The way things are going
They’re gonna crucify me . . .

—John Lennon

It is hard to move ahead, at this point in time, to the dark core of my archive with a straight face: I mean the awe-some spectacle of “Stalin as Linguist,” the apex of all literary hit pieces. And, as luck would have it, someone has gone and started the job for me. On 24 August 2018, Dispatches from the Poetry Wars hosted David Levi Strauss’s mini-dossier of the scandal that erupted in Poetry Flash over his 1985 revival of the 1978 debate with Robert Duncan over Louis Zukofsky, about which I have written so much I do not even want to link to it [but see below]. The capstone of the dossier is not Levi Strauss’s encomium, nor the original Poetry Flash slam, published over two full pages about the same time, but Clark’s 1987 version, cleaned up and published in Partisan Review. The stakes of the retrospective defense of Duncan (and belated attack on me) get past the local knee-capping to seek support from a serious piece of red-baiting, which, in the mid Reagan Era, still had resonance with neocons and would be taken up by them.

My charge is to find new take-aways from this old history, and there are several. First, Levi Strauss’s dossier, with Dispatches‘ minimal introduction, is mainly a scandal-provoking display, meant to complement the uploading of the Duncan tape as part of a long-term fascination with that event—not to gain any sort of understanding of it. But the dossier itself is bad history (sense 1: methods): the context for this privileged eruption of the Poetry Wars misses the larger stakes of the reception of Language writing, which was full-tilt at the time [see below]. As such it is a nostalgic bit of hagiography for Levi Strauss and the Duncan revival. Second, the scandal returns to what was so cryptic and provocative about the line “Stalin as a linguist” itself. What was its use in my poem, and what bad history (sense 2: events) does it refer to? What issues of authority, relevant to the present, does this second-order invocation of “Stalin” disclose? Finally, the publication of this dossier itself had a context, in fall 2018, that would become fateful quite soon—providing an example of the uploading of pseudo-scandalous material to target, abject, and humiliate. The dossier draws on the tradition of the journalistic hit piece and remediates it in the age of doxxing and trolling, for nefarious purposes to come. … More

Pursuing the truth hidden in the archive, I could have called this entry “Poetry Wars,” as a hot-button topic. But that would be to give in to the facile and fetishistic, the already scripted. What I am interested in is learning from the traces of reception, what the reception of a work, an author, a movement gives us as information, in a kind of feedback loop, of the world in which it was meant to have its effect—to “win its way” as Stein wrote. But that course is never guaranteed. Whitman’s assertion of a reciprocity with the people, his readers—”I alone receive them with a perfect reception and love—and they shall receive me”—may be posited as an ideal that is impossible to achieve. And it is true that the reception history of Language writing often took place in an opposite sense—to the extent that populists could claim it had been rejected by the “people,” seen as a literary ideal. It could be said that the entire movement, as a group form of “negative capability,” held open its horizon of reception until some future time to come. Rather than empowering the reader, Language writing intuited its reception as something it could not yet wholly envision or grasp. The writing itself, I would now say, took form on the basis of an unknown futurity.

Returning to the files for evidence does not disclose a simple negative history; far from it. “The morning of starting out, so long ago” (Ashbery) was as legitimately optimistic as it could have been. In that sense, an “originary” moment, at least on the West Coast, might not be the December 1978 “canon-making” debate with Duncan over Zukofsky’s reception, but the May 1979 “focus on language-centered writing,” edited by Steve Abbott, in the Bay Area journal Poetry Flash. By that time, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E had begun its four-year run of publication out of New York, and San Francisco small presses such as The Figures, Tuumba, and This Press had brought some of the early major works of the movement. But seeds of contestation or reaction were already evident. Alan Soldofsky’s “Language and Narcissism”—one of five contributions to the issue—was the first attested moment of “Language baiting,” and tended to overshadow the positive contributions of the forum. From that moment to Tom Clark’s cartoon parody of this author—likely drawn from the head shot on the cover of Poetry Flash—was but a little minute. And from that moment to the present, “forty years on” as Tony Green wrote, the discourse of populist antagonism to Language writing has been in place. Returning to the archive creates a series of talking points to comprehend what was at stake. … More