Notes on Twee #13

“David Riesman considers it to be practically the essence of the means of mass entertainment that it raises consumers, beginning in childhood and constantly accompanying the grown-ups: ‘Today the future occupation of all moppets is to be skilled consumers.’”

— Jürgen Habermas, The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. Thomas Burger, 192. (The Riesman citation is from The Lonely Crowd, p. 81.)

Part of the reason I hesitate to actually write "Notes on Twee" is that I would like there to be more to it than a Frankfurt-style condemnation of consumer culture's infilitration into us ordinary US citizens' hearts and minds. That kind of stuff makes me cringe — it seems so 1950s. But I actually think it might be the best explanation.

Underground Films

Film critic Manny Farber on "Underground Films," 1957:

"…any day now, Americans may realize that scrambling after the obvious in art is a losing game. The sharpest work of the last thirty years is to be found by studying the most unlikely, self-destroying, uncompromising, roundabout artists … The films of the Hawks-Wellman group are underground for more reasons than the fact that the director hides out in sub-surface reaches of his work. The hard-bitten action film finds its natural home in caves: the murky, congested theaters, looking like glorified tattoo parlors on the outside and located near bus terminals in big cities. These theaters roll action films in what, at first, seems like a nightmarish atmosphere of shabby transience, prints that seem overgrown with jungle moss, sound tracks infected with hiccups. The spectator watches two or three action films go by and leaves feeling as though he were a pirate discharged from a giant sponge …

"The action directors accept the role of hack so that they can involve themselves with expedience and tough-guy insight in all types of action: barnstorming, driving, bulldogging. The important thing is not so much the banal-seeming journeys to nowhere that make up the stories, but the tunneling that goes on inside the classic Western-gangster incidents and stock hoodlum-dogface-cowboy types. For instance, Wellman's lean, elliptical talents for creating brassy cheapsters and making gloved references to death, patriotism, masturbation, suggest that he uses private runways to the truth, while more famous directors take a slow, embalming surface route." (Negative Space, 15-17)

Farber's excitingly arguable definition of "underground," which is quite different from what we often take the word to mean when applied to art nowadays, makes me want to do a Keywords-style analysis of it, with particular attention to the evolution of the term in the late 50s/early 60s. The movies that Farber's using "underground" to champion are "male action films" directed by Howard Hawks, William Wellman, Anthony Mann, Robert Aldrich, etc. Briefly, here, Farber seems to want at least three different connotations of "underground" in play:

1. oblique in its formal strategies — "roundabout," "tunneling," and in contradistinction to "scrambling after the obvious"

2. not obviously authored — "the director hides out in sub-surface reaches of his work" — a hiding out which paradoxically confirms the director's ultimate authorship by allowing him to indulge his preference for "private runways to the truth"

3. disreputable — referring both to the films' conditions of viewing ("shabby transience") and their conditions of production and reception ("The action directors accept the role of hack")

For Farber "underground" is a kind of portmanteau concept, combining these three senses (which refer to form, authorship and social status respectively) into a rough category which he can use to classify, and therefore justify, the kinds of films he likes. What Farber doesn't make the word refer to is any type of coterie, conspiracy or social network, which I think has become the primary meaning of "underground" since. (One would assume this usage has political roots, though it would be interesting to try to figure out exactly which ones. A later instance that might reward some attention is the Weather Underground.) He also, while making a point of these filmmaker's opposition or at least indifference to more legitimate film culture, avoids any mention of the "avant-garde," both because it would be silly to apply such a term to Hollywood movies and because he clearly doesn't consider it a prerogative of any of his favorite underground filmmakers to épate la bourgeoisie: that would actually be closer to the sort of over-obvious, over-audience-focused films he attacks elsewhere in the essay.

Thus I think we can isolate, in Farber's article, a relatively pure conception of "underground," before it acquires its decisive association with the "counterculture" (a word yet to be coined). Farber's use remains idiosyncratic, but I think it nonetheless captures the word at an interesting point in its trajectory.

(I may write more on this later, when I read Farber's more famous essay on "White Elephant Art vs. Termite Art.")

Keeping Up with LeRoi Jones

If one wanted a pocket history of late-fifties American avant-garde poetry that was under fifty pages and all by one author, one could do worse than to read LeRoi Jones' 1961 Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note. A teasing little note at the beginning of the book states that "these poems cover a period from 1957 until 1960 … I have arranged the book in as strict a chronological order as I could manage … for reasons best known to other young (?) poets" (parenthetical question mark Jones's). What this refers to I'm not entirely clear, but it's certainly true that Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, more even than most books of poetry so arranged, is clarified enormously by proceeding chronologically. Jones covered a lot of distance in those three years, ending up, on the surface at least, at almost the diametrically opposite point to where he began.

The early poems have a casualness and humor that brings to mind the Beats and Frank O'Hara (all of whom were personal friends of Jones, and published by his Totem Press and Yugen magazine), as well as bearing plenty of traces of E.E. Cummings' easygoing satire. "Hymn for Lanie Poo," the second poem in the book, is a good example: a record of a black man's experiences in white urban bohemia, it features a provocative epigraph from Rimbaud ("Vous etes de faux Négres") and has references to John Coltrane, offhand travesties of academic "high" culture ("Read Garmanda's book, '14 Tribes of / Ambiguity,' didn't like it") and a generally breezy tone. Except for the heightened racial consciousness and occasional dips into a more Gothic register ("Beware the evil sun… / turn you black // crawl your eyeballs // rot your teeth"), this could be a late-fifties poem by O'Hara.

But Jones (like O'Hara himself, in fact) eventually becomes interested not just in expressing his personality but in critiquing it, a process which begins with the (great) sixth poem, "Look For You Yesterday, Here You Come Today." It begins: "Part of my charm: / envious blues feeling / separation of church & state / grim calls from drunk debutantes," the beginning of a poem-long anatomy of Jones' personality and lifestyle which is intricately bound up, not just with his status as a black man in a mostly white subculture, but with his role as literary editor as well:

terrible poems come in the mail. Descriptions of celibate parties
torn trousers: Great Poets dying
with their strophes on. & me
incapable of a simple straightforward
anger.

It's so diffuse
being alive. (15)

From there, Jones goes on to muse O'Hara-ishly about not being a painter, quote O'Hara himself on the value of quietism, contra Kerouac ("Frank walked off the stage, singing / 'My silence is as important as Jack's incessant yatter'"), associate his thoughts with Baudelaire's ("All these thots / are Flowers Of Evil"), get lost in a nostalgic reverie ("What has happened to box tops?"), and finally imagine his own death ("F. Scott Charon / will soon be glad-handing me / like a legionaire / My silver bullets all gone / My black mask trampled in the dust"). Thus the interior movement of this one poem anticipates the movement of Jones' development on the level of oeuvre.

