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Permanently Uncanonical.
A Fortnightly Review of
Heretics of Language
by Barry Schwabsky
Black Square Editions 2017 | 248pp | $20.00 £15.04
By NIGEL WHEALE.
NOTE: In The Fortnightly’s online template, illustrations are thumbnails with captions or onward text links embedded. To enlarge an illustration, click on it. To read a caption, hover over the illustration. To play an embedded video in a larger size, click twice. Pressing ‘esc’ returns you to this page.
I wish that were as easy as it should be. It’s chastening that I know nothing about the Mauritian ‘visionary’, to use Schwabsky’s term, Malcolm de Chazal; the Czech modernist Ivan Blatný, the poet Milan Kundera ‘most admired when [he] was fourteen’; the eraser-author Jonathan Safran Foer, who writes by ‘subtractive composition’, blocking over original text that peeps through, by redaction; Ronald Johnson’s Radi Os (1977) I must look at, a redacted Paradise Lost; Italo Calvino, a ‘science-fiction realist’ (I’ve read him but have nothing to say); Tim Dlugos, possibly ‘the great poet of the AIDS epidemic’; I need to read Alda Merini and Amelia Rosselli, contemporaries of ‘a remarkable generation of Italian poets born in the early 1930s — among them Edoardo Sanguineti, Nanni Balestrini, and Antonio Porta’; call up on your screen the lovely graphic textualities of Natalie Czech, clearly in dialogue with the other redactive creators discussed here; I must also read novelist Bruno Jasieński’s I Burn Paris (1928), which sold out as soon as published, ‘a strange sort of hybrid, mixing avant-garde strategies with the hoariest clichés of pulp adventure stories and large doses of heavy-handed Communist sloganeering’; Amy King manages to reconcile ‘emotional openness with semantic obliquity’; ‘Whatever became of the New York School … the last avant-garde according to some?’ is a really good question, and Schwabsky makes a case for Matvei Yankelevich and Noel Black as the latest generation of that wave; I know nothing of the Italian novelist, Nanni Balestrini, poets Arthur Sze and Wong May, that Facebook aphorist named Jeff Nunokawa, fragmentary essayist and punk guru Richard Hell, or Yugoslavian novelist Borislav Pekić. But Schwabsky’s essays make all of these artists so intriguing that you, perhaps all of us, need to discover them promptly.
Schwabsky begins with the wannabe avant-guardist beast, Francis Picabia, in a discussion of Marc Lowenthal’s selection of Picabia’s texts, I Am the Beautiful Monster (2007). Picabia continues to be scandalous. When I first saw some of his post-Surrealia and Dada, realist paintings in the Reina Sofia, I was — I remain — deeply shocked. Their trite offensiveness is beyond parody.
The uneasy banality of ‘Femmes au Bull-dog’ and of ‘Printemps’ can be understood as paintings expressive of the false, sinister, self-censored culture produced by the Nazi occupation of France and its fake Vichy state puppetry.
Schwabsky persistently writes about poets, artists, whose work eludes, is evasive of, single readings.
Schwabsky persistently writes about poets, artists, whose work eludes, is evasive of, single readings. The strand of classical American twentieth-century poetry that particularly attracts him includes Barbara Guest and John Ashbery. Guest’s long poem, ‘The Türler Losses’, how one can be condemned to lose stuff repeatedly – two luxury Swiss timepieces, in this case – becomes a Proustian slippage, ‘Like time … moving from one thought or image to another almost before one has quite caught its drift’. Schwabsky describes how Denise Levertov, as poetry editor for Norton, rejected a collection by Guest because it was tainted with ‘the typical chic flippness of the NY School’ — O’Hara, Ashbery, again — and that the poems seemed to her to be too often ‘an unrelated series of poem-seeds’ that never grew to any effect. Schwabsky acknowledges the truth of this description, which for his kind of aesthetic, becomes its virtue – evanescence of meaning, ‘artifice verging on artiness’, the mode also of John Ashbery’s lovely first collection, Some Trees (1956). For Schwabsky, Guest’s poems can also attain a sense of materiality, as in Rocks on a Platter: Notes on Literature (1999), but at their most characteristic, they effect a ‘dematerialization’ of the word: ‘The structure of the poem should create an embrasure, inside of which language is seated in watchful docility’.
In ‘Contemporary Poetry by Women: The Verge of a Language’, Schwabsky argues for a radical substitution:
For Schwabsky, the posited ‘mainstream’ represents a ‘backward-looking poetry whose aesthetic lost its freshness a century ago’. This category won’t do…
This is a familiar trope for poet-polemicists who claim to write from an ‘alternative’ poetic practice: the ‘mainstream’ is what has to be rejected / written against / that idiom (whatever it is) that has to be completely made over. In some ways, this is a lazy argument, creating a supposed monolithic poetic discourse without ever really defining who or what these poets are. Maybe the recent incumbents of the Laureateship would be resoundingly mainstream: Ted Hughes, Andrew Motion, Carol Ann Duffy, and then the ‘Liverpool poets’, Seamus Heaney? This is already a various and differentiated bunch, and what about Rap and Performance poets – Kate Tempest, Katie Makkai – the National Poetry Slam, the poetries of BLM writers, Benjamin Zephania, who listens ‘to Gardeners’ Question Time more than you might think’ (he admitted to Radio 4)? Are these the ‘alternatives’ that are somehow now acceptable to ‘the mainstream’? They are also all variously decent, widely studied authors, though for Schwabsky, the posited ‘mainstream’ represents ‘a backward-looking poetry whose aesthetic lost its freshness a century ago’. This category won’t do, without a lot more definition and refinement.
