By NORMAN FINKELSTEIN [Jacket2] – In his magisterial essay “On Some Motifs in Baudelaire,” Walter Benjamin argues that the menacing spectacle of the urban crowd, described by mid-nineteenth-century writers as diverse as Poe and Engels, “became decisive for Baudelaire. If he succumbed to the force by which he was drawn to them and, as a flaneur, was made one of them, he was nevertheless unable to rid himself of a sense of their essentially inhuman makeup. He becomes their accomplice even as he dissociates himself from them. He becomes deeply involved with them, only to relegate them to oblivion with a single glance of contempt.” Benjamin goes on to analyze the shock effect of the crowd for Baudelaire, and how, for the individual, “nervous impulses flow through him in rapid succession, like the energy from a battery. Baudelaire speaks of a man who plunges into a crowd as into a reservoir of electric energy. Circumscribing the experience of the shock, he calls this man “a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness.”
Taken all together, I can think of no better description of [Lawrence] Joseph’s stance in Into It. Attraction and repulsion, sympathy and contempt, identification and alienation — these are the antitheses which determine the key in which Joseph’s book is written. Joseph’s response to the crowd, which is to say the people of Manhattan, changes moment to moment, line by line. Like Baudelaire’s man registering the experience of urban shock, Joseph is a kaleidoscope equipped with consciousness, but a kaleidoscope equipped with language as well. This instrument is repeatedly brought to bear on individuals in the crowd; the poet attempts to keep his distance, struggles with his contempt, but, as Benjamin understands, inevitably becomes an accomplice. George Oppen, writing about New York City in Of Being Numerous, likewise faces these “ghosts that endanger // One’s soul” and pointedly declares that “one may honorably keep // His distance / If he can.” Living and writing through and after 9/11, Joseph’s work has a verbal speed and intensity that contrasts dramatically with the meditative deliberation of Oppen’s masterpiece. But both poets understand the problem of honorably keeping one’s distance, and their poetry records their struggles.
Into It, then, may be understood as the intricate verbalization of a kaleidoscopic vision of historical catastrophe, even as the poet constantly questions his role. A poem such as “What Do You Mean, What?” (a quintessential New York expression, which reminds me of the title of Hugh Seidman’s “People Live, They Have Lives”) caroms from one instance to the next of what Joseph calls “this individual and collectivized looting / of the most astonishing complexity, / each point of an imagined circuit / attached to each of the others” (Into It, 20).
Continued at Jacket2 | More Chronicle & Notices.
