Wordsworth/Keats: Some Class Notes
Posted on September 29, 2008 - Filed Under
Today, in the poetry intro class, we had a pretty successful conversation about Wordsworth’s Preface to Lyrical Ballads and Keats’ letters. We are using Kwasny’s Poetics Anthology, Towards the Open Field. As I expected, students found the philosophical tenor of the language a bit challenging (and also a bit dull, I think). We started out with Keats and tried to work backwards to Wordsworth. So, first, I laid out these three famous Keats squibs:
1. “As to the poetical Character itself, (I mean that sort of which, if I am any thing, I am a Member; that sort distinguished from the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime; which is a thing per se and stands alone) it is not itself—it has no self—it is every thing and nothing—It has no character—it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated—It has as much delight in conceiving an Iago as an Imogen. What shocks the virtuous philosopher, delights the camelion Poet. It does no harm from this relish of the dark side of things any more than from its taste for the bright one; because they both end in speculation. A Poet is the most unpoetical of any thing in existence; because he has no Identity—he is continually [informing]—and filling some other Body—The Sun, the Moon, the Sea and Men and Women who are creatures of impulse are poetical and have about them an unchangeable attribute—the poet has none; no identity—he is certainly the most unpoetical all God’s Creatures. If then he has no self, and if I am a Poet, where is the Wonder that I should say I would write no more? … It is a wretched thing to confess; but is a very fact that not one word I ever utter can be taken for granted as an opinion growing out of my identical nature—how can it, when I have no nature? When I am in a room with People if I ever am free from speculating on creations of my own brain, then not myself goes home to myself: but the identity of every one in the room begins to press upon me that, I am in a very little time annihilated—not only among Men; it would be the same in a Nursery of children.” (45-46)
2. “at once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in Literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously—I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, Mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason” (44)
3. “the excellence of every Art is its intensity, capable of making all disagreeables evaporate, from their being in close relationship with Beauty & Truth—Examine King Lear & you will find this exemplified throughout” (44)
Obviously, we needed to try to suss out what Keats could mean by “the wordsworthian or egotistical sublime,” and I figured that would help us a) get some kind of handle on what Wordsworth himself thought he was up to—even as Keats is disagreeing with it—and b) what kind of alternative Keats could be offering in the guise of “Negative Capability.”
We began by looking more closely at the idea of the “poetical Character” that has “no self.” When asked what that could mean, one student suggested it sounded like acting, which I thought was a great way to open things up a little bit. We spent some time talking about the range of typical associations we pair with acting and actors, and things got very interesting.
As a working analogy, we tried talking about Keats’ description of poetical Character alongside the idea of “method acting.” One student told us that Daniel Day-Lewis never broke character while filming Last of the Mohicans (including camping on location, etc.). This was helpful as we pushed further into what it is we think good actors do when they take on a role. One student suggested that they must imaginatively try to project themselves into another person’s situation and (in doing so) filter out the parts of themselves that don’t fit. Others countered with a description that sounded more like spirit possession. To me, this pair sounded like a pretty good way of describing a fundamental difference between the way Keats views Wordsworth’s project on one hand and his own on the other. Wordsworth wants to project some of himself on to characters and objects in the world, whereas Keats wants to let the same into himself and into his poems. A subtle difference semantically but a major difference in attitude towards the poetic “role.”
We talked about Wordsworth’s professed interest in “common men” and “rural occupations,” as complicated by an interest in “elevating” the passions while also practicing selection, e.g. “removing what would otherwise be painful or disgusting in the passion” (14).
A student asked the class (I was very pleased that he directed the question at the group) whether it didn’t seem that Wordsworth felt a moral obligation to his society that Keats seemed to lack. In response, another student said she thought Keats seemed to feel an obligation to “art” in contrast to Wordsworth’s stated obligation to society. This struck me as helpful insofar as it helped us get away from calling Keats “selfish,” which doesn’t really make sense, given his repeated protestations to having “no self.” I suggested that both seemed to feel moral obligations and both felt those moral obligations were bound to be mediated by art; they have slightly different emphases. I then reminded them of our conclusions regarding the different kinds of acting performance we’d imagined earlier in the class.
