MARCH/APRIL 2007
Into the Language Lab
Joan Retallack and Juliana Spahr's Poetry and Pedagogy
Barbara K. Fischer
Since most college students resist all poetry as arcane, elitist, or even inscrutable, why not give them material that’s supposed to be hard, that requires active reading to make provisional sense of it? That’s the argument of Poetry and Pedagogy, a collection of essays by poets, teachers, and scholars. The approach is, in fact, a shot in the arm for sluggish classrooms, and the adrenaline it prescribes is contemporary innovative poetry. The experimental poetries of the past 30 years, the editors argue, expose students to the “linguistic laboratory” of their own multi- and cross-cultural moment. One contributor, Lynn Keller, extends that metaphor with her compelling image of the “centrifugal classroom”: whereas traditional models tend to pull the reader inward into “confessional spaces,” the centrifugal classroom draws students outward “toward the world outside the poem and how language works there.” Inviting and dynamic, Keller’s model makes it easy to catch the fever of “democratization and openness” that the teaching methods described here inspire.
Yet easy the poems are not. The texts that Keller and most of the other contributors have in mind are associated with Language writing, including works by Susan Howe, Bob Perelman, Ron Silliman, Lyn Hejinian, and Charles Bernstein, with Hejinian and Bernstein also contributing essays themselves. These poems are famously (or notoriously) difficult for their disjunctiveness and indeterminacy, their theoretical underpinnings, and their departures from formal, narrational, and generic conventions. The suggestion that such texts are ideal for sparking student interest in poetry appears counterintuitive at first, but the book makes a persuasive case. Retallack and Spahr observe that because these poems require intense concentration and collaboration, they engage students in “a performative dimension”—a “collaborative making of meaning” that is axiomatic to contemporary innovative poetry in the first place. What emerges in these classrooms is not undergraduate solipsism (“The poem is open to interpretation, so it means anything I say it does”) but ways to “make meaning in motion”—comparative, vigorous reading practices.
The result, as these reports from
the front lines of seminars attest, is the biggest boon to close
reading in 50 years. Charles Bernstein’s “Poem Profiler”
is a fabulous 134-item list of things to pay attention to in poems,
going far beyond irony and metonymy to include “coefficient
of weirdness (wackiness quotient),” “sampling (use
of found or quoted material),” and “variant versions,
including performances,” as well as an exhaustive list of
relative possibilities such as parataxis vs. hypotaxis, kinetic
vs. static, and neat vs. messy. He has his students looking for
ambivalence, density, artifice, closure, exaggeration, right justification,
radicalism, pastoralism, mysticism, melodiousness, sobriety, surrealism,
and relevant ethnic, gender, national, and sexual orientations.
Bernstein and many of these teachers are concerned with giving
their students tools for descriptive analysis: awareness of connotation,
recognition of different modes of representation, a grammar for
reading forms and contexts. They promote the habits of concentration
and close attention to language that poetry requires and rewards,
but without the apoliticism associated with New Critical formalism,
bringing Understanding Poetry—Cleanth Brooks and
Robert Penn Warren’s seminal 1938 textbook—up to date.
This updating is long overdue.
Despite sporadic resurgences, poetry has for several decades occupied
a marginalized position in English departments, where fiction
and popular culture have become the preferred objects of analysis.
The New Criticism, with its heuristic approach to analyzing a
poem’s tropes and formal construction, left a generation
of students with a distaste for the seemingly clinical task of
“explication”—the dreaded homework assignment.
Meanwhile, New Critical aestheticism—its emphasis on the
poem as a self-referential objet d’art, isolated
from politics and the conditions of its making—was set up
over and over again as a straw man for the arguments that comprised
the revolutions in critical thinking of the 1970s through 1990s.
As poststructuralists, New Historicists, and many others challenged
the New Critical paradigm, they also demoted poetry as the privileged
object of literary study. The contributors to this volume reinstate
poetry to the discussion where it belongs—not a site of
lyric seclusion, but right in the midst of a complex evolution
of ideas about literature and literary language, the place of
literary forms in the political sphere, and the cultural weight
of creative work.