In place of this idea of conventional writing, Schwabsky substitutes the poets represented by Infinite Difference: Other Poetries by U.K. Women Poets (Carrie Etter (ed.) 2010). These include Wendy Mulford, Andrea Brady (curator of the Archive of the Now and ‘one of the best poets in Infinite Difference’), Carrie Etter, and (Schwabsky’s ‘personal favourite’) Denise Riley. Schwabsky describes Denise Riley as ‘one of the finest writers of the English language; along with the late Anna Medelssohn [“Grace Lake”] (like Riley born in 1948)’. He relates her to the group of poets that followed on from ‘the remarkable generation born in the later 1930s, of whom Lee Harwood, J.H. Prynne and Tom Raworth may be the other most salient names’. Schwabsky’s discussion of Denise Riley’s ‘A Part Song’ and her prose reflection on that poem, ‘Time Lived, Without Its Flow’, is a moving tribute to this work: ‘The English language proceeds in indifference to the death that suspends the flow of time, that locks the survivor in her stasis.’
Schwabsky writes challengingly, and uses words new to me – ‘the tremendous trifecta of early modernist French poets’ – ‘trifecta’ an outstanding performance or achievement in some activity, usually horse racing, and a ‘tricast’ to us. And ‘a passel of books’, which sounds like what it is, a ‘parcel’, a group of people or objects, mid-nineteenth century US informal talking; ‘accept the primacy of randomness, the clinamen’ – plural, clinamina, from clīnāre, ‘to incline’, Lucretius’s rather lovely word for the ‘unpredictable swerving of atoms’, according to Wikipedia, more generally, an inclination. When you ‘get the hang’ of a writer, begin to know what they do, you can invent the work that you wish they had done, and see where they might take you, if only they had. So I invent essays by Schwabsky on Proust, and what would he write about Marcel Duchamp, whom he tantalizingly mentions, I need his essay on La mariée mise à nu par ses célibataires, même (‘The Bride Stripped Bare by Her Bachelors Even’) (1915—23). Or, perhaps, Schwabsky is of the mind of Ben Lerner (what would he write about Lerner’s two brilliant novels, Leaving the Atocha Station and 10:04?), that Duchamp remains ‘unfortunately, in my opinion – the tutelary spirit of the art world’ (10:04).
Something else that Schwabsky doesn’t do is popular culture, mass-consumption work – Why should he, since he focuses on what he takes to be a very specific practice within classical late/post Modernism:
Maybe Schwabsky (here) is not messy enough. For example, there are so many thoughtpieces now about ‘Childish Gambino’’s This Is America, Donald Glover’s layered Trap musical. The online video is a perturbation of its source, it disidentifies mass identity, a risky project. Who is not at variance with how we are identified?9 As Schwabsky writes elsewhere:
Robert Langdon, Dan Brown’s intrepid, well-toned (but strangely empty) hero, pursues all the big questions, from The Da Vinci Code onwards. In Origin (2017), the questions are, Where do we come from? Where are we going? Langon’s inhuman ally in his quest is Winston, a neural network that often outstrips Langdon’s (limited, human) resources. Winston follows a really complicated algorithm, but is also getting interested in creating music and images – though its composition is a bit dull, a sort of Miró or Mondrian pastiche (it’s also a code, inevitably). It wouldn’t do well in the RobotArt.org competition, held since 2016.
Langdon is being charitable here about the 2014 experiment, which was widely criticised as overhyped, the brain-machine little better than a mediocre ‘chatbot’. Arthur C. Clarke’s Heuristically Programmed Algorithm (HAL) was way smarter, as early as 1968. Evaluating The Painting Fool’s compositions calls for aesthetic criteria such as composition and originality – in addition to judging whether it is human- or machine-made work. Painting Fool now judges its own work – one image ‘a miserable failure’ – and has moved on to poetry. It would, wouldn’t it? Will this too be anything more than ‘skilful digital ventriloquism’?11 Barry Schwabsky knows how this feels. One of his poems (appeared to have) appeared in Issue l, a 3785-page online anthology of poetry by several thousand poets – none of whom were responsible for ‘their’ work in the collection. It had all been generated by a program devised by Jim Carpenter. Schwabsky compares this spoofing to the ‘Araki Yasusada’ episode from the early 1990s. Haunting, surreal poems written by a survivor of the Hiroshima atomic devastation appeared to acclaim in many prestigious journals, American Poetry Review included — until the poems were denounced as an elaborate deceit perpetrated by a Midwest literary professor, still not certainly identified (possibly Kent Johnson?). In a second discussion of the poetical spoof, Schwabsky concludes ‘nothing is in principle off limits to the imaginative writer – provided that the imagination and the writing and also…the sense of irony are adequate’.
Schwabsky has such thoughtful and original perspectives on the ‘New York School’, Francis Picabia, Lawrence Wiener, Samuel Beckett’s poems, AI creativity and the ‘other poetries’ of UK Women writers, that I find myself wanting to know more about his interests, his thought, and his poetry. Which are the central works for him, how does all this cultural production relate to our times, what is the Tendenz of his artistic perspective, his own clinamen? Reading Heretics of Language makes you want to go on to Barry Schwabsky’s Words for Art and The Perpetual Guest. I certainly will.
♦
Nigel Wheale is the author of Raw Skies: New and Selected Poems (Shearsman 2005) and The Six Strides of Freyfaxi (Oystercatcher 2010). His academic texts include The Postmodern Arts (Routledge 1995) and Writing & Society: Literacy, Print and Politics in Britain 1590-1660 (Routledge 1999). An archive of his work for the Fortnightly may be found here.
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Publication: Friday, 6 July 2018, at 09:13.
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