I pointed to the apocryphal story about “Ode to a Nightingale” having been written in one go (and brought in Keats’ “if Poetry comes not as naturally as the Leaves to a tree it had better not come at all” (45)). I then briefly compared that to “The Thorn” and Wordsworth’s claim that he’d wanted “by some invention [to] do as much to make [a real thorn] permanently an impressive object as the storm ha[d] made it” to his eyes on a stormy day on the ridge of Quantock Hill.
From this position, we were able to pretty much agree that Keats’s openness to light and shade, Imogen and Iago amounted to imagining the poetic self as a kind of neutral vessel or conductor for the full range of phenomenal experience, whereas Wordsworth’s “proportional capability” (wherein, “the human mind is capable of being excited without the application of gross and violent stimulant” and by which “one being is elevated another” (8)) aims at an fairly idealistic, even Platonic, amount of control over what should be experienced. We briefly talked about the threat posed by violent movies and video games as 21st Century fields in which these questions are still contested.
Wordsworth probably got the rough end of the conversation ultimately, but I was delighted that the discussion was so lively. I had been somewhat apprehensive about the day’s prep because I found Negative Capability to be an extremely slippery concept when I was an undergrad. Today, my overall impression was that folks had a pretty solid grasp of what Keats could have meant, and I’m impressed. Wednesday, we will talk about the poems more, and it should be interesting to see how the Poetics informs our take on the poems: as Keats admits, “it is easier to think what Poetry should be than to write it” (45). Likewise, dare we say, “to read it”?
Note
Posted on August 9, 2008 - Filed Under
If the Internet (along with its models of “globalizing” interconnectivity and hyper-subjectivity) represents the most significant and meaningful leap in technology in our era, and this leap has (will have) major implications for the way we think about reality and actuality, should poets not be thinking against its grain as much as along it? Meaning: shouldn’t poets be wondering about the possibilities/necessities of a kind of radical “autism” (this would be a version of the Deleuzian body without organs, I think … where breakdown is productive in itself).
Blogging on the go
Posted on August 7, 2008 - Filed Under
Now that wordpress has a working app for the iPhone, I am hoping to be a bit more regular in making posts.
The whole idea of blogging from a mobile device seems like it could exaccerbate the problems that often keep me from blogging in the first place (namely, the temptation to blurt things out without the benefit of adequate forethought). On the other hand, extemporanious utterances have their valid place, and this takes things to new heights of ease in the realm of access.
Today is almost perfect. I am going for a run.
A Kind of Schizoanalytic Stroll
Posted on May 13, 2008 - Filed Under ,
MUTO a wall-painted animation by BLU from blu on Vimeo.
New Review of Little Ease at Word For/Word
Posted on May 7, 2008 - Filed Under ,
Adam Strauss has written an astute review of my most recent book Little Ease over on the new issue of Word For/Word. Stop on by for lots of other good stuff.
Neighbor-love and Daniil Kharms’ “The Old Woman” (more notes towards an unquiet metaphysics)
Posted on April 18, 2008 - Filed Under ,
I’ve been thinking about the idea of “the neighbor” for a long time. I was raised in the Methodist Church in Tennessee by parents with fairly eccentric views on religion (at least for the bible belt), and my reception of Christian doctrine and dogma was always pretty bipolar. On the one hand, I was attracted to the basic ethical message I found in scripture, and I was also invigorated by the feeling of community I found among my peers at Church (as opposed to the typical “freaks and geeks” dynamics of high school). On the other hand, I was often infuriated by the social conservatism of my more fundamentalist peers, and I could never square the exclusivity of the creed (particularly the Nicene’s “one baptism”) with the offer of Love, the insistence on Love, the command to love that made the religion revolutionary…the part that felt like Truth to me. There were many, predictable, heated arguments about Gandhi and hell, etc. I remember being fairly obsessed with Matthew 25:45 “whatever you did not do for the least of these, you did not do for me.” I’m not sure why this one of all the injunctions to love the neighbor (and enemy) really struck me. But it did. It really pinned me down in the way Kierkegaard describes the “as oneself” in the commandment of Matthew 23:39 pinning one down: “it penetrates into the innermost hiding place where a person loves himself; it does not leave self-love the slightest little excuse, the least little way of escape … this as yourself—indeed, no wrestler can wrap himself around the one he wrestles as this commandment wraps itself around self-love.”
