Rob Ager: Collative Learning

Rob Ager is a Liverpudlian film critic. His website is called Collative Learning. Though some of the movie-related texts on the site seem far-fetched and crack-pot, I recommend the videos: they are cogent, well-organized, and intriguing.

The Other In All This

What is preservation and where does it come from? I have given a good deal of thought to this, and a seemingly simply question has (in my judgment) a complex answer. Preservation is essentially a social phenomenon. It happens through a social nexus and a social context— through an Other, or (usually) many Others. Put simply, preservation is the result of people wanting to preserve your work. What motivates this process? Why do certain poets inspire this dedication while others do not? It depends what we may find at the root of dedication (to a poet or to any artist.) The question arises (and it is an uneasy one) whether dedication is more emotional or intellectual, more about feelings or thoughts, or whether it is caught somewhere in between. My own sense is that this kind of (internal, psychological) scaffolding is more affective than intellectual. It is a compelling emotional drive. That is why poetry that demonstrates little affect would seem to have meager chance for continued life over a long period of time— decades, centuries. Why would anyone want to preserve you, if you have no emotional gravitas? Who's going to develop an affective drive to resuscitate you? Of course, there is no affectivity in Kant either. But philosophy engenders a very different horizon of expectations— cognitive complexity is a sine qua non, and affective flatness is desirable. There are moving passages in Kierkegaard, Buber, Sartre, but they usually result from rhetorical flourishes, rather than demonstrated passion (though these two sometimes merge, and it can be hard to tell the difference.) Poetry that is all intellect falls between two stools— it lacks the intellectual rigor of philosophical discourse, and the emotional gravitas that usually attends durable poetry. I think that most poetry which survives for any length of time generates an implicit affective compact between reader and poet (or, to be more deconstructive, reader and text). Those that preserve poetry do so because someone has engendered an emotional attachment in them. Even if, as in Eliot, we are made to feel something because the emotions portrayed are entropic.

When looked at objectively, it seems that it may really only take one person (who acts as a foundation) to effectively preserve the work of a poet. It must be one person working in concert with others, but one is enough. It was Mary Shelley that put Percy’s work in a cohesive form after he died and presented it to the world. She was the best editor he ever had, and his posthumous fame would not have been guaranteed without her intervention. It is also worth noting that this process was facilitated because Mary Shelley was already, herself, a publishing author. Shelley put himself into good hands, and it wound up sealing his reputation. Blake lived his entire life in absolute obscurity— gradually, a coterie began to grow around him as he neared his death. Over a period of 80 years, this coterie developed and Blake’s fame was consolidated. It can also work in reverse— poets like Bob Southey have degenerated from laureates into nonetities. It points out what has always been an Achilles’ heel of the poetry world— a lack of criticism, engendering a “no quality control” situation. Other art forms are mediated by critical interventions— the vast majority of poetry critics (myself included) are poets, and this makes objective analysis (in its “pure” forms) difficult to come by. So, we get an unregulated system that feeds on flim-flam and mediocrity. Garbage gets taken for gold and vice versa. The experimental side of things is not exempt from this syndrome, but I do not wish to belabor the point. To bring it all roundabout, it seems to me that direct (albeit textual) transmission of affect is what (more often than not) creates the dedication that kindles resurrections.

Can poets deliberately cultivate Others? Lord knows, it happens all the time: poets get disciples. The problem that I have noticed is that many disciples are more lured by prestige than by any burning dedication. They like the auratic presence of the successful artist, more than they are dedicated to the works of art. Certain poets, like Eliot, have become victims of their disciples. Many of the Baby Boomers that currently dominate the poetry landscape were educated in the Sixties, when the New Critics ran the academies. The New Critics, a sect of homogenous, often racist and misogynistic formalists, created tremendous resentment among their liberal students, some of whom became poets. Their valorization of Eliot created a kind of metonymic distaste for Eliot that has remained widespread in experimental circles to this day. Oddly, some seem to let Pound off the hook while Eliot (who was arch-conservative but not an out-and-out Fascist) takes it in the face. It is guilt by association. However, I have had the same feeling about Eliot from the beginning— he is durable enough that resuscitation is inevitable. He saw his work as, on some level, an escape from emotion, but atrophied emotions, when represented precisely, still have a substantial impact, and are symptomatic of the historical nexuses of high Modernism— World Wars, fractured consciousness, rejection of commerciality, separation from dominant cultural norms. When all is said and done, I must revert to something I said in the first piece of this series— that there are no guarantees for any of us. I maintain my belief in the preponderance of loners and risk-takers.

