Moypoets

WHO HIRED BILL MOYERS TO DESTROY AMERICAN
POETRY?

Big talk; Small Minds; Short
Poems:

     This essay begins with the
seemingly innocent and the
maliciously rhetorical question: Who hired Bill Moyers to
destroy American poetry? The truth is Moyers didn’t destroy
poetry so much as gather a debased product that even his
pedestrian sensibilities could get a sentiment around. The
reality is poets, who have owned and operated the assembly
line of the “self” for the last fifty years, have destroyed
what little authority poetry had established with the
moderns. Moyers is simply a high profile, read media,
example of the audience today’s poets deserve.

     Moyers’ collection of poetry
and interviews entitled,
simperingly enough, The Language of Life: A Festival of
Poets is actually devoid of poetry. In reality it is
full of
well-meaning ego surges from “perfectly” nice people who
unfortunately write poetry. As far as the communication of
truth goes: in my personal experience, I have never met
individuals as sanitized as the personae that narrate these
poems.

     The Moyers poets are
“enlightened” without, in the context
of that process, understanding what that encompasses. Max
Horkheimer and Theodor Adorno in their Dialectic Of
Enlightenment lay it out this way:

Every spiritual resistance [Enlightenment
principles encounter] serves merely
to increase [their] strength. Which means that
enlightenment still recognizes itself
even in myths. Whatever myths the resistance may
appeal to, by virtue of the very
fact that they become arguments in the process of
opposition, they acknowledge
the position of dissolvent rationality for which
they reproach the Enlightenment.
Enlightenment is totalitarian. (p. 6)

     Although the Moyers poets see
themselves in an adversarial
position vis à vis “dissolvent rationality” (e.g. militarism,
technology, the consumer culture, racism, sexism, et al), they
are, in fact, unwitting dupes of the very economic, cultural
and political environment they wish to confront, criticize
and/or illuminate. One result of the success of
Enlightenment science and technology has been the
flourishing of any western taxonomy that yields to the
conformal processes of mathematization and quantification.
This is not to say that poetry should attempt to emulate
these formal constraints. It couldn’t if it wanted to.
Having no opportunity to participate in the hegemony of
reductive systems, poetry quite naturally is in an
adversarial position. Even the Moyers poets perceive this as
demonstrated by their anti-intellectual cant. However the
Moyers poets are so little versed in what they are
criticizing that their critiques appear childish. Further,
they contradict their own sentiments by borrowing,
unwittingly, from the underlying hermeneutics of quantifiable
systems to support their inevitably empty images,
precipitate metaphors and soporific circumstances.

     Processes of quantification have produced what F.A. Hayek
calls “scientistic” disciplines. Among these “humanist”
taxonomies are economics, psychology and sociology. When
poetry has perceived ideological and thematic advantage, it
has borrowed heavily from the latter two paradigms. Without
studying the gulf established between the actual and its
conformal expression that has fueled the success of the
social sciences, poets, through their soft science
affinities, have introduced into their language a shorthand
for quantification which has obliterated the distinction
between the actual and its numerical value. The Moyers poets
(and by extension most others) in various ways, by
sympathetic borrowing from the “scientistic” disciplines,
have created an ineffectual and sloppy version of
Enlightenment values of formality and quantification. In
this poetic morass, only the sappy survive. Major
responsibilities of poetry as an expression of the aformal
are ignored. For example, in this atmosphere of ignorance,
where will poetic discourse be if the imposition of
quantifiable systems upon the actual turns out to be the
fundamental trope responsible for ecological devastation?

     Because the scientific-technological paradigm seems to have
seized control of matters of the intellect, the Moyers poets
are all too willing to cede all manner of this discourse to
elements of the dominant culture. The Moyers poets take a
decidedly anti-intellectual stance. Donald Hall attacks “the
rational;” Lucille Clifton sputters at the notion of
“intellect” and then contradicts herself. Robert Bly, Gary
Snyder and Coleman Barks make a chant of anti-intellectuality in their New Age, Jungian myth-based
chatter. Moyers’ whole book is stuffed with poets abandoning
intellectuality to the formalizing, iterative universals of
science and technology. Even when the Moyers poets talk
about an ambivalence toward the intellect or a qualified
acceptance thereof, one is left asking: “Where is the
‘intellectual’ voice in the poetry?” As Adorno and
Horkheimer demonstrate, the current definition of
“intellectuality” (for example “the intellect” rendered
coeval with numbers and quantification) that the Moyers
poets so uncritically reference and/or reject, is a creation
of the Enlightenment itself and does not have to be accepted
at face value by anyone engaged in imaginative work. But the
Moyers poets, paralyzed by their naïve “anti-intellectuality,” are so monumentally ignorant of the
historical conditions of Enlightenment thought, they regard
their trivial “life-affirming” “feelings” or the improbable
archetypes of Joseph Campbell as a viable alternative to
today’s scientific and economic juggernauts.