What happens there is unexpected. As I read it, it entails a move away from O'Hara towards an engagement with the canonical texts of High Modernism: in particular, with exactly the quality of Modernism that poets like O'Hara, Ginsberg, Ashbery and Koch were most concerned to protest, its thoroughgoing depressiveness. Two poems in the middle of the book, "Way Out West" and "The Bridge," initiate a new phase in Jones' poetry by imitating and investigating what I'm going to call here the mode of "FUBAR Modernism," the sense of an entire environment gone to pot that in Eliot expresses itself elegiacally and, often through the use of the affective fallacy, lyrically as well. This return to Eliot, who Koch would later call "the Great Dictator / Of literature" (and not even exactly a return: let's keep in mind that Eliot was still alive in 1961, and if he was out of fashion with the avant-garde he was, in many ways, at the peak of his cultural power in the literary mainstream), is pretty surprising in a fellow-traveler of the Beats, Black Mountain and New York School, none of whom had much use for Eliot, preferring Pound and Williams if they had to have Modernist forebears at all.

I feel I could make a case for Eliot's pervasiveness throughout the whole second half of Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note, but for simplicity's sake I'll stick to the two poems aforementioned. Here's "Way Out West" in its entirety:

As simple an act
as opening the eyes. Merely
coming into things by degrees.

Morning: some tear is broken
on the wooden stairs
of my lady's eyes. Profusions
of green. The leaves. Their
constant prehensions. Like old
junkies on Sheridan Square, eyes
cold and round. There is a song
Nat Cole sings … This city
& the intricate disorder
of the seasons.

Unable to mention
something as abstract as time.

Even so, (bowing low in thick
smoke from cheap incense; all
kinds questions filling the mouth,
till you suffocate & fall dead
to opulent carpet.) Even so,

shadows will creep over your flesh
& hide your disorder, your lies.

There are unattractive wild ferns
outside the window
where the cats hide. They yowl
from there at nights. In heat
& bleeding on my tulips.

Steel bells, like the evil
unwashed Sphinx, towing in the twilight.
Childless old murderers, for centuries
with musty eyes.

I am distressed. Thinking
of the seasons, how they pass,
how I pass, my very youth, the
ripe sweet of my life; drained off…

Like giant rhesus monkeys;
picking their skulls,
with ingenious cruelty
sucking out the brains.

No use for beauty
collapsed, with moldy breath
done in. Insidious weight
of cankered dreams. Tiresias'
weathered cock.

Walking into the sea, shells
caught in the hair. Coarse
waves tearing the tongue.

Closing the eyes. As
simple an act. You float (24)

That the poem describes the contemplation of suicide should be obvious (even if Jones' book title didn't nudge us toward that reading). But it also narrates the passing of a day, beginning with "opening the eyes" and ending with "closing" them, though both are understood as "simple … act[s]" that contain within them the possibility of death, which is just as easy to bring on as wakefulness or sleep. As in Eliot, there is a constant toggling between dramatic or autobiographical details and purer image-making. There is also a tension between lyric and jeremiad, if we take the former to be the questioning of the self and the latter to be the questioning of the world. The textbook lyrical move of describing his "lady's eyes" leads him first to the natural world ("The / leaves. Their constant prehensions") and then to a corruption of it, as those eyes are in turn compared to "old / junkies on Sheridan Square" in a way that gives a wider characterization of the urban landscape in which our narrator dwells, a landscape which, as in Eliot, undermines the lyric impulse while paradoxically strengthening its effects (cf. Kant on disgust). The speaker, thrown once again into this sordid world, thinks of but does not quote from one of its more pleasant manifestations, a "Nat [King] Cole" song (an obvious update of the music hall numbers Eliot inserted into The Waste Land), and then free-associates across an ellipsis about "[t]his city / & the intricate disorder / of the seasons": an intricate disorder which recalls that which "breeds lilacs out of the dead land," the "stony rubbish" of "The Burial of the Dead." (I take it as significant that there is natural growth in Eliot's poem: it just appears as perverse, unnatural.) Writing a poem in what he sees as a waste land, but after Eliot, and after the avant-garde reaction against Eliot, Jones feels unentitled to the later Eliot's devices for coping with such misery: he is "[u]nable to mention / something as abstract as time" as in the redemptive Four Quartets (though of course Jones, in asserting this, has just mentioned it). Moving a little faster, we find "creep[ing]" "shadows," a personal "intricate disorder" ("your disorder") to match that of the city's, a dip into the rhetoric of pastoral elegy ("Thinking / of the seasons, how they pass, / how I pass, my very youth, the / ripe sweet of my life; drained off…"), horrible visceral images of the kind Eliot's early poetry is full of ("Childless old murderers," "giant rhesus monkeys") and then a final double echo, first of The Waste Land ("No use for beauty / collapsed … Tiresias' / weathered cock") and then, climactically, of "Prufrock" ("Walking into the sea, shells / caught in the hair. Coarse / waves tearing the tongue"): walk, sea, hair, drowning.

The next poem in the book, "The Bridge," takes up a different High Modernist author, one less eminent and influential than Eliot but perhaps even better as a symbol of the FUBAR aesthetic, since he actually killed himself: Hart Crane. The poem is not formally much like Crane, but it pays him unmistakable homage in its title and in its imagery.

I have forgotten the head
of where I am. Here at the bridge. 2
bars, down the street, seeming
to wrap themselves around my fingers, the day,
screams in me: pitiful like a little girl
you sense will be dead before the winter
is over.

I can't see the bridge now, I've past
it, its shadow, we drove through, headed out
along the cold insensitive roads to what
we wanted to call "ourselves."
"How does the bridge go?"

Here the bridge is also a musical bridge, and the poem can be understood as written from the perspective of a jazz musician. This realization renders the first strophe almost Metaphysical in its playfulness, with existential confusion figured as losing one's way in a song ("I have forgotten the head / of where I am") and "bars" meaning both measures of time in music and places where you drink alcohol, both of which are felt as mysteriously constricting ("seeming to wrap themselves around my fingers"). But music really appeals to Jones as a symbol of the unfreezable flow of time, a forward-rushing movement that cannot be seized at any one moment without losing its integrity: "The changes are difficult, when / you hear them, & know they are all in you, the chords // of your disorder meddle with your would be disguises." The obvious play is on "changes" as both chord changes and historical changes, both of which are "difficult" in the sense of jarring but which are felt as corresponding to some innate and inchoate need of the self, "your disorder" as opposed to "your would be disguises." My claim, a little bit of a stretch maybe, is that it's not just free jazz — and the postwar, postmodern moment associated with it — that Jones is talking about here, but also Crane's The Bridge, and Modernism. This has been left behind for what is already, by the late 50s, observable on the horizon as the coming of Confessionalism, which Jones presciently sees as abandoning monumental expression to travel down "the cold insensitive roads to what / we wanted to call 'ourselves.'"

