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Unmade Remarks on Innovation (Michel Foucault, Walter Benjamin, Samuel Beckett, C. D. Wright, Tanya Tagaq)
I was invited to take part in the closing panel of the UBC Arts Undergraduate Society’s student conference on “Innovation.” The members of the panel were asked to discuss ways in which academic faculty could foster innovation in student research, but I seem to have missed the memo, and so I prepared a set of remarks offering a critique of the concept of innovation. I realized my mistake about five minutes before I was scheduled to speak, so I ended up improvising some comments—using bits and pieces from what I had written—on the poetics of “study” (gesturing a little at Fred Moten and Stefano Harney’s work on the undercommons) and on research as question and risk rather than innovative production: that it might be better to think of ourselves as students rather than experts. I also felt that I had pitched my remarks all wrong, and that it would be better to talk with this audience than read out my prose. Still, I like what I wrote; I used this moment to start thinking about Tanya Tagaq’s music, a critical project I have been meaning to set in motion for some time. Here is the composed undelivered text I’d prepared.
Innovation Without Innovation
Kevin McNeilly, University of British Columbia
Unmade Remarks at the AUS Humanities Conference
Saturday, 16 January 2016
I want to make a few remarks to frame and to critique the ideological loading of the concept of innovation. I’m resisting the un-interrogated praise of making things new—the allure of novelty—and at the same time trying to suggest a relationship to time, a going forward (or perhaps better, outward) that can be sounded as a crucial potential in particular forms of lyric, in poetic language that W. H. Auden famously imagines as “a way of happening, a mouth.”
Approaching the end of writing The Order of Things(1966/1970), Michel Foucault admits that he discovers himself “on the threshold of a modernity that we have”—that he has—”not yet left behind” (xxiv). This unqualified “we” is epochal, its episteme described asymptotically by the reflexive acknowledgement not only of the limits of his own language, but also of a cultural latecomer’s language as such: “the question of the being of language,” as he puts it, is “intimately linked with the fundamental problems of our culture” (382). (I’m poaching and re-appropriating material, if not the argument, from John Rajchman’s 1983 essay “Foucault, or the Ends of Modernism” [50].) The shared cult of Bildung—linked to myths of progress, of newness, of innovation, of transcendence, of what the philosopher of science Isabelle Stengers refers to as the “epic” of our time—presently and lately, as it touches the expressive limits of its own futurity, its forward motion, can only cannibalize and repurpose itself in the guise of renewal, a mortal remix that tends to pass off an eviscerated avant garde for material discovery.
Foucault must be thinking of Walter Benjamin’s angel of history, pictured in the ninth of his “Theses on the Philosophy of History”:
A Klee painting named “Angelus Novus” shows an angel looking as though he is about to move away from something he is fixedly contemplating. His eyes are staring, his mouth is open, his wings are spread. This is how one pictures the angel of history. His face is turned toward the past. Where we perceive a chain of events, he sees one single catastrophe which keeps piling wreckage and hurls it in front of his feet. The angel would like to stay, awaken the dead, and make whole what has been smashed. But a storm is blowing in from Paradise; it has got caught in his wings with such a violence that the angel can no longer close them. The storm irresistibly propels him into the future to which his back is turned, while the pile of debris before him grows skyward. This storm is what we call progress.
So-called progress names a cultural if not an ontological imperative as a species of dire pharmakon: remedy as ruin, betterment as destruction. In the opening paragraphs of one of his last texts, Worstward Ho, Samuel Beckett articulates this imperative as driving whatever remains of self-expression in our time, the need to “go on,” and to go on saying, despite exhaustion, despite the obvious futility and emptiness of the new, despite the asymptotic approach of his language to its absolute expressive limits, its nohow: “On. Say on. Be said on. Somehow on. Till nohow on. Said nohow on.” The work’s title parodies Charles Kingsley’s 1855 novel Westward Ho!, an extended romance of colonial expansion, masculine industry and liberal self-reliance. More recently, Beckett’s lines have often been misappropriated and repurposed as a kind of global capitalist mantra, a call to technological and corporate innovation. As readers, and fellow latecomers, we need to be more rigorous and careful about what Beckett articulates here.
