Louis Armand, ed., Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetic, Litteraria Pagensia Books, 2010.
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This volume brings together writings on Edwin Denby, Mark Hyatt, Bern Porter, Asa Benveniste, Lukas Tomin, William Bronk, Gilbert Sorrentino, Robbie Walker, Bob Cobbing, Paddy Roe, Philip Whalen, Loop Poetics, Cyberpoetics, Flarf and other fringe poets and poetics from the 1960s to the present.
CONTRIBUTORS
Ali Alizadeh, Louis Armand, Livio Beloi, Jeremy Davies, Stephan Delbos, Michel Delville, Johanna Drucker, Michael Farrel, Allen Fisher, Vincent Katz, Stephen Muecke, Jena Osman, Michael Rothenberg, Lou Rowan, Kyle Schlesinger, Robert Shepperd, Stephanie Strickland, John Wilkinson.
Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics, edited by Louis Armand, collects essays by poets about marginal poetries and poets; recalling John Ashbery’s series of lectures on unknown poets, Other Traditions. Hidden Agendas does not purport to be some kind of conclusive collection of marginal poetics; its premise, rather, is refreshingly contingent on personal proclivity: “a number of writers / editors were invited to reflect on a poet, a group of poets, or a poetics from the last half-century, that they deemed of personal significance and which they felt to have been underestimated, neglected, or overlooked. Consequently, each contribution is subjective and critical” (4).
Indeed most of the book’s eighteen contributors are probably better known than their subjects. Roughly half of these contributions are about poets and their work; the other half about (the concept of a) poetics. The essays about poets include: Kyle Schlesinger about Asa Benveniste, Robert Sheppard about Bob Cobbing, John Wilkinson about Mark Hyatt, Vincent Katz about Edwin Denby’s sonnet series “Mediterranean Cities,” Stephan Delbos about William Bronk, Jeremy Davies about Gilbert Sorrentino, Louis Armand about Lukasz Tomin, and Michael Rothenberg about Phillip Walen. The essays about poetics include: Stephanie Strickland about digital poetry, D. J. Huppatz with a history of Flarf, and Allen Fisher with an essay about complexity and incoherence.
Before looking at these and other essays, let us first return briefly to the book’s title, Hidden Agendas: Unreported Poetics, which immediately lays bare the apparent paradox of this anthology: are we offered a report of the unreported, an exposition of the hidden, a centralizing of the marginal? Not necessarily. Perhaps these poets and poetries will be allowed to remain hidden, unreported and marginal even as they are examined in this book. This is true in the obvious sense that this one anthology is unlikely to lead to a widespread retroactive appropriation of these various poets into the various canons from which they have hitherto indeed remained hidden in the unreported shadows of their margins. However, as Louis Armand writes in “Notes in lieu of an Introduction”: “an unreported poetics could not be allowed to simply be thought of as the disenfranchised other of a presumed mainstream” (3).
Another possibility, then, is to consider the marginal not in resentful opposition to the canonical, but as an expression of its own kind of affective difference. “[T]here is the question of how ‘marginality’ itself may be seen to underwrite a poetics — not simply a style or poetic stance, but a technics of composition” (2). Looking, for example, at one etymological root of the word “margin,” we find that apart from meaning something of little consequence, something that resides on the edge of the center, it also shares a root with “mark,” namely, “mereg-” (edge, boundary). For the word “mark” this has a recorded meaning of “sign of a boundary” → “any visible trace or impression.”[1] So a remnant of this slight trace or impression can also be thought of as lingering as an effect of the margin, allowing us to think of it affirmatively instead of appositionally. Instead of dismissing the margin as the boundary between text and the edge of the page, perhaps we can think of it in terms of what traces it leaves at this boundary of text and space. Much like Deleuze and Guattari’s concept of minor literature, Pierre Joris’s (Deleuze-inspired) Nomad Poetics, or Joan Retallack’s poethics of the swerve, a literature that is marginalized in this sense is not one that is forced into a position of powerlessness but one that merely makes a slight difference, leaves a nearly imperceptible, but not insignificant, trace. As a way into this book, Hidden Agendas, we can thus ask: What singular impressions do these poets and poetics leave? What is it that makes them marginal?