The second half of the poem starts: "(Late feeling)," indicating a kind of postscript I suppose, the morning after the jazz performance maybe, but also continuing the theme of time, and of belatedness. It continues:

Way down till it barely, after that rush of
wind & odor reflected from hills you have forgotten the color
when you touch the water, & it closes, slowly, around your head.

Another image of immersion, death by water, suicide. But:

The bridge will be behind you, that music you know, that place,
you feel when you look up to say, it is me, & I have forgotten,
all the things, you told me to love, to try to understand, the
bridge will stand, high up in the clouds & the light, & you,

(when you have let the song run out) will be sliding through
unmentionable black. (26)

"The bridge will be behind you": literally in time (because the performance is over) but also figuratively in memory (because the forward-looking avant-garde is leaving The Bridge behind, and The Waste Land, or so they think). I read the passage, then, as expressing a certain melancholy for the moment of 20s/30s Modernism — a time when, arguably, jazz and avant-garde writing were more closely socially associated; in any case, a monumental timelessness ("the bridge will stand") placed in opposition to contemporary triviality, "all the things, you told me to love, to try to understand" (the pop cultural detritus celebrated in O'Hara's work, and in Preface's first six poems). Without the fixity and permanence of "the bridge" (a bridge between white and black experience? a testament to the potential of communal, human making?), the speaker of the poem is doomed to slide into solipsism, to racial and social isolation, "unmentionable black."

I guess what interests me most about this reading of Jones (which could be totally off the mark: I should admit I don't know almost any of his later, more militant work) is that it really fucks with the historical narrative that sees postwar poets, particularly ones with political leanings, rebelling against the High Modernist aesthetic of Eliot, Pound, Crane, etc. I'd argue that this is truer of essentially apolitical poets like Robert Lowell and (gulp) John Ashbery, who refuse High Modernism for affective reasons — it's not the mood, the tone they want to project — rather than because they see it is ideologically or communicatively faulty. This doesn't have to be a question of competing metaphysics, or its objectification ("poetics"), it's just rhetoric: the language of and The Waste Land and The Bridge is more "political" — i.e. more strident, stirring, closer to agitprop and soapbox speeches — than the language of Life Studies and Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Even if "the personal is the political," the persons involved have to speak to and convince each other: as Eliot puts it in Sweeney Agonistes, "I gotta use words when I talk to you."

For the trajectory of influence in Preface to a Twenty-Volume Suicide Note is so clearly from O'Hara to Eliot, and not the other way around: that is, from personality to impersonality. And it is exactly personality, in O'Hara's sense, which is rejected by Jones as hegemonic, pedagogical, and totalizing ("all the things, you told me to love, to try to understand"). The mode of Eliot (and the example of Crane), on the other hand, offer him a different kind of expression.

Howl, New Jersey, Holla

Have either of you looked at a little book called The Poem that Changed America: "Howl" Fifty Years Later? Silly title, I know, but it's actually pretty useful. The collection is edited by Jason Shinder, Ginsberg's personal assistant from the late 70s on, and his introduction is kind of embarrassingly idolatrous and not very well-written. But the volume does bring together a number of interesting reactions to "Howl" (by, among others, Amiri Baraka, Marjorie Perloff (who argues that Ginsberg is a direct inheritor of Modernism [OK, fine, whatever] and that "Howl" is really about WWII [more interesting]), Billy Collins (!), John Cage, and Rick Moody) as well as including a facsimile of the original mimeographed edition, which "costed [sic] $10.00 typed by poet Robert Creely [sic] dittoed by Martha Rexroth transported by me to the hands of Robert Lavigne [sic] in exchange for several drawings," according to Ginsberg's inscription. (Doesn't $10 seem like kind of a lot of money for 1956? Seems like one could do a Lawrence Rainey-esque analysis of the economics of this first presentation.)

A couple of remarks about the poem itself: has anyone written on the possible influence of W.H. Auden on Ginsberg? Auden is mentioned in Shinder's preface as one of Ginsberg's "'enemies'," but also an "eternal presence": I don't know much about their personal relationship. But on this reading I notice quite a few touches which seem Audenesque; for one, the unexpected dropping and adding of definite articles (examples include "the drear light of Zoo" and "the last fantastic book thrown out of the tenement window"). This is something Auden does a lot, and I think the effect in his poems is usually to either particularize or universalize the rhetorical situation of any given poem: kind of a Zoom-In/Zoom-Out effect. In "Howl," Ginsberg utilizes this to keep the reader involved on a macrosociological level ("this is an important poem: it's about a generation, it's about a nation, it's about history") and on a more micro-, affective/emotional level ("this is about the author, his friends, his mother, or me"). It's a technique Whitman uses too, of course, but Ginsberg's interest in including shabby, sordid or ironic details which temporarily undercut the grandeur of the macro-phrases (e.g. "in beards and shorts with big pacifist eyes sexy in their dark skin passing out incomprehensible leaflets"; compare "Spain 1937") is closer to (early) Auden, I think.

Second idea: Ginsberg's insistent return to New Jersey place names ("Paterson," "Newark," "the filthy Passaic," etc.), among, admittedly, a lot of other place names, has to be understood, in its historical context, as a very complicated rhetorical move. Because New Jersey was not just where Ginsberg was from, and thus a signifier of the "real" or the "autobiographical," but also, by the mid-1950s, a landscape that was newly literary, thanks to the ecstatic critical reception of William Carlos Williams' still-in-progress Paterson. As Perloff points out her chapter on him in The Poetics of Indeterminacy, the publication of Paterson had finally secured a major reputation for Williams, long considered a marginal figure of the Modernist movement. Thus Paterson, which ten years earlier would have been fairly meaningless as a literary signifier, now evokes a whole complex of ideas about Modernism and American poetry that Ginsberg slyly insists upon. (And WCW also wrote the introduction to Howl's first commercial edition, as Adrienne pointed out months ago.)

