The Annual Convention of the Modern Language Association took place, in Philadelphia, in December 2006. The program weighed heavily towards poetry and poetics. The poet Ron Silliman, who was in attendance, notes, in his
weblog entry dated 02/01/ 2007:
‘Somebody – I think it may have been Dan Waterman of the University of Alabama press – telling me that this was the “all-poetry-all-the-time MLA.” Then hearing ten other people tell me the same thing over the next two days.’
He goes on to tell of his realisation that:
‘ this wasn’t just the “all-poetry-all-the-time MLA,” but rather was the “all-post-avant-poetry-all-the-time” MLA. I never have seen an MLA where I couldn’t get to every post-avant panel because there were three and four going on in every single slot. Realizing that this was really the “Marjorie Perloff MLA” & she’d pulled out all the stops.’
Marjorie Perloff, the 2006 President of the MLA, is a renowned scholar and champion of contemporary and often experimental poetry, author of Radical Artifice and Wittgenstein’s Ladder. Silliman’s tone is hard to gauge. It is apparent that, among the attendees, there was considerable excitement about the convention’s focus on poetry; ‘ten other people’ used the same phrase to tell Ron Silliman the same thing. His wry anecdote serves to separate Silliman from the excitement though. So, too, does his comment that ‘I couldn’t get to every post-avant panel because there were three and four going on in every single slot’. If this is accurate (or even if it’s only a little exaggerated) then it is clearly excessive, and it’s apparent that Silliman thinks so. The tone of ‘she’d pulled out all the stops’ seems intentionally tongue-in-cheek. Silliman’s term ‘post-avant’ is his own coinage, often used in his discussions of poetry on his weblog, and it refers to poetry characterised by its acknowledgement that there is no one way forward for poetry, that experimental work will never achieve a triumphant end for poetry, but that a successful future will involve a variety of poetries and poetics. The ‘echoes in the mind’s eye’ that Silliman lists in the same post are worth examining. There are 32 ‘echoes’, of which only five are related to the panel-discussions that formed the official body of the convention. The rest range from personal memories to, and these form the majority, notes on readings at the ‘off-site event’, an unofficial tagged-on poetry-reading event ‘that has been going on annually since Rod Smith started it in 1989... held off-site so that all of the local poets (somewhere between one third & one half of all the readers) don’t have to pony up an MLA membership just to go to a reading’
(Silliman, Weblog entry, 03/01/2007) :
There seems to have been, from Silliman in his report of the conference2 , and from the poets involved in the off-site reading, a deliberate, uneasy distancing of poets and their poems from the academic conference which was devoted to discussing them. The
poet Barrett Watten (like Silliman associated with the group of writers usually termed ‘Language Poets’) in his ‘Conference Report’, writes of,
‘the question of the elephant in the room, Marjorie Perloff's culmination of her MLA presidency this year and her Presidential Address, as a historically defining moment (one of a series, as each MLA president gets to present his or her views in such an address, and through a series of forums on a selected topic). Why didn't I attend? I might well have, but I was with friends and colleagues enjoying the beer, conversation, and masses of spaghettini, as before mentioned. But, the point was made, the address will certainly be published in PMLA, so we decided to skip it, take in the Penn open bar, and then either attend or crash (depending on one's invited status) the cocktail event on the 33rd Floor of the Loews afterwards. ’
Watten’s ‘masses of spaghettini’ undermine the ‘historically defining moment’, and there is an ambiguity as to what ‘point was made’ and who was making it:
‘It is without question that poetry, poetics, and the avant-garde were featured at the MLA due to Perloff. But at the same time, I heard from a friend, Perloff's speech foregrounded a moment of triumph over Cultural Studies, which Marjorie, ever the Cold Warrior, sees as the evil empire that the free play of avant-garde democracy will vanquish...My anticipation of such triumphalism, and precisely its containment of debate, was a reason for the "Engaging the Debate" subtitle of our poetics and Cultural Studies panel.’
Watten’s problem is ‘triumphalism’ and its ‘containment of debate’. By extension, and from the emphasis of the conference’s officialized, establishment nature through his repetition of the word President: ‘culmination of her MLA presidency this year and her Presidential Address, as a historically defining moment (one of a series, as each MLA president gets to present his or her views in such an address...)’. The word establishes itself an extra time, like the ‘elephant in the room’ in the word ‘present’. This reveals a further ambiguity as to just what it is Watten will either ‘attend or crash’: is it ‘the academy’? There’s a definite contrast between the ‘open bar’ and ‘the cocktail event on the 33rd floor’. Watten’s report gives more attention to the conference panels than Silliman’s, but it is consistently ironic in approach:
‘I heard from many that the sound poetry sessions were exceptional, and lots of energy radiated from Christian Bök, Caroline Bergvall, Steve McCaffery, and others. Tracie Morris wasn't on the program but was vibrating in tune as well. The Postmodern Culture open bar was a hit, as was the one sponsored by Penn, where schmoozing continued unabated and many younger scholar/poets turned up. I am wondering about the next generation of same, and hope next year to see Wayne students as part of the scene in Chicago. More on schmoozing in a bit.’
Silliman and Watten’s reactions both reveal a more comfortable preference for the off-site poetry reading, which is available in full audio on ‘Miporadio’3. Listening to the recording is revealing. Each reader was allowed two minutes in which to read; there were at least sixty readers and Silliman, for example, read for only one minute. In his introduction, poet and scholar Bob Perelman, states that there is a correlation between the shorter a poet reads and how virtuous she is. To use the time as efficiently as possible, Perelman asks the poets to announce themselves, prior to reading. The poet Patrick Durgin introduces himself as Charles Bernstein, the most famous of the Language Poets. The air of manic fun that ensues, and which is present in the recording is characterised in Watten’s report as follows:
‘there was obvious pleasure in the room, and the two-minute format seemed to provide for some peak performance moments. However, I did not think that Walter Lew's cutting in two Aldon Nielsen's tie was at all cool, nor his crashing over the grand piano. Dumb, seeks attention.’
