Monday, November 10, 2008

Seamus Heaney

An excellent interview with the redoubtable Seamus Heaney. He says a lot of things that are just plain bang-on. Todd Swift says:

Heaney has not, it is clear, made peace with the experimental wing of contemporary poetry - he calls it "a refusal of the kind of poetry I write" - which begs the question any mirror does - isn't his kind of poetry a refusal, equally, of the avant-garde sense of what poetic language entails?


No, it's not. (And no it doesn't "beg the question," but that's another matter.) Why not? Because probably about 99% of writers who self-identify as "experimental" or "avant-garde" define their aesthetics in opposition to what they view to be "mainstream" or "establishment." The very metaphor "avant-garde," with all its military associations, is ample evidence of that. If it's not a negatively-defined, oppositional stance, then the label shouldn't be used. The fact is that the avant-garde is nowhere without the establishment, whereas the establishment could carry on quite happily without the existence of the avant-garde.

From what I've seen of Heaney's work as a poet and critic--which is most of it--he is not similarly opposed to "the experimental wing." Mostly, he simply ignores it, as an elephant would a mosquito on its arse. Which is of course what that noisy faction hates most. The only reason he mentions it in the interview is because he was specifically asked about it.

10 comments:

Anonymous said...

"about 99% of writers who self-identify as "experimental" or "avant-garde" define their aesthetics in opposition to what they view to be "mainstream" or "establishment."

Interesting...could you provide an example of this?

Zachariah Wells said...

As I said, it's made explicit by the very labels. Avant-garde, as opposed to rearguard; experimental as opposed to traditional. They're very precious bits of nomenclature. But a couple of recent examples. I saw Meredith Quartermain read at the OIWF a couple of weeks ago and she was talking about how, when she started writing she was part of the KSW and all the people she was hanging out with were dead set _against_ the idea of writing lyric poetry. She opposed this lyric ethos with a poetry "more focussed on language." A facile dichotomy that assumes that lyric poets are not focussed on language. Many aren't. But they're not good poets.

Another example is second hand, but Lee Shedden told me once he was at a reading/talk in Calgary and someone from U of C whose sympathies were with "experimental" writing said she'd rather be napalmed than write a sonnet. Napalmed.

And just in general--you don't have to look very hard to find it--you hear people throwing around the rhetoric that "non-experimental poetry" is "neo-conservative," whereas "experimental poetry" is "radical." It's a load of manure, but it's manure that's fertilized avant-gardism qua movement. It couldn't exist, as such, without its enemy.

Anonymous said...

KSW is a cult of insane marxists and feminists who should go back to America!

I don't like avant-garde or experimental poetry or whatever it is b/c basically I don't understand it. And I don't like things I don't understand!

Zachariah Wells said...

Ah, the standard ploy of the oppositional avant-garde: invent an enemy who's easy to destroy. The lyric poet too naive to realize the "I" in the poem is not identical with the "I" of its writer. The formalist whose aesthetics reflect deep-seated reactionary political views. The mainstream poet who panders to a capital-stunned bourgeois audience. And the philistine who just doesn't get it.

Problem with most of the KSW writing, and other work of its ilk that I've come across, is not that it's too hard to understand. It's that, beneath its rebarbative surface, it's far too easy to get, that it lacks layers and nuance. Personally, I don't like poetry that I understand too readily. And while I think there's a place in poetry for sociology, I don't think the two should be mistaken for each other.

Anonymous said...

"Problem with most of the KSW writing, and other work of its ilk that I've come across, is not that it's too hard to understand. It's that, beneath its rebarbative surface, it's far too easy to get, that it lacks layers and nuance."

How arrogant! You indiscriminately yoke together a vast body of writing, and then claim ALL of it lacks depth and "nuance" -- don't you mean to say *your reading* of such work (which works, we wonder...?) lacks depth and nuance?

Unless you believe a poem has one meaning that can only be unlocked by a certain kind of reader.

Perhaps if you offered a reading of a particular poem showing its "lack of nuance" it would be clearer...

Zachariah Wells said...

I said "most ... that I've come across"; I've yoked nothing to nothing. And if I have, it's no different from the rhetorical postures of those who speak of all lyrical poetry as tho it were a homogeneous mass. My main point is that I find, say, Fred Wah less difficult and complex a poet than Robert Frost. So let's just label you pot and me kettle and call it a day, shall we?

Anonymous said...

"My main point is that I find, say, Fred Wah less difficult and complex a poet than Robert Frost."

Ok. And my main point is that this says more about you and your reading practices than it does about the work.

If certain works fail to register as "complex," this is because you've failed to elaborate a complex reading.

Zachariah Wells said...

So then you think that complexity is something that has no existence outside of the mind of the reader/observer? Do you think a sixty year old blended scotch has the same inherent complexity quotient as the water it's made from? This is impossible. You add something to something else, it becomes more complex. The more things you add and the longer you let those elements mingle, the greater its complexity.