     You can see the difficulty in Rita Dove’s poem, “Canary,”
about Billie Holiday. In the poem she writes:

Fact is, the invention of women under siege

has been to sharpen love in the service of myth.


If you can’t be free, be a mystery.

     Check out the vocabulary. The first line above uses a
ubiquitous, rationalist jargon. Clichés that reflect
Enlightenment sensibility, such as the words and phrases
“fact is,” “invention,” and “under siege,” demonstrate an
exhausted conceptual foundation entirely derivative of the
scientific/empirical paradigm. The “mystery” of Dove’s
Billie Holiday is not generic with Bly’s and Snyder’s
evocation. But all of them share something in common. They
are a reaction to the dominant paradigm and their reactions
are not educated enough about the mechanisms of that
dominance to provide a genuine alternative or even recognize
their conformity with and subservience to it.

     The poet must, at least, read and familiarize
herself/himself with some of the foundational texts of the
Enlightenment paradigm before she or he can provide any
effective resistance. Criticizing an economic system, a set
of cultural restraints or whatever, without a specific
knowledge of the object of criticism, leads to specious
hermeneutic epiphanies which function as aesthetic opinions.
And you know what “they” say about opinions; they are like
assholes — everybody has one. This explains why there is so
much poetry written and so little that deserves to be read
and why some deserving poets cannot get a hearing.

     The legacy of Enlightenment thought is tricky. In the same
manner as its technological/scientific paradigm, its social
paradigm is seen as historically progressive. Yet, its
nature is to eradicate all other potentialities even as it
allows reconstructed forms of the alternative past to be
expressed within the jurisdiction of its own legalistic
frameworks. The dispassion of a legalist approach
substitutes for an ontology of evolved means.

     Dove could just as easily have created an apocalyptic Billie
Holiday. The canary could have rhymed with those birds which
were taken into mines to help miners detect dangerous gas
deposits. Thus, Holiday would have fulfilled Pound’s dictum
— artists are “the antennae of the race” — and like José
Rizal, Ruben Dario, Leonel Rugama or Placido, Holiday could
have been correctly identified with those and all other
poet/revolutionists. In the poem economic repression would
quite naturally have been grafted to racist and sexist
repression. And Holiday’s suffering, addiction and
relatively early death would have been connected seamlessly
to the very forces Dove ineffectually addresses in her poem
— the Enlightenment paradigm’s disenfranchisement of the
female and, by extension, the human sensibility.

     But even then, the poem would just be a sentimental conceit
and justice would not be done to Billie Holiday. Pound twice
articulated the problem early on in the Cantos. In Canto I,
he breaks off his Homeric narrative to acknowledge that he
was experiencing Homer through the Latin translation of
Andreas Divus. “Lie quiet Divus,” Pound says as he glimpses
the dilemma of getting at Homer through the sixteenth
century translation. And Canto II immediately refines the
theme when Pound writes:

Hang it all, Robert Browning,

     there can be but one “Sordello.”

     But Sordello, and my Sordello?

     Both of these instances in Pound are an expression of the
Kantian dilemma of the object and its relation to
perception. Kant’s arguments are most elaborately drawn out
in the philosopher’s Critique of Pure Reason. Pound converts
Kant’s physical dilemma of perception to a textual one — no
mean feat. Only with this understanding does Pound begin, as
Carroll Terrell puts it in his Guide to the Cantos, “the
mythological dimension” of Sordello in relation to Odysseus,
with the line “Lo Sordels si fo di Mantovana.” Why have
poets abandoned such careful discrimination in their craft?
Why are we content to be so ignorant?

     Since the Moyers poets have surrendered “intellectuality”
and in the process most of the world, they must rely on
personal events to provide them with material for their
poems. This is where some of the Moyers’ poets betray their
anti-intellectuality and anti-rationalism and demonstrate
what the actual dilemma is — a shortage of raw materials even among the consumer abundance that follows from their
lack of discrimination concerning subject matter. Poets like
Robert Hass, Stanley Kunitz, Carolyn Forché, Barks and
Snyder betray “the fact” that they have some ad hoc
familiarity with other writings and even modes of thinking.
In the case of Snyder and Barks, the learning is quite
focused and deep. In the case of Forché it is ceaselessly
superficial. However, the poetry of Snyder and Barks
abandons even their hard-earned notions of myth to rush back
and hug the Enlightenment requirement — “the projection onto
nature of the subjective.”