Beckett’s language sloughs off the trappings of Western progress for an acknowledgement of cultural and epistemic decrepitude: “All of old. Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better.” Speech deteriorates into fragmented clichés and bathetic puns; pushed to its verbal limits, the romance of expressive imperatives can only cannibalize itself. What passes for innovation or renewal reduces to tautology: “Imagination dead imagine.” For me, this fraught word-circuit allegorizes the broken teleology of the human project, its attenuated failure, a diagnosis that seems increasingly self-evident in our era of climate change, endocapitalism, exhaustive consumption, viral technocracy, global insecurity, displaced populations and supersaturated media. The imperative to innovate, however, persists as a resilient remainder, or “stirrings still” as Beckett’s last text puts it. Acknowledging the vestiges of this imaginative prod that might stir us on is one of the cultural functions of lyric, still, today. Confronted with its own extinction, Beckett’s language nonetheless enacts a thetic rhythm, a halting but persistent step beyond itself.
The American poet C. D. Wright, who died earlier this week, suggests in One with Others (2010) a comparable cultural function for poetry in our fraught, self-destructive era of “progress”: “It is a function of poetry to locate those zones inside us that would be free, and declare them so.” Wright’s declaration may sound as if she wants to recuperate naïve confession, potentially masking wreckage in aspirational nostalgia. That’s certainly a danger in advocating for poetry in an age when lyric language becomes increasingly corny, recycled and fatigued. Better understood, Wright advocates for a fracturing of interiority, a form of innovation, a freeing that doesn’t so much foster the cult of expressive genius as open intimacy onto an alterity, an outside, that refuses merely to cannibalize its own ruins.
Let me give you an example of what I mean. Tanya Tagaq’s 2014 album Animism culls a lyric intensity, an embodied affective immediacy, by splicing and looping an extemporaneous, situated circular breathing derived from Inuit throat-singing back onto itself, supported by her core improvising trio with Jesse Zubot and Jean Martin, and others. Confronting the porous boundaries between the human and the animal, the corporeal and the machinic, the given and the made, the recording troubles the edges of signification, and generates its eros by turning those zones of encounter inside out. Each nascent “song” offers a kind of post-natural ecology. It innovates not by being new but by freeing up, by crossing lines, and by making vocal music from the come-and-go of those transgressive stirrings. Her/their music surges up, finds its pulse, in sustained and audible risk. There is much to say, and to say on, about this recording, but I’ll finish my own set of re-purposed texts by briefly noting how Tagaq and group re-purpose and renew—innovate through—The Pixies’s “Caribou.” A parody, perhaps, of ethnomusicological collecting, the CD opens by concocting a form of techno-shamanism with a cover not of Inuit folksong but of American post-punk, inverting salvage anthropology into a call for, if not a performance of, primordial agency—deft ululation, yes, but also voicing an acute cultural politics through expansive virtuosity, decolonizing the ear: “Give dirt to me / I bite lament / This human form / Where I was born / I now repent.” In an interview in NME Black Francis apparently disclosed that “maybe even the singer of the song is reincarnated as a caribou.” In Tanya Tagaq’s version, animistic metempsychosis emerges from speech act—thematized as repentance in the lyrics—toward verbal becoming, the self—its human form—transubstantiated through unfolding textures of voice: anthropomorphic debris reanimated, said on, sung on.
All Good Possibles: Ken Babstock, On Malice
Ken Babstock read last Tuesday evening at Book Warehouse on Main St., for the Vancouver launch of his latest collection On Malice, which appeared a little earlier this fall from Coach House Books. The book gathers three extended pieces and a skewed sonnet sequence: “Perfect Blue Distant Objects,” “Deep Packet Din,” “Five Eyes,” and “SIGINT.” The emphasis falls variously in each agglomerated text on distraction and noise, on riddled and riddling semantic textures, on versions and variorums. A little like Tom Raworth, Babstock inclines his ear closely to the saturated, thickened flows of mediatized language — “the streaming of form from the machine” as the closing line of “Deep Packet Din” puts it — catching at and contingently arresting on each page those overlapping currents, those soupy waves of vestigial sense. Each poem presents itself as a species of media drill core, a striated section of repurposed data-packets, reconstituting voice as shifty aggregates of sedimentary, lexical samples. Reading these lines, I rarely know quite who or where or how I am meant to be, or to be positioned: “The excess space junk making / prayer beads of morning’s screaming / party.” Speech cannot settle into consistency, and the speaking subject asserts itself as verbal ragpicker, as audio splicer. “May we become / noises,” somebody eventually does pray in “Perfect Blue Distant Objects.” Just so.
