In Questions of Poetics, I wrote that, in contrast to André Breton’s motto “I seek the gold of time,” what I wanted is more like the “currency of history.” All this bears on the question of value, of course. Breton’s wish to alchemically transform desire into substance is inscribed on his tombstone, where it is still doing its work. In another present, I see history as a gold mine of another sort, making meanings that circulate and become value. Such is the task of the poet, broadly put, writing works that will be circulated until they find their meaning and use. It is also the task of the literary historian, to establish the contexts, motives, situations in which such meaning may be made. There needs to be more literary history, not of the old, positive kind but one addressed to the making of value in poetics as history. This could begin with the work of an archive, as an assembly line of parts for meaning making—eventually tending toward a form of comprehension, like the work of literary history depicted above.
Lilian Chaitas’s Being Different: Strategies of Distinction and Twentieth-Century Poetic Avant-Gardes contains, in my reading-in-progress, the best account of the debates on early Language writing I know. Published in 2017, it is a meticulously detailed, 435-pp. account of American poetic avant-gardes from the New Americans to Language writing, drawing its theory from Renato Poggioli and Pierre Bourdieu, with a glance back to Alan Golding’s From Outlaw to Classic (1995). Originally it was a 2013 dissertation written to German standards under the direction of Bernd Engler at the University of Tübingen, where not coincidentally I was hosted as a Fulbright scholar in 2005 and staged a raucous conference on Authorship and the Turn to Language that December—a currency of history itself. But I did not know the work existed until a section of the last chapter, retelling the 1978 Duncan/Watten cataclysm in microscopic detail, turned up as a pdf on Dispatches from the Poetry Wars. I finally located a copy on Amazon.de, which arrived last month from a warehouse in Nijmegan, Netherlands. The last chapter, “Language Poetry in the 1970s and 1980s,” is what concerns me here—and which so impressed me that I provide it in three separate pdfs (here and below), one for each of the major sections. These address, in turn, “The So-Called ‘Language’ School”; “The Duncan/Watten ‘debat/cl/e'”; and “Stalin as Linguist.”
In writing her account of the red-baiting of Language writing, after my line “Stalin as a linguist” from the opening stanzas of Progress, Chaitas goes back to sources—the sequence of articles in the San Francisco Chronicle, Poetry Flash, The Berkeley Monthly and later The New Criterion and Partisan Review, where hay was made over that one line. Her first moment of critical gold, oppositely, comes from a meticulous reading of George Lakoff’s positive review of Bob Perelman’s Writing/Talks. Lakoff’s discussion sets the terms for poetics as self-authorizing discourse: “The workers have taken over a factory and converted it to serving the needs of their community. . . . It is poetics whose job is to inform and to generate poetry” (qtd. 353). This “taking over a factory” is addressed to the fixed positions of “consecrated authority,” whose hallmarks are “the referential fallacy” as informing the “romantic ideal,” where poetry “has to serve an uplifting and healing function by communicating deep truths in especially charged, compact form” (qtd. 354). While this thumbnail sketch by no means accounts for the “turn to language” in poetry, it demonstrates that the positional struggle over literary hierarchy is in fact a contestation of presumed value in terms of a pluralization of divergent values. This move from value (as in “what is a good poem”) to values (how any standard of value is made up of numerous competing values, held in tension or in play) is the motor force behind literary change and history, here the emergence of a new school, tendency, or movement (which Chaitas distinguishes carefully in section 1, on the unstable “name” of Language writing). Lakoff’s reasoned argument, calling into question the unstated romantic/realist poetics of Poetry Flash, is met with a barrage of ad hominem attacks by Tom Clark, who was solicited to defend the castle consecrated for poetry. Clark attacks Lakoff’s credentials as a linguist not a reader of poetry, and then my credentials as a poet in personal terms: “Priggish to a fault, self-reflexive, variably articulate, mock-professorial, Progress is a solipsist tour de force. . . . Watten writes about the inside of his head; he goes from writing to copyediting texts for the University of California” (qtd. 362). Chaitas goes on to anatomize this remarkable screed as in fact an argument of “value” that begins by stigmatizing my divergent aims in writing and, linked through Shklovsky and the Russian Revolution, red-baiting what Clark might have seen as an emergent postmodernism, had he been keeping up with Fredric Jameson. The point throughout is that the war of positions in the mid-80s “Poetry War” moves quickly from questions of authority to questions of value, which need to be seen on their own terms.