     So the Moyers poets are left with nothing but their
personal experience as material for their poems. But with
teaching, attending meetings and conferences, grading
papers, sitting on panels and symposiums, doing readings,
etc., very little material arises that has even the 20-watt
glow required for one of their dim illuminations. They
struggle to find enough material to write their slender
volumes. Because of their attachment to the self, they are
like colonizers starving amidst the abundance of a new
continent. And like all colonizers, they are forced by the
demands of production to exploit the wilderness instead of
understanding it.

     Certainly, the vague ideas of “universality” and
“affirmation” that this writer has encountered at public
meetings of poets would not suggest poetry as a practical
alternative to anything. The Moyers poets are constantly on
a desperate hunt to find material for a poem; any little
epiphany at the behest of the muse. They are comically
imperialist in their pursuit. Gerald Stern watches his cats
real close a là Christopher Smart without the “eccentristic
iconoclasm.” Garrett Hongo illustrates for us the enormous
gap between a volcanic eruption and his ability to evoke the
experience. Marilyn Chin tells us she has been married twice
and considers herself the intellectual foil of William
Carlos Williams. Victor Cruz accelerates the marginalization
of Puerto Rico. Sandra McPherson goes the adoption route.
Bly fishes and naps. Yawn. Kunitz fishes, too, but doesn’t get
sleepy because a bullhead gashes his thumb. Yawn. Stretch.
Yawn.

     Sometimes a Moyers poet really hits the jackpot. Someone
dies. This is always good for a few lines. Adrienne Rich
exhumes a friend. Kunitz does the same with his dad. So does
Donald Hall. Then he goes Kunitz one better and talks about
his own death, a fratricide (metaphorical, of course; this
ain’t Euripides) at the hands of his new born son. David
Mura mines a lynching for a few lines about himself; and
Forché has a macabre luncheon date with a Salvadoran death-squad colonel. Also, in the multi-death category genocide is
invoked a number of times. All these poems in the Moyers
book give a whole new meaning to the phrase “the dead in
service to the living.” The method and ends of these poems
are too small and self-serving to confront the subject of
death. Give me Milton’s “Lycidas,” Auden’s “In Memory of W.B.
Yeats,” Pound’s Canto XVI or Villon’s “Testament,” where the
poet provided the homicide that in part inspired the work.

     Mostly the Moyers poets are content with the commonplace,
everyday occurrences of their lives. Here the hunt for
poetic kindling is easier. And as the material shrinks in
significance, and the poetic conceits become worn and
strained, the silly claims of universality become
grotesquely exaggerated. Talk about a poet with nothing to
say; listen to Robert Hass’s final image in his poem, “House:”

& barely, only barely,

     a softball

falling toward me

     like a moon.

     And then he and Moyers try to extricate this image from its
not inconsiderable inconsiderableness. Hass begins a
response with: “Perhaps I was remembering.” In short, he has
no idea what he was saying. He associates softball with his
youth. But boys when Hass was a kid didn’t play softball;
they played baseball. Otherwise, you would have been
considered a sissy. If Hass played softball, he would have
shown considerable courage. And I’m sure we as readers would
have been undeservedly rewarded with entire books of poetry
chronicling the many threats and beatings Hass had received
at the hands of the bigoted local baseball establishment of
his youth. Hass’ image isn’t drawn from recollection or
even life; it’s a desperate and flabby concoction.

     And among all this inconsequentiality, the poets defend
themselves on the grounds of universality. But this is an
illusion created by an appeal to undiscriminated experience.
This is a consequence of flight from the intellect. But they
have nowhere to run. Every time they turn on their word
processors, one of the basest products of demonized
intellectuality is at their fingertips, and they are helpless
to address their ambivalence. “Representation is exchanged
for the fungible — universal interchangeability.” Dialectic
of Enlightenment (p.10)

     And this is the ‘universality’ to which the Moyers poets
appeal. Charles Altieri in his book, Self and Sensibility in
Contemporary American Poetry, makes reference to the
inevitable repetitiveness and homogeneity of what might be
called the unquestionable universality of the mediocre when
he sums up a discussion of Cleanth Brooks and Jonathan
Holden with: “Hypothetical expressions of the tonal self are
a fairly impotent source of poetic power.” (p.80) He
describes the Moyers-like poets of his critique thus:

Taken together these poems seem somewhat less than
the sum of their parts — probably because the sum becomes too easy to
calculate. Their lyric emotions are
usually motivated by fear or fear of loss, and the
structure of relations in the
poems mirrors that constricted space. Either
attention is focused on the local
or domestic or the poem tries to suggest, from the
local, general metaphoric
glimpses of total life processes. The two blend in
lovely lyric moments, and the
selves who control the process display highly
civilized, sensitive intelligences.
But the extended conceit or the well-polished
offhand generalization quickly
absorbed back into the lyric scene is the most the
poetic thinking produces.
There is little dialectic between the local and
the general — compare Yeats or
Stevens — so that the self seems passive and
finally somewhat smug in its
capacity to produce lyric closure. The dominant
impression is of a person
constructed around self-confident self-pity and
yet still confined to polishing
the small change. (p.73)