Over the past year and a half I have heard Ken Babstock read three times: at Tuesday’s launch, in late October at the Vancouver International Writers Festival (as one of eight featured in the Poetry Bash), and last spring at the Play Chthonics series at the University of British Columbia, which I was coordinating. At each reading he concentrated on presenting slices from “SIGINT,” the opening sequence from On Malice. Given the complexities of this poetry and my own limited space here, I’m going to concentrate on making an initial foray into reading “SIGINT,” rather than attempting to come to terms with the book as a whole. Even as networked arrays, each of the extended poems of On Malice is constructed and derived from a principal source, an originary pool from which its draws much of its noise; “Perfect Blue Distant Objects” refigures an essay on optics by William Hazlitt, while “Five Eyes” “mines vocabulary” (as Babstock puts it in his own notes, without which — or at least without a thorough Google search — I would have a pretty hard time figuring this out) from John Donne’s tract on suicide, “Biathanatos.” “SIGINT” is a set of thirty-nine hybridized sonnets, which seem to gather voices at an abandoned surveillance station atop the artificial Teufelsberg in Berlin, but are also built from translations of Walter Benjamin’s manuscript notes about his son Stefan’s language acquisition – records of a preschooler’s various word-games, puns and whimsical infelicities. The choice of the sonnet form may have a little to do with Benjamin’s own posthumously published Sonette, a Jugendstil-ish sequence he began composing after the war-protest suicide of his friend, the poet Fritz Heinle, in 1914 — a segment of literary history that may also link to the Donne piece. Despite any gestures at late modern formalism (Benjamin’s sequence, for example, uses Shakespearean and Rilkean sonnets as formal models), Babstock’s poems tend to be fractured both metrically and structurally, hacking their generic/genetic source-codes. Each poem consists of four tercets, substituting a hypermetrical thirteenth line for a couplet, an imaginary “incident report” of collisions between birds and aircraft, animal and machine, in Soviet airspace between Siberian and Berlin. Place names invoked in these seemingly arbitrary last lines are also ordered, approximately, alphabetically, another gesture at factors of thirteen: twenty-six letters divided by two. The sequence itself is broken symmetrically into three parts of thirteen poems. Thirteen, not quite fourteen: these are sonnets gone to pieces. But rather than collapse, the form also suggests reconstitution — not teleology or closure, but asymptote, approach. These are sonnets in the process of self-acquisition, self-fashioning, assemblage.
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| Teufelsberg, from http://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Teufelsberg |
The Teufelsberg station, haunted by Cold War spectres, figures in the poems as a listening post that attends to human aftermath. The poet, in Babstock’s sequence, takes on a role derived from Benjamin’s reading of Charles Baudelaire, a cultural ragpicker: “’Everything that the big city has thrown away, everything it has lost, everything it has scorned, everything it has crushed underfoot he catalogues and collects. He collates the annals of intemperance, the capharnaum of waste.’ . . . Ragpicker and poet: both are concerned with refuse.” Babstock’s poems collate by listening to mediated human noise, attending to the “rattle again of splintered waste” that aerials, ears and dishes manage to pick up. The poems both catalogue shards and orts of discourse and aspire to regenerate meaning tentatively from semantic refuse: “It is, I’m afraid, a symbol, dear rubble.” Writing wants to devolve, fearfully, into replicant transcription, copy-editing: “I can only read out / what we get back.” What those fractured symbols might impart to us remains in abeyance, the mechanics of representation still fraught and insufficient. “What gets learned,” our frustrated ragpicker asks, “from all this listening?” “One can listen all night,” we’re told, without imaginative gain. Yet traces remain, nonetheless amid what feels like aleatory jumble, of a “devotional commerce,” a vestigial lyric religiosity, a texture of sense; or, what the poems at one point name “a surplus of negative affect” onto which the voice opens, as a prayer to language itself, a call to recover from informatics welter — by what the poems call merely thinking, by cognitive and creative effort — whatever might be left to us of singing: “in the post-informational gloaming” we “can never not finish reading it as song.” Melopoeia prods readers, as listeners, into affective involvement: “I have just thrown / the feeling into your mouth. Now you tell it.” What Babstock offers as poetic throwing — and even as throwing up, an abjected language that also frames itself as “desiccated scat” and refuse —hangs in the hiatus, as the small lurch of the line break here suggests, between repression and disclosure, like the uneasy stall of a double negative (“never not finish”). “There will be no clarification,” our collator notes, so we need, even at this late moment, to”[t]hink of a good reason not to quit listening,” so that we might somehow move past reiterative stasis. ”I am practicing dead songs,” the poet aggregator declares, but, amid “constant surveillance,” swallowed in “the knowledge industry,” the first person singular, the speaking subject, still inclines to sing: “I’m repurposing myself.” The call to listening shifts reading away from semiotic anxiety (“I’m afraid”) toward an aesthetics of mouth texture, of shared speech and permeable selves, a remaindered eros: “Because you involved me.” The hiatuses, the fractures and absences onto which these poems open, are also — as linguistic surplus, as negative tropes — spaces of desire, of human longing:
Because I am sleeping in love’s room
now, the moment will have
received a promise to wait.