Anyway, it's interesting to think of the symbolic capital that New Jersey acquires in this period, as the breeding ground of the only ideologically correct,* homegrown version of High Modernism (Williams') as well as the most incendiary updating/challenging of the academic version of Modernism: significantly a humble state, in proximity to a great metropolis but not containing it, a place synonymous with the simple, homely and plain, which also just happens to be the site of some of the worst industrial exploitation and ecological spoilage in the entire country. This is quite a different pole to orient us than London or New York, and the attitude of its writers to it is also significantly different: sure, it's a waste land, they tell us, but it's our waste land, and we like it that way. And this in turn might have something to do with the remarks by Leslie Fiedler that Adrienne just posted, about the American mediation (some would say adulteration) of Modernism through regionalism. But I'm getting hungry, so I'd better stop here and drag myself through some Brooklyn streets to go looking for a sandwich fix.

* If you ignore the Communism.

Remembering the Thirties

By Donald Davie:

I

Hearing one saga, we enact the next.
We please our elders when we sit enthralled;
But then they're puzzled; and at least they've vexed
To have their youth so avidly recalled.

It dawns upon the veterans after all
That what for them were agonies, for us
Are high-brow thrillers, though historical;
And all their feats quite strictly fabulous.

This novel written fifteen years ago,
Set in my boyhood and my boyhood home,
These poems about "abandoned workings," show
Worlds more remote than Ithaca or Rome.

The Anschluss, Guernica — all the names
At which those poets thrilled or were afraid
For me mean schools and schoolmasters and games;
And in the process some-one is betrayed.

Ourselves perhaps. The Devil for a joke
Might carve his own initials on our desk,
And yet we'd miss the point because he spoke
An idiom too dated, Audenesque.

Ralegh's Guiana also killed his son.
A pretty pickle if we came to see
The tallest story really packed a gun,
The Telemachiad an Odyssey.

II

Even to them the tales were not so true
As not to be ridiculous as well;
The ironmaster met his Waterloo,
But Rider Haggard rode along the fell.

"Leave for Cape Wrath tonight!" They lounged away
On Fleming's trek or Isherwood's ascent.
England expected every man that day
To show his motives were ambivalent.

They played the fool, not to appear as fools
In time's long glass. A deprecating air
Disarmed, they thought, the jeers of later schools;
Yet irony itself is doctrinaire,

And curiously, nothing now betrays
Their type to time's derision like this coy
Insistence on the quizzical, their craze
For showing Hector was a mother's boy.

A neutral tone is nowadays preferred.
And yet it may be better, if we must,
To praise a stance impressive and absurd
Than not to see the hero for the dust.

For courage is the vegetable king,
The sprig of all ontologies, the weed
That beards the slag-heap with his hectoring,
Whose green adventure is to run to seed.

(1953)

Erving Goffman, the 50s and Literature

Sociology: what is it good for? For students of literature, that is. I'm pondering this question as generals loom. Still on my list, yet to be cracked, are Pierre Bourdieu's Distinction and Jurgen Habermas' The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere — both works that have already influenced my thinking via my hazy preconceptions of what they are likely to say, but which I must admit I'm scared to actually confront. And even more scared to have to talk about in front of a committee who might actually know something about them.

One sociology book I have managed to read, however, as previously mentioned, is Erving Goffman's The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. I have some ideas about how I might eventually be able to work this into a developing thesis idea about the social self-presentation of poets and the genealogy that stretches from Eliot to Auden to Ashbery, but I will leave those aside for another day. In the meantime, I'll just give a sketch of some first impressions of Goffman, in the hope that they might lead to something more fruitful later.

I was turned on to Goffman originally by Jeff Nunokawa, who used a little bit of I think Frame Analysis in his Victorian novel seminar as a conceptual framework to talk about "awayness" and the evasion of the social totality (Jeff, in his own personal conceptual system, plays Goffman off against Foucault). He is (still?) highly regarded as a sociologist who facilitated a paradigm shift within the discipline from the macro- to the micro- level, i.e. studying not broad social trends or "laws" but actual human behavior as collected by experts in the field operating similarly to anthropologists.

Anyway, The Presentation of Self is a weird, crafty, idiosyncratic little book that is equal parts empirical survey, philosophical treatise, etiquette guide and public relations manual. Its basic subject is "the art of impression management": how people strive to make other people feel a certain way about them, or to limit or control the information others have about them. (This theme gets its best literary expression, to my knowledge anyway, in the works of David Foster Wallace.) To this end, Goffman uses "some language of the stage," speaking of performances, backstage areas, rehearsals and improvisations, etc., only to retract this conceit on the second-to-last page in a headspinning rhetorical move: "The claim that all the world's a stage is sufficiently commonplace for readers to be familiar with its limitations and tolerant of its presentation" (254) — that is, this very claim, on which the whole book has been based, was itself an impression-management strategy. It made me slap my forehead when I read it.

Though Goffman focuses on real-time interactions and thus is naturally led to use theatrical terminology, the manipulations he describes could just as well be those of a novelist, or a poet, both of whom also work by carefully controlling the amount of information, both literary and extra-literary, given to the audience of their work. In fact, one thing that distinguishes Goffman from sociologists past (Weber, Durkheim) and future (Bourdieu) is his conscious literariness. Not only is his own prose style economical and attractive, clearly learned from reading short stories and New Yorker profiles, but he often takes his clinching examples from literary sources: some of the authors he quotes from at length include Kenneth Burke (25, 175, 194), Henry Mayhew (41), Kafka (96), Warren Miller (97), Evelyn Waugh (101), Orwell (122), Melville (137), Gore Vidal (193) and Mary McCarthy (219) (as well as stuff like Character, Manner and Customs in the People of India and Ebony magazine). And it must be admitted that he sometimes comes off like a frustrated novelist himself ("So, too, members of the team must not exploit their presence in the front region in order to stage their own show, as do, for example, marriageable stenographers who sometimes encumber their office surroundings with a lush undergrowth of high fashion," 214). There's a lot of that sort of thing, sometimes a little too much: a number of Goffman's categories seem like opportunities for examples rather than helpful distinctions in their own right.
Goffman is also, noticeably, a creature of the 50s, receptive to the literary and intellectual influences of that time. One of the more interesting features of Goffman's book are its periodic mentions of Jean-Paul Sartre and Simone de Beauvoir. Sartre's Being and Nothingness supplies a description of a waiter in a café who "is playing at being a waiter in a café": "The child plays with his body in order to explore it, to take inventory of it; the waiter in the café plays with his condition in order to realize it" (76). De Beauvoir's The Second Sex is quoted a few times to describe the attitude of women (problematically labelled "woman," a usage not followed by Goffman) to their performances in the presence of men: "Confronting man woman is always play-acting; she lies when she makes believe that she accepts her status as the inessential other … With other women, a woman is behind the scenes; she is polishing her equipment, but not in battle; she is getting her costume together, preparing her make-up, laying out her tactics…" (113).