     Speaking of “easy calculation,” the Moyers poet, Claribel
Alegria, even has a poem called “Summing Up,” which indeed is
far, far less than its parts. In the subjectivity of “the
sixty-three years/ I have lived,” Alegria achieves the
quantificationist feat of giving equal weight to jumping
over puddles, the murder of Archbishop Romero, and losing her
virginity. A kind of computerized inventory of the soul!

     All the universals that the Moyers poets claim for
themselves are simply commonplaces or made commonplaces in
the subjective digestion of their non-discriminating voices. Like Gerald Stern, T.S. Eliot liked to observe cats. But
unlike Stern, Eliot did not try to invest his
anthropomorphic inventions with the emotional weight of his
serious work. Everyone knows people who have died. But one
would hope that a body of poetry would show more respect for
the deceased and avoid making it another instance for
subjective self-celebration.

     The Moyers poets are shackled to and by the personal
epiphany. In one poem alone, “On the Far Edge of Kilmer,”
Gerald Stern begins his lines with “I am…, I come…, I
like…, I like…, I like…, I climb…, I walk…, I lean…, In my
left hand…, In my right hand…, I am…, I am…, I am…,” and “I
am….” One marvels at the endless redundancy of the poet’s
infatuation with himself. Stern has no problems with self-image. He must have mirrors on the ceiling of his study.

     As Charles Altieri puts it, the Moyers poets employ “the
same rhetorical cloth from which epiphanies were mass-produced.” It’s no wonder every scrap of their day-to-day
existence ends up as a poem. It is no wonder that every
solipsistic middle class fop living off the sweat and blood
of every other middle class fop and all those less
fortunate, wants to validate his sad existence, and
participate in a community that by its anemia advances the
injustices and murder that have made this sadly satiated
form of poetry possible. This poetry is the adipose of
hegemony. Its messages, though predictably humane, are
ineffectual and therefore, as a practical matter, not
considered by those for whom practical concerns are
paramount. The Moyers poets are well-meaning but
inarticulate, giving voice to the same consumer commonplaces
that their far more influential brethren in advertising use
to generate capital. And, like advertisers, they contrive
“universals” out of the most indiscriminate and private
experiences, when in reality they have no methodology for
circumventing the true paradigm of universals, the
impoundment of all experience by systems of formalization,
quantification and mathematization. The Moyers poets imply
that they are struggling against this, but provide no
evidence that they are in any way familiar with the issues.
Anyway, if they were waging a struggle, they have clearly
lost. But more on that later, because this failure to learn
about what it is you are criticizing cuts across the entire
poetic spectrum. The Moyers poets are not unique in insisting
upon a position of willful ignorance as their most potent
weapon. They are simply the starkest example.

If You Lick Up and Down, It Looks Like Yes:

     When reading the Moyers anthology, The Language of Life, the
reader is struck by just how nice these folks seem to be.
There’s no drunken, womanizing Dylan Thomas (Galway Kinnell
is not interviewed, only cameoed). There are no wife-tormenting patrician anti-Semites like Eliot. There are no
future slavers a là Rimbaud. There are no cloacally obsessed
wags like Dante, Swift, Rabelais or Joyce. There are no
fascist sympathizers and fiscal phonies like Ezra Pound. No,
the Moyers bunch, in terms of society’s supposedly broad
acceptance, is a damned wholesome bunch. Solid citizens. The
kind of folks you be happy to have next door. They are, as
Altieri notes, “passive,” preferring to be victims or victim
wannabees.

     Moyers himself is a paragon of virtue. And if his anthology
has the tone of a church social, it is a result of Moyers’
choices for poets to interview and their established
willingness not to rock the boat. I have had the opportunity
to witness some of these poets in venues such as conferences
and readings. Their audience is made up of a middle class
sensibility (the term used to be bourgeois) that will brook
no authentic voice. At the slightest whiff of anything different, this sensibility rallies around authoritarian
forces in order to preserve its well-being. It’s like the
editorial policies of the New York Times or the Washington
Post. The world’s population is allowed to live as long as
that population is willing to make enormous sacrifices for
capital. But the minute they seek a more equitable
alternative, the murderers at the Times and the Post insist
the instruments of oppression be brought to bear in a swift
and violent fashion, lest their enormous consumption be
momentarily interrupted.