At such moments Babstock’s sonnets become sonnets, although the trimmed tenth syllable of the pentameter in the first of these lines, “now,” thrown forward into the next line, also marks a disjunctive temporality, an abeyance: passionate stall.
Listening to Ken Babstock read these poems out loud — briefly, quietly, even undemonstratively — gestures, despite their apparent recalcitrance as texts that might be decoded, clarified or understood, at reciprocity, at shared affect:
Perhaps you truly don’t own it but it’s
in your mouth now so take it
for a walk.
(Again, a pair of skewed pentameters, sonnet shards.) At the Book Warehouse reading, like a poetry nerd, I found myself taking notes, transcribing stray lines, a little like the ragpicker of these texts. It turns out, perhaps, that I was inadvertently answering that call, getting involved, pulling a few good possibles from what I thought I heard, taking his words for another brief walk. Just so.
Robert Bringhurst and Anne Carson Translating Antigone (Audio)
Also on Sound Cloud, I have uploaded some audio of my paper, “Ecologies of Estrangement: Robert Bringhurst and Anne Carson Translating Antigone,” which I delivered at Beyond the Nature of Culture: Rethinking Canadian and Environmental Studies, a conference held at the University of British Columbia from 28-30 September 2012. It’s currently being expanded into a chapter, developing connections and contrasts between Carson and Bringhurst by assessing their work on Paul Celan (and Celan’s fraught relationship with Martin Heidegger’s poetic philosophy), and connecting their ideas on translation to Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator.” In this conference paper, the focus was narrowed to an investigation of the tensions between concepts of poetic ecology and poetic economy. To set things up, here is the opening paragraph, which also works something like an abstract:
Finding intersections between the aesthetics of Anne Carson and of Robert Bringhurst, if you are at all familiar with their extensive bodies of translations, essays and poetry, might appear counter-intuitive at first. Carson’s bittersweet, media-savvy postmodernity seems obviously at odds with Bringhurst’s latter-day highbrow modernism. Her work weaves its genealogy through Gertrude Stein, while his lineage derives from Ezra Pound. Her interest tends to be drawn by the fraught epistemic terrains of language, his by its ontic capacities. Her default to a bittersweet wryness contrasts rather markedly with his typically mindful seriousness. Still, a critical collision of their work – around their different translations of the “Wonders are many . . .” chorus from Sophokles’s Antigone (lines 332-375) – might prove educational as we try to think through the complexities of how we, as human speaking subjects, aspire to frame the natural. Both Bringhurst and Carson exploit the divagations within the process of translation to call radically into question the results of human technē, and use this foundational Western text to voice critiques of the limits and the reach of poetic and cultural craft, of what people have done and have failed to do for their world.
VISI Art Song Lab 1, Opening
This week I’m taking part – as one of six poets – in the Art Song Lab, which is hosted by the Vancouver International Song Institute, an intensive set of early summer programs in art song performance and in academic approaches to art song. Now in its seventh year, VISI is the creative brainchild of Rena Sharon, a professor of collaborative piano studies at the UBC School of Music and one of the very finest pianists in the country. For six successive Junes, I have given lectures on poetry for VISI, and will be giving another one (on W. H. Auden this time around) on June 21. But this week, I’m a participant rather than a faculty member. The six participant poets were asked to produce a draft of an original poem in January, which would be set to music by two different composers – two art songs emerging from the same initial text. The composers then bring their draft songs to rehearsals in Vancouver, for a week culminating in a concert – “Playing with Fire” – at the Orpheum Annex on Friday, June 7, when each of the twelve compositions will receive its world premiere, as part of the month-long Songfire Festival.