Kierkegaard’s Christian ethics pivot on the effort to eradicate narcissistic self-love and replace it with neighbor-love. This isn’t about some sort of masochism. It is about identifying the “good life” in a universal, objective duty-bind with others. That has always appealed to me (irrespective of my own selfish tendencies). Identifying with this trend of thought has not come out of moral drills and sermons. It has surfaced in me as a kind of primal recognition: every time I think about Matthew 25:45 it surfaces. Often, when I am thinking about typical daily happenings, it surfaces. Infuriatingly, feeling (much less doing) what one ought, is difficult to the point of impossibility. The Judeo-Christian tradition knows this, and that is why it obsessively returns to the subject of the neighbor. Psychoanalysis and Political Theology have been similarly obsessed. Hannah Arendt’s description of the neighbor is particularly compelling in its emphasis on claustrophobic closeness. It seems virtually irrelevant to me that she is speaking of relationships under totalitarianism. I have no experience of such totalitarian relationships, but the following gloss from Kenneth Reinhard makes it sound pretty much identical to federal-democratic loneliness:
totalitarian loneliness is not simply a function of the disappearance of traditional social relationships of neighboring, but results from the overwhelming presence of this neighbor, who is neither fully interiorized nor exteriorized, but whose unbearable closeness makes the self ‘equivocal,’ interchangeable rather than singular, and thus threatens its ability to speak to others within a symbolic order.
In Civilization and Its Discontents, Freud understands the pressure of the neighbor as an irritant, so far from lovable that it is rather an irresistible temptation to cruelty. Our neighbor, according to him, is “not only a potential helper or sex object, but also someone who tempts [us] to satisfy [our] aggressiveness on him, to exploit his capacity to work without compensation … to torture and to kill him” (66-69). That strikes me as rather overheated, to say the least, but the basic perversity of it is not utterly misguided. It helps me read Daniil Kharms, whose work I’ve been spending some time with over the last week. Kharms, of course, was a citizen of a totalitarian regime (Stalinism). A good, extensive selected edition of his work (Today I Wrote Nothing) has recently been released by The Overlook Press, edited and (for the most part) translated by Matvei Yankelevich. The entire volume is interesting, and Matvei’s introduction is a warm, useful one. He repeatedly stresses that it is a mistake to read Kharms as an “absurdist,” and I find that an interesting protest. Absurdism doesn’t do much for me. A friend once described it as “what’s going on inside the mind … of no one.” I think that captures absurdism at its most uninteresting, and it crops up all over the place in American poetry as nursed by Bly, Simic, Strand, Wright, Hugo, Tate, and the rest of the 70s-Quiet-Surreal. That inheritance is a blessing and a curse, and it makes me approach a book like Today I Wrote Nothing (another entry into the Another Republic sweepstakes) with some apprehension. And some of that apprehension ends up being well-deserved. Many of Kharms’ micro-fictions do feel like what is going on inside the mind of no one. However, “The Old Woman,” one of Kharms’ best-known pieces, is incredible and basically redeems everything around it (not that there aren’t also other pieces that redeem themselves). It is weird, disconcerting, and magical, but it is also something that has gravity. It is no joke and has none of the kind of irony that ends up colluding with power in order to get its bitter laugh. The story is brutally alienating, sublimely alienating, and its alienation effects depend on the problem of neighbor-love.
