Poetics and Praxis 'After' Objectivism
214
Poetics and Praxis 'After' Objectivism
214Overview
Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivismexamines late twentieth-and early twenty-first-century poetics and praxis within and against the dynamic, disparate legacy of Objectivism and the Objectivists. This is the first volume in the field to investigate the continuing relevance of the Objectivist ethos to poetic praxis in our time. The book argues for a reconfiguration of Objectivism, adding contingency to its historical values of sincerity and objectification, within the context of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.
Essays and conversations from emerging and established poets and scholars engage a network of communities in the U.S., Canada, and the U.K., shaped by contemporaneous oppositions as well as genealogical (albeit discontinuous) historicisms. This book articulates Objectivism as an inclusively local, international, and interdisciplinary ethos, and reclaims Objectivist poetics and praxis as modalities for contemporary writers concerned with radical integrations of aesthetics, lyric subjectivities, contingent disruption, historical materialism, and social activism. The chapter authors and roundtable contributors reexamine foundational notions about Objectivism—who the Objectivists were and are, what Objectivism has been, now is, and what it might become—delivering critiques of aesthetics and politics; of race, class, and gender; and of the literary and cultural history of the movement’s development and disjunctions from 1931 to the present.
Contributors: Rae Armantrout, Julie Carr, Amy De’Ath, Jeff Derksen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Graham Foust, Alan Golding, Jeanne Heuving, Ruth Jennison, David Lau, Steve McCaffery, Mark McMorris, Chris Nealon, Jenny Penberthy, Robert Sheppard
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9781609385934 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Iowa Press |
| Publication date: | 08/15/2018 |
| Series: | Contemp North American Poetry |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 214 |
| File size: | 3 MB |
About the Author
W. Scott Howard is associate professor of English and literary arts at the University of Denver. His books include SPINNAKERS: poems and Susan Howe’s factual telepathy. He is founding editor of the poetics journal, Reconfigurations, and lives in Englewood, Colorado.
Broc Rossell is lecturer in critical and cultural studies at Emily Carr University of Art and Design in Vancouver, British Columbia. The author of Unpublished Poems and Festival, he is publisher of the small press Elephants.
Read an Excerpt
CHAPTER 1
OBJECTIVIST POETICS, 'INFLUENCE,' AND SOME CONTEMPORARY LONG POEMS
RACHEL BLAU DUPLESSIS
The criteria for poetics that Louis Zukofsky proposed in his early essays offered central concepts to realist and left-oriented poets of the post-Pound and post-Eliot generation. "Objectification" and "sincerity" were ideas both precise and malleable; the poets inspired by this poetic ethos returned to these concepts throughout their lives, meditating upon them, and generating work that answered to these talismanic evocations. Zukofsky had outlined this modernist-realist aesthetic in his February 1931 issue of Poetry magazine: poetry as analytic work, featuring cuts of a material real focused by this documentary ethos, a fastidious attention to language as "matter," and a striking avoidance of mythopoetic surges. Neither "Program: 'Objectivists' 1931" nor "Sincerity and Objectification" were made as manifestos. Yet eminence grise Ezra Pound and editor Harriet Monroe were eagerly championing the reception mechanism of a "group," insisting that Zukofsky declare his thinking to be a manifesto for a movement rather than a statement of generative literary principles.
Although there will always be some debate on this point, the objectivist position is, in literary historical terms, a poetics without a movement. There may be objectivists, but there was, at the time, no Objectivism. The objectivist position links a radical (experimental) poetics to a radical (progressive) politics. And from these claims in poetics, like-minded poets found an articulation of some theoretical terms for their practice. The objectivist "nexus" is, thus, both a set of concerns in poetics and a network of poets who related to each other via this general poetics. The historical "objectivist nexus" consisted mainly of key dyads active at various career junctures: ReznikoffZukofsky; Reznikoff-Oppen; Zukofsky-Oppen; Zukofsky-Niedecker; Zukofsky-Bunting; Williams-Zukofsky; Pound-Oppen; Pound-Zukofsky. Some of the objectivist denizens never even met, or met quite late in life (like Oppen and Carl Rakosi). Some poets had angry, bitter as well as intense, or "perfectly nice," or mutually generative, or intermittent relations with each other. Be that as it may, it is useful to postulate a continuing "nexus" among poets who chose to draw upon this poetics and its implications.
However, this essay is not solely about poetics; it also concerns the biographical interactions between one of these dyads. As recent books on poetic friendship have proposed, interactional dialogue, relationships like mentoring, discipleship and resistance, events of mutual formation and group identity, but also dissensus, debates, and splits are all significant topics for a discussion of poetic careers.