On the afternoon of Sunday, June 2, we had an informative opening session with the three co-directors of Art Song Lab: poet Ray Hsu, composer Michael Park, and pianist Alison D’Amato. They invited questions and discussion – most participants had just arrived in the city, and were still orienting themselves – and then offered to give something of a demo, workshopping a composition that Ray and Michael were preparing with Alison and soprano Lynne McMurtry for its premiere later this month. During the discussion, each of the co-directors spoke about the opportunities for collaboration that the Art Song Lab offers. Ray compared the creation of art song – and of poetry itself, for that matter – to translation, an analogy that gestured back toward Walter Benjamin’s “The Task of the Translator,” though Benjamin went unmentioned. (Ray gestured at Benjamin’s notion of an Ursprache or primal language, I thought, which all works of art translate; difference becomes primary to any form of writing, any work of art.) I thought Renée Sarojini Saklikar, one of the participant poets, made a provocative point about “performance as a site of research” for poetry.
The brief, open rehearsal for Ray and Michael’s new art song was really informative, a pleasure to watch and to hear. The text for the piece involved a re-purposing of material from an interview with Lynne about art song performance, which she then sang back in a kind of lovely recursive loop; one of the lines referred to “having something to say and the confidence to say it,” which she did.
This first session for the Art Song Lab was followed by a plenary discussion for the whole of VISI; there was some thought-provoking talk about strategies for overcoming the potential hermeticism of contemporary art song and also about cultivating an aesthetic openness, an open-mindedness. I’m looking forward to seeing, and hearing, what happens this week. It was good to meet the two emerging composers who have created art songs from my work: Alex Mah and David Betz. I’m keen to hear what they have come up with. The poem I came up with is a three-part elegy for the children and teachers killed at Sandy Hook Elementary in December. Here is an audio version of the poem.
Short Take on John Coltrane, Sun Ship: The Complete Sessions
I have it from a reliable source that at one point during his speech at the ACRL conference in Indianapolis this past March, Henry Rollins re-emphasized the significant impact on his life of the music of The Clash and of the music of John Coltrane. The latter might be a bit surprising, although Rollins did record Everythingwith Charles Gayleand Rashied Ali in 1996, so Coltrane has been with him all along. He has said that he first heard Coltrane from records his mother owned, but that what he took from Coltrane’s music wasn’t spiritual or even musical, but a kind of directness, a fierce honesty that models intense communication: “I am not a musician. I have written a lot of songs but it’s just to get the words out. I always admired Coltrane for his truth and his purity. He was really going for something. He is inspiring because you can tell every moment he plays is sincere. I have never heard anything like it.” (The same thing might even be said for Joe Strummer’s gruff, insistent, committed vocals.) As far as my own listening goes, I think I have been struggling (or maybe something less agonistic: aspiring) to reconcile the collisions of Coltrane and The Clash, conflicted aesthetics aimed at what I tend to divide into the transcendent and the world-bound, the excessive and the mundane, contemplative restraint and expressive intensity. One conceptual trajectory that might bridge such bifurcations is the idea, and the practice, of what I’d call commitment. It became a key word in my Embouchureproject, and it makes a kind of sense, for me, to re-invoke it here. One of the reasons I have picked up on what Henry Rollins has to say about Coltrane’s music is that his tastes, his preferences, seem to coincide with my own: he says he is most drawn to late Coltrane, post 1964. And he’s consistently skeptical about any all-too-easy professions of enlightenment or poetic transport: he’s no mystic, but a demystifier. That doesn’t make his work any less searching, any less committed to honest, hard engagement with a will to truth, to truthfulness. But it does depend on how you understand what and when and how that truth might be.