In his introduction, Matvei implies that the subject of the “miracle worker who worked no miracles” is the story’s heart (the story is hatched out of writers’ block), but I don’t think so. The old woman referred to in the story’s title is what’s interesting. She just shows up at the speaker’s apartment, barges in, and dies. Her ontological status is a little murky (she has a watch with no hands, for example; she appears while the speaker is napping and dies while the speaker is sleeping; and she seems to be a bit undead at certain moments). Her ethical status is a little murky, too, but it is that murkiness that gives the story urgency and weight. The speaker’s two primary reactions to the old woman are 1) sleepiness and 2) fury (when he discovers that she has died in his apartment, he kicks her in the jaw). As the speaker then muddles through the rest of his day, his disparate, mildly absurd non-adventures are made coherent by a recurring concern over what to do with the body and annoyance at being imposed upon in such a manner.
The speaker is oppressed by neighbor-love. He would like to be an autonomous agent, even if that autonomy is expressed only in personal clumsiness or decisions not to act (the speaker’s story really begins when he realizes he has forgotten to turn off the stove, and he returns home then only opting to take a nap). The old woman appears at his door seemingly out of the blue, but really, we can say she appears to call him back to the fact that even his petty marks of individuation are knotted up with relations to and responsibilities for others. Her dying and then being violated by the speaker only reinforce this fact, and they would seem either to give the lie to or to solidify (I’m not quite sure which) Kierkegaard’s conclusion that the ideal neighbor is a dead neighbor. Since the old woman seems to shift back and forth between being dead and sort of undead, maybe she does both. In any case, the speaker tries to shirk his responsibility by putting the old woman in a suitcase and getting on a train with plans of dumping her in the woods somewhere. Curiously, he feels physically ill on the train ride, leaves the suitcase unattended, and returns to find it stolen. This amplifies his concerns about being blamed for her death but also extends those worries into infinity (because he can never really know what the thief will do when he finds out what he has stolen). The worry and frustration, over which the speaker had initially had an illusory sense of control and which drove his narrative, thus becomes apotheosized into an almost mystical problem. The speaker can do nothing now but anticipate punishment, and so the story ends abruptly. He gets off he train, heads for some bushes to hide in, and prays. There are three lines of ellipses and then: “At this point, I temporarily end my manuscript in the belief that it has drawn on long enough.” Again, agency is indicated here (“I temporarily end my manuscript”), but it is a kind of empty agency. If this is a story about the problem of neighbor-love, there is no more story to tell. The speaker has lost his neighbor (albeit his dead neighbor), and in doing so, he has lost a future for himself.
I Made This Just For You…
Posted on April 10, 2008 - Filed Under Uncategorized
Muxtape.com is a site that allows you to upload songs for a streaming mixtape type of thing. It’s legal, presumably, because one can’t download the songs. The interface is very pleasing. If you click the above cassette, you can listen to the mix I made to convey how big a crush I have on you.
Self-Consuming Artifacts … towards an unquiet metaphysics
Posted on April 6, 2008 - Filed Under ,
“It looks like a bombed out landscape but it’s not, it is an intentional one”
(Edward Burtynsky, on the demolition of cities in China’s Three Gorges Dam reservoir, Manufactured Landscapes)
*
Now China is the air
and Tibet is the ether
Now China is the ether
and Tibet is the air—
(Barrett Watten, “Tibet”)
*
I wasn’t really expecting to think about China so much this weekend, but I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. China is on our minds more and more, again. I’m not deeply interested in the Olympics. In fact, I find the Olympics pretty tedious. Nevertheless, the Beijing Olympics, the olympic flame (which, I recently learned, is a tradition reintroduced by the Nazis), and the international spectacle of the whole kaboodle seem to be playing a significant role in the present amplification of the enduring Tibet problem. Simultaneously, our “potential” recession, which is really a pretty full-blown recession (at least ‘round these parts), and its relationship to consumer consumption (i.e., economic stimulus package? an economy driven by the consumption of goods, mainly Chinese-made), coughs up all kinds of ambient questions: global economy questions, and questions about how the rules of the political game are channeled through the rules of the economic game. And, of course, when we are thinking about Tibet we are thinking not just about politics and economics but also metaphysics, since the principal (or at least the most emotionally provocative) sticking point in the Chinese suppression of Tibet is embodied by the Dalai Lama and the religio-cultural apparatus for which he is a kind of metonym.