The question of literary value was a hot-button topic at last month’s Louisville Conference. A basic grounding in Bourdieu’s aesthetic theory—versus the ghosts of Understanding Poetry that haunted the room—would have led to a more dimensional discussion. The stated agenda of two sessions on “Evaluation” was to separate aesthetic value from historicism or theory, which is like trying to swim the River Ganges with one hand tied beyond one’s back. You just cannot separate “value” from history or philosophy, or cultural studies or gender politics, though the assumption was that one has to try. What remains is that a valuable poem is one that is “memorable,” you cannot get it out of your head, like “Ode to a Grecian Urn” or “Mending Wall” or “Meditation at Lagunitas.” The discussion of poetics in Chaitas’s chapter contradicts this point: everything about value is negotiated in historical time, including the memory of professors or the lyric tradition for Hannah Arendt. It is the strife and becoming of “position-takings” against fixed “positions” that is always at work—true of the Duncan/Watten “debat/cl/e” and “Stalin as Linguist,” and demonstrated in a reactive (if not reactionary) clinging to “blackberries, blackberries, blackberries” in Robert Hass’s poem. In my response to the discussion, I said that the poem, in 1979 and only a year after the “debat/cl/e,” had been weaponized as a defense, after Lakoff’s account, of “romantic subjectivity” and “word to world correspondence,” precisely the point of “blackberries.” That reaction, in turn, led to the exclusion of poets who wished to create their own standards of value through a process of calling out and red-baiting. Taking over the factory of meaning just means installing the creation of value into the terms of the poem itself. It is the task of an approach like Chaitas’s to show exactly that such a form of value—the currency of history même—can be made.
Here literary history takes as its example the sequence from mid-century modernism to the New Americans to Language writing, but is that all that there is? Certainly not: after Black Lives Matter in 2015, that sequence was called into question in Cathy Park Hong’s calling out of “The Whiteness of the Avant-Garde” in Lana Turner, the calling out of Kenneth Goldsmith and Vanessa Place, and a bit later my heated debate over “myth” with Nathaniel Mackey. This moment calls for meticulous analysis of precisely what value claims were at stake, which have to do not only with “schools, movements, and tendencies” but with specific decisions in the act of writing. In the debate with Mackey, it was the authority of “myth” in the consecrated lineage of the New Americans and Robert Duncan that was at stake, but this was acted out in a micropolitics of aesthetics and language, with the racial subtext kept in the wings. The move from the negotiation of values, which brings light, to obfuscating logics of exclusion (as with Tom Clark) is what needs to be reversed. I would love to see Chaitas’s methods brought ahead to the heated, and fruitful, arguments in poetics from 2010 to the present, where a panoply of values is often condensed into logics of identity-baiting.
Links and notes
Chaitas, Lilian. Being Different: Strategies of Distinction and Twentieth-Century Poetic Avant-Gardes (Leiden, Neth.: Ferdinand Schöningh, 2017). Pdfs of chap. 6, introduction and section 1, “The So-Called ‘Language’ School,” here; section 6.2, “The Duncan/Watten debat/cl/e” here; section 6.3, “Stalin as Linguist,” here.
Kellogg, David. “Desire Pronounced and/Punctuated”: Lacan and the Fate of the Poetic Subject.” A discussion of desire and the lyric, focusing on work by Robert Hass and Jorie Graham, here.
Previous discussion:
“Archive 01: Zukofsky @ SFAI.” barrettwatten.net. 1 April: here
“Archive 02: Reception Study.” barrettwatten.net. 6 April: here
“Archive 03: Abjecting the Avant-Garde.” barrettwatten.net. 10 April: here
“Archive 04: The Death of Stalin.” barrettwatten.net. 13 April: here
“Archive 05: Olson in This.” barrettwatten.net. 27 August: here“Page 04: My Literary Controversies.” barrettwatten.net. 5 January: here