The recent release of the “complete” studio recordings for John Coltrane’s Sun Ship – first issued in edited form posthumously, in 1971 – aims materially toward full disclosure of historical and music fact, to paint a vivid, truthful sound-picture of the improvisatory collective creative process of the Coltrane-Tyner-Garrison-Jones quartet by offering for public issue every listenable scrap of music and studio chatter extant on tape. This is definitely a music of plenitudes: the huge swathes of saxophone, the dense piano, the rolling bass-lines and the surging drums characteristic of the quartet’s last days together, and of the music Coltrane made from 1964 until his death in 1967. The session that produces Sun Ship takes place on 28 August 1965, and, apart from a first pass at the “Meditations” suite on September 2 (issued later as First Meditations), this is the last time the “classic” Coltrane quartet will record together as a unit. (McCoy Tyner and Elvin Jones will leave in November, replaced by Alice Coltrane and Rashied Ali: all of this information is well-known, and well-circulated.) So in so many respects, this music has immense historical value and interest, and every detail is worth hearing. Even the fragments and outtakes can be heard as stunning performances unto themselves. The false starts and apparent missteps overflow with powerful, potent music. Everything happens.
It’s tempting to want to hear what Walter Benjamin might have called a messianic totality in these recordings, a vital archival gathering of historical minutiae – the digital imprint of every essential sonic particle – into an absolute and audible present. We can imagine ourselves there, as we listen – or can imagine the “there” of those searching performances now here, relocated in our own immediate moments. That’s how recording works, sure, but the idea of a “complete” package such as this one is to seem to place us, aurally, in close proximity to the music’s realization. And it works, of course: McCoy Tyner’s solos on both versions of “Sun Ship” are astounding instances of extemporaneous dynamism, but more than that they refuse to settle even on repeated listenings, re-creating the sound of surprise – at each return, they still never sound the same, even though they must be. Historical value collapses into what feels like an exploratory, unsettled present tense. Hearing Jimmy Garrison patiently evolve and re-shape his solo prelude to “Ascent” reaffirms his careful attention to depth of tone, to the rounded resonances of his instrument; in his ensemble work, too, I can hear foreshadows of William Parker’s elastic sense of time and line (in his recordings with David S. Ware or his In Order to Survive quartet). But that influence also seems to dissolve in the palpable immediacy of Garrison’s playing.
What strikes me most about this session both works against and strangely reinforces this idea of a reanimated plenitude, of a musical Jetztzeit. A little of the studio banter was included in the original release of Sun Ship, but now most tracks contain extended snippets of “studio conversation”; rather than mar the music in any way – they don’t, of course – and rather than merely let us hear bits of the musicians’ speaking voices, as if they are with us again in our own sound-spaces, the loose fragments of casual chatter present a stark contrast to the intensities of the performances. The quartet can shift on a dime from chuckling about a track title to overwhelmingly powerful improvisation. How is it, I keep asking myself, that a music of such depth and wonder can co-exist so unproblematically with the casual and the mundane? Though maybe, maybe, that seemingly effortless coexistence is exactly what this music can teach us, can let us overhear.
An Unlikely Sameness, Alias Myself
She is importunate, indeed distract (Hamlet IV.v.2)
Michael Robbins has fast become the laureate of American culture trash. Fast, in the contrary senses that his work confronts both the disjunctive velocities of the non sequitur and the tenuous monumentality, the making fast, of whatever might still remain of the well-turned poem in these late, noisy days. Positioning himself, with the recent publication of a spate of reviews and of his own provocative poetry, as an ornery aggregator – an alien-predator hybrid, maybe – of media flows, commoditized tag-lines and discursive meshes, he repurposes packets of worn, oversold language into brutal, keen lyric, making out of the deliberate anachrony, the untimely music, of rhyme and of vestigial stanzaic form both a temporary stay against confusion and a plastic word-bin to hoard our swelling cultural clutter.
I say “our” with some trepidation, because I’m not even American. As a reader, I still want to stay a little outside of those ineluctable surges of images, music, and text stemming from the plugged-in United States, still want to maintain a bootless resistance to the manifest destiny of its whelming literacy. Robbins’s poems might be read as articulating just such a resistance, but from somewhere inside its pervious borders:
The coyote drives her in a false-bottomed van.
He drops her in the desert. The bluffs are tan.
She’ll get a job at Chili’s picking up butts.
I feel ya, Ophelia, I say to my nuts.
And there is pansies. And that’s for thoughts.