Friday night, we watched Edward Burtynsky’s documentary, Manufactured Landscapes. A student had recommended it, based on something we had been discussing in class. The film is disturbing on several levels. The most powerful for me, I think, was a literal feeling of vertigo I had several times. Something about the dialectical relationship between microscopic and macroscopic attentions in Burtynsky’s landscapes makes me queasy. I’m not sure if this effect is intended or common among viewers, but it makes sense for all kinds of reasons. The film’s subject matter is, of course, vertiginous in both a literal and a figurative sense. I kept thinking, “this is a real horror movie.” Most of the attention is put on astonishing trash vistas of one form or another. Sometimes the trash is something still in use (a factory, for example), producing more trash. Always, the colossal object of attention is part of a larger trash cycle, and China is its hyper-stimulated heart. Burtynsky makes a point of trying to be neutral, or of saying he is neutral, but I don’t find him extremely convincing on this point. Several segments are deeply moving, including the long, long, long opening pan shot of a factory floor so repetitive that I found myself wondering more than once if I was watching a loop. Another segment, dedicated to a “ship breaking beach” in Bangladesh approaches the Kantian sublime (the scariest parts of it). I was most taken, however, with the segment dedicated to the construction of the Three Gorges Dam (the world largest dam, which when filled creates a measurable “wobble” in the earth). Earth wobbling scale aside, I was fairly mesmerized by presentation of the cities in the Dam’s way obliterating themselves.
Growing up in Tennessee in the 70s, I got to experience TVA damming work first hand. My father did much of the field archeology preceding the flooding of thousands of acres in Normandy, TN as well as other places. I know many people from those parts whose original homesteads are now underwater. Its not an “uncommon” thing, really, as a idea. But those were rural areas, and there is something more dramatic, to say the least, in entire cities being erased in this way. It becomes even more dramatic when the cities’ inhabitants take their home apart brick-by-brick before the flood.
On saturday night, we went to Dreamland Theater in Ypsilanti for the textsound.org launch party. It was well-attended, and there was lots of interesting work to take in. Most apropos for this post, Barrett Watten (with some audio help from Joel Levise) performed a kind of remix of his 1972 poem “Tibet.” I love seeing Barrett perform. He is so stern and yet so human. This is not an irrelevant detail since he is hellbent on challenging each and every position of epistemological comfort. As Barrett read the poem, Joel played samples of a vintage recording of Barrett reading the poem and looped various segments of that recording (primarily lines from the end of the poem, or the “Footnote To Tibet”). Barrett also cycled through a power-point-driven series of images (traditional Tibetan paintings and 3D-modeled pictures of tanks and missiles). Once he reached the “Footnote” section, the sampled reading (the “Barrett-in-the-machine”) dropped out, and the only voice uttering the tanka-esque last lines was Barrett’s present voice. I found the effect moving. The poem’s question (“What about this / suppression of Tibet?”) was still (maybe more than ever) unresolved. Turning these and other lines over in my head (“China is the Manifest / Dream of Tibet”), I kept thinking of Manufactured Lansdscapes.
