpkin seed in the title of this section, one time I was on a 14-hour journey in Costa Rica, crossing a mountain range in a dilapidated bus with bad shocks, enduring hour after hour of hairpin turns. A gaggle of North Americans on the bus complained vociferously about the inadequacy of the country and its transportation system. At one point, we stopped and boys came on the bus to sell home-baked pumpkin muffins. I began eating mine and found a pumpkin seed in the middle of it, another imperfection. I let the seed linger in my mouth thinking, this is the gift of language I have been given: to have this vocabulary on my tongue, to simply participate in other ways of being in the world. (99)

 

“A lack of comfort is the obvious burden the American poet carries,” Robert von Hallberg notes in his definitive account of the American “tourist poems of the 1950s,” “this is as much a test as a vacation.”(73). With the setting switched from Europe to Costa Rica, Glazier demonstrates his fittingness by the way he handles hardship. As in other tourist poems, fellow travelers from home–“A gaggle of North Americans”–offer contrasting examples; their complaints highlight the poet’s sophistication as he experiences a moment of pre-industrial imperfection coded as authenticity. When Elizabeth Bishop describes wooden clogs making a “sad, two-noted wooden tune,” she notes, “In another country the clogs would be tested. / Each pair would have identical pitch.” Bishop analyzes her experience shrewdly, realizing “the choice is never wide and never free” (18). Glazier similarly savors the pumpkin seed in the middle of “home-baked pumpkin muffin,” “another imperfection,” yet he succumbs to the illusion of unmediated experience. Forgetting the economic exchange involved, he accepts “the gift of language I have been given . . . to simply participate in other ways of being in the world.” (99)

 

The sequence embeds this narrative, with suggestive moments of lyric intensity and tourist discomfort: “Sleeping / hummingbird doesn’t wake–even to camera flash in volcanic night” (34) and “Narrow seats and coffee-can sides of rattling bus” (29). The fifth section returns to “the gift of language” embodied in the pumpkin seed: “as language forms / fills the mouths, tongues of tropical light, pura vida, compita” (31). This remarkably energetic conclusion builds to an ecstatic moment, where cultures, languages, and place commingle to sing an epiphany of “pure life.” An updated vocabulary and verse technique barely disguise what Glazier elsewhere calls the “sentimentalized ‘I'” that “can be considered as having passed away.” Rather, Glazier reproduces what he wishes to reject.

 

Works Cited

 

• Armantrout, Rae. “Cheshire Poetics.” American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language. Eds. Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr. Middletown: Wesleyan UP, 2002.
• Bishop, Elizabeth. Complete Poems. New York: Farrar, 1969.
• Glazier, Loss Pequeño. Digital Poetics: The Making of E-poetries. Tuscaloosa: U of Alabama P, 2002.
• Harris, Dylan. “Anatman, Pumpkin Seed, Algorithm.” Slashdot 18 Dec. 2003 <http://books.slashdot.org/books/03/12/18/1442246.shtml>.
• Hejinian, Lyn. “Introduction.” The Character. Boston: Beacon, 1999.
• Lerner, Ben. The Lichtenberg Figures. Port Townsend: Copper Canyon, 2004.
• —. Conversation with Kent Johnson. Jacket 26 (Oct. 2004) <http://jacketmagazine.com/26/john-lern.html>.
• Von Hallberg, Robert. American Poetry and Culture, 1945-1980. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1985.