In today’s mail came the current Critical Inquiry (36, no. 2; Winter 2010), which I earlier noticed would contain an essay on George Oppen (John Wilkinson, “The Glass Enclosure: Transparency and Glitter in the Poetry of George Oppen”). I had been looking forward to that discussion with interest, in terms of Oppen but also of where poetry criticism seems to be going in CI, after some recent questionable efforts. “Poetry” itself is still a tarnished critical category, with the New Lyric Studies and Conceptual Writing failing to provide direction.

Flipping through, as one might likely do, scanning footnotes and catching the drift, I came up short at the penultimate paragraph: a strained mention of my Constructivist Moment in the service of—what point? That the split between Oppen’s poetics of “integrity” and his Left politics remains problematic, pointing to a tendency in American poetics to presume a convergence of politics and form that collapses under scrutiny? This is the quote:

The fantasy entertained by Barrett Watten of an American “constructivist moment” seeks to arrogate William Carlos Williams and Vladimir Mayakovsky as dialectically linked forefathers for Language Poetry. Watten seems ignorant of the two poets’ meeting in an apartment in East Fourteenth Street in Greenwich Village on 19 September 1925. Mayakovsky’s reading was a profound experience for Williams, according to his biographer—a touchstone for epic revolutionary art exposing the bombast of Carl Sandburg, even if its influence cannot be discerned directly in Williams’s poetry. But Williams continued to publish both poetry and prose through the Depression and the period of the Cultural Front . . . . (237–38).

Certainly it’s nice to be cited, and in a prominent place, even in the service of such a tendentious argument as Wilkinson’s essay. But the non sequitur and projection here are marked. If there is any justification for Wilkinson’s slam, it would be to align the argument of The Constructivist Moment with a “Whig history” (evident in “Poems for the Millennium, Silliman’s blog,” and other publications) that would conflate Left politics and radical formalism “so as to redeem a conservative, even authoritarian, even racist strain in modernism” (236). Oppen’s biographical schism between politics and poetry, of course, is a problem for such a progressive history; either we accept Hugh Kenner’s modernist elision of the “twenty-five years it took to write the next poem,” or we try to come up with a Left formalism that would condense the progressive impulses of both poetry and politics (intellectually challenging, as it must reconcile Oppen’s political “Stalinism” with his Heideggerian poetics).

The misreadings of this passage, however, typify the difficulty of Wilkinson’s attempt to undermine a poetry of direct perception and truth in language as politics in Oppen. First, The Constructivist Moment is by no means a “Whig history”; its methodological commitment to divergence and discontinuity in terms of period, genre, nationality, region, and scale is marked. Its analyses everywhere seek contrast, unlikeness, and even negativity as terms for political readings. The “constructivist moment” indeed involves utopian fantasy, as is directly stated in the introduction, so it is no matter of mere “arrogation” to argue across unlike citations of Williams, from Spring & All, and Mayakovsky, from How Verses Are Made. Rather, it is to point to the divergence in scale of two strains of modernist aesthetics, not only toward the cultural logic of modernity that contains both but to their dialectical synthesis in practice. Such a synthesis may not be “Language Poetry” as such, but it may well be what The Constructivist Moment wants to put forward as a critical and poetic practice.

The “smoking gun” of Williams’s meeting with Mayakovsky, thus, proves two points. First, it discloses a polemical motive in Wilkinson’s seemingly high-minded attack on Oppen’s incommensurability: the shout-out to Perloff, nod to Bernstein, mixed reviews of Nicholls, dissing of Silliman, Joris, and Rothenberg are all right there where we can see them, with the penultimate blast at The Constructivist Moment as a deal-maker for the cognoscenti. But second, it discloses Wilkinson’s own “Whig history” of social progress and aesthetic innovation going hand in hand; thus we follow Williams forward from that meeting to the Popular Front—however elided! as with Oppen, though scarcely admitted, at least after the Library of Congress debacle in the 50s. Wilkinson’s politics, then, holds as an ideal a merger of word and thing, poetics and politics, modernism and the Left that Oppen failed to realized and that, scandal upon scandal, the “Whig history” of the Language school merely purports to assume. 

The criminal non sequitur of the passage, however, is to claim that because I cited Williams and Mayakovksy without mentioning their actual meeting, I was in some form of denial of it—and the progressive history that followed. No, that is not the case: I read the same biography of Williams as Wilkinson, as well as Michael Denning’s account of Williams’s prose in the Popular Front period, and have ever been an admirer of his democratic leanings in mid career. The influence of Mayakovsky on Williams’s triadic line, of course, is well known. I remember—and have recounted elsewhere—complaining to Robert Creeley about the lack of appreciation of Williams’s stories and novels, especially White Mule, and have taught them frequently. Recently I have been engaged in a sampling experiment with Paterson, which I read in terms of its democratic politics. As a test of my knowledge of Williams’s involvement with these issues, I might cite “A Morning Imagination of Russia,” or the following from 1950:

Jingle

There ought to be a wedding
a wedding, a wedding!
There ought to be a wedding
between Russia and the United States
. . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . . .
The classes liquidated
liquidated, liquidated
the rich would be supplanted
by the meek enriched with love [. . .]

(Collected Poems, 2:227–28)

At times one imagines the British think they invented class politics (which to an extent may be true). But I have noticed elsewhere an undercurrent of ressentiment among poet/critics like Wilkinson over American “arrogation” of politics through aesthetic and formal means. The problem for these critics—as with the U.K. Left’s embarrassment over the aesthetic—is what to do with poetry itself, as it always produces some fatal disjunction of word to thing that invalidates anything like a politics (grounded in Whig history, it may be added). The “glass” and “mirrors” that for Wilkinson are the smoking gun of Oppen’s poetics (which do deserve scrutiny, but in a historically more complicated account) thus reflect back on an inaccessble blindspot: correspondence theory, of word to world, and its presumed denial by art.