Erotic lyricism has degenerated to bathos, and here – in the final lines of the recently published “The Second Sex” – discomfiting literary pleasures (in the reiterated highbrow melopoeia of Shakespearean misogyny) collide with the craven vocabularies of yellow journalism around “illegal” immigration and the clichéd lyrics of YouTube pop bands. The disjunctive quotations echo Eliot’s technique in The Waste Land, and enact an ironic distancing of self – the fraught “I” that enounces this poem, and for that matter most of Robbins’s poems – from its own broken voices. From this angle, Robbins might be understood as a late modernist, in as much as his ostensive love poem consists of ventriloquized stock phrases and hollowed-out figures of speech, a brief constellation of fragments shored against itself, redeployed in the service of ideology critique, parodying the commodity fetishism of literacy itself, of our sense that we’ve been sold this wordy bill of goods before. “These love poets,” he jabs in “The Learn’d Astronomer,”
couldn’t write their way
out of a bag of kitty litter. The genitals, the heart,
the burning fantastical heavens themselves–
just junk in a Safeway cart I’m pushing
down to the recycling center. (Alien vs. Predator 31)
Any Romeo-and-Juliet-style romantic transgression of boundaries, any hint of the hyperbole of “love” and tragedy, degenerates in “The Second Sex” into exploited “illegal” janitorial labour, at best some recycled junk.
This contrariety informs the “vs.” of the title of his viral New Yorker poemand of his 2012 collection, Alien vs. Predator. Picking up cigarette butts at a Chili’s (even the restaurant name suggests mestizo-mestiza cultural commodification, capitalist appropriation) literalizes the work of gathering culture trash that I am associating with Robbins’s poetry; I’m suggesting that the resistance to commodification – again, from this particular reading’s angle of incidence – takes part in the remainders of a late modernism that emerges from, say, Theodor Adorno’s assessment of Samuel Beckett in “Trying to Understand Endgame” (from which I’ve poached the whole idea of “culture trash”):
The objective decay of language, that bilge of self-alienation, at once stereotyped and defective, which human beings’; word and sentences have swollen up into within their own mouths, penetrates the aesthetic arcanum. (281)
Or, as Adorno puts it otherwise, “because there has been no life other than the false life” (275), Beckett can do little but try to confront his own, and our, ontological impoverishment, and to shock us into recognizing, if only temporarily, that falsity. (“All of old,” he would write in Worstward Ho, some two decades after Adorno’s passing:“Nothing else ever. Ever tried. Ever failed. No matter. Try again. Fail again. Fail better” [Nohow On 101].) Those small, particulate shocks, I’d say, are exactly what Robbins’s poems aspire to generate – like how, for instance, his Robert Frost gets bent backwards over an In Touch magazine: “I kiss your trash. My boobs are fake. / I have promises to break” (“Plastic Robbins Band,” Alien vs. Predator 15).
But this reading of Robbins as fusty modernist is belied in those same lines, because he doesn’t merely trash his literary forebears, but also kisses that trash, embraces it with what I read as genuine vigour. In a review of John Ashbery’s Quick Question for the Chicago Tribunein December 2012, Robbins implicitly acknowledges his indebtedness to Ashbery’s mixed technique, colliding cartoonish daftness with lissome lyric, concatenating “lucid sentences” from “marooned pronouns” and “mismatched adjectives.”Ashbery, he asserts has been replicating himself in successive publications, suggesting a certain self-parody in his work. But that auto-iterative tack, making poetry (new?) out of its own garbling memes, is what Robbins says he admires in Ashbery: “Lots of poets write the same book over and over, of course, especially as they age. Why complain about Ashbery’s sameness when it’s so unlikely?” Ashbery might be read as a latter-day modernist, a holdover, but it’s his recovery of creative disjunction from the relentless sameness of Anglo-American literary culture, from its overflowing virtual trash bin, that gives his poems their vitality. And it’s in this ardour for the unlikely that Robbins finds his own poetic purchase.