The central "member" of the Objectivist "group"— had there been such a group — was Louis Zukofsky (1904–1978), who greatly affected George Oppen (1908–1984) and Lorine Niedecker (1903–1970), as well as taking Charles Reznikoff (1894–1976) as a model poet. However, Zukofsky was always the most adamant that no "Objectivist" group existed, that he wanted no part of it if it did exist, and that, like Peter in the New Testament, even if "accused" of this group, he would deny its existence. Yet independently of his wishes, his career remains linked to this nonmovement in various ways. Spoiler alert: there are a lot of ironies in the reception of Objectivist poets.
What did the objectivist ethos generate in the late 1920s and early 1930s? To extrapolate from Zukofsky's and Oppen's earliest poems, one distinctive element is their deliberately ignoring, or distancing from, the "poetic" as an expectation for poetry, moving to a programmatic realist ethos. The "lens" became a photographic/filmic-materialist inducement to the selection, framing, combination, and juxtaposition of real-world materials extended by meditation. A number of Zukofsky's poems trump poetic tradition by realism — or at least by a drastic expansion of topics for poetry: the poem connecting ear hair to a flower; the poem about beds rattling at night; the poems about the washstand and the bathroom. Taking seriously these quotidian, ignoble materials conventionally beyond poetic notice creates a witty populist-inflected literariness. Oppen's published early work has similar a-poetic elements — elevator indicator lights so abstracted by visual description as to be simply language itself tinged by oddity and the jump-cut action shots of work and customers at a soda fountain, not to speak of the fundamental modular strategy of "discrete series." Objectification seemed to involve exacting antipietistic formal invention. And while both poets render poverty and economic crisis, Oppen rests on the irreducible and absolutist image (an impoverished man selling postcards on the street), while Zukofsky is far more prone to theorize and cite. His tour de force "singing" some of Das Kapital in 3/4 time predicts the three-step line of William Carlos Williams and constructs a Cubist-inflected Marxism. Their poems have topical resemblances: work on the river, cars, the beach. In mentioning geraniums, for example, Zukofsky frames the comedic, awkward rhyme and half rhyme of millennium,geranium, and cranium (he is charmed by the word), and Oppen, condensing an oblique plot in you and him and "two geraniums," makes an obscure comment on the world.
The intense minimalism of Discrete Series and the almost baroque elaboration in Zukofsky's early poems do foreshadow greater differences of poetics under the objectivist rubric. Oppen's final Discrete Series poem notes one key difference: does art organize a "field" or is it part of that field?
Written structure, Shape of art, More formal Than a field would be (existing in it) — (New Collected Poems, 35)
If, as Wallace Stevens proposed in Harmonium, one placed a "jar in Tennessee," does it organize that wilderness or does it become part of the wilderness? Does it shape the "slovenly" real or dissolve into the real? In Oppen the tension is unresolved (and a little tautological): the poem is indeed "more formal" (more objectified) than a natural field (let's say of the things that exist — no artifice about them, thus sincerity), but the speaker and poem also exist in the whole field of everything, including art. What is one's actual responsibility to each element? Objectification and sincerity are, cast in a certain light, opposite entities, contradictory goals, precariously balanced. Aside from the proleptic "field," a word suggestive of the link between projectivist poetics and the objectivist ethos, here the question of making a static or "formal" work ("objectification") is contrasted to registration of event happening as a situated person sees it (the "sincerity" of "existing in it").
Some of that sense of poised opposites also emerges from their biographical interactions. Zukofsky was four years older than Oppen; he had graduated from college and had an MA (George and Mary Oppen had simply left what is now University of Oregon at Corvallis), and he had precocious cultural range and incisiveness. Hence Zukofsky functioned as their pedagogue in poetry and poetics. The evidence in Mary Oppen's memoir Meaning a Life is warmhearted and appreciative; it constructs a picture of engaged young people in a supportive and exciting interior exile from family and social expectations. Given that Zukofsky assiduously pursued a literary life and that Oppen stopped his literary production circa 1935 or even before, one result was that Zukofsky maintained no particular interest in or contact with Oppen from about that date. The feeling of falling away seems to have been mutual. In fact, when Zukofsky says to Kenneth Rexroth in March 1936 that he rejected his ties with wealthy people in about 1930 [sic on that date], he undoubtedly means with Oppen, who, he apparently felt, had reneged on financial promises. Therefore, except for their intense transformative early friendship, Zukofsky was always more interesting to Oppen than Oppen was to Zukofsky. Far more central to Zukofsky over his whole career were Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, and the less acknowledged Lorine Niedecker. It is even possible to argue that Oppen's desire to test himself within the world of action, skill, and politics was not only a critique of his cosseted, wealthy upbringing but also a rejection of the sheer literariness (and perhaps the different enactments of politics) of the Zukofsky world.