Poetry and Preservation

By a process of mirroring, national discussions of Health Care and insurance have got me thinking about insurance, where the arts are concerned. If you are lucky, you can obtain an insurance plan to ensure that you get adequate medical coverage with reasonable co-pays. With the arts, it is a very different story. We all have ways of insuring ourselves, but most of them will be for naught. What most of us want is to be preserved. We want to have the peace of mind that comes with knowing our work is not evanescent. There is one major problem: there is a large amount of work being preserved through different channels and in different ways, and most of it will prove to be as evanescent as we would like it not to be. Anything that seems secure is not; any seeming solidity is illusory. The more I think about this, the more I become furious from perception. Why dedicate our life to an art which promises no long-term recompense? What is the point squabbling over petty distinctions when most of them will be prescribed moot by “posterity’s brisk way with manuscripts”? It seems to me that I am lost in a milieu that has a tendency towards faddishness and present-mindedness. The essentials, the fundamentals, what one might call the roots of our collective psychology are left more-or-less unexplored. There are 4,200 college libraries in America. Think of all the forgotten books sitting on those shelves: dead matter, inert matter. Yet every author of every book in every one of those 4,200 libraries thought that their work meant something. They were all published, preserved, and still the vast majority of those books are useless rubbish.

This issue makes me think, too, of all the channels of preservation currently operative. The most obvious channel, and the most conservative, is via college library. To a large extent, whether this happens or not depends on who publishes you. If you publish with a big press, especially a University press, you can expect “heavy library coverage.” If you publish a lot with small presses, you can forget it. There is a certain amount of work you can do for yourself, but I do not know anyone that has the time and energy to call 500 libraries to try and pique interest in carrying their books. I certainly do not. Then there are print journals, especially big mainstream ones like APR and Poetry, that widely circulate in libraries, but just being in these journals is not very efficacious in piquing any kind of continued interest. Then, we have the bold, the beautiful, the newfangled: Net preservation. For some reason, non-U.S. online journals are having better luck getting archived than U.S. online journals. There is Jacket, and smaller journals like Australia’s Cordite and UK journals Great Works, Nth Position, The Argotist. Being published in these places is quite as efficacious as being put in a library, which is to say, not particularly efficacious but better than nothing, where preservation is concerned. In the US we have Pennsound, operating out of my alma mater and a wonderful resource, well-funded and potentially as permanent as any other channel. What about blogs? Where blogs are concerned, most of us are really flying blind, so that it is an act of courage to maintain a substantial blog. It makes me think to allegorize the particulars of American poetry history: that independent-minded loners like Whitman and Dickinson overcame establishment folk like Whittier and Longfellow by taking risks and doing things their way. And were rewarded the way poets are usually rewarded for their pains: posthumously.