     In spite of its acceptance of a tame domestic plurality, the
audience for Moyers poets is exclusively drawn from those
that honor their contract with power and hegemony.
Certainly, institutional support for Moyers poets is
indistinguishable from that support which seeks to insure
ideological dominance among traditional elites. They demand
emotional if not legal contracts in all of their everyday
dealings. Why should their investment, even though
miniscule, be any different for poetry? Moyers poets are
the expression of the social muzzle. As Moyers poet, Linda
McCarriston, says, “Poetry allows one to speak with the
voice of power that is not, in fact, granted to one by the
culture.” Poets are satisfied with this voice (actually
inflection or intonation) of power, while genuine power
continues to accrue elsewhere. Powerful voices attract
powerful repression, not the life-style debates between NEA
grant mongers and their repressed critics.

     I once did an experiment to gauge the reaction of a Moyers-type audience when they feel threatened. At a well-attended
reading, I read a part of a long poem of mine based on
Diogenes of Sinope’s statement: “The only place to spit in
a rich man’s house is in his face.” Although I believe that
neither David Rockefeller nor Rupert Murdoch were in the
audience, the middle class component created an uproar,
falling all over themselves to defend the rich. They hissed
and booed, told me to “Go fuck myself,” called me names
their mamas would have used in the same circumstances, threw
wadded paper and stormed from the room and generally dropped
the bullshit liberal etiquette that characterizes that
segment of the colonizing class. I had smoked out the little
imperialist wannabees, denying them their masks, thanks to
Diogenes the Dog. But I get almost no venues, so I rarely
get to experience that level of honesty and neither does my
potential audience. That kind of brutal honesty is generally
reserved for the populations of the so-called developing
world.

     I kept waiting for one of the Moyers poets to submarine
Bill. I placed my hopes in Adrienne Rich, but apparently she
was saving her sucker punches for bigger game. Rich and the
other poets allowed Moyers to insist their poetry was “life-affirming.” As I read, I wondered what a “life denying” poem
might look like. Maybe, the Inferno cantos of the Divine
Comedy? Maybe, Eliot’s “The Hollow Men?” Maybe Swift’s “On
Poetry: A Rhapsody?” Juvenal’s Satires? Aimé Césaire’s
Notebook of a Return to the Native Land? What about Rimbaud, John Berryman
and Robinson Jeffers? What about Yeats’ “Second Coming?” Get
It! How could any poet sit there and allow a reformed flack
for Lyndon Johnson purr the phrase “life-affirming” at them
over and over and not go for Moyers’ throat — and I mean on
the air a là Morton Downey Jr. What a narrow, controlling
bullshit criteria for poetry! Given Moyers’ criteria, the
only potential audience is people who don’t get the shit
kicked out of them every day. And that’s damned few of us.
Furthermore, Moyers poets, by their statements, affiliations
and in their impotent writing, claim to acknowledge that
people do get the shit kicked out of them every day. They
“acknowledge” it, but they don’t acknowledge its fact — its
truth. What is that!? It’s the same sanitized logic for
murder you get from the State Department when they announce,
“We regret that your country is suffering so grievously, but
we will not cease making you a target of American foreign
policy until you agree to do things our way.” Sentiment and
violence have always gone hand-in-hand. Why should the
poetry from the Graduate Department of Moyers’ Hallmark
University be any different?

If You Lick Side to Side, It Looks Like No:

     Joe Brennan has commented on many occasions that he does not
object to the solipsistic, self-inflating poetry that I have
discussed above. What Brennan objects to is that it is
virtually the only kind of poetry being written, published
and read today. Charles Altieri finds this community so
ubiquitous that he calls it the poetry “establishment,” and
bemoans the fact that creative workshops and writing
departments around the country require this kind of product
for advancement in the community. Pound called this kind of
writing “an asylum for the emotions.” And since our
universities and publishing houses have become sanitariums, it makes it much easier to identify the
inmates. Without fail, people (e.g. corporations and
endowments) who fund sanitariums want a say in their
operation and the right to propose and control appropriate
therapies.

     Recently, post-modernist critics Stanley Aronowitz and
Katherine Hayles and others have come under fire from the
scientific establishment abetted by a press so ignorant that
they are thrilling. Even journalists, handily the most
ignorant of the stooge classes, defended the economic and
intellectual hegemony of the sciences from this relatively
insignificant threat. But poetry, post-modern or otherwise,
could not enter the fray. When some of the central
assumptions of our culture were on the line, poets could not
contribute to the discourse. How do you get more irrelevant
than that? How could this have happened with poetry’s own
bad boy/girl “intellectual” movement safely ensconced in the
asylum? I am, of course, referring to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poets. Nobody shouted alarms and waved a collection of
Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman or Bob Perelman at the
conference in New York, hastily convened to condemn the
spread of post-modernism across our campuses. How absurd
of me to even bring it up!