Watten’s mock-disapproval has the tone of a condemning schoolmaster, and certainly the poets seem to have enjoyed revelling in a spirit of rebelliousness, tangled up in their ‘masses of spaghettini’, at the very point when they are receiving school colours.
If I have laboured my explanation of this moment of recent history, it is because I think it reveals interesting tensions between the academy and poetry, specifically the poets associated with Language Poetry4. In
his weblog entry dated 03/01/07, Silliman writes, ‘happily poetry isn’t about teaching or the academy any more than it is about the trade book industry. The Venn diagram5 overlap between these three worlds gets to be less every year, and we’re at that point now where these three circles barely even touch’. Silliman has no job within the academy and he makes no secret of his scorn for it.6 But Barrett Watten, and other Language Poets such as Charles Bernstein, Rae Armantrout and Bob Perelman do or have had jobs within academia. In his collection of ‘speeches and poems’, My Way, published in 1999,
Charles Bernstein includes a number of pieces that deal with the relation of poetry to academia. One, titled ‘Revenge of The Poet-Critic’, separates ‘official verse culture’, by which Bernstein seems to mean poets who win prizes, from innovative poets. ‘Official verse culture’ is deemed ‘watered down forms that only capitulate to the mediocracy’ (15). In defence against charges of inpenetrability and intellectual elitism (which have been directed at Language Writing), Bernstein makes two connected points: ‘for artists and intellectuals, the problem is not that their work does not speak to the public but that few public spaces will permit them entry to make their pitch’ (15); ‘Universities can be a crucial base of opposition to the construction of ignorance, but not if they view their role as merely ameliorative. Indeed the production of ignorance is aided by the passivity of the scholarly community in accepting narrow definitions of disciplinarity and specialization that enforce irrational constraints on the nature of research and writing’ (16). Bernstein, like Watten, finds ‘containment of debate’ in universities’ treatment of works of art. It becomes clearer what he means in another piece, ‘Frame Lock’:
‘Frame lock, and its cousin tone jam, are the prevailing stylistic constraints of the sanctioned prose of the profession. No matter that the essay may interrogate the constructed unity of a literary work, or putative period, may dwell on linguistic fragmentation, demolition, contradiction, contestation, inter-eruption; may decry assumptions of totality, continuity, narrative progression, teleology, or truth...The keepers of the scholarly flame... maintain that the argument for this or that or the other must maintain appropriate scholarly decorum’ (90).
He continues, ‘a traditional, or framelocked, curriculum is designed so that each of its elements fits within a single overall scheme’ (94). Bernstein is making a more general point than I wish to, about the study of artworks in universities. But Watten, Silliman and Bernstein all demonstrate a discord in their poetics with conventional academic practice. I think a case can be made that when the work of art being studied decries ‘assumptions of totality, continuity, narrative progression, teleology, or truth... may insist that meaning is plural, polygamous, profligate, uncontainable, rhetorical, slippery or sliding or gliding or giddy and prurient’ (Bernstein 90), and much of Language Poetry fits some of these parameters, then an awareness of this in the criticism addressing it, will help to illuminate the work of art in interesting ways. I find Bernstein’s argument convincing when he puts it like this, ‘while one of the defining axioms of cultural studies is the death of the author, the authors of cultural studies seem to exempt themselves from the full effect of this theory, much the way a queen might be exempted from her own decrees’ (45), and when he speaks from the perspective he is attacking: ‘theory enacted into writing practice is suspect, demeaned as unprofessional’ (90). There have been interesting studies of Language Poetry, most notably by Perloff, but these, as sustained comprehensive projects have always followed the model Bernstein sets up as a framelocked curriculum: ‘each of its elements fits within a single overall scheme’ (94). And there are examples of imaginative, innovative criticism, notably by Bernstein, but these have mostly been either isolated, or by the language poets themselves. The opportunity for research that I see is a sustained engagement with Language Poetry, growing out of interested, constructive engagement with individual texts, without an ‘overall scheme’. In lieu of anticipating a thesis-statement, I think that this project will reveal both commonalities and differences between the works of the language poets; I think it is an appropriate method to adopt to study poems that, according to the poet
Bruce Andrews aim, to ‘emphasise the force of language and not just what it ends up meaning in its customary genre confinement’. I think that my approach will illuminate the ‘force of language’ by virtue of its lack of an ‘overall scheme’.
I am taking my cue first of all from Bernstein, whose essay on the poet George Oppen, from My Way, concludes with the following example of engagement:
‘the following stanzas generated using an acrostic procedure (G-E-O-R-G-E-O-P-P-E-N) to select lines, in page sequence, from Collected Poems. I have borrowed this procedure from Jackson Mac Low. That these these poems are so characteristically Oppenesque is, I think, less the effect of familiar lines or typical references than the way single Oppen lines can be hinged to ‘each other’ to create the marvellous syntactic music found throughout his work...
Grasp of me)
Eyes legs arms hands fingers,
On the cobbles;
Reaches the generic, gratuitous
Geared in the loose mechanics of the world with the
valves jumping
Endlessly, endlessly’ (194).
By regenerating Oppen’s lines, Bernstein has illuminated an aspect of Oppen’s poetry, the way his line endings ‘hinge’, and in doing so, by using a random system, seems to have subjected himself to the full impact of the idea, ‘death of the author’; he has (‘unprofessionally’?) enacted ‘theory into writing practice’.