On the one hand, Goffman's quotations from Sartre and De Beauvoir clearly have something to do with the widespread popularity of Existentialism in America in the 50s; this vogue both explains why the quotes impressed Goffman and why he feels they will bolster his argument with a "lay" "literary" reader. But in another sense Sartre seems an odd choice of hero, given that Goffman (a) doesn't seem to be much interested in metaphysics, or abstract thinking of any kind, and (b) avoids any explicit discussion of politics. And yet Sartre and De Beauvoir were also associated with and influenced by Maurice Merleau-Ponty, author of The Structure of Behavior and The Phenomenology of Perception — both Goffman-ish titles. And while I don't know squat about phenomenology — just that it was also being enthusiastically received in the art critical world at about this time, by Michael Fried for instance, and that it made my eyes glaze over in college — it's clearly this aspect of Existentialism, and not so much its concern with "being" or "commitment," that interested Goffman.

Well, how about this. A vogue for phenomenology suits a sudden awareness of an explosion of phenomena: and that's what the affluence of the American postwar economy, with all its attendant cultural renaissances, produced. And there was apparently also an explosion of sociological research conducted and published in the 1950s (much of it, I think, under Goffman's supervision). Reading The Presentation of Self in Everyday Life you get the feeling that we have so much more data on 1950s America than we do on any previous society. While Goffman occasionally dips back into earlier eras (often Victorian or eighteenth-century England) for his examples, he rarely "historicizes" in the sense of accounting for changes in values or social agreements from one period to another. I would have to think that this close focus on the current day was fairly radical for the field of sociology, which, in its development out of Hegelian philosophy and traditional social history, would have been interested in nothing so much as epochal change. My question is, how much of Goffman's contentment with "now" was tied to a general sense in the America of the 50s that, after centuries of talking around the subject, everyday life itself was finally being discovered, a notion that is connected both to the public events of the time — the Kinsey Report comes up in passim — and the gradual permeation of such intellectual events as Freudianism and phenomenology into American life? It's a notion, at any rate, that prepares the way for Confessionalism, and for the Beat poets.

A final question. Can Goffman meaningfully be called a Modernist, or even placed in respect to the intellectual influence of Modernism? This is tricky. His literary sources (with a few interesting exceptions, like Kafka) are straight-ahead novelistic realism, because that's where the source of the best information lies. He shows little concern with language, and much with physicality and expression, making his work hard to subsume under the heading of "the linguistic turn" that is often seen to be Modernism's theoretical counterpart. (On the other hand, it suggests points of contact with the later Wittgenstein.) In his concern with "everyday life" rather than "culture," with the facts of contemporary social life rather than what it evolved out of or might be tending toward, he is not at all in the semi-metaphysical tradition of Eliot, Leavis and Raymond Williams. But clearly he's in no way a throwback to 19th century intellectual traditions either: he engages with Freud, with Simmel and Durkheim, with literature. He recognizes modernity has taken place, but he prefers to anatomize and catalogue it than to situate it in a larger historical or theoretical framework. For this reason the Modernist he most resembles is probably Joyce, the Balzacian Joyce who bragged about Ulysses being a blueprint from which turn-of-the-century Dublin could be reconstructed.
Or maybe Beckett: "Performers are aware they foster and ordinarily also possess destructive information about the show," Goffman states on page 144. Waiting for Godot had its American premiere in 1956, Endgame in 1957; a dedicated follower of Existentialism would presumably have been aware of them. This last point raises the question of what I'll risk calling the postmodernity of Goffman's approach, and it's closely connected with one of my biggest problems with his book in general. It seems to me that Goffman's concept of "destructive information" (first used on page 141) is seriously flawed. Putting my objection in short, analytically unrigorous form: just how sensitive are we, anyway? Goffman sometimes talks as though the merest breeze that happens along could destroy the delicate ecosystems of human interaction that he so minutely anatomizes. Social relations are more adaptable and impervious than that, as the early work of Stanley Cavell (in my view a direct inheritor of Goffman: but more on that trajectory another day) shows quite extensively. Goffman, for one thing, is so eagle-eyed himself that he fails to account for the fact of repression, or willful not-noticing, that the more Freudian Cavell so doggedly attends to in essays like "Knowing and Acknowledging." But this emphasis on the ever-present possibility of destruction, far from being a mere weakness on Goffman's part, may point to something bigger, a distinctively postwar epistemic framework that extends inexorably to where we are now: that is, we are getting used to being disillusioned — perhaps Adorno would say "disenchanted" — consistently, and in every aspect of our cultural life. (This is a condition perhaps also anticipated by Wittgenstein, whose Philosophical Investigations was made available and became influential only after the Second World War.)

Hypothesis: in the postmodern period, disillusionment itself becomes the frame in which cultural activity — and not just, but especially, literary activity — is automatically viewed.

Corollary: it's time for a nap.

Die, Modernism, Die

Yep, it was literary critics killed Modernism, not poets (though many of them poet-critics: not exactly sure what to make of that). And it was accomplished not through any sort of polemical attack, but through a simultaneous collective lowering of expectations, and a willingness to rest on laurels. We know everything we need to know, the argument ran, to write great poetry now: and if you don't know, you haven't been paying attention. In that case, God help you.

Exhibit A: R.P. Blackmur's "Lord Tennyson's Scissors: 1912-1950," an overview of the Modernist period published in 1951 as the epilogue to his collection Language as Gesture. "Forty years of poetry took their rise in Eliot, Yeats, and Pound," Blackmur says, condensing a half century's worth of complex aesthetic and political wrangling into three Big Names to set alongside Shakespeare-Marlowe-Jonson, Wordsworth-Coleridge-Southey and Shelley-Keats-Blake. I'm just going to quote some (OK, a lot of) stuff from this essay, because some of it is helpful, a lot of it is funny (and unfair), and all of it gives a good index of how even the most pro-Modernist critics wanted to wrap things up and move on to the next thing by the beginning of the 50s:

On Yeats: "neither his vices nor his poetry ever quitted him" (424)

On 1922: "1922 seems the great year of our time — especially if you let the months run a little both ways — for it holds a good many of Yeats' Tower poems, Pound's first eight Cantos, and Eliot's The Waste Land, not to mention Ulysses, the finishing of The Magic Mountain, and the beginning of The Counterfeiters. The year 1922 is almost inexhaustible in all the arts" (426)

On Pound and prosody: "The general prosody of the 'teens and 'twenties had equally little to do with the practice of Yeats, Pound, and Eliot … and with the practice of the old conservatives. The general prosody was perhaps the weakest and least conscious in English since the dead poetry of the mid-sixteenth century. It ran, under various guises and doctrines, toward a combination of absolute doggerel and absolute expressionism. Ezra Pound was as responsible as anyone for this condition, not by the progress of his own work but by the procession of manifestoes which he promulgated by letter and print. His doctrine, however it may have promoted the incentive of writing, only got in the way of full work and when it got stronger, deeply damaged, though it never destroyed, his expressive powers" (427)