     The grand dame of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets is the critic
and scholar, Marjorie Perloff. Perloff expresses a knowledge
and understanding of scientific taxonomies such as
information theory, chaos theory and nuclear physics.
Perloff is also not shy about attributing expansive
aesthetic and philosophical implications to these and other
branches of science, mimicking broadly the kinds of
synthesis that brought ridicule down on Hayles and
Aronowitz. Perloff relies on the music and writing of John
Cage to provide a fundamental archetype for all that is
post-modern; that which is illuminated by and in turn
illuminates discourse in the sciences which in turn
determines what is merely “scientistic.”

     Now, don’t get me wrong. I’ve been a John Cage fan for
years. Just about the time I was attending Marjorie
Perloff’s seminar on William Butler Yeats at the University
of Maryland, I was in my seventh year of discovering what I
called new music. I listened to Cage’s recordings and read
his books. One of my professors, Dr. Rudd Fleming, unlike
the repressed computer engineer, Douglas Hofstadter, was a
student of both Cage and Bach. Fleming read sections of
Silence in his classes. For me Cage’s books were scores. The words were notation; their articulation, music.

     Further, for me Cage was part of a broader musical
experience which included Pierre Boulez, Iannis Xenakis,
Charles Wuorinen, George Crumb, Edgar Varese, Olivier
Messiaen, Luciano Berio, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof
Penderecki and Elliott Carter, to name a few of the more
prominent composers. The rap on these guys among the
conservative musicians and listeners I knew was that their
musical theories were often more engaging than the music
itself. They considered this especially true of Cage. This
was described as a problem later music had inherited from
Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, and so-called
twelve tone or serial composition. But I was resolute that
the real strength of these composers came from the aural
experience itself and I still derive great pleasure from
their compositions today.

     Cage was singled out for special ridicule because the
experience of his compositions appears so ad hoc upon first
hearing, that the listener naturally desires some
explanation for the piece. Cage insisted that the pieces
should stand on their own as music. Cage desired to change
the way people listened. People, in general, have not
adopted Cage’s ideas about music, much less the pieces
themselves. The aural repertoire has been expanded, but this
can no more be attributed to Cage’s influence than to Varese
or Stockhausen, who seemed to be more greatly mimocked in
popular forms of music floated out there to create elite
little clusters of conspicuous, even malignant,
consumption. Compact discs have even cleaned up the surf
that once announced a recording’s imminent invasion of its
surrounding environment and provided a bridge to
environmental sounds.

     But Perloff wants to bastardize the considerable musical
achievement of John Cage, rendering it a theoretical
referendum on the agenda of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets.
Perloff’s dependence upon the critical dimensions of Cage’s
work seems to be the problem endemic to all L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poetry — their criticism IS more interesting than the poetry
(music) itself. Their attempts to blur the distinction
between poetry and criticism acknowledge as much.
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry as well as most post-modernist poetry
is dissipative — entropic would be a borrowing that would
get Gross and Levitt’s blood boiling (which reminds me of
the funny story of how John von Neumann convinced Claude
Shannon to make a trope of the term, entropy, in Shannon’s
foundational paper on Information Theory.)

     But the critical or hermeneutic dimension of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poetry, though open ended, aspires to traditional norms of
comprehension. As testament, the reader has little trouble
understanding what Perloff is saying. But Perloff and the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets have had to create a self-interpretative model for the poems themselves. While this
has the effect of delimiting and legitimizing a school or
movement, the result is that your critical dimension is de
facto going to have more force than your imaginative one. In
an ideology the formal doctrine always plays better than the
praxis. The demise of Isms is in the praxis. (And I am
making no reference to the reactionary pseudo-insights of
Karl Popper’s historicism or F. A. Hayek’s “scientistic”
standards of metaphorical conformity.) I’m simply saying
that, in the instance of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, the
critical dimension is used to mask the failings of the
imaginative. This cannot be said of the work of John Cage.

     L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poems are intended not to “mean” in the
traditional ways we associate meaning and poetry. Yet,
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry’s major architects have no difficulty in saying that they don’t mean while meaning what they don’t
say. There is a priceless exchange in a back issue of Ariel
Magazine between the interviewer, Marjorie Perloff, and the
interviewee, none other than poet and Sun and Moon Press
editor, Douglas Messerli. Perloff slips and asks Messerli
what the particular poem they are discussing “means.” Well,
since Messerli has already stated that his poetry is
intended to mean “nothing” in the usual manner of such
communications, he should have taken Perloff to task for
asking such a “meaningless” question. Instead Messerli
attempts to “interpret” his poem in the manner of I.A.
Richards. What ensues is a pointless and hilarious
discussion as he and Perloff attempt to wring
some meaning from the intentionally meaningless. They do
manage to root around in Doug’s psyche long enough to reveal
some of his “intentions” in the poem. But Doug’s
“intentions” prove to be so ad hoc and pedestrian that they
only heighten the comic dimensions of the exchange. The
effect is not much different from Hass’ and Moyers’ attempt
to beat some meaning out of Hass’ soft ball image. And both
have deep affinities with the lectures of Professor
Irwin Corey or the Socratic dialogues of Abbott and
Costello.