How does one theorize splits, revulsions, angers that seem so wholly "personal" (and/or economic), given a period of intense closeness, the eros of poiesis that Mary Oppen has recorded? How does one acknowledge not so much (in the current cant expression) "the hatred of poetry" but rather "the hatred between poets"? It is possible to note how generative some hatred or some polemical "dislike" of poetry actually is. There is a lot to dislike in it. (Marianne Moore's formulation in "Poetry" comes with a helpful lack of melodramatic staginess.) So, too, the mutual "hatred (or dislike) between poets" is fiercely generative. Dissensus is energizing; anger, however painful, is provocative. So when dealing with poets, one must interpret and not just deplore the painful, ugly explosions (as between Robert Duncan and Robin Blaser, Duncan and Denise Levertov) or game-changing decisions (as by LeRoi Jones) that realign one's sociality and political allegiances. To a later critic, the causes may be odd or even untraceable, and certainly such explosions have multiple motivations. After the magnetic eros of poiesis, they create antimagnetic force fields.
Fast forward about twenty hard years. In the period beginning in the mid-1950s, turning to Zukofsky was a way of declaring a generally Poundian poetics without having to cope with the increasingly obvious problematic of Pound's clear and continuing political and social allegiances — to fascism and to a nonpersonal anti-Semitism (as in "some of my best friends"). Zukofsky — like Pound then, an obscure, undervalued, intransigent, knowledgeable, hermetic, brilliant, cranky writer of a long poem and of influential essays in poetics — provided a way of affirming Anglo-American radical modernism yet sidestepping its most notable exemplar.
Given the long-ago relationship and then cooling between Oppen and Zukofsky, and the settled "divorce" (with whatever submerged feelings), nothing, circa 1958, could have been more surprising to the ambitious and frustrated Zukofsky than Oppen's reappearance in the United States as a serious poet. There was some mutual reaching out between the families in 1958–1960, but the few encounters had a distinct oil-and-water quality. There were uncanny resemblances: in both cases a small family of three; an almost unreadable (or unparsable) intensity among those three in each case; the complexities of both wives having less visible yet personable artistic careers; the poetic ambitions of both men being (though differently) overwhelming. From Zukofsky's viewpoint, from 1947 on to the later 1950s and beyond it appeared as if his achievements in poetry were finally becoming acknowledged after a deeply felt, embittering neglect. He developed gratifying epistolary ties with, and the respect of, younger poets like Robert Duncan, Robert Creeley, Cid Corman, Jonathan Williams, and others (Robert Kelly, Jerome Rothenberg, and British poet Charles Tomlinson).
Oppen seemed (oddly) shocked that their old friendship and long-ago dialogue could not resume. But Zukofsky had no particular need of Oppen except perhaps as a member of the cadre of those who admired him, possibly even seeing Oppen as an irritant. Zukofsky resented the flowering of Oppen's second career — Oppen being a newer darker horse come up on the outside track when Zukofsky had staked his fame precisely upon being the dark horse of literary history.
Between Oppen and Zukofsky, there were, then, strong differences that became pronounced, then acute, then insurmountable: economic differences occasioning resentment and suspicion, differences of political emphasis and action, differences in career trajectory. Most fundamentally, there were differences in the poetics of "objectification" and "sincerity" as proposed in actual texts, differences that I have, retrospectively, framed as versions of objectivist dissensus.
It is impossible, even in this poetics context, not to account for one of the biographical sources of resentment. The story is focused with distinct narratives around that most poet-ly of potential abrasions: the prospect of publication. Oppen, in part fueled by his own intellectual, poetic, and career momentum after 1958, but certainly buoyed by the interests that his half-sister, June Oppen Degnan, maintained in his literary career and her desire to be making her own kind of literary mark, was able to broker the publication of three objectivist and neo-objectivist books of selected poems plus the appearance of his own new work, The Materials, done by San Francisco Review (supported by June's wealth and fervor) and New Directions — no small plum of dissemination. For whatever reasons of regrounding himself in a talismanic poetics, of quite strategic reentry into the poetry world by constructing a reception context, or of recovering some almost lost poets, Oppen was reexamining "objectivist" writers — Reznikoff, Rakosi, William Bronk (a new entrant), and also Zukofsky. Since Zukofsky already had a painful history of having manuscripts rejected by New Directions in at least 1940 and 1961, one can postulate his fascination with this publication initiative.
