On "Aesthetic Tribalism"

http://chrisbanksy.blogspot.com/

The tactic used in this finger-wagging snipe dressed up as a corrective, a plea for the possibility of serious poetry criticism, is ...... hmmm ..... tribally applauded and beneficient, a frequent ploy, one used by those on the receiving end of uncomplimentary reviews who see dark forces at play, the reviewer being mainly a frontperson for the primitive, reactionary group who must put down anything which even vaguely threatens their own power base of influence. I set down the last clause with much humour, for surely the reader can smile, even laugh, at the inflated, antagonistic presumption entailed in one who sees an isolated review through such a conspiratorial lens.

I stare at the following quote, made by Banks, in disbelief:

"a provocative essay about Dean Young and his emulators which has started me thinking about the various poetry camps we see here in Canada. In a section of his essay called “Followers”, Hoagland writes, “We are living in a time of poetic explosion; the university creative writing systems have not just trained a lot of young poets in literary craft, they have fermented these young artists in a broth of language theory, critical vocabulary and aesthetic tribalism, which the age apparently demands.” "

Let's see. I've been linked in his first polemic as a snarkist, as one who can't or won't engage with the writer's intentions (bogus arguement, which I've answered in a blog post late last year). So -- though he employs the passive-aggressive tactic of high school off-stage whispers just loud enough for everyone else to hear, including the subject of the snark within a "snark", without naming them, myself and others -- I'll answer with some facts (not petulant assumptions) which should interest anyone else who may read his words.

Banks applauds Hoaglund's essay. In his quote of Hoaglund (above), "followers" are chastised for a kind of groupthink, a tribal coterie, which arises out of the university creative writing system. A quick glance to the right sidebar informs the reader that Banks has emerged with a degree from a university creative writing program. He now teaches creative writing. Is this a super sly form of self-abasing satire? If so, well done. If not, this contradiction tops even his previous embarassing assumption of yours truly as a young gun out to create an unearned following by stepping on the necks of his elders.

Anyone who has read my blog can easily see that the aggregate opinion is one of dismissiveness towards coteries and groupthink. That's one (among many) reason(s) I take the postmodernists to task. With rare exceptions, what they're doing is third-rate Black Mountainisms and French theory. Their theory (often written directly as "poetry") accepts no "conversation" with those poets working in the lyrical vein. So the conversation is pre-emptively closed by deconstructionists, postmodernists, post-postmodernists, avante-gardists, post-avantists, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E ophiles, flarfists, and other assorted doctrinaire "new"-schoolers who, by their very foundation, are reacting against the word's (understood, obviously, here, in quotes) patriarchal aggression, linear falseness, traditional entrenchment, value-bound overview. No, when someone (or many someones) attacks my entire foundation for what not only constitutes great poetry (oh, evaluative meanie!), and for whom I see boring, in-club poetics substituting for poetry, I don't see any way of having a fruitful intermingling or "understanding" (misapplied word). But then the no-less-aggressive post-lyric "tribe" only recognize "signifiers" when coming from those they attack.

And the spiritual "progressives" complain because those not enamoured with spiritual ideas of what poetry should and should not be have their own ideological "tribes". I love spiritually saturated poetry. But only if it's poetry first, any message, if any at all, incorporated into it, not used as an excuse to mount a pulpit, unaffiliated or Presbyterian or Buddhist. But much in the direction of this conversation is unseemly, it seems. The best spiritual poetry I've read -- timeless lines about timelessness by way of timeless truths (you can immediately see the problems needed to surmount the abstractions inherent in much so-called "spiritual" poetry)-- is so because the music is there. Spiritual maturity or authority (a good word, not the oppressive accusatory outrage the "egalitarian" pomos denounce) is conferred on an author often by long, slow, doubting, thoughtful, changeable degrees. But "spiritual" poets often want to advertize their elevated status, their putative understanding, or, failing that, their wonderful sensitivity for the importance of enlightenment. I find it nauseating. And ironic, obviously. Spiritual pride is the most subtle and deceptive of sins. And by no means the most rare. By the way, my tendency is towards Advaita Vedanta, but there're no needed organizations for that, and certainly no proselytizing, which is a small part of its beauty.

