East of the Sun and West of the Moon

I spent some of tonight reading W. S. Merwin's "East of the Sun and West of the Moon" in The Dancing Bears (1954). I've never paid much attention to Merwin's work prior to The Drunk in the Furnace (1960); though to be honest, I suppose I haven't really thought much about any book before The Lice (1967). Migration (2005) is giving me a chance to go back and pick up some of the earlier work, but so far what's made the biggest impression on me is his retelling of the Norwegian myth of the peasant girl and the White Bear prince. With its echo of Cupid and Psyche, Merwin's poem anticipates in interesting ways Robert Duncan's "Poem Beginning with a Line from Pindar," which was first published in 1958, four years after The Dancing Bears. Since the two poets have been so firmly separated by their respective anthologies--Merwin in Hall's New Poets of England and America and Duncan in Allen's New American Poetry-- they're not freqently discussed together. Interesting that both of them should adopt a Cupid and Psyche myth at nearly the same time. Probably the most surprising connection that I've discovered, though, is how this fairy tale gave rise to the jazz standard, which I've long associated with Billie Holiday, though it evidently comes to her by way of Princeton. Who knew?

Scattered Open and Falling

Enjoying reading David Hinton's new collection Classical Chinese Poetry on this summer morning, warm enough to burn the mists off of T'ang China. Still, it's nice to find those cool mountains in Hinton's free, but lovely, translations. Here's my old friend Wang Wei:





Golden-Rain Rapids
Wind buffets and blows autumn rains.
Water cascading thin across rocks,

waves lash at each other. An egret
startles up, white, then settles back.

I love the way something almost happens at the end of the poem, then just doesn't . It's also a testament to the egret, refusing to be moved by wind and the water. It can't ignore them, but it can find its place again. In Hinton's version (and really no one else's), the Wheel-Rim River sequence ends with this quatrain.

Magnolia Slope
Lotus blossoms adrift out across treetops
flaunt crimson calyxes among mountains.

At home behind this stream, quiet, no one
here. Scattered. Scattered open and falling.

I do miss the Lord of the Clouds from the end of Pepper Tree Garden , the final image in the sequence as I've encountered it until this point, though I admit that I don't know what order the poems appear on the scroll where the Wang River Sequence was painted. Moreover, Hinton's conclusion comports better with the expectations of a secular audience, unschooled in the Book of Songs. I always liked the fact that Wang Wei makes his literary past inseparable from his natural surroundings by invoking the Book of Songs here, but I admit that the first time I read the sequence I paused over Magnolia Slope and thought, "That's fantastic." It would be hard for any poet today to resist letting that end the poem.

We're not much today for the idea that cultivation of sensibility is a necessary precursor for apt perception, that rawness is just unshaped rather than authentic. So it makes sense to end this translation not with an allusion but with a fruitful dissolution, a beautiful decay that can be read without recourse to footnotes or history.

A good poetry day at the New York Times Sunday Book Review. Ben Downing reviews Daisy Hay's Young Romantics, a book that's been knocking around in my Kindle app for the past couple of months. Further in, Brenda Wineapple reviews Michael Sledge's first novel about Elizabeth Bishop, The More I Owe You.

Reading the Wineapple review left me reflecting on how teaching about Bishop has evolved over the past twenty years. When I first studied Bishop she was presented as a prim, patient poet, one with an impeccable eye for detail. Had I studied her twenty years prior to that, I think there would have been something more obviously demeaning in this presentation, as if her precision were the result of modest goals. In fact, I've been told throughout my career that Bishop is a major, one of the major, American poets. If her status relative to Lowell has shifted, this probably reflects Lowell's decline at least as much as it does Bishop's elevation.

What has changed about Bishop, however, is how readers respond to her biography. Partially this reflects a growing willingness among critics to consider facts about an author relevant as methodologies of cultural studies have undermined the splendid isolation texts maintained from The New Criticism through Yale School deconstruction. Yet critical shifts alone don't account for the difference between the Bishop I teach and the Bishop I learned.