After the Cultural Revolution, China was basically 20% urban and 80% rural/agricultural. I can see how that kind of agrarian-materialist economic model could be legible as the “Manifest / Dream of Tibet.” Now, China is moving very much in the opposite direction in terms of demographics. They have made it their explicit intention to be world’s foremost supplier of disposable crap. I suppose this gesture, too, could be read as a version of this “Dream of Tibet,” but how, exactly? What kind of philosophical work does one have to do to get from the Buddhist “abandonment of attachment” to Crypto-Capitalist “planned obsolescence”? Well, we could say, in its Free-market phase, China is forcing the issue of relinquishing attachment to material existence in at least a couple of ways. First, it is reinforcing our sense that things—all things—are disposable (as in the recent car ad, with voice acting by Jeff Bridges, where an ironic series of “get a new ones” is rattled off… “don’t like your spouse, get a new one,” etc.). Second, and more importantly, China is aiming to satisfy this tendency by erecting an infrastructure that must collapse under its own weight. Surely, neither we nor China really think that the current industrial model can go much further before there are no materials left to turn into other materials (and/or no more fuel to burn to automate the transformation). But China (at least as depicted in Manufactured Landscapes) doesn’t seemed concerned. On the contrary, China seems utterly unperturbed. Can we call it a state of equanimity? Certainly, none of us will be attached to material things if there are no things and there is no us. Accelerating our approach to a world of no things is one way to look at Chinese global ambition. What reasonable goal underwrites such ambition? It is hard to take believe improved living standards for Chinese nationals is the motive, because the working conditions are horrid and pollution is out of control in equal proportion to the scale of the manufacturing surge. I don’t think there is a reasonable goal. I think, ultimately it is the worst kind of metaphysics. Whether that kind of metaphysics is really related to the kind that makes people shave their heads and go into monasteries is a different question. Hence, the question of the air and the ether, the ether and the air, I guess.
Christian zionism is interested in bringing about a metaphysical apocalypse via political and economic means. What is it the manifest dream of? What of this suppression of a Palestinian state, perhaps? I’m not sure. Put another way, do the ways and means of life we usually think of as secular always turn metaphysical when those ways and means become instruments of empire? If so, can we really say that they are manifestations of the colonized’s metaphysics? Surely, they are always our own.
Which brings me back to poetry and the on-going conversation. On Friday, Linh Dinh wondered how poets of different aesthetic/ideological orientations can seriously be taken to possess different relationships to body and self (something along the lines of “we all have bodies and we’re all self-involved, so any pretension to heterogeneity driven by aesthetics and/or ideology is a fool’s paradise”). I won’t quibble with Linh’s basic claim that embodied subjectivity always reminds us of our own physical limitations (sometimes more than others, as his copious examples illustrate). Also, I’m not interested in taking up Kenneth Goldsmith’s program as particularly interesting or defensible. I tend to agree with one of the commenters on Linh’s blog that squaring Goldsmith’s poetics with Reginald Shepherd’s litany of physical ailments just doesn’t make sense.
What I find particularly baffling is the move Linh then makes to align Goldsmith with Silliman and against a pairing of Shepherd and SoQ-style-identity-po. Basically, I don’t accept that LangPo, or Avant po, or post-avant, or whatever you want to call it is exclusively interested in disavowing the “self,” as such. I’ll agree that all of these trends are often anti-humanist, but that’s not the same thing as anti-self. It just represents a different vision of selfhood and imagines what is important and interesting about self-formation differently.