I had planned to say plenty about some of Robbins’s new poems, and as with all of his work there is probably too much to say. Instead, I’ll just return to “The Second Sex” for a moment, to its aphoristic opening line: “After the first sex, there is no other.” He’s toying with the cult-value of chastity, as a marker of moral or existential purity, and as a figure of authenticity (shades of Adorno, again?); he’s also gaming the gender-politics of the heteronormative love poem, front-loaded with patriarchal idealizations of a passive and commodified femininity, which Simone de Beauvoir criticizes in The Second Sex – the source of Robbins’s backhanded title – as a projection of masculine horror of the flesh. The poem precipitates into a set of gender-b(l)ending quips, but I want to hang on to the first line a little longer. The balanced cadence – it’s an end-stopped iambic pentameter – gives the line a monumentality, a closure that might seem at odds with making it the poem’s opening gambit. It also sounds like you may have heard it before; it sounds like poetry with a capital P – because it is, or rather, it’s an un-likeness, a turned echo, of the last line of a modernist masterwork, Dylan Thomas’s “A Refusal to Mourn the Death, by Fire, of a Child in London” (1946): “After the first death, there is no other.” Some might read Robbins’s substitution of sex for death – Freudian Eros for Thanatos, a very Thomas-like pairing – as crass, but what Robbins accomplishes with this detournement blurs lyric into trash, not to choose between them but to make them vacillate and phase. If I had to name this kind of intertextual figure, I’d suggest that it might be best understood not as epigone allusion but as distraction, as an unlikeness, a tangential negation that hangs unresolved in a hiatus of semantic duplicity, or even multiplicity. In a review-essay published in the January 2013 issue of Poetry, Robbins seems to trash Dylan Thomas by comparing his overcooked verbiage to the names of heavy metal bands:
The best metal undercuts its portentousness with self-awareness —
if your major tropes include corpse paint and Satanism, you’d better not take yourself too seriously. In Thomas’s work, self-seriousness is the major trope.
But you have to remember that Robbins professes to love heavy metal. Apparently disavowing the influence of Dylan Thomas – alongside his early enthusiasms for James Wright, Rilke (“the jerk”) and Neruda – Robbins comes to recognize the impact of Thomas’s poetic clutter:
That’s what I hate most about Thomas: if you care about poems, you can’t entirely hate him. Phrases, images, metaphors rise from the precious muck and lodge themselves in you like shrapnel.
The love-hate, the un-likeness, which Robbins registers here as influence has a visceral, palpable and (I would say) shocking aspect, because it marks what remains, amid the distractions of too much to say and hear and register, of lyric impact, of language making something happen. I think there is a connection to be made with Walter Benjamin’s prescient juxtaposition of modern, mass-culture distraction and late romantic aesthetic concentration, in his investigation of media viewership in “The Work of Art in the Age of its Technological Reproducibility” (1935-36). In the collision of art and commodification – in photography, in dada poetry, in newspapers and especially in film – Benjamin perceives a shift into distraction that ultimately politicizes the aesthetic (another modernist fantasy of redemption and recovery), but which nonetheless still entails a revitalization of perception rather than the anaesthetizing of viewership (and, I would suggest, of reading):
For the tasks which face the human apparatus of perception at historical turning points cannot be solved by optical means – that is, by way of contemplation. They are mastered gradually – taking their cue from tactile reception – through habit.
Even the distracted person can form habits. What is more, the ability to master certain tasks in a state of distraction first proves that their performance has become habitual. The sort of distraction that is provided by art represents a covert control of the extent to which it has become possible to perform new tasks of apperception. Since, moreover, individuals are tempted to evade such tasks, art will tackle the most difficult and most important tasks whenever it is able to mobilize the masses. (40)
Overcoming habituation is not simply a matter of the shock-work of ideology critique, but the discovery of a mode of apperception – a more fully and technologically mediated embodiment – that can master the uptake of aesthetic and cultural shrapnel. You can look, all the signs used to say, but you’d better not touch. On the contrary, yes, you’d better, says Benjamin. Touch this, says Michael Robbins. “A cheap knockoff, the night / proved to be,” he writes in “Be Myself” (a retooling the grandiloquent “multitudes” of Whitman’s “Song of Myself” into recirculated “platitudes,” an epigone diminishment, perhaps, but definitely a knockoff): “Nokla / not Nokia on the touchscreen.” The poem becomes touchscreen, rife with distracted tactility, rendered apparent – and apperceptive, if you read carefully enough – in the fracture that opens in an uncertain, ersatz, out-of-country brand name. Unenglished.
More Stuff
Adorno, Theodor. Can One Live after Auschwitz? A
Philosophical Reader. Ed. Rolf Tiedemann. Stanford:
Stanford UP, 2003. Print.
Beckett, Samuel. Nohow On. London: John Calder, 1989.
Print.
Benjamin, Walter. The Work of Art in the Age of its
Technological Reproducibility and Other Writings on
Media. Ed. Michael Jennings, Brigid Doherty and
Thomas Y Levin. Cambridge,Mass.: Harvard UP,
2008. Print.
Robbins, Michael. Alien vs. Predator. New York: Penguin,
2012. Print.
Flow, Fissure, Mesh 