Robert Frost's work is engaged in a dialogue with all of English poetry past, and a fair bit of non-English poetry. His particular use of iambic pentameter is a complexification of English measures that follows a line from Chaucer to Shakespeare to Milton to Wordsworth to Browning to him (to simplify things for the sake of brevity). Fred Wah, by contrast, as a member of TISH, is taking as a point of departure the poetry and Olsonian poetics of Black Mountain, a movement originating in the 1950s and largely predicated on the rejection of such measures as iambic pentameter (here we get back to my original point, that the aesthetics of self-consciously avant-garde writing is negatively defined). Frost's work is necessarily more complex, more layered, more nuanced, more fundamentally difficult (because it takes a hell of a lot of reading and hard work to recognize all of those layers, not to mention the work of laying them down in the first place), for all its surface clarity, than Fred Wah's could ever hope to be.

If we follow your logic to a bit of a silly--but ineluctable--conclusion, then Rod McKuen's latent complexity is just waiting for the right reader to unlock it. Or, to follow it to its most absurd conclusion, then the user manual for my toaster oven, qua "text," is just as complex as Yeats' "Second Coming." Can you really believe this? It's pure sophistry, debunkable by anyone who's done a first year philosophy class.

Come on, anon; relativism is so 1985.

Anonymous said...

Your argument in defense of Frost is not convincing, nor is your claim that the avant-garde is "negatively defined".

1/ If Frost is complex for his engagement with the English canon, then Wah inherits (and exhausts) that complexity ipso facto through his engagement with Olson, who superseded Frost. I don't subscribe to the anxiety of influence thesis, but it seems inherent in your argument.

2/ The rejection of the past or of other movements is not a defining characteristic of the avant-garde. Wordsworth rejected the Metaphysicals in favour of "plain speech" (still iambic), and Pound Wordsworth for his "emotional slither", etc. Crusty formalists reject the avant-garde for all kinds of crusty reasons, etc.

That said, the avant-garde *can* be defined through negation (Barrett Watten has described this better than anyone I can think of) -- but it is NOT a superficial negation of style: it's the negation of the commodity form. Every serious avant-garde poet knows this. See Peter Burger, "Theory of the Avant Garde." If you want to be taken seriously as a critic, rather than a gadfly, you'd do well to brush up before you brush off.

Finally, from a linguistic/discourse point of view, a manual for a toaster oven IS as complex as a poem. The idea that poetry is some special arena of language use (with its specialist interpreters) entirely distinct from other forms of discourse is SO 1920's.

Zachariah Wells said...

"If you want to be taken seriously as a critic, rather than a gadfly, you'd do well to brush up before you brush off."

The question is, since relativism seems to be the order of the day, taken seriously by whom? By someone who earnestly believes a toaster manual has as much intrinsic complexity as one of the great poems of the English language? I think to be taken seriously by such a fool would be awful.

Let's not dwell on the fact that this thread is an outgrowth of a statement made by Seamus Heaney, who is taken more seriously as a critic than almost any other poet in the English-speaking world. Let's not think about that, but focus on li'l old me instead. Given the regular requests I receive to write reviews and essays and the number of unsolicited offers (4) I've had from publishers to publish a collection of said essays--the number of each I've had to decline, moreover--I'm not too worried about being taken seriously. Somehow, despite my best efforts, it's just happened. But thanks for your concern and unsolicited advice, it's quite touching, really.

It's good to see that Anon #1 has recruited a more eloquent and well-read Anon (for, unless Anon #1 has moved, this latest post is by someone else) to fight the battle (s)he'd lost. Too bad the new recruit's only marginally sharper.

"If Frost is complex for his engagement with the English canon, then Wah inherits (and exhausts) that complexity ipso facto through his engagement with Olson, who superseded Frost."

This is totally hilarious. I mean, really, Anon, I had to put Huggies on just to read this again. Olson "superseded" Frost? I missed the bulletin that that particular titanomachia was won by Chuck O; this is historical revisionism on a grand scale (grander even than the scale of Chazz's massive frame). Outside of very circumscribed academic circles, Olson's poetry (which Irving Layton memorably described as prose wrapped up in hair curlers) isn't even read. The big fat Broadview antho I had to buy for an undergrad class ten years ago, the inclusion criteria for which are far from stringent, doesn't have a single Olson poem in it. Many of those who do still pay any attention to him have only read "Projective Verse," to which the poetry is little better than a really long footnote.

Speaking of which, let's do a wee close-reading of PV's opening:

"Projective Verse

(projective (percussive (prospective

vs.

The NON-Projective

(or what a French critic calls "closed" verse, that verse which print bred and which is pretty much what we have had, in English & American, and have still got, despite the work of Pound & Williams:

it led Keats, already a hundred years ago, to see it (Wordsworth's, Milton's) in the light of "the Egotistical Sublime"; and it persists, at this latter day, as what you might call the private-soul-at-any-public-wall)

Verse now, 1950, if it is to go ahead, if it is to be of essential use, must, I take it, catch up and put into itself certain laws and possibilities of breath, of the breathing of the man who writes as well as of his listenings. (The revolution of the ear, 1910, the trochee's heave, asks it of the younger poets.)