Flarf Time

Nada Gordon posted a rebuttal to my comments about flarf here yesterday. I thought it would be useful to respond point by point. Have I engaged in a "prolonged investigation" of flarf? If I thought that flarf merited a prolonged investigation, I would give it one. I have not. No excuses. Nada says that flarf, for her, is "about kicks." Then why bother to spend 1000 words defending it? Why get defensive at the slightest insinuation that flarf is aesthetically insubstantial? As I told Nada in Brooklyn, the whole "I do it for kicks" stance feels like a cop-out to me, so that larger issues can be comfortably avoided. Not that we all need to be so self-serious that we pant and heave over every word, but that wanting to have it both ways (it is serious/ it is a joke) and choosing whichever response happens to be contextually convenient is very slight of hand and the art-equivalent of a card trick. Nada also likes to pat herself on the back for her points that are "even more cogent" than mine; it is wiser to let your readers decide that unless (as seems to be the case) you are merely preaching to the converted. What takes more guts: to be a lone voice speaking against a group or to be in a group whacking each other off, as seems to be the case with these flarf folks? Where the debates about canonicity are concerned, obviously I know that the idea of a central, patriarchal, homogenous canon are considered passe. It is nevertheless my hunch that, even if in fifty years there are a plethora of "mini-canons" (because whether we like it or not, the processes of canon-formation will continue, whenever something poetic is preserved), pride of place will still go to poems and poets that people find memorable. This is obvious stuff, but immersion in theory and ego can make poets dense. Again, Nada includes a condescending gesture in the direction of one William Snodgrass, hinting that his inferiority is manifest and the preservation of his name is a testament to the arbitrary nature of canon formation. But, like it or not, canon formation is not arbitrary, and if there were not a significant number of people who admire Snodgrass, his name would not be preserved. Besides, as I said to Nada in Brooklyn, what would Snodgrass think of you?

Nada makes a useless distinction, I think when she accuses me of naivete for my use of the word "generations." Canons form, she says, betweem two poles: groups who make canons, and individuals who ferret out what has been lost. This happens, specifically, on a generational level. Different generations have different reasons for embracing different poets and different types of poetry. Whether it is a function of groups or individuals, someone is going to decide the fate of our work, and it is not us. That is all I meant to say. And it could take me ten entries to answer what I feel is the most glaring error in Nada's post: "which of the high modernist poems are terribly memorable, beyond the first line or so?" As much as it is a temptation to reel off a list of poems, all I will say is that I would feel hard-pressed to find more memorable poems than early Eliot, especially. It is like criticizing Romantic poetry for not being imaginative enough, or Beat poetry for being too tame. I do not think that it is the GESTURES of these texts that we remember; it is the texts themselves, the way they made sense of a new century, its ruptures, fissures, and discontinuities. GESTURE has to do with CONCEPT, and CONCEPT has been dominating visual arts for far longer than flarf has been around, so that art critics lament how BORING much conceptual work is, and I agree with them. But poetry usually brings up the rear, where the arts are concerned, and so here we are reacting to something old like it is new (while other artists, if they notice us at all, laugh at us). It is also odd that Nada says that she remembers Language texts because she reads them over and over again, not because they are memorable. Why would anyone read something that has no taste, distinctiveness, or personality over and over again at all? I refuse to entertain the notion that good art does not need to be memorable. Period.

I do, in fact, think that poetry has and will continue to develop a "real history." Nada makes the mistake of thinking that by "real" I mean "unitary," and I do not. As with canons and canonicity, authenticity does not negate diversity. There are many histories being written as we speak, including this one. It is simply my feeling that the most durable forms of poetry history will be written around memorable poems that have continued and continuing human interest. It is hard not to make the same art-moves, because forms change, but content does not change that much. Should Keats not have written his Odes because Horace had already written Odes? This is art: inevitably, it will come down to people's opinions. Nick Piombino thinks that I am jealous. I am not. All this came about simply because I read with Nada Gordon and she sat down next to me and we had a conversation. It happens to be my opinion that flarf is flaky. Nada says she is doing it because she likes doing it. Yet she also goes to great lengths to defend it. I stand by my original formulation: it is not for either of us decide what matters and what does not matter. Nada wants to have it both ways: for flarf to matter and not matter at the same time. Whether we like it or not, we are both writing for ourselves and strangers: the strangers decide who is worthy. If Nada could not care less about enduring impact, that is her business. She can be as obsolescent as she wants, and get her kicks. But I would not be surprised if secretly she cares just as much as I do whether her work will last, and her whole stance is a pose. Are the flarf people poseurs? I think you could make a valid argument that they are. We really do not care what we are doing, it is just for fun. In the end, it does not concern me much. I have my own work to do. But it is worth clarifying in public something that I started, so that my position is clear.