     Perloff will go to great lengths to make a poet’s work fit
anachronistically into the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poet’s agenda. A case
in point is her emphasis on syntax in her discussion of
Objectivist poet George Oppen’s third poem in Discrete
Series. The poem reads:

         Thus

Hides the


Parts — the prudery

Of
Frigidaire, of

Soda-jerking — —


Thus


Above the


Plane of
lunch, of wives

Removes
itself

(As
soda-jerking from

the
private act


Of

Cracking
eggs);


big-Business.

     As Perloff points out, Harold Schimmel is certainly correct
that the opening, “Thus/ Hides the,” and its rhyme,
“Thus/Above the,” contain a sneer at a mathematical or, more
syntactically, a symbolic logic or logical positivist
origin. Certainly, the title of the sequence, Discrete
Series, bears this out. Oppen does indeed, as Perloff states,
“deconstruct” “the consumer culture that produces
Frigidaires” because writing a critique “would be much too
easy and uninteresting.” But Oppen’s approach reveals his
own impotence in the face of the seemingly incontestable
logic of better nutrition and stability of the food supply
afforded in part by modern refrigeration. Every “image” of
the poem that follows the direct assessment, “the prudery/Of
Frigidaire,” continues in a bitter vein of sexual repression.
“Soda jerking — –” is onanism with ” — –” imaging the
erect penis and the “some assembly required” instruction
suggested by, “Thus.” The isolation of the line, “Above the”
is a desperate and disparate attempt to make this phrase
take on something other than its apparent meaning by
exploiting the word “Above.” Oppen fails to make this line
anything more than a weak transition. “Plane of lunch” is a
shelf in the refrigerator and “of wives” alludes to the bed
where “normal” intercourse used to take place. But lunch now
“Removes itself” the way, during onanism, the penis is
removed before ejaculation. Lunch removed from the
refrigerator is sterile. Furthermore, it requires no partner. It
“Removes itself” just like the onanism of “soda-jerking
from/ the private act,” sex, is not in reality “cracking
eggs,” e.g., procreating. “big-Business” pulls out before
ejaculation too. Oppen is saying “real” men would procreate.
They would be “Big” not “big,” and “business” would be
secondary to the more fundamental needs of society. Oppen
even goes to the syntactical length of capitalizing the “O”
in “Of” twice in order to enhance its suggestion of
fecundity. But Oppen’s syntactical manipulation cannot hide
the fact that the poem fails to provide a sufficient counter
argument for the advocacy of refrigerated food. Oppen knows
something is wrong with the picture which he is addressing,
he just cannot articulate an alternative. One is reminded of
Pound’s Canto XLV with its “With Usura/ With Usura hath no
man a house of good stone.” And further in support of
Oppen’s argument, Pound writes in the same Canto:

It hath brought palsy to bed,
lyeth

between the young bride and her
bridegroom

                                         CONTRA NATURAM

     Credit, folks, credit. One can almost hear the newlyweds,
instead of banging out little “brown shirts,” lying in bed,
arguing over whether they should borrow money from the
credit union to buy a new Frigidaire. As someone once said,
“All of our desires have become economic choices.” But
better food sources have led to more potential “brown
shirts,” not fewer. Hence, Oppen’s and, by extension, Pound’s
philosophical dilemma. Oppen’s poem is as much a
masturbatory act as the technology, “the dissolvent
rationality,” he attacks.

     Pound’s Canto attempts an historical/economic explanation
for the sterility of the modern condition and, though he
provides no viable alternative, his poem seems equal to its
subject. Oppen opts for the “discrete” disembodied rant. In
the process he is forced to rely on syntax and punctuation
to carry his poem. Clearly, syntax and punctuation cannot
carry the weight and the poem collapses. Perloff’s attempt
to project syntax and punctuation as the central force for
the success of poetic expression is cynical in the extreme.
Perloff attempts to exaggerate the minor success of Oppen’s
syntax at the expense of diminishing his more profound and
valuable failure of meaning.

