Lucille Clifton and (Personal) History

Lucille Clifton often writes at the intersection of personal past and history, attempting to recover what is personal about even large-scale historical events. In particular, she is concerned with speaking for those who have not had a voice in shaping official history, as in "at the cemetery, walnut grove plantation, south carolina, 1989":

among the rocks
at walnut grove
your silence drumming
in my bones,
tell me your names.

She looks beyond the "inventory lists" that enumerate the property belonging to the plantation. Historical documents and historical narratives are windows into lived experience, often figured in terms of the body or its labor. For Clifton, the reading of these documents is not just a means to intellectually understand the past, but to physically hear and feel the past in order to help shape our lives in the present.

Two Alienations: Jean Baudrillard and Georg Lukacs

In History and Class Consciousness, Georg Lukacs performs a close reading of Marx's Capital in order to focus on the effects of commodities. Lukacs is primarily interested in how workers are alienated from their labor due to the fetishization of commodities in the capitalist system. Further, the alienation is read back into self-consciousness; the subject understands itself in terms of the commodity form.

Jean Baudrillard argues in The Consumer Society that human society has become a profusion of consumer objects which are part of a signifying system governed by consumption as a metonymical means toward happiness. The logic of consumption, however, tends to the needs of the order of production rather than the needs of human beings -- and does so primarily by inflating the subjective perception of these needs. The subject becomes a collection of desires walking through a shopping center of magical objects.

These analyses are valuable because they reveal the material basis of such concepts as "the self" and "desire." Taking Lukacs and Baudrillard into account forces readers to consider the role that literature plays in social and economic developments. I don't claim to have a well-developed way to do this, but I would suggest that an awareness of these perspectives can add depth and complexity to our interpretations of poetic texts. Let's use a short poem as an example. Here is "The Scour" by A. R. Ammons:

It was so windy
last night the snow
got down nowhere
except against something.

Without the benefit of a social analysis, this becomes what it at first appears for so many critics: a poem about nature. One might actually group the possible readings of this poem into three types. First, the poem can be seen as an attempt to get at "the thing," a sensible object in nature. The natural world operates in peaceful and violent ways.

It's difficult to remain in this rarefied field of interpretations without jumping to the second level, which involves the individual subject in the instantiation of nature. This can happen in two ways. First, the poetic speaker can recount his experience of nature and reflect on the intersection of man and nature as two objects. Second, the object or event in the natural world can explain or refer to some aspect of the poetic speaker's (or poet's) personal history.

It's possible to read the Ammons poem from either of these first two levels, and in fact the poet may have meant for it to suggest possibilities on these levels. However, the poem is just as open to the third level: the social. The process of snow falling on a windy night might be a figure for a social process as much as it may stand in as a figure for a personal revelation. In this case, one's standard understanding of snow descending peacefully is disrupted in order to show that nature has different modes and can enact violence. In other words, instead of a 'natural mode' in nature, there is a set of fluctuating possibilities. Among these possibilities, the poet recognizes the potential for violence.

If the earth is taken as a figure for the subject, this means that there are a variety of processes leading to our definition by the falling snow. That is, the contours of our subjectivity are determined in part by the material relations covering us. Ammons' poem encourages the reader to consider not just the violent scouring of snow and wind, but also its innocuous counter-possibility: the inevitable and more natural-seeming slow covering by falling snowflakes.

Marjorie Perloff and the Other Tradition

Marjorie Perloff explores the non-symbolist mode of poetry in The Poetics of Indeterminacy. She speaks of a tradition that is non-representational, which defamiliarizes our strategies for making things cohere. Like the poetry she treats, however, it seems Perloff does not have an aggressively explanatory metanarrative for this tradition. Instead, she proceeds down an explanatory path for a while, and then, after confronting disruptions and discontinuities from the poetic text, she reverts to the concept of ultimate undecidability. When performing this reversion, she doesn not complain about the text, but uses it as a chance to extol its virtues; defamiliarity is valuable in itself.

I focused especially on her chapter dealing with John Ashbery. In it, Perloff writes that "Dozens of provocative and possible stories suggest themselves" (258). This is true, of course, and Perloff spends some time with some of these stories. But it isn't very long before these stories, with which we've travelled with Perloff, are tossed up into the air and we're told to admire how they create a "precise tonality of feeling" (260). A series of perhapses is given up for a tonality. After pointing out these bland but true observation like "we never come to know the larger story," Perloff quickly transitions away, as if to say 'Let's talk about something else': "Here it is illuminating to compare Ashbery to Beckett" (273). Okay, but what about getting to some conclusion? No: "In this context of absent causality, even familiar things become unfamiliar" (274).

Of course, any great conclusions are forestalled by the poetry to which Perloff insists on responding. Ashbery isn't going to give any conclusions, so why should I fault Perloff for failing to deliver one? Because I'm sick of being told that non-representational texts like Ashbery's (or postmodern texts in general) are about disrupting or defamiliarizing the meaning making process or denying the reader an easy overarching metanarrative. I'd rather read a critic's own story through an Ashbery poem -- even if it isn't (and cannot be) the one and only accurate reading. As long as it's interesting and it makes some commitment.