Readings of Bishop I encountered as a student seemed to reinforce, and maybe be complicit in, the reticence of Bishop's own poetry. Often used as a foil to Lowell, Plath, Sexton and Berryman, Bishop was the poet of careful observation, whose personal life was largely irrelevant to her poems. What makes this anonymous reading of Bishop so perverse, in retrospect, is just how facinating her life is, as Sledge's novel attests. More than that though, understanding at least part of Bishop's autobiography makes so many of her poems, particularly the great poems from Questions of Travel and Geography III more resonant and more comprehensible.

The Bishop I know now is more daring than the miniaturist that I encountered twenty years ago. Her reticence seems testament to her transgressive life and loves as much as it is a sign of her prim aestheticism and eye for detail. She is a woman who simply can't confess; the stakes of confession are so much higher for her than they are for a poet like Lowell. Similarly, I once viewed Bishop's relatively sparse output only as a sign of her exacting standards. Doubtless those standards account for much of her limited productivity compared to poets like Lowell or Berryman, but so too does her struggle with alcohol. (Not that Lowell and Berryman didn't join in this struggle themselves.)

What I like so much about today's Bishop is her bravery. I always admired Bishop's much-praised eye, but until a few years ago, I don't think I understood how brave she was in her homelessness, and how this bravery made her, in some ways, the first really hemispheric poet. With her childhood in Canada, her soujourns in Massachusetts and Washington, D.C, her long and passionate loves in Brazil, Bishop is a poet who belongs to the Americas, in some ways even more than Neruda or Whitman do. We were always right to love her for her details, but I'm glad we've begun to love her for the many boundaries she crossed as well.

Hopper with Headshots

Interesting response from Grant Tavinor to Roger Ebert's claim that video games can never be art.

I have a couple of responses myself to Tavinor's piece. One is that I really need to finish Bioshock. I keep skimming past portions of these essays so as to remain unspoiled. (Of course, if Bioshock really is art, then it should stand up without a surprise twist. I can't imagine putting aside Madame Bovary once I knew (spoiler alert!) that Emma dies. However, it's becoming increasingly clear that Bioshock is the game around which the videogame/art discussion will take place. Essays like "Ludonarrative Dissonance in Bioshock" (among others) suggest that Bioshock will be the game around which much discussion of the medium will take place. That's OK, as I can't think of a better one, except possibly Braid, which I also didn't quite finish. But Braid is a short independent game, and so Bioshock is probably a more representative example of what a commercial studio could accomplish if it decided producing a serious game was worth the effort.

I've finally looked at Ebert's essay, and it's shockingly shallow. Of course, he doesn't have to rise much to meet Santiago's challenge; any essay that uses Wikipedia for its definition of art might as well just give up at the outset. What's really troubling about Ebert's response, though, is his steadfast refusal to play a game. Whatever one thinks of games, it should be clear that playing is the mode of experiencing the medium. No serious person would review a piece of music without listening or a film without viewing it. It's easy enough to imagine Ebert's response if someone were to say The Godfather was an inferior piece of work because it was about gangsters and thus was clearly "one more brainless shooting gallery." Why even bother sullying yourself by watching it?

Ebert's failure to even understand how games are experienced appears most clearly in his dismissal of Braid: "You can go back in time and correct your mistakes. In chess, this is known as taking back a move, and negates the whole discipline of the game. Nor am I persuaded that I can learn about my own past by taking back my mistakes in a video game."

Now I couldn't actually finish Braid. I don't enjoy platform gaming, probably because I've never really had the reflexes for it. Still, Ebert appears to have missed the entire conceit of Braid, which is that some of its puzzles can only be solved by reversing time and taking back previous actions. A complex series of maneuvers have to be completed to finish the level. In chess, this is known as playing the game.

Because Ebert doesn't understand the mechanics of the game, he can't really grasp Santiago's point about how the game explores permutations of memory and regret. Had he played the game, moreover, Ebert might have considered Braid's use of music, for example, or its painterly design, which alternates Edwardian interiors with pastoral dreamscapes. These surely deserve consideration in an essay that purports to consider the aesthetics of the game.