On Shelley's Birthday

Today is Percy Bysshe Shelley's birthday. It seems somewhat appropriate that it is also Barack Obama's. Though a direct comparison between these two men seems a bit of a stretch, there are certain characteristics shared between them. Both Shelley and Obama offer visions of change, of a world refurbished by liberal sentiment, ethos and praxis. With Shelley, the liberal impulse was etherealized, put into delicate poems that referenced Greek mythology and decried the political waste and laissez faire brutality of the Industrial Revolution in England. Obama is an American president, who is attempting to transform the political landscape to conform to a vision of a more equitable America. Jerome McGann saw in Shelley an ideology of hope, that many of his greatest poems were displaced out of present moments into a golden, shining future which was inaccessible to Shelley. An ideology of hope is exactly what delivered Obama the presidency, though the current brass tacks reality demonstrates in no uncertain terms how incommensurate the ideology is with actually moving American political machinery. Just as Shelley felt a keen, stinging sense of isolation, I am beginning to see Obama, also, as an isolated figure. Health insurance and health care is where this seems to be manifested most strikingly. We are, supposedly, the land of the free and the home of the brave, but there is no freedom without health and 50 million people (the population of Philly times 50) remain uninsured. In all the debates, amidst all the rancor, am I the only that has noticed that no one seems to care about the 50 million uninsured people? Everyone is defending their narrow interests, and Obama is left (alone) carrying the 50 million on his back. It is pathetic and disillusioning to watch, especially when you consider how hard Republicans are fighting not to make any real health care reforms and how many of the 50 million happen to be their constituents.

What long-term visions are haunting the poetic unconscious in 2009? This weekend, I was in New York to do a reading in Brooklyn, and I got my first chance to talk in depth to a member of the Flarf Collective. It was a stimulating conversation, but my opinion remains unchanged- I do not think flarf makes for the creation of memorable poems, and I fail to see how it adds to the Duchamp paradigm (of the "ready-made") that was put into place one-hundred years ago. The problem with adopting this stance (as I found out, in the course of this conversation) was that it leads straight into a New Critical abyss. So I will admit that opposing flarf is potentially as risky as supporting it. How retrograde is it to want to produce things that will last? Most manifestations of a post-modern sensibility encourage a sense of ephemerality, transience, "positive obsolescence." Post-modernists often tend to adopt the opinion that any other mode of perception is backwards. But, whether or not this puts me back in the New Critical era theoretically, I really do care if what I write will last. So I cannot find much to admire in flarf, other than the fact that it is relatively new and many people are starting to take notice of it. I will say that nothing is going to turn me into a novelty freak, because this kind of trend-hopping is anathema to the very slow development of real poetry history. It is sad but certain- most real changes in poetry are only visible in retrospect.

I am left with the feeling that there are certain advantages to a non-theoretical approach to poetry- what you might call the just do it ethos. If you write without using theoretical apparatuses to find your bearing, you can write as a mode of "play" and thus find a natural joy in what you are doing again. Healthy spontaneity may result. It also means that you can follow affect wherever it leads, without restraining yourself based on a conceptual standard or letting a computer do your work for you. When emotion becomes stylized, it turns hokey. No one is going to have a problem with raw emotion, if it is presented with savvy and taste. We must wrestle, at some point, with the notion of the trans-historical, where people and poetry are concerned. New Historians believe that subjectivity is unstable, and that very little is trans-historical. However, if literally nothing were trans-historical, there would be no reason to read Shelley anymore, and there are valid reasons to read Shelley. It is not merely his emotion that remains compelling, it is the emotions produced by the textual enactments of his ideology. In other words, how his politics made him feel. This is a key that is important to us, if we want to document 2009 effectively, and it is something that flarf cannot do: to take an honest look at our consciousness, make conscious the ideologies that determine our thoughts and actions, and see what affect lies within this process. This is complex terrain. It also makes our activity a useful adjunct to what Barack Obama is doing; we are giving voice in art to the impulses he is enacting as a political figurehead. We participate with him in trying to change national consciousness. We can do our little part to make America more cohesive, and in so doing we create templates that will bear fruit in years to come.