Deleuze and Guattari

I'll confess up front that I haven't read the whole of Anti-Oedipus, but I don't think Deleuze and Guattari would be upset. After all, my desiring-energy pursued its own schizo course in a series of conjunctive and disjunctive flows through the pages. I found much of interest, but I found much with which to disagree, as well. I was struck by comments like this: "desire produces reality [....] It is not possible to attribute a special form of existence to desire, a mental or psychic reality that is presumably different from the material reality of social production" (30). This gives important reality to desire as a force in the world, rather than relegating it to a realm of psychological phantoms.

I also find myself agreeing with their conception of capitalism as a social form that "deterritorializes" desire. Unlike the social forms that precede it, capitalism requires flows of desire. But Deleuze and Guattari critique capitalism as a reterritorialization, as well. Psychoanalysis participates in this reterritorialization through the construction of individual egos (and superegos) that internalize prior forms of territorialization: "The great territorialities have fallen into ruin, but the structure proceeds with all the subjective and private reterritorializations" (308). Psychoanalysis, through the Oedipus complex, produces subjects based on the concept of lack. It's prohibitions create the desires it prohibits.

But in other ways, I sense a problem with this theorizing. I appreciate that Deleuze and Guattari insist that we must not get caught up in the historical garbage heap of mythical territorialities, but then what do we get caught up in? How do we come to value things? If "we are all handymen: each with his little machines" of desiring-energy, where do we point these machines? These may seem like quaint questions to those who like the idea of a schizo's walk, but too many important ideas get thrown out with the bathwater -- such as the idea of importance itself.

The biggest conceptual problem I have with the text is that Deleuze and Guattari posit a "free" desire when they talk about decoded flows, but what makes it suddenly free? How are its directions and obsessions determined? They write that "the schiz came into existence only by means of a desire without aim or cause" (378), but it's not clear how desire can be without aim or cause. They suggest that desire just is. Perversely, this is the same type of thinking used to argue that whatever is is right.

Charles Altieri and the Challenge to Affected Naturalness

In Self and Sensibility in Contemporary American Poetry, Charles Altieri investigates the dominant mode of contemporary American poetry (in the 1980s), which he suggests is made up of poems that affect a sort of naturalness and move toward a moment of visionary closure. (He gives a nod to Jonanthon Holden, who made a similar diagnosis earlier). Altieri argues, however, that the very rhetoric needed to achieve these ends undercuts them. He provides a model of reading that seeks to understand the pressures that lead to such rhetorical strategies rather than getting swept up in the desired effect of the strategies.

In a sense, Altieri asks for a metapoetic reader, one who considers the tensions that give rise to the poet's rhetorical performance. That is, the poem's content does not constitute its meaning; the story of the poem's creation does. The poetic speaker is not natural, but is, rather, the result of a collection of concerns within a dominant rhetorical framework.

This perspective explains why Altieri values John Ashbery's work, which according to Altieri establishes a self of "various desires and [...creates] a mobile field of lyric attachments" (19). But it seems to me that Ashbery is so diffuse regarding the subject that tension dissolves. The reader is left with only the play and not the results of the examination. After one of Ashbery's diffuse performances, the reader (and critic) is left to wonder what has been mobilized. What does the blur of these transitory attachments mean? How does a poem, like "Laughing Gravy" for example, become anything more than a blank?

"Laughing Gravy"
The crisis has just passed.
Uh oh, here it comes again,
looking for someone to blame itself on, you, I...

All these people coming in...
The last time we necked
I noticed this lobe on your ear.
Please, tell me we may begin.

All the wolves in the wolf factory paused
at noon, for a moment of silence.

We cannot attach ourselves to the fate of the crisis because it goes unnamed. The "you" is generalized and is not more perplexing than the wolves, who are not given a relation to the speaker or the unidentified "you." In short, these attachments are too "mobile" to gain purchase on the reader. In a way, many of the discrete statements in Ashbery's work are like philosophical declarations or conclusions to arguments in which we can't participate and which deal with experiences and consequences that aren't provided.

John Ashbery and the Accumulation of Emptinesses

By pure, happy accident, I happened to be reading Samuel Taylor Coleridge's "Biographia Literaria" on the same night I was trying to read the poems of John Ashbery. Coleridge argues that the imagination can be conceived of on two levels. The first level is related to perception. Human beings have some capacity to organize sense data as they perceive the world. For Coleridge, perception is a form of creativity. Secondary imagination is what poets utilize in reshaping perceptions into re-creations of the world. According to Coleridge, this secondary imagination "struggles to idealize and to unify." Coleridge distinguishes these two notions of the imagination from the term Fancy, which is used to refer to that faculty of the mind that begins with the material of memory, but is "emancipated from the order of time and space."