But perhaps Banks was the exception, bravely (or cynically?) soldiering on in the face of closed-minded tribal association, dissociating himself from the power-groups forming themselves in his very midst during communal workshops and theory riddles. And for the record, I don't think creative writing programs are all evil (though I wouldn't know, I've never entered one). I just don't see that they're necessary. Fun, perhaps. And, maybe the best that can be said for them: I'm sure they can, at their best, save time for a budding poet by instructing her or him on what hasn't worked. My most prevalent thought on that particular subject, though, is that we already have more than enough poets on board. What sympathetic reader of contemporary poetry can read even a single poem of even a tiny corner of them? Just to be clear: I think that everyone on earth should, if they feel it strongly enough, create and try to get published as much poetry as they want. I should also have the opinion that that's often unfortunate only in that the acceptance of middling or bad verse tends to obscure, by time constraints and the leveling pell-mell effect, good poetry. But then there I go being evaluative and unaccepting, again.

The arguement that "Reviewers should be asking of every poetry collection they read what is the intent of the poet" (Banks) is unworkable and inane. I've dealt with this at some length in my post last year on "Negative Reviews of Poetry", but I'll expound since it crops up a lot lately amongst poets who feel hurt by an unkindly assessment of their own poetry. The creation of poetry is obviously highly personal, highly idiosyncratic, highly subjective. Why should the reader not be granted the same attitudes? If a poem, TO ME, lies on the page like wobbly graphite, smudged ink, or typographic epilepsy, my immediate reaction may very well be "ugh!" (TO ME). If the feeling persists through several more poems, I may start to formulate an opinion that this is bad (TO ME). If I read the entire book and find no redeeming virtues in it, I may even be so callous as to (gasp!) not even read it again, thereby losing all chance for a second-chance about-face, or at least softening. More often, though, there ARE redeeming strengths in even otherwise bad books, and I often point them out. Proportion is everything. I often point out what are (TO ME) severe faults amongst the books I rave about. Again, proportion. Another term for that is honest engagement.

Reviewing is highly subjective. It is not a soft procedure in order to find, at whatever compromising stretch, a go-between for author and reader. Such a "sensitive" approach is patronizing to both. The author can detail the most lovely sentiments, the most highly evolved spiritual truths, the most progressive social solutions, yet if those aren't set down in compelling image, metaphor, voice, syntax, narrative, sound, organic structure, passion, mood, rhythm, tone (you know, those outdated poetic "vice"-devices, according to the "revolutionaries"), the words may better be employed in a prose essay, religious tract, political speech.


"[T]he book reviewing status quo .... is about the homogenization of literary culture, and robs poetry of its natural tendencies toward innovation and change."(Banks)

That's the kind of abstract mush that sounds fine and noble, but what does it mean? I love poetry in many forms, moods, subjects, styles, voices, modes, lengths. I also become bored, even irritated, with poetry in the same forms, moods, subjects, voices, modes, lengths, styles. And whenever I encounter one of many complaints in the guise of calling out for "innovation and change", my eyes glaze over with a fine mist. Those frequently championed words need to be explained. There's nothing new. Though, thankfully, there are an infinitely fascinating array of new ways to say nothing new.

Want a better, more "engaged", review? Ask a friend, or a family member, or a poetic "superior" who can do you a favour. Isn't that, though, part of what Banks denounces in his (or Hoaglund's) silly "tribal" metaphor? I write my reviews because I love poetry. Over 90 % of them are unpaid. The ones I have been paid for have netted me somewhere in the neighbourhood of $1.89 an hour (give or take a quarter, or so). And if I wanted to kiss ass and "get ahead" in an intricately staged secret hand-shaking power-broking nod-nod-wink-wink-off, I'd say that shit was sherbet, and fashion my efforts and desires around the community and not the poem (Ursus makes that last important point in Brenda Schmidt's blog, though it shouldn't have to be said). If you want a guaranteed forgiving review of 10,000 + words, focusing on bland descriptors of psychically-intuited authorial intention, dealing with beside-the-point author profiling, thematic concerns, compositional theory and process, adjectival generalizations without textual back-up, and pro hominem non sequiturs in place of analysis of the poem(s), cough up the payola to one of those internet-review-dictators (in the secretarial sense) by giving a pre-set outline to him or her. That'll certainly get some kind of discussion going, perhaps even an understanding of sorts.