I want to do two things: first, try to show what projective or OPEN verse is, what it involves, in its act of composition, how, in distinction from the non-projective, it is accomplished; and II, suggest a few ideas about what that stance does, both to the poet and to his reader. (The stance involves, for example, a change beyond, and larger than, the technical, and may, the way things look, lead to new poetics and to new concepts from which some sort of drama, say, or of epic, perhaps, may emerge.)"

So, right away, we have exactly what I was describing: the new, the avant-garde, in oppositional relation to "pretty much" all of what precedes it. Ergo, we do not have someone engaging with the tradition, but rather, dismissing it as ossified.

And rather ignorantly, at that. The notion that "closed forms" like iambic pentameter are bred by print is utterly risible. This was the measure exploited to great effect by Marlowe, Shakespeare, Johnson and pretty much any other dramatist of the day. Not intended for print primarily at all, even if that tends to be the way those texts are presented to students today. Iambics, as any initiate into the arts of English prosody can tell you, mirror the rhythms of the body, which Olson vainly tries to arrogate to his own, very hazily limned, vision of how verse might be written. It's so hazily limned, in fact, that when pressed repeatedly by Irving Layton to explain what PV was all about, Robert Creeley, Olson's #1 correspondent and a devotee of PV--and one of the only decent poets to emerge from Black Mountain--had to finally concede that it's nothing so much as "a state of mind."

Note also, besides the dualistically puerile opposition of "open" vs. "closed," the bogus teleology of verse "catching up" and "going ahead." These are idealistically naive poetics, par excellence. And, as you say, they are the foundation for the poetics of countless young poets in the 50s and 60s, who have had considerable influence on subsequent generations of ephebes.

In spite of this proliferation, Frost has not been superseded (except, of course, in the fanatical minds of true believers). Anyone who really thinks that Frost is yesterday's news simply isn't paying attention. I just read a fascinating, recently published essay on him by Paul Muldoon, in fact.

(Now, I'm not a big Muldoon fan, but there's a guy who's genuinely innovative and not just treading the same stagnant pondwater.)

As a guide to prosody, PV is useless at best, something tacitly acknowledged by Olson in that opening chunk when he speaks of "a change beyond, and larger than, the technical." This is an escape clause, getting him out of actually saying what PV is or might be--other than, of course, what Creeley said it was when painted into a corner by someone who didn't take for granted all the assumptions Olson made: a state of mind. Groovy, baby, I dig it.

Now, to get back to your own argument:

"2/ The rejection of the past or of other movements is not a defining characteristic of the avant-garde. Wordsworth rejected the Metaphysicals in favour of "plain speech" (still iambic), and Pound Wordsworth for his "emotional slither", etc. Crusty formalists reject the avant-garde for all kinds of crusty reasons, etc."

Wordsworth moved towards something more ancient yet, the ballad. Also, the sonnet. His project was far more renovatory than revolutionary. And Pound, tho he hated WW, also turned back to very old stuff, e.g. the Troubadours and old Chinese poetry. Olson and his heirs, by contrast, seem reluctant to go back any farther than Pound and Williams (as cited in the opening paragraphs of PV). So to say that WW and EP were "rejecting the past" is false. They rejected certain dominant figures and schools from the past as models for their own poetics. As for the "crusty formalists," I've gone on record repeatedly as having no truck with such dinosaurs, so there's no "aha" valence to your claim.

Here's the thing, Anon. From the get-go, I've made the allowance that some self-identifying (crucial phrase in my initial post) avant-garde writers produce work that is not merely oppositional, that adds something of use, value and beauty to the canon. The vast majority of anyone pretending or attempting to write poetry fail miserably; so saying that 99% of self-identifying avant-gardists also fail isn't really too harsh a dig. What makes them different from other folks trying to write poetry is their clannishness, this insistence on labelling. That collective thinking and behaviour is deeply ingrained in the assumptions of the avant-garde is manifestly evident in, for example, the polemics of Ron Silliman, in which he repeatedly and absurdly attempts to herd every poet he reads into one corral or another. Forget closed verse forms; these are closed thought systems, dogmas bent on reducing every poem and poet to a manageable bit of data. If the avant-garde gets unjustly homogenized in the minds of others, it's more because of friends like Silliman than "enemies" like me or Seamus Heaney.

"it is NOT a superficial negation of style: it's the negation of the commodity form. Every serious avant-garde poet knows this."

Funnily enough, so do I. I just don't buy it. It has the same flaws as a mixed metaphor. One hears all this blah-blah about commodification and pandering to an audience and all that stuff. Thing is, it's no more true or false of "mainstream" poets than it is of "avant-garde" poets, particularly at this point in time, when the latter have integrated themselves with shocking smoothness into University faculties and hence curricula. To cling to this facile notion of rejecting commodity forms now merely highlights how otiose and calcified avant-gardism, qua movement, has become.

"The idea that poetry is some special arena of language use (with its specialist interpreters) entirely distinct from other forms of discourse is SO 1920's."

Here, finally, you have a point. Thing is, it's 1920s BCE, not CE. And not all that much has changed, nor will it, the revolutionary fervour of commodity form rejectors and coherence-smashers notwithstanding.