     Oppen was too good a poet to get caught up in nostalgia, but
I wouldn’t be surprised if his long hiatus from poetry was
not in response to his own impotence in the face of
capital’s onslaught and his inability to counter the
philosophical implications of its scientific/technological
paradigm. Oppen’s syntactical rage in the poem above is not
grounded at all in the hyperbolic language of advertising.
Oppen was attempting to address the implications of the
technology itself. This is a far more difficult and
necessary task. Oppen’s philosophical failure is far more
significant than Perloff’s ideological one-upmanship at the
level of syntax. Oppen’s more authentic task does not point
to the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E project. Therefore Perloff ignores
it.

Writing With a Food Processor:

     Charles Bernstein performs a similar sleight of hand in a
paper he delivered at the Eleventh Alabama Symposium on
English and American Literature. After some standard and
often half-baked observations on writing with a word
processor and technology in general, Bernstein in his paper,
“Blood On the Cutting Room Floor,” attempts one of the most
breathtaking equivocations in the history of academic
prattle. Bernstein attempts to diminish the importance of
the authoritarian dimensions of technology in order to
blame “writing practitioners that block realization of
reading values and stunt the developing writing values” for
the current state of poetry. In other words, technology is
potentially a culprit but, in reality, Stanley Plumly and
Gerald Stern bear much more responsibility for the generally
marginal condition of poetry. By implication, the project of
Bernstein and his friends can create or restore (take your
pick) “the multidimensionality of reading values — to sound
the sonic, measure the lexicon, and refuse the
standardization and regimentation that deafens us to the
living past in language and diverts us from enacting living
presents — decentered and plural — for language.” Like Lenny
Bruce’s mayor says in Thank You Masked Man, “God damn, boy,
you can talk your ass off, buddy!” Anyone with eyes and ears
could see and hear that Bernstein’s proposals would only
accelerate the marginalization of poetry and, in fact, after
an initial burst of acceptance, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry has
undergone the sclerosis of the academy. This is a source of
frustration for Bernstein. As his movement has topped out,
he is forced to debate know-nothings like Gerald Stern on what
Bernstein perceives to be Stern’s turf. Further, it’s one
thing for Bernstein to call Stern a poetic policeman, and
quite another to find himself in the same role. The new-
Georgians, as exemplified by Stern, could have suffered a more
devastating and thoughtful critique than that provided by
the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E clique. If my eyes don’t deceive me,
Bernstein, Silliman, and Perelman are all petrified in the
Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry along with
all the other post-moderns who, with few exceptions, were
too tired or too busy to try to “make it cohere.” This is a
far cry from the Bernstein’s stated ambitions for his
project.

     Addressing those ambitions, Joe Brennan has pointed out,
“Bernstein should realize it’s one thing to have your work
rejected because it is seen as a threat to the status quo,
and quite another to have it rejected because it is not
interesting.” Bernstein’s 61 poetic experiments that he uses
for instruction at the academy teach kids who have nothing
to say, different techniques for saying nothing.
To paraphrase Brennan: “Instead of telling these kids to go
out and learn something on their own, Bernstein is, by
adhering to the traditional rules and standards of the
university, exercising the same kind of control over the
creative process that he accuses Stern of doing.”

     Except for Joe Brennan and Robert Peters, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
poetry’s imaginative product has no discernible readership
outside of its immediate circle. Bernstein clearly has a bee
in his bonnet when it comes to the self-serving ego maniacal
greeting card poetry that infests the institutions that he
must operate in on a daily basis. But the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E
project’s expressed poetic alternative is too marginal and
glossomorphic to supersede the soporific memoir style of
Gerald Stern. Why replace one lilliputian voice with
another?

     The L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets’ approach ultimately was a good
short term strategy for gaining an institutional foothold in
a today’s dreary poetic landscape. But like all narrow
enterprises with an inflated value, there will be a price to
pay further on down the road. If anything, the
L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets have created a more homogeneous and
undistinguished body of creative work than even the “Self-Ish” poets. In the future, the authority of poetry will be
even further diminished by the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry
episode.

Freedom’s Just Another Word For Nothin’ Left To Say:

     Years ago when Andrei Codrescu was still living in
Baltimore, I asked an acquaintance of ours to propose a new
kind of poetry reading to him. I called it the Battle of the
Bards. This was about 1984, and I’m sure poetry slams were in
full swing somewhere, but I was not aware of them. My idea
had one significant difference. Sure, I would drive a
carload of Washington poets to take on a group of Baltimore
versifiers. But on my team, I would also have an individual
who was utterly steeped in the poetic tradition. In fact,
the individual I had in mind had committed huge amounts of
poetry to memory — Homer in classical Greek, the Romantics,
Auden, Yeats, Dickinson, Eliot, Pound, Lowell, Stevens,
Joyce, Beckett, and, like the playbill says, many, many,
more. The Baltimore gang was to supply a similar
individual.