The Misguided Followers Of bp Nichol

Intriguing post regarding the super-subjective post-modern wrong turn much of Canadian poetry has taken apres Nichol. The writing is at times shoddy, and I don't accept the authorial presumption of American post-modern pioneering greatness, but some of the arguements are compelling. Here are a few:

"So closely wedded is poststructuralist theory to literary practice (in not just Nichol's but Davey's, Wah's, writings) that many lines in the Martyrology, for example, can virtually pass for Derridean critique itself, not even bothering to make prosy theorizing sound poetic: "third millenium bc.../pre-diluvian pre-babel king/gilgamesh suffers disunities of language of time" (What History Teaches 122), and "given back into the drift of print/of speech/ born anew among the letters/a different tension/ different reach" (119). The one regrettable consequence of this propensity to write always according to critical theory is that Nichol dashed lyricism aside as too logocentric and perhaps too fatuously colonial for his purposes. And the results for poetry to this day have been disastrous." -- DiDiodato

"And dear old isolable (semantic) meanings also go by the wayside, dangling loosely on the tongue as slippery 'signifiers', the poem caught in the closure of language that cannot mean anything but itself. There's something self-aggrandizing in the theory that brash experimentalists were naturally drawn to. Words are ultimately signs of more possible signs in a ménage of many possible discourses where syntax, "linearity of discourse" (34) and most of the traditional figurative devices virtually dissolve." -- DiDiodato

http://didiodatoc.blogspot.com/2009/10/oh-bp-what-youve-romantic-vaniteux-does.html

Peter Trower, Heather Haley, Lyle Neff

PETER TROWER'S "FAREWELL TO GIBSONS" POETRY READING

Esteemed West Coast poet Peter Trower will make his last poetry reading in Gibsons, the town in which he's long been associated. Peter has recently moved to North Vancouver, and, since he's departed the Sunshine Coast, is looking forward to a last chance personal connection with many local friends and other readers, either long-standing or new.

Respected West Coast poets Heather Haley and Lyle Neff will also be reading from their work.

Location: Chaster House Hall in Elphinstone(Gibsons), 1549 Ocean Beach Esplanade

Date/Time: November 14 at 7 p.m.

Tickets: $5 advance at Beauchamps in Molly's Lane, Lower Gibsons, as well as Windsong Gallery, 5721 Cowrie St., Sechelt.

Tickets, if seating still available, also at the door.

Any other questions, feel free to send me mail. (No ferries back to Vancouver and area after the reading -- the last sailing from here, unfortunately, is 8:20 p.m.)

A Blank-Blanketed Ghost For What Yales You

Money, like power, flows here and there according to the dictates of a very peculiar mix of educational and social philosophies, poltical events, community mood, student pressures, and institutional opportunism.

--John Hersey, Yale alumnus, from LETTER TO THE ALUMNI (1970).

An apologia? No, my friends, we at the Yale University Press’ human resources hadjit-prop arm of literary succinctness have, in our new editions, excavated and bulldozed discursive swatches from not only the infamous cartooneries of Mohammed, but as well the weedy superfluities of Whitman’s benchmark, the profusion of blackbirds from Wallace Stevens’ “Thirteen Ways” (now “Seven Non-Ambiguities”), and the peripatetic shenanigans of Great Expectations to a more modest, sober, and proportional Middling Fancies makeover, to name just a few cold-fusible skeleton essentialities. No more the clause-clotted Faulknerian stylized raconteur run-off. Iconography is not necessary when the Yale’s “In A Station Of The Metro”-like epiphanies supersede mug-shot impressionism. A word is worth a thousand pictures.

We don’t like to tip our dry hands, but suffice it to say that those fussy journalistic quibbles of nuance, bias, and personal stake are evaporated, the emptied lakes now puddles where drydocked boats are poised and rockerless. Effusions are for the day before the honeymoon. What’s left (no pun), in Jytte Klausen’s The Cartoons That Shook The World, out-constricts Coles notes. And drawings are for kids’ colouring books -- entertaining, yes, but a faulty diversion when considering the important issues of the day, even if those issues are engendered by drawings. But you won’t find our fearless editors hair-splitting over solipsistic infinitives. Unanimous, we march over those anachronistic nullities of “values”, “context”, “priority”, and (especially) “courage”.