Jed Rasula has put it well in Syncopations:
The most pertinent consequence of language poetry is its erosion of the complacency with which the lyrical ego hoists its banner. The lyrical ego has by no means been deposed as such (and in any case, a wholesale atunement of poetic activity to chronicling language itself would suggest nothing so much as a return of the repressed, in which ego fortification would be immunized from direct scrutiny by its artful displacement onto resistant surfaces); but the diversification of poetic means and strategies have opened up sites of ‘agency’ that require different sorts of validation and do not serve as vigilant fortifications of identity. (pp. 210-11)
So, there in a slightly different form we have Kent Johnson’s (valid) point that the author function is still affirmed by anyone who puts his or her name on a poem, no matter how resistant (or “uncreative”) the language ends up being. We also have “agency” instead of “body” or “self.” This strikes me as an important difference. The third term (“agency”) is crucial to thinking honestly about post-, or for that matter pre-, humanist “selves.” It isn’t, for me, a question of what is good/bad, true/false, or “real”/“unreal.” In any case, all of those categories strike me as prone to reifying the more pernicious legacies of Liberalism. It’s a question of making something happen, making a world in language (and yes, that world is attached to a self and that self’s body, but it isn’t necessarily “self-regarding,” “self-loving,” or “self-promoting”). To my mind it’s about metaphysics (and yes, I can hear the language poets ralphing at the mention of the word). It’s about metaphysics but the best kind. Not the metaphysics of materialism destroying itself and everything in its path via mass-reproduction. Not the metaphysics of colonially-induced-armageddon. Something else. The ether that is what is the air. The air that is what is the ether.
Link Barf’d
Posted on April 4, 2008 - Filed Under
Today, I’ve made an appearance in Ron’s link-barf. I still want that Silliman-for-Dummies, tho.
Today I Read…
Posted on April 2, 2008 - Filed Under
Today I breezed through Johannes‘ neat, engaging translation of Henry Parland. This is one of the many, many interesting and engaging books published by Matvei Yankelevich and company over at UDP over the last couple of years, but it’s my favorite so far, and I think I will return to it often.
I read the entire book outloud to myself, attempting my impression of Johannes all the while. Sometimes it turned into a kind of Irishy brogue and sometimes it verged towards a sort Borat-y central european thing. Occasionally, however, I nailed it. The effect was delicious. I’m not sure what compelled me to do that. I saw Johannes read from his own work in NYC in February, and his accent and delivery were fairly captivating. I’ve known him for a long time (Iowa), but I don’t think I’d ever heard him read. In any case, I wanted to recreate the experience for myself. Only I know how much it added to my experience of Parland.
It sounds like I’m being a jerk here, maybe, but I’m not. Parland is great and, to my ear/palate, he lives up to the blurb hype. Eliot Weinberger (whom I think is brilliant) taps into the rock-and-roll discovery-nerd main vein: “Just when you thought there were no more discoveries to be made in modernist poetry…” Oh, boy, you are speaking my language Eliot. Anyway, I’m not sure I thought there were no more discoveries to be made, but I’m always interested in getting into a new discovery. Parland feels like one, too. Presumably, if you speak Swedish, he isn’t a new discovery. He’s bigger than John Ashbery over there.
RIYL (which in rock-n-roll means recommended if you like): Paul Celan crossed with Frank O’hara. The poem from which the book’s title (Ideals Clearance [Idearealisation] in Swedish]) is taken strikes me as an good sample for all kinds of reasons. Here:
The Clearance Sale of Ideals
– you say it has already begun.
But I say:
Better cut the prices.
That’s it. Four lines. Most of the poems are brief. “The Clearance Sale of Ideals.” This feels more like late modernism, or even post-modernism, than it does like high modernism, but it was written in the late-20s. It’s unclear who “you” is in this imaginary dialog. I want to say it could be the disgruntled high modernist who complains that his impeccable ideals are unappreciated by the philistine hoi polloi AND/OR the old guard reactionary who dismisses all modernism as anti-humanist degradation. Parland’s speaker is somewhere in between, glibly dismissing both. “Peace sells, but who’s buying,” quoth Megadeath.
I wonder. Is “The Clearance Sale of Ideals” a multilingual pun? In Swedish its a kind of Celanian compound: “Idealrealisationen.” Johannes translates this compound as “The Clearance Sale of Ideals.” Is there a hint of “The realization of Ideals” in there? I have no idea, but I want there to be. Maybe Johannes will happen upon this post and enlighten me.
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