On "the ideographic method" and expressionism: "The procedure is very tempting, always, to get rid of what is behind one and what is ahead of one, neither by capitulation nor by mastery, but by declaring an arbitrary substitute. Then expression becomes immediate, which is good, and spontaneous, which is not; for spontaneity is the curse of poetry to at least the same degree that neologism is the curse of language. But the temptation is very deep; Art, as Maritain says, Art bitten by poetry longs to be freed from reason, but so long as nothing is substituted for reason the longing is not fatal and may indeed promote a fresh and rejoicing sense of disorder, as The Waste Land did, or a new underground for reason, as the work of Valéry and Mallarmé did" (428)

On Basic English: "What, should we get rid of our ignorance, of the very substance of our lives, merely in order to understand one another?" (428)

On the "heroization of the sensibility": "What [the modern poets] did was to make just enough of a prosody to heroize the sensibility and not quite enough to make a heroic statement. Just enough meter to make a patter, just enough rhyme to make a noise, just enough reason to make an argument; never enough of anything to bind together what came out of the reservoir of their extraordinary sensibility into possible poetry … This bad poetry is not worth reference in itself; it is here only to represent the condition of the language and the state of ambition in which an unusually large amount of good — or partly good — poetry got written" (428-429)

On flatness/prosiness: "Verse should be written, said Pound, not to the metronome but in the sequence of the musical phrase. The prose tradition alone produces flatness, inhibits song, and excludes behavior; and I see no sense in welcoming these disorders, as Eliot has done in parts of the Quartets and as Schwartz has done in all but his earliest work, as other and desirable forms of order. I do not refer to careless writing but to deliberate flatness; which is only the contemporary form of Georgian deliquescence" (429)
[this opinion will become particularly interesting in the context of Ashbery, I think]

On solipsism and "the real world": "…it seems to have been an age when the sensibility took over much of the task of poetry. That is why we have created so many private worlds each claiming ascendancy over the real world about which nothing, or nearly nothing got said. That is why, too, Yeats and Eliot (though not Pound, except rarely) were almost alone able to express a version — an actual form — of the real world. In each the sensibility had other grounds than itself; the ground of beseeching, history, faith or momentum and the other ground, no less important to poetry, of prosody." (430)


Then there's a long section where RPB runs down all the various "schools" of Modernism (what Graves and Riding call "dead movements"), those not entirely assimilable to the traditions created by Yeats, Eliot or Pound. This is the fun part:

1. "the parallel Old-Timers' school, what we might call the school of Chaucer and the Ballad; think of Hardy, Housman, Robinson, and Frost … Reading them, we see why Pound does not occupy a first position, but a position on one side. The superlative metric of Pound may be a clue to their weakness but it would never furnish an understanding of their imperfect strength. Their work stands ready to infect the work of young men who have not yet found a form for their ambition and who can no longer, since they apprehend what has happened to it, heroize their sensibility. At least I should suppose there might be a coming race of poets who would want to reverse Maritain's phrase and say Art, bitten by reason, longs to be freed from poetry: from the spontaneous and the private and the calculated public worlds. There might be a race of poets, that is, who would woo the excited miracles of absolute statement, not as a refuge, but to get their work done" (432)
[to me, this seems to presage a lot of the most accepted poetry today, in both America and Britain; what Ron Silliman calls the School of Quietude. More on this some other day, maybe.]

2. "the Apocalyptic or Violent school … Here is where we find the remains of Vachel Lindsay, the evangel of enthusiastic rebirth; Robinson Jeffers, the classical Freudian; Roy Campbell the animal, authoritarian evangel of anti-culture; Carl Sandburg, the bard of demagogic anti-culture; and of course others … All these stem poetically and emotionally from Whitman-Vates: and all are marked by ignorance, good will, solipsism, and evangelism … nor should we think of them even so briefly as more than false alarms if it were not for the two extraordinary talents that must be grouped with them … D.H. Lawrence and Hart Crane … Each is a blow in the face but neither can hit you twice" (433)

3. "another school of anti-intelligence … They got rid of too much of their reason, and as a result they effervesced rather than expressed, and what is left is flat. Nameless they shall be here; they belonged only to their principal journal transition. What was wrong with them is clear when you see how weak is their imitation of Apollinaire, Aragon, Cocteau, Soupault [!], and how great their misunderstanding of Mallarmé, Rilke, Joyce, Kafka, and Pirandello: all men who longing to be freed from reason had a kind of bottom supply of it. Neither the English nor the Americans have ever been very good at this sort of thing. Let us say that we have not so much of reason that we can afford to lose any of it; we need it to make our nonsense real as well as genuine; and one would say that in this respect prosody was a form of reason" (433-434)
[obviously, this will have renewed significance in the 60s with New York School et al.]

4. "the school of Donne into which the largest number of individual writers of good verse fall when shaken up and let settle … they are difficult in style, violent in their constructed emotions, private with actual secrecy in meaning. There is in their work a wrestling struggle toward statement, a struggle through paradox and irony … and the detritus of convictions. The statements are therefore impossible to make, but the effort to make them is exciting because genuine …" [here he includes John Crowe Ransom, Allen Tate, John Wheelwright, William Empson and Hugh MacDiarmid]
"The general poetry at the center of our time takes the compact and studiable conceit of Donne with the direct eccentricity, vision, and private symbolism of Blake; takes from Hopkins the incalculable and unreliable freedom … of sprung rhythm, and the concentration camp of the single word; and from Emily Dickinson takes spontaneous snatched idiom and wooed accidental inductableness. It is a Court poetry, learned at its fingertips and full of a decorous willfulness called ambiguity. It is, in a mass society, a court poetry without a court" (434-435)

5. William Carlos Williams: "To him beauty is absolute and falls like the rain, like the dream of rain in a dry year. He is, if you like, the imagism of 1912 self-transcended. He is contact without tact; he is objectivism without objective … The neo-classicist and the neo-barbarian are alike in this: their vitality is without choice or purpose" (435)