We mentioned “bias” in the previous paragraph, and we’d like to expand on that thought. So much of our journalistic hot house procedure is predicated on pre-conceived -- let’s cut through the cheese, right to the chase -- rather, furiously entrenched political positioning. The Yale line of books-in-a-matchbox circumvents with finality this specious filibustering. The skinny stake of terse banality -- er, appropriateness -- is driven into the back-and-forth carnality of needless exposition and ornate detail. Yale-For-Mummies prides itself on the direct approach, a fresh alternative to those legions -- (OK, two or three broadsheets) -- of journals, newspapers, and scholarly frontline publications which depicted a bomb in a turban and a star over an eye. Not a year went by, seemingly, without one more redundant Jyllands-Posten-ism splashed across a backwater mimeographed sheet with a circulation of four.

Censorship? Ha. Simple editing for clarity and a sharp, new angle. Of course, when we say “angle”, we don’t mean egotistical subjective spin, but balanced, concise analysis. Just because Gustave Dore can amaze readers and viewers of Dante’s miracle with pictorial buttressing doesn’t mean we, the collective readership, have to submit to that wordless purgatorial dimension. Some wars end abruptly. And our goal is to put a stop to the war of words by turning every doodle frame into a lame white blank, every prolix Rasta-cut into a terse Telly Savalas-like caption in a billiard-ball bubble. War And Peace has been slashed-and-burned to the length of a TV commentary during a live putt by Tiger Woods. And the better for it.

It’s not simply that our lives are less accommodating to real-time debt-countered paginated tomes. Clarity comes from brevity. And pithiness comes from the cauterized flab. Objectivity reigns. For when arguments, facts, nettlesome discussion once rolls across the parchment freeway, we lose focus, and crash against the two-way divider. In these information-saturated times, readers just want the cutting overview deflowered in a curt, expressionless utilitarianism. Just the fact, ma’am (say our students), and I can get back to the higher twin pursuits of careerism and ass-kissing. Well, our united posteriors may be polished like genetically-modified apples, but we know our market. And with that, we three or thirty marketeers stab the playlists with what we hope to be final edits of the canon.

Michel Houellebecq’s sex tourism sprawl has been trimmed, declawed, sandblasted, sauna hotboxed, cored, sliced, spliced, and put on a grapefruit diet to reduce its bulk from a windy Platform to a single, polished tile. Postcards are read; fairy queens wait centuries for a lone, confused suitor. Terrorism, graphic sex, misanthropy: these may be realities in the over-febrile imaginations of certain authors and readers, but so too is a redundant maxim for those to whom cledonism instructs a vapid smile.

Bret Easton Ellis’ American Psycho may only contain several pages of horrific violence (these, of course, have been excised), but the no less shocking soak of troubling contemporary cultural references to eighties’ music and hair products dominate the text, and these have been chainsawed to a prose tanka. Inflammation protects a cut and helps the skin to heal, though in literature it can flourish into a garrisoned impetigo, reactionary scabs lobbing extraneous and hoary arguments to-and-fro. “Artistic necessity” is just another phrase for “nothing left to do”. After consulting with the U.N.’s highest ranking Muslim, Ibrahim Gambari, that title page won’t be Pandora’d to.

Finally, we’re releasing a much needed single-page quarto of Shakespeare’s King Lear. The intrigue and brutality may excite audiences, and unfortunately the poetry is intertwined -- in fact, inseparable -- with the intensity. You know, by now, which side of the street we walk on to get to the bank. Therefore, only the crucial stage directions remain. There’ll always be another poet around to turn a colourful phrase. But after talking with council chair on Middle East studies at Yale, Marcia Inhorn, it’s our firm conviction that we, all of us, must do our part in ensuring that we have no blood in our palms, only sleeping pills.
　
　
　
　
　

Desk Space

Just been included in Evie Christie's entertaining http://desk-space.blogspot.com/ . The window actually allows a mid-afternoon peek at the side yard spreading out from the giant fir, but the slate clouds and massive branches made it appear as midnight.