I think that many poets probably do operate through the secondary imagination. The form, import, and consequence of this integration are wildly divergent, of course, but the tendency is unity. One can turn to a poet like Ashbery, however, and ask whether he is trying to idealize or unify that which has been perceived. Most would agree that the answer is no, but I'm interested in the nature of this refusal. On the one hand, this could be seen as a typically postmodern complication of epistemology, but Ashbery's poetic concerns suggest otherwise.

He is not as interested in problematizing how we come to know objects as he is in exploring how we come to know emptiness. He reminds us in one of his most characteristic poems, "The Absence of a Noble Presence": "You've got to remember we don't see that much." What we see, however, is less than what we don't. We are surrounded by a vacuity. He rarely mentions specifics, as if they are unattainable or not meaningful in the ways we hope they are. The poem starts with:

If it was treason it was so well handled that it
Became unimaginable. No, it was ambrosia
In the alley under the stars and not this undiagnosable
Turning, a shadow in the plant of all things

That makes us aware of certain moments,
That the end is not far off since it will occur
In the present and this is the present.

The first line repeats the pronoun "it" three times without naming its referent, but the word presumably refers to the "absence" of the title. If this ultimate absence is treacherous, it usually seems okay because the perception of nothingness is "unimaginable." In other words, perception tends to focus on things so the horror of emptiness might be averted. The poetic speaker insists instead that the absence is "ambrosia / In the alley under the stars." But it's too late for the reader: the concept of absence cannot be filled by the epinorthosis that tries to provide a sensation and a location. One must try to perceive absence. Ashbery seems to force the reader back to the first level of imagination: perception...with the added difficulty that the journey of his poems starts with an absence. Here are two recent examples:

"Meaningful Love" begins: "What the bad news was / became apparent too late / for us to do anything good about it." "Lost Footage" begins: "You said, 'Life's a hungry desert,' / or something like that. I couldn't hear."

But "The Absence of a Noble Presence" has a lesson for us: "And since this too is of our everydays / It matters only to the one you are next to." This recalls Whitman's poem "On the Terrible Doubt of Appearances," in which the great ontological and epistemological questions are, if not resolved, at least deflated by the touch of a lover's hand. Though Ashbery does not seem like an objectivist or an intersubjectivist (if there is such a term), his poems do suggest that absence or emptiness are merely states from which perceptions emerge. Another of his well-known poems, "Paradoxes and Oxymorons," ends with the assertion that "The poem is you." And while there are no doubt many levels to this evocative phrase, on the most fundamental level, it suggests that something comes into being from the perception of nothingness.

Galway Kinnell, the Primal, and the Civilized

In "Lastness," the final poem of his sequence "The Book of Nightmares," Galway Kinnell calls a poem a "concert of one / divided among himself, / this earthward gesture / of the sky-diver." In these two metaphors, Kinnell enunciates a profound and carefully wrought idea of poetry. It becomes that harmonizing act that unifies the manifold and activates the condemned. While he accepts the concept of the divided subject, he ultimately recognizes the need for a gesture, the coordination of the body into some attempt at expressing a symbolic meaning. Though condemned to fall and ultimately to die, the skydiver clutches for the earth.

In many ways, these two metaphors exemplify my approach to reading poetry. I try to read the tensions of subjectivity and desire expressed in the poem -- even those poems that at first come off as unified reflections of a confident poetic speaker. In other words, how might the concert be understood as the presentation of divisions among the players? Of what do these divisions consist and how do they arise? And second, how are subjects instantiated by their gestures? That is, how do we become through our actions?

"Lastness" provides its own statement on these questions. The fifth section of the poem recapitulates Kinnell's perspective:

That Bach concert I went to so long ago --
the chandeliered room
of ladies and gentlemen who would never die . . .
the voices go out,
the room becomes hushed,
the violinist
puts the irreversible sorrow of his face
into the opened palm
of the wood, the music begins:

a shower of rosin,
the bow-hairs listening down all their length
to the wail,
the sexual wail
of the back-alleys and blood strings we have lived
still crying,
still singing, from the sliced intestine
of cat.

The section begins with the height of civilization: the Bach concert, and yet it is made possible by the "sexual wail" of the bow across strings made from animal intestines. This is an example of Kinnell's oft-used strategy of mixing the primal and the civilized, suggesting that the latter should not be recognized as the expulsion of the former, but rather a special refinement of it. In fact, the trajectory of this section -- and much of Kinnell's work -- is backwards, stressing the recovery of the primal from within the civilized. While he often takes as his material the wild stuff of nature, he does not jettison civilization; he brings the two together into a tension that marks contemporary life.

More specifically, he continually returns to the question of poetry and expression -- even in his well-known poem "The Bear," which otherwise seems to be a narrative of a hunt, a possession, and a transformation:

the rest of my days I spend
wandering: wondering
what, anyway,
was that sticky infusion, that rank flavor of blood, that poetry, by which I lived?

In this final moment, the speaker of "The Bear" has not transformed into a bear but rather recognized the importance -- and difficulty -- of speaking the primal.