While I like Tavinor's discussion of overlapping cultural activities, I actually think he concedes too much in responding to Ebert's argument about rules and competition. The fact of the matter is that in many many games produced these days, one does not win, though it's again unsurprising that Ebert doesn't realize this fact. You don't win Bioshock and you don't win Braid. You finish them, as you might finish a novel. Except in PvP areas of MMOs, there's very little competition in the sense that Ebert suggests.

Neither Braid nor Bioshock is without its flaws. I found both the whimsy and the melancholy in Braid wearying after a few hours of play. And both Clint Nothing and D. Riley in the links above explore how Bioshock fails to make good on its promise of ethically significant play. But Bioshock urges players to consider the ethics of their in-game action, the ethics of ludonarrative, and in this it distinguishes itself from any other game I'm aware of.

But is it art? At this point, I finally think Ebert makes a valid point, just not perhaps the one he intends. He's right to suggest that gamers shouldn't worry about whether games are art. Games, like film, painting and theater, are cultural productions, more or less engaging, more or less complex. Critics like Tavinor can probably more fruitfully spend their time analyzing games themselves than they can trying to persuade anyone that games measure up to the the arbitrary aesthetic standards of Roger Ebert.

After Post-Avant

Ron Silliman's recent post declaring his intention to "get his head out of the eighties" by looking more skeptically at his Quietist/Post-Avant dichotomy was heartening. Silliman is right to recognize that this way of thinking about poetry is a relic of the anthology wars of the 1950s and early 1960s. His most persuasive evidence for looking beyond such a division is his own blog, which as he suggests, contains links to poets representing a wide array of aesthetic and political commitments. Indeed, the fact that I, a dyed-in-the-wool product of the American MFA system, default to his blog for poetry links is part of what makes his investment in labeling a diverse school of poets "quietist" so troubling. The whole idea of the anthology wars only makes sense when attention (readership and publication) exists in an economy of scarcity. Since the advent of the web, that hardly seems to be the case anymore, though of course one can argue about prizes and the like, as Silliman does, if one is so inclined. Still, the whole idea of a movement, as Raymond Williams argues, stems from the need to brand one's art to better achieve recognition and sponsorship. Achieving this identity through the centralizing gesture of movements, and particularly a few massive competing movements, seems better suited perhaps to Fordism of the last century than the distributed networks of this one.

Strangely, the same students who excoriated Michel de Certeau have just lapped up Baudrillard like cream. Either that stern talk I gave them about approaching complex texts with humility was more effective than I suspected, or Baudrillard just makes more intuitive sense to them. Maybe they're already used to living in hyperreality. I do think, as a matter of style, Baudrillard's use of extended examples distinguishes his writing from de Certeau's or Debord's. Those long sections on Disneyland and the Loud family give them something to hold on to through the desert of Baudrillad's more abstruse sections. I am looking forward to teaching Baudrillard as the Salahi and Heene stories unfold. In both cases, people wanted to be on reality TV and then suddenly, they were. Only the reality TV wasn't "Big Brother" or "American Idol," but reality itself. These stories seem to me the best examples I've encountered of what Baudrillard calls the "dissolution of TV in life, the dissolution of life in TV." "There is no longer a medium in the literal sense," Baudrillard writes, "it is now intangible, diffused, and diffracted in the real." Little wonder, then, that my students can't be exercised by the desert of the real.

Boomlay, Boom: Vachel Lindsay's Modernism

Al Filreis just released an excellent new podcast about Vachel Lindsay’s “The Congo,” a poem I teach in my Modernism class. Just the recording of Lindsay reading his poem is worth the price of admission, or more really, since admission is free. Filreis stumbles badly out of the gate, though, by asking about how to “get beyond” the racism in “The Congo.” His interest is clearly in redeeming the poem as an early example of performance poetry, a poem as speech act rather than as text. In reading Lindsay this way, he looks forward poets like Olson and Duncan and tries to propose alternative Modernist roots that diverge from the textuality of poets like Eliot, Moore or Williams. The self-evident racism of Lindsay’s poem, then, presents Filreis with a problem, one to be “gotten beyond” so that Lindsay can be finally valorized. This desire to recuperate may also account for the discussion’s exclusive focus on the first section, with its anticolonial banishment of King Leopold to a hell where he will be forever maimed. Unmentioned is the poem’s final section, in which Mumbo-Jumbo, the African god is defeated by Christ and the Congo itself is “redeemed.”