Sue Wheeler's HABITAT

Sue Wheeler is one of many poets whose name I've happened across from time to time over the years, without anything more registering than the nominal impression. This is inevitable in contemporary poetry, when the numbers of published poets far exceeds any possibility of keeping up with most of them, even by reading one representative slim volume.

And when I picked up her third poetry collection, Habitat, published in 2005, and read the back cover's description of a poet who "bends her ear toward the language of the natural world", I thought that perhaps it would be better if she remained -- to me -- a floating name in the muddy sphere of poetic referencing.

I also thought it an unpromising endeavour to engage with the book's contents since the concerns stated therein -- Nature, with a capital N, and intoned with holy hush -- have been the province of so wide a swath of poets, from beginner to emerging to established, from coast to coast, from rapturous exhorters to quiet observers, that I've found the ground has not only been walked on, but crushed, extracted, turned over, and turned fallow.

But the seeming conformity of content can ironically be seen as a dangerous concentration: when a million poems about hummingbirds, fir trees, and sheep have already seen print, it takes a very good poet to say something new in verse number million-and-one. There's nothing new in content anyway, after all, unless one includes contemporary news. But that's a danger of another kind -- believing that what's new now will have lasting significance.

But I'm beginning to ramble. One reason for the lengthy intro, though, is that these many thoughts, and others besides, were all put into play before I read the first poem. And it speaks to biases I believe many of us have when picking up a book and deciding to read it or not. It's fascinating to me since I've often been let down by a book I'd initially thought I would enjoy, as well as been surprisingly delighted by a book I'd been doubtful about. Habitat falls into the latter category.

Wheeler's observations are underpinned by long, loving, patient study. "This is my church and my clock,/where crocuses rise at Valentine's/and the March full moon forsythia/houses the ghosts who have lived on this upland" from "Who I Am" reveals Wheeler's attitude as one who accepts her surroundings with the complex emotions they invoke rather than one who glazes over them with sentimental inaccuracies.

I also love Wheeler's strong two-ply focus on the hopefulness embedded in "December" where an observation of a hummingbird leads to "how little hope weighs,/rowing the air with its hollow bones" (fantastic!) while also noting with subtle chiding, a critique of sentimental separation in the preceding lines' "Another Emily might have sketched him/into a foreground, backdropped by the cedars/out past the barn."

This habitat, unlike the worlds of many other environmentally focused poets, includes people, and includes them as sympathetic participators, not cardboard cut-out rapacious brutes or complacently cut-off techno-cynics. I like that very much indeed. People aren't spared severe-eyed treatment, though: "We tightroped/the white board fence, one foot, one foot,/above his history lesson" ("Cotton").

There are many lovely sounds scattered throughout Habitat, sounds which serve a greater purpose, but (some of) which I'd like to set down here, anyway, knowing they're missing context: "its thousand lime-green chandeliers. Into this ballroom of bloom and promise" ("Sing a Song of Blackbirds"); "frog caught in a snake's jaws" ("Weeds"); "January, that black and white documentary" ("The Primrose Path").

There are faults, to be sure. Cliches pop up occasionally: "hanging on for dear life"; and "Truth is the scatter of moth wings" recalls the preciousness of Robert Frost's "when Truth broke in" (at least Wheeler's capitalization can be excused for being a sentence-beginner). But I've delighted in reading, rereading, and letting the images and thoughts from Habitat fill my own world.

I'm curious as to why Wheeler seems to be a relatively minor voice in contemporary CanPo. Perhaps the sequestration of Lasqueti Island, her long-time home? Not enough connections, and hence traded talk, resulting in the same kind of story for others as outlined in this review's beginning: the floating name syndrome? Whatever the case, I'd like to think that if her book, in competition (yes, competition) with other poets' books, should fall into the hands of more readers, her stock might increase, perhaps in leaps.

Michel Houellebecq's PLATFORM

I've been reading some contemporary novels lately. Most of my fiction perusal has been limited to the "ancients" -- the 20th century and before. Curious as to what's been getting praised -- or at least discussed -- amongst the newest releases, I turned to a novel of "greatness", "brilliance", "stunning achievement", by an author deigned by a New Statesman reviewer as "the sharpest and most perceptive chronicler of our era". Who could resist? It's not as if we'd heard blurbs this wildly laudatory before, what?