6. Stevens/Moore/Cummings
"Each, so to speak, is full of syllables where [Yeats, Eliot and Pound] are full of words. Each is a kind of dandy, or connoisseur, a true mountebank of behavior made song … let us say they make an equilateral triangle of three styles hung like a pendant from the three major styles" (436)

a. Wallace Stevens is a dandy and a Platonist … You need an old dictionary and an old ear to get his beauty: as if he had to find an unfamiliar name before the beauty of his perception could emerge; and it is along these lines that you have to think of the French symbolists' influence upon him. They taught Eliot the anti-poetic and the conversational style; Stevens they taught the archaic and the rhetorical; that is, Eliot and Stevens saw the one prosody running in opposite directions. But Stevens is in essence of a very old tradition, French and Platonic, working on a modern substance … He should have lived in the age of Pope; with his sensibility and his syllables he could have made rational statements with more beauty than that age was capable of. But as he is, he is 'the tranquil jewel in this confusion'" (436)

b. Marianne Moore "has written the most complex syllabic verse of our time: as if she brought French numbers to English rhythms with no principle of equivalence. But she is not the syllabist as dandy but as connoisseur; she is the syllabist of the actual, the metrist of the immediate marvel… There is a correspondence here to the coerced heightened perception (the forced close observation) in the painting of still-life. Poetry is to her, as she says, an imaginary garden with real toads in it. She knows all about the toads because she has imagined the garden; as you look suddenly everywhere there is the disengaged leap of a green or a brown toad, all warts, all soft, all leaping, all real. If there is not much other reality there, and there seldom is in a connoisseur's garden, you bring her, or ignore, the life she hasn't got just because what she has got is do real: you bring or ignore as with a shut-in whom you love" (436-437)
[this is, incidentally, both one of the most eloquent and the most spectacularly condescending statements about MM ever made]

c. E.E. Cummings "is the child turned poet, the child with that terrifying and incomplete dimension. Otherwise put, Cummings is the traditionalist who insists on the literal content of his tradition without re-understanding its sources: this is, of course, the easiest form of eccentricity and the most human form of fanaticism … He has too little a developed self ever to escape from it except waywardly, when you want either to console him or beat him … He was educated by Edmund Spenser, the English sonneteers, Keats, Swinburne, the funny-papers, and John Bunyan; but perhaps he was most educated by the things that were left out that would have gone to make a structured mind. All he knows is by enthusiasm, habit, and aversion. He refuses the job of the full intelligence, preferring intimacy with what he loves and contempt for what he hates; and he accepts what love and hatred give as if they made all the music of a full mind … if he were not part of a going concern larger than he, he would be nothing. Here again is a case where prosody is an instrument of reason. Like the wilder currencies in the age of Veluta (or like the serried marks of Hitler [!!!]) Cummings' experimental typography depends on the constant presence of the standard it departs from and would be worthless if not measured against it" (437-438)
[seems like some of these ideas — or prejudices, if you like — could be usefully applied to Kenneth Koch]


Blackmur finishes up by assessing "the further development and release, still inchoate to these observations, of the doomed school of Auden about 1930" with its "deliberate approach to doggerel through Skelton, the Ballads, the immediate situation, and the multi-valenced distrust of self combined to produce the new flat style" (438-439): again, this suspicion of "flatness," and an interesting offhand use of the rhetoric of "doomedness" so often applied to the poets of 1890s (which, as RPB must be thinking of, produced Yeats). He also looks toward "the generation born between 1913 and 1918: Shapiro, Barker, Schwartz, Thomas, Berryman, Manifold, Lowell, Betjeman, Meredith, and Reed" (I must admit I have no idea who half these people are). Solemnly passing the torch to these promising whippersnappers, Blackmur delivers the New Critic's version of "you kids today don't know how good you've got it": "they have the enormous advantage over their predecessors that there is an idiom ready for them to develop according to their own needs" (439). So this is what it has come to, Modernism is "an idiom," and no longer anything like a movement, or even a set of loosely concatenatable authors and texts. "We might have a great age out of them yet," he reckons, but if they do succeed it will be because they keep ploughing the same furrow as the Big Three (or at least their equilateral pendant): "[t]hey have more than a chance — it is half done for them — to develop out of personality the most objective of all creations, the least arbitrary and spontaneous, a style."

Countdown to "arbitrary and spontaneous" begins now.

Change of plans

I'm in a crisis. Originally I had planned to read English, American and a smattering of French poetry from 1870 straight through to 1970: basically the series that begins in Baudelaire and ends in John Ashbery, which we might reductively call French Poetry Coming In and Fucking With the English Tradition (or FPCIFWET for short). Piece of cake, right? In doing so, I'd hoped to avoid making a clear Modernism/Postmodernism break, basically relying on Ashbery's and the other New York Schoolers' productive re-readings of Modernism to help me tie it all up into a single revisionist Santa Claus narrative.

But now I think I need to stop at the 50s. It's just too hard to link it all together. Even by the beginning of the 40s the series is losing its internal coherence, everything is changing, you can feel it, the major Modernists are hardening into caricatures who can be toppled by the merest breeze of common-sense, England is a different England and America a different America and France is like the dozenth of a succession of different Frances, although not everybody in all of them seem to have realized it yet.

I'm reading Randall Jarrell's "The Obscurity of the Poet" today and the tone is so despairing and reactionary compared to earlier essays on Modernism and its social reception. The thing about this "early postmodern" period (let's say roughly 1940-1950) is that it can be easily overlooked because poetry doesn't actually change all that much: the work of Jarrell, Lowell, Berryman and Bishop seem pretty much like a natural outgrowth, maybe even a watering-down, of the expected Modernists like Yeats, Eliot and Auden, with Pound becoming ascendant in some of the more marginal quarters. But the self-justifications, and the climate in which such justifications seem necessary, are qualitatively different. The trajectory from Graves and Riding in 1927 (stubborn, brilliant resistance of Modernist dogma) to Burke and Wilson in 1931 (gentle skepticism about some of Modernism's larger claims combined with a firm laissez-faire attitude toward culture in general) to Jarrell in 1951 (hurt and freaked out that not just Modernism, but all poetry of all periods, is in danger of being permanently scrapped by the bourgeois democratic public) speaks volumes about the situation that eventually births full-fledged Postmodernism, in its heyday of 1960-1980, the simultaneous sprint into the arms of theory on the one hand and systematic dismantlement of Modernist prejudice and sense of superiority on the other.

Consider these representative excerpts from Jarrell's essay: "it is not just modern poetry, but poetry, that is today obscure" (3); "the poet seems difficult because he is not read, because the reader is not accustomed to reading his or any other poetry" (4); "Any American poet under a certain age, a fairly advanced age — the age, one is tempted to say, of Bernard Shaw — has inherited a situation in which no one looks at him and in which, consequently, everyone complains that he is invisible" (10); "today, many of the readers a poet would value most have hardly learned to read any poetry; and many of those who regularly read his poems have values so different from his that he is troubled by their praise, and vexed but reassured by their blame" (15); "the poet is a condemned man for whom the State will not even buy breakfast" (18); and finally, lazily, late-fortiesishly pinning it all on popular culture: "Boys who have read only a few books in their lives, but a great many comic books, will tell one, so vividly that it is easy to sympathize: 'I don't like books because they don't really show you things; they're too slow; you have to do all the work yourself.' When, in a few years, one talks to boys who have read only a few comic books, but have looked at a great many television programs — what will they say?" (19).