Aldon Nielsen rightly brings Filreis up short by insisting that the racism of the poem isn’t something one can “get beyond.” Nielsen, along with the other panelists, argues that the poem be reintegrated into our understanding of Modernism, but Nielson understands that the poem’s racism is an integral part of its Modernism. In this, I think Nielsen demonstrates a more sophisticated grasp of the issue than either Filreis or Charles Bernstein, both incredibly smart guys who are usually the reason I listen to the podcast. Bernstein, for his part, presents Linday’s primitivism as if it were idiosyncratic. Lindsay, Bernstein argues, thinks white culture has lost touch with fundamental rhythms and connection to Yeatsian “song,” and that African-American culture offers a corrective to that alienation. “We typically think of racism as saying bad things about African-Americans,” Bernstein says, “but Lindsay is racist because he says, or intends to say, good things about African-Americans.” Perhaps Bernstein realizes that this is one of modernism’s central tropes, proposed in various ways by Carl van Vechten, William Carlos Williams, Gertrude Stein and eventually Norman Mailer, to say nothing of African-American’s like W.E.B. Dubois in “The Negro Mind Reaches Out,” his contribution to Alain Locke’s The New Negro. In their own way, Eliot’s Upanishads and Hemingway’s Basques represent a similar gesture. If Bernstein does realize the centrality of this recourse to primitivism, though, he certainly makes no mention of it in the podcast.

It is, though, the very ubiquity of Modernist primitivism that makes Lindsay such a key figure. Filreis believes that Lindsay was excised from the canon because his performative style of poetry conflicted with dominant textually based narratives about Modernism. I find that hard to credit for a couple of reasons. First, Lindsay’s aural effects on the page don’t appear much different than those offered by other Modernists; “Boomlay, Boom” seems perfectly in keeping with, and maybe a little staid compared to, Stevens’ “hoobla hoobla hoobla how” or Williams “marrruu.” Filreis can insist that Lindsay’s performance of these nonsense syllables fundamentally differed from those of the solemn Stevens or the adenoidal Williams, but in the days before great internet archives like Penn Sound, very few readers could have been aware of these differences in performance. The page really was inescapable as a medium for the transmission of poetry, as Olson’s comments on the typewriter demonstrate. More importantly, though, Filreis’ own chronology has Lindsay disappearing from the canon during the 1970s and 1980s, the very period that witnesses the mainstreaming of bardic poets like Ginsberg, and the emergence from the workshops of a model of poetic creation centered on the metaphor of “voice,” as Mark McGurl discusses in his recent The Program Era. If Lindsay’s exclusion from the canon were motivated by his privileging of voice over text, wouldn’t that exclusion have occurred under the banner of New Critical irony? That it didn’t is testified to in part by my first exposure to “The Congo,” in Hayden Carruth’s The Voice that Is Great within Us. Though I can’t evoke the same kind of conspiracy that makes Filreis’ claim so interesting, I think the more obvious answer is the more likely one: As classroom’s became more diverse and the Black Arts movement made it harder to “get beyond” racism that had once been glossed over as impolite, it became harder to teach “A Study of the Negro Race” that opens with a section titled “Their Basic Savagery.”

Which is both good and bad. Good that the racism of the poem is recognized, neither ignored nor explained away, but bad that, as Bernstein points out in the podcast, many white writers who simply ignored African-American experience (sorry, Wallace Stevens and Marianne Moore, but I am looking at you.) are given a free pass. Lindsay, a populist poet who walked from Illinois to New Mexico trading books of his poems for food, saw himself as Whitman’s heir, and in many ways he was. Lindsay, like Sandburg and Robinson, partakes of an American modernism that never had to make “A Pact” with Whitman, that never decamped for Paris or London. Restoring Lindsay to the Modernist canon isn’t just about finding a godfather for spoken word, but really about locating Modernism within the American culture of the early twentieth century. That’s what makes it essential not to get beyond the poem’s racism. It’s not a bug, it’s a feature.