However, the price to Zukofsky would have been high. First, he would be appearing in a context where some trace of the rubric "objectivist" as the suggestion of a former "movement" or formation was in play — something he fiercely opposed. Second, he would be accepting a selected poems and discussing this selection with former "student" Oppen (of all people) as an editor standing between himself as poet and the press. Third, he would be agreeing to a representative set of shorter poems when for him many of his poems were singularities — or comprised one total oeuvre, indivisible. A selected shorter poems was proffered from Oppen to Zukofsky as a serious possibility in September 1962; a collected shorter poems was all Zukofsky wanted and all he would accept. So this negotiation in good faith turned bad around October 1962. And finally Zukofsky was indeed published, not by New Directions but by Norton, when his short poems appeared in two paperback volumes accepted by poetry editor Denise Levertov and brokered by Robert Creeley and Robert Duncan. The title (ALL) tells this story of pride and resentment in capital letters. By September 1963 Zukofsky was very angry at Oppen for what he saw as Oppen's failure to accomplish successfully what Zukofsky wanted, needed, and demanded after so many years of neglect.
Zukofsky's developing anger, a second resentment after the loss of income paid by Oppen decades before, folded into and exacerbated his already proud sense of being isolated, excluded, beset, sidelined, overlooked — even by his erstwhile friends. Their models of friendship — to make another theoretical point — differed considerably: Oppen sought the give-and-take, sparring dialogue in a fraternal (even rival-fraternal) relationship. Zukofsky's model of the exchange was of a superior (himself) and his willing foil, wingman, appreciative helper. That is, Zukofsky did not allow with Oppen what he himself had earlier sought from Pound — a fraternal relationship between equals — and he redirected the (anyway rapidly eroding) relationship with Oppen along the pattern of mentor-epigone. In his own self-conception, Zukofsky was the better of the two poets by such a large margin as to make Oppen's positive opinion of his own work not simply derisory and ridiculous but downright insulting to poetry in general and to Zukofsky in particular. Oppen knew this. In a (typically) undated note, this direct address to Zukofsky shows his interior dialogue with an absent interlocutor: "But Louis, you think I haven't earned the poetry? It seems to me that I have."
In this long-frayed former friendship neither, finally, talks to the other, although sometimes each will talk about the other, though in different ways (as to an awed and uncomfortable Charles Tomlinson). The intimate, sometimes repetitive, sometimes staggering meditations and aphorisms that Oppen produced in his later career show that he never stopped talking to Zukofsky or talking about the originary Zukofskian terms 'objectification' and 'sincerity.' Oppen continued to mull, to respond to the statements, choices, and poetry of his long-ago companion-mentor, sometimes not in the most flattering terms, trying to measure a distance that now points to some contemporary uses of their work. Finally, Oppen felt that Zukofsky had taken a wrong path into obfuscation and obscurantism, was misusing his considerable intelligence, and even was acting deviously at various moments.
(Continues…)
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Table of Contents
Contents Acknowledgments Introduction - ‘After’ Objectivism: Sincerity, Objectification, Contingency / W. Scott Howard and Broc Rossell Chapter 1 - Objectivist Poetics, ‘Influence,’ and Some Contemporary Long Poems / Rachel Blau DuPlessis Chapter 2 - “More formal / Than a field would be”; or, Imaginary Gardens with Virtual Poems in Them: On George Oppen and Louise Glück / Graham Foust Chapter 3 - “Listening’s trace”: Reading Lorine Niedecker and Lisa Robertson / Jenny Penberthy Chapter 4 - Macro, Micro, Material: Rachel Blau DuPlessis’s Drafts and the Post-Objectivist Serial Poem / Alan Golding Chapter 5 - John Seed’s Poetics of the Punctum: From Manchester to the “Mayhew Project” / Robert Sheppard Chapter 6 - Meaning It: The Affective Poetics of Social Sincerity / Jeff Derksen Chapter 7 - Against Objectivism: Claudia Rankine’s Citizen / Amy De’Ath Chapter 8 - Women and War, Love, Labor: The Legacy of Lorine Niedecker / Julie Carr Chapter 9 - The Long Moment of Objectivism: Reznikoff, Bäcker, Fitterman, and Holocaust Representation / Steve McCaffery Coda - Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism / Rae Armantrout, Jeanne Heuving, Ruth Jennison, David Lau, Mark McMorris, and Chris Nealon Notes Contributors IndexWhat People are Saying About This
“Poetics and Praxis ‘After’ Objectivism is an important contribution to our understanding of a movement that refused to be labeled a movement. It will be useful for students of modernist and postmodern poetics interested in the evolution of issues first addressed in Zukofsky’s foundational essays, ‘Program: Objectivists 1931’ and ‘Sincerity and Objectification,’ and in the various formal innovations launched by the practitioners. This is a new look at Objectivism’s influence and, equally, a look at the problematic nature of influence in general.”