What these statements, en masse, add up to is an idea that Modernism, in its public character as a project of popular re-education, has utterly failed, not because of any lack of persuasiveness on its own terms but because the bottom fell out: there's no public worth convincing any more. As Jarrell himself admits, he can only be sure of this failure because he once passionately believed in such a project. (A quick perusal of his essays on Moore and Williams confirms this: he's drunk the Kool-Aid, all right.) As he puts it, "these are conclusions which I have come to slowly and reluctantly, as the world forced them on me. Would that I were one of those happy reactionaries, born with a Greek vocabulary as other children are born with birthmarks and incomes … But I had a scientific education and a radical youth; am old-fashioned enough to believe, like Goethe, in Progress — the progress I see and the progress I wish for and do not see. So I say what I have said about the poet, the public, and their world angrily and unwillingly." Even more discouraging is Jarrell's proposal for responding to this failure: "If my hearers say, 'But what should we do?' what else can I answer but 'Nothing'? There is nothing to do different from what we already do: if poets write poems and readers read them, each as best they can — if they try to live not as soldiers or voters or intellectuals or economic men, but as human beings — they are doing all that can be done" (21). In other words, the public apparatuses of Modernism are no longer worth wielding against a public that is more disinterested than it is hostile. Therefore, no more manifestoes, no more false claims to importance: the postmodern, for a while anyway, will take the path of least resistance. This is giving the argument up for dead, the argument for Modernism or for literature and art in general, not because art isn't something that can or should be argued about (Graves' and Riding's position, as I understand it) or because the argument is incorrectly framed (Burke's and Wilson's position), but because the argument is unwinnable. Which is a very different thing.

So: Postmodernism, for my purposes (for now), starts around about 1950, when all the arguments for and against Modernism (if not Modernism itself) are exhausted and familiar. There is an interregnum of a decade or so before there are theoretical issues to get worked up over again — namely, whether we ought not to do something to, and with, contemporary poetry after all — though this time they will be fought out almost entirely inside the academy, and be more markedly metaphysical than social in character.

And I need to stop here. I'm fascinated by this shift, I love some of the poetry that results from it, I want to know everything about it, but, for God's sake, you have to stop somewhere — sometimes. Plus we have World War II to worry about.

Next week I'm gonna read a lot of Hugh Kenner and try to make sense of my life.

Howl! intro

William carlos William's introduction to Howl:

"When he was younger, and I was younger, I used to know Allen Ginsberg, a young poet living in Paterson, New Jersey, where he, son or a well-known poet, had been born and grew up. He was physically slight of build and mentally much disturbed by the life which he had encountered about him during those first years after the First World War as it was exhibited to him in and about New York City. He was always on the point of ‘going away', where it didn't seem to matter: he disturbed me, I never thought he'd live to grow up and write a book of poems. His ability to survive, travel, and go on writing astonishes me. That he has gone on developing and perfecting his art is no less amazing to me.

Now he turns up fifteen or twenty years later with an arresting poem. Literally he has, from all the evidence, been through hell. On the way he met a man named Carl Solomon with whom he shared among the teeth and excrement of this life something that cannot be described but in the words he has used to describe it. It is a howl of defeat. Not defeat at all for he has gone through defeat as if it were an ordinary experience, a trivial experience. Everyone in this life is defeated but a man, if he be a man, is not defeated.

It is the poet, Allen Ginsberg, who has gone, in his own body, through the horrifying experiences described from life in these pages. The wonder or the thing is not that he has survived but that he, from the very depths, has found a fellow whom he can love, a love he celebrates without looking aside in these poems. Say what you will, he proves to us, in spite of the most debasing experiences that life can offer a man, the spirit of love survives to ennoble our lives if we have the wit and the courage and the faith—and the art’ to persist.

It is the belief in the art of poetry that has gone hand in hand with this man into his Golgotha, from that charnel house, similar in every way, to that of the Jews in the past war. But this is in our own country, our own fondest purlieus. we are blind and live our blind lives out in blindness. Poets are damned but they are not blind, they see with the eyes of the angels. This poet sees through and all around the horrors he partakes of in the very intimate details of his poem. He avoids nothing but experiences it to the hilt. He contains it. Claims it as his own—and, we believe, laughs at it and has the time and affrontery to love a fellow of his choice and record that love in a well-made poem. Hold back the edges of your gowns, Ladies, we are going through hell.

William Carlos Williams"

-----------

So for Williams, the poem's all about about love of men for men, love of the male mind and the male body and everything that comes with it, the horribly good and the horribly bad. Men who use their manly 'tools' which allows them to 'plunge' into the world and "experience it to the hilt"--- and yet, the final invocation is to ladies who need to hold up their gowns. Or men who are like ladies in gowns. A jab at the feminine, nonetheless (no matter if its the bourgeois feminine...its the feminine under attack, since bourgeois and feminine can't be unlinked by Williams nor the Beats it seems)

Howl! contains the male flanneur tradition continued, except with more drugs and more shit. The flanneur may be crazy and imprisoned from time to time, but the mobility is always still central. It's interesting to compare this long outrageously-announced constantly-moving madness with Plath's quiet unperformed and unarticulated poems of madness, which happen to be just as image-filled, horrific, and desperate, but without the mobility. Plath's ultra-white poems (the color of her imagery, not completely but also not un-completely racial--especially with all the African lions running around in contrast) versus the dirty grays and blacks of Howl! (with its own black shadows and Negro-fied background figures leaping in and out of the poem) reveal the conflict for me. Ginsberg doesn't seem to really care about color...a few are mentioned in Howl! from time to time, but I think he wants them all to blur, to create a blurish block where its impossible to pick a single color.

Anyway, just wondering if anyone knew about Plath's connections/possible reflections on the beats. Ariel could be read, somewhat perhaps, in response to the utterly masculinized madness of the Beat generation, where their madness is allowed to be celebrated and idolized, making them freer and freer with every public performance of it, people eating up the (faux) spontaneity as part of all the boyish antics. Ten years later, we have Plath's carefully revised and reworked poems, written alone, portraying a slow and static position, a madness unglorified, poems not read aloud or not even allowed to be read. Not allowed to be dirty, the cleaness is what ultimately seems to be what is so dangerous to Plath.