Most of these writers criticize
the values implicit in New Critical analysis, especially its reliance
on voice and lyric subjectivity. Brooks and Warren’s first
principle states that a poem is “an individual’s attempt
to deal with a specific problem, poetic and personal.” Language
writing explicitly challenges the notion that an expressive “I”
speaker of a poem gives the reader a transparent window on reality,
and experimental writing more broadly shuns the hubris it takes
to think, à la Robert Lowell, that anyone cares about a
solitary speaker watching a skunk poke through his garbage. Nonetheless,
as these writers propose new pedagogical paradigms suited to new
poetries, they wisely resist the now-familiar oppositional stance
to the New Criticism, which Harryette Mullen observes would be
“flogging the ghost of a dead horse.” If any teacher
of poetry today, with whatever aesthetic bent, encountered a student
who had actually read Understanding Poetry, he or she
would rejoice. This new book of guidelines for teaching poetry
returns us to close reading through a principle that we tend to
forget that Brooks and Warren also stated: “Poems come out
of a historical moment, and since they are written in language,
the form is tied to a whole cultural context.” Moreover,
these writers would also likely agree with Brooks and Warren’s
belief that human experience as embodied in poetry “is concrete,
in that it involves a process, and in that it embodies the human
effort to arrive—through conflict—at meaning.”
Understanding poetry, then and now, requires a process-oriented,
tension-fraught engagement with its concreteness, specificity,
and irreducible writtenness—though these more recent writers
insist that we arrive at meanings, emphatically plural.
Full of examples and exercises
that point students in the direction of these specific meanings,
the book is a valuable practical resource. G. Matthew Jenkins
describes his step-wise process for teaching Susan Howe’s
The Non-Conformist’s Memorial at a two-year vocational
college, overcoming repeated protests of “It doesn’t
make sense!” with a “web” model of reading that
encourages students to see how “some poems try to multiply,
rather than control, possible meanings.” Jerome McGann and
Lisa Samuels offer several exercises for “deforming”
poems to open interpretive possibilities, such as isolating all
of the verbs in a poem to reveal “the energy or dormancy
of the poem’s action.” Another “deformance”
technique—“reading backward”—derives from
one of Emily Dickinson’s letters: “Did you ever read
one of her Poems backward, because the plunge from the front overturned
you? I sometimes (often have, many times) have—a Something
overtakes the Mind—.” The question that is posed to
students throughout the examples given in this book shifts from
“what does the poem mean?” to “how do we release
or expose the poem’s possibilities of meaning?”
Several teachers encourage students to respond to experimental writing in ways other than traditional academic essays. Mullen and Mark McMorris each have the students perform M. Nourbese Philip’s “She Tries Her Tongue; Her Silence Softly Breaks,” dividing the class into male and female “choruses” and having them write treatments for staging it. Jim Keller assigns “hypertext reading” exercises that employ free writing to enact a process of “pluri-poiesis.” Derek Owens has students create multimedia environments, and has received projects, in lieu of term papers, ranging from Web-site presentations to origami mobiles to “an inflatable sex doll with poems inserted into orifices.”
Amidst the classroom hijinks, the collection
gathers important discussions, and several thorough theorizations,
of developments in contemporary poetry and the position of avant-garde
poetic practices at large. Charles Altieri’s trenchant analysis
of lyric expressivity locates Language writing’s insistence
on the linguistic basis of affective experience in the context
of Romantic and Modernist strategies. Alan Golding revisits the
problem of the avant-garde’s “co-option” by
the academy, reflecting on the pedagogical implications of the
institutionalization of experimental poetics. The matter of innovative
poetry’s oppositional stances persists—opposition
to “centrist” conventions such as normative syntax,
narrative, “aboutness,” and “I-lyricist”
modes of expression. Yet the editors acknowledge from the outset
that “while there has been a tendency to see Lyric and Language
as two groups warring over dominance, the actual picture is much
more complex, full of numerous divergent poetries.” Their
emphasis on the multiple possibilities for locating poetic subjectivity,
of which the singular expressive “I” is only one,
is in keeping with the volume’s pluralistic and democratizing
aims: “Any ‘I’ from whom one has something to
learn must be in conversation with an unsettling mélange
of ‘others.’”
This emphasis on difference and otherness leads to some utopian fantasies. Maria Damon, in the space of a single page, calls for “ahierarchic heterogeneity,” “utopian heterocracy,” and “alchemical heterotopias.” The editors themselves, by their own admission, approach the teaching of poetry with “unabashedly utopian ideals.” The essays in this collection are persuasive when they show how students who are schooled in examining experimental poetry are “more prepared to examine how other texts, from other poems and works of literature to TV advertisements and political speeches, make and communicate meaning.” However, they are considerably less persuasive when they claim that students enter “the zone where vernacular meets academy, where disciplines are undone, where street and workshop are one.” Taking the leap to the claim that this collective classroom work constitutes “the definition of a democracy” overlooks institutional facts. The workshop is not the street: unless this poetry were taught in public K–12 classrooms, which is proposed but remains unlikely, most of the suggestions offered here require the reader to be part of a tuition-paying community. It is one thing to challenge the scene of solitary reading and promote the democratizing power of readerly collaboration and collective interpretation, but quite another to access this power without being enrolled in a degree program. There are other reading communities, to be sure—online, in coffeehouses, in book clubs. For most readers, however, the opportunity to do these kinds of exercises and assignments, to confer with others in depth and detail about social meaning-making in polysemous texts—as opposed to reading on lunch break, or in an exhausted half hour before bed—constitutes a luxury indeed.