Platform, a 2002 release by Michel Houellebecq, explores, in first-person, the personal and collective guilt in the way of Western consumerism, complacency, and -- ultimately -- nihilism. The comparisons between the authorial and narrative "Michel"s are easy to make. It's unnecessary and redundant to outline the story here: for those in the dark, a succinct synopsis can be found rather easily in many on-line reviews. But I'd like to make a few comments which haven't been touched on, surprisingly, in any of the many otherwise excellent takes on the book.

I have a big problem with the credibility of the narrative voice in any work of fiction when that voice seems incongruous, even false. I don't mean only in the simple narrative sense (contradictions in stated belief or detail within the novel, which also occurs in Platform), but in a a deeper, more abiding imprint. Houellebecq is not subtle in his lacerating comments. He spares no one, including himself (or, er, the "other" Michel). He's a drone, an antisocial bureaucrat with zero ambition, charm, warmth. Yet this hard-hitting realistic chronicler of Western decadence is to be believed when Valerie, the sexy, intelligent, rich, ambitious, curious, emotionally generous, uninhibited, shapely twenty-eight year old not only lusts for the lifeless protagonist thirteen years her senior, but initiates the pursuit, and incredibly, after a brief cold front when Michel isn't up to the task, falls hard (on the bed, and in spirit) upon their first meeting back in France. Now, even in a more plausible coupling, any woman spurned, or even given the noncommital cold shoulder, isn't going to pursue the possibilites, no matter what the man does after that. Unlike the book's Michel, who had previously only hooked up with four women in his life, and only then when drunk at a bar, I, and many of my male friends, acquaintances, former work associates, others' penned accounts, and long and frequent observations of the mating ritual, have seen this point (not pardoning the pun) driven home forcefully.

But, apparently, Michel is the only man in Western society for whom realized uninhibited lust-coupledom is possible, and which can cover up his other glaring insufficencies. So much for realism.

Psychological acuity in some of Platform's characters is effective, lively, and occasionally wise. The predatory Robert, the hapless Lionel, the cynical Jean-Yves: all of them speak to social parallels, easily filled in imaginatively by readers who've surely stumbled across close counterparts in their own lives, but they're also given a unique gravity or stamp.

Aside from this character recognition, though, and in addition to the narrative credibilty issue, two other problems emerge.

Houellebecq's story of global sex tourism is simply a hinge on which to enact a supposed extemporization in the mouths of his characters. Three Arabs (and this HAS been mentioned in at least one review I've read) are ushered onto the platform to decry the barbarism of Muslims and of Islam itself, but the reader isn't priveleged with any first-hand dealings with actual Muslims, unless you count the brief mention of three with "turbans" who engender the terrorist atrocities at the resort in Thailand. In a political tract, this would be suspect; in a supposedly imaginative novel it's an unacceptable failing. (I'd be interested to know just how much the timing, the prophecy, with the Bali bombing might have played in giving Platform a media jolt.)

The other failing, and I'm very surprised it's gotten no play, at least amongst the reviews I've seen, is the writing itself. There is, at times, a deadpan, bitter humour in the book: Michel remarks, after ejaculating between the pages of a popular romance thriller that "it's not the kind of book you read twice, anyway". And a few of the beach descriptions capture an imagistic imprint, if not the flavour, of the topography. Also, it must be said, Houellebecq can't be at fault for Frank Wynne's clumsy translation, unless he personally approved it, (though I don't know the quality of Houellebecq's English.) Those caveats aside, there is little else to please this reader, at least, in the overall spread of the writing. Metaphor, arresting image, simile, syntactical quirks, narrative compression (editing), even local phrases of verve and concision, are notable by their needle-in-haystack appearance. The book has been compared to Camus' 1942 L'Etranger, but that classic had real ideas (not journalistic asides), deployed with force and passion, in a style and arrangement thrilling to experience.

It'll be interesting to see how the "shock" of contemporary views stated in Platform play out with the shifting evaluative reception of the novel in ten years, twenty years, or more.