Anticipating this charge, Lynn
Keller cites Barrett Watten’s assertion in his introduction
to Ron Silliman’s Tjanting that “a bus ride
is better than most art” and his further suggestion that
“it is possible, in fact, to read this book on a bus.”
This scene of reading in motion, reading while traveling within
and through the “din of culture,” is presented as
a touchstone for the centrifugal classroom. Even though a classroom
is necessarily an interior of its own, a centrifugal classroom
can be attuned to how students and poets got there—attuned
to public arenas, multiple discursive communities, social and
cultural contexts. A centrifugal classroom must continue to be
an interrogative space, continually asking about, among many other
things, where readers are situated. Mullen’s list of new
critical questions for poetry includes these about readers:
Do readers seek intellectual stimulation, vicarious experience,
an opportunity for empathy, escape from reality, gossip? Do
readers seek to join or maintain their membership in a group
defined by its intellectual and creative interests, its cultivation of high levels of culture, its critical and theoretical sophistication?
. . . Is the reader imagined as a consumer of a well-made aesthetic artifact, a collaborator in a decoding/signifying process, a potential political activist?
The writers of these essays clearly prefer some of these positions to others—“yes” to the reader as collaborator and activist, “no” to the well-wrought urn. To be true to this book’s own spirit, however, these answers should not be taken for granted. Does the ubiquitous principle of readers as co-producers of meaning empower seminar participants, or marginalized poetic communities, in any concrete sense? How exactly do experimental poetries spin out of their high cultural and theoretical orbits to “formally instantiate” an ethics or call for political action?
These questions are not new, but
this volume raises afresh the need to answer them. In a recent
article in PMLA, Marianne DeKoven reflects on the fervor
with which feminist poetic experimentalism was pursued in the
early 1980s in such journals as Kathleen Fraser’s HOWever. DeKoven describes her own earlier hope that experimental writing
might challenge capitalist patriarchy and lead to “the abolition of all forms of hierarchy, of dominance-subordination”:
“the opposition implicit in experimental writing to the
cultural hegemony of sense, order, and coherence has ramifications
on the largest scale.” Although she is somewhat critical
of her earlier optimism, and less convinced now that experimental
writing is “poised to unleash utopia,” DeKoven goes
on to point out the persistence of “experimentation”
in various media. Yet she, like many the writers who contribute
to Poetry and Pegagogy, leaves unquestioned some basic
assumptions about what “experiment” is and how it
attempts to enact its revolutionary work, especially the notion
that fragmentation and derangement of syntax can undermine the
evils of the status quo. From the vantage point of our current
historical-political moment, “sense, order, and coherence” don’t seem like such terrible things. Whatever merits there
might be in a participatory ethics of reading—including
the reader in the making of meaning and thus leveling hierarchies—must be weighed against the dangers of enshrining yet another chaos that cannot redeem itself.
A less lofty goal of this book than the embodiment of a readerly democracy—and perhaps a more important one—is its call to expand curricula to include poetry written since 1950, and, in so doing, to make Language
writing and other experimental works available to a wider audience.
There are times when the suggestions here bear the marks of an
“in crowd” problem—the promotion of one poetic
canon over another. Most of these writers, predictably, do not
have anything nice to say about Elizabeth Bishop or Sylvia Plath.
Nonetheless, the diversity and breadth of examples offered, an
eclectic mix of poems from different regions and right up to the
present day, remedies a chronic omission in college courses. A
tone of passionate optimism, moreover, imbues these teaching methods
and suggests their wide, flexible applicability. When Damon cites
Jack Spicer’s oft-quoted lines “No / one listens to
poetry,” she does so to correct a misreading. The line break
means that these lines need not be read as an admission of defeat,
but as a directive: “No, one listens to poetry.” If
a single message can be gleaned from a book that insists that
poetry’s messages are always multiple, it is this: take
notice, read closely, read your way right out the classroom door.
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