Of course the marginal subsists in what is major, mainstream, of “central importance”; in the same way that mainstream literature/art will carry traces of the inassimilable, the outside, the margin. “The marginal is a complex — a whole web of parallel universes surrounding and overlapping whatever purports to constitute a ‘centre’, yet about which it remains in the dark” (5). What does this notion of the margin as a complex mean? Alternatively to thinking about the margin as something that has veered away from a “the centre,” [2] the margin as a complex might be thought of as being part of the interconnectedness of things — what Timothy Morton has theorized as the Mesh — in which of course there is “a centre” depending on where you stand.[3] But thinking in terms of a complex, or mesh, allows one to think from below about how a poem emerges from its particular circumstances, instead of imposing from above a normative standard in which it must somehow be straightjacketed.
A marginal poetics — alternatively to being opposed to the mainstream — can thus be a poetics of the mesh, an ecology of poetry. British artist, poet, and critic Allen Fisher takes a similar approach in his closing contribution to Hidden Agendas, proposing a diagrammatic poetics, which tries to include a diagram of the poet’s whole environment in the poetic process. Instead of the poem emerging from the supposed deep recesses of a poet’s sensitive mind observing the world from a distance, Fisher prefers to talk about the poetic process in terms of a poet’s proprioception (the body’s sense of itself and its spatial surroundings) in relation to its environment. The focus is not on an ostensibly coherent collection of words that appear as if out of nowhere on a blank page, but precisely on the surroundings that give rise to a poem, what Fisher calls, somewhat awkwardly perhaps, archaeological spacetime. When the poem starts from the poet’s proprioception, “it comprehends the planet as home and proposes both a dig down and a dig upwards, by which can be meant an understanding made cogent from both historical perspective and geological information … the archeological spacetime implicitly fields an ecological understanding in all directions …” (249). An explicit reference here is Charles Olson (d. 1970) who similarly emphasized the specificity of place as a constantly reiterative creation of a Polis, a coexisting.
Similarly to Olson, too, Fisher extends his discussion of the ecology of poetics to include superficially unrelated disciplines such as archaeology, mythology, modernism, theoretical biology, quantum mechanics, and contemporary literary theory. Ecology, the diagrammatic, spacetime; all concepts that emphasize spatiality and dimensionality (as opposed to viewing a poem as no more than the flat words on the page). Letting in spatiality and ecology means recognizing not only a coherence in any situation, but also the inhering incoherence. So in addition to the poem as a straightforward linear narrative, Fisher examines the possible ramifications for poetry of different facets of incoherence and chaos.
Fisher’s multifocal style zaps through historical eras, scientific disciplines, and schools of thought, sometimes within the same paragraph. Witness his discussion of incoherence in which Fisher begins with a rejection of Plato’s view of poetry (as intuited “mental poison” and “enemy of truth”), then jumps forward twenty-five hundred years to cite Alan Turing’s insolvability solution (which proved that there are mathematical problems which cannot be solved by pure logic, thus demonstrating, “within mathematics itself, […] the inadequacy of ‘reason’”), only to borrow from theoretical biology the concept of chreod — which refers to the necessary paths for brain activity and cognition — as an example of the inherence of chaos in equilibrium and vice versa; subsequently showing how this can be “ventriloquized” in poetry in as much as poets’ “consistent patterns or chreods in the cellular connections of their speech productions are characterized and can be discerned in the patterns of their language presentations”[2] (253, 257, 259).
In part two of the essay Fisher discusses Joan Retallack’s Poethics as an example of a poetics of incoherence. Retallack’s poethics of the swerve too stresses nonlinearity and complexity and chaos theory as inspirations for her poethics. “How can one frame a poetics of the swerve, a constructive preoccupation with what are unpredictable forms of change?’ (271). Her swerve brings to mind many other such references to a minor or marginal movement that nevertheless is an impetus for/of change: Lucretius’s famous clinamen (the unpredictable swerve of atoms), or Deleuze/Guattari’s nomadic becoming minor (a movement always away from the major). Retallack writes: “Imagining a cultural coastline (complex, dynamic) rather than time’s horizon … thrusts the thought experiment into the distinctly contemporary moment of a fractal poetics” (274).
So where along this complex and fractured coastline do some of these forgotten poets surface? What swerves did they make in their environments and in their poetry’s environments that make them memorably marginal? And how do we find them if not in the neat chronological presentation of the school textbook, the bookstore’s alphabetically ordered poetry section, the ostensibly all-inclusive, decisive anthology? Hidden Agendas offers a variety of answers to these questions. Amongst these, one very intriguing sounding poet is Lukasz Tomin, whose short life and virtuosic writing is introduced by Louis Armand.
Lukasz Tomin’s life and work started from various positions of marginality. It is poignantly ironic that, born in 1966, he grew up during normalizace, the period from about 1969–1987 that saw the reestablishing of the Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, in reaction to the reforms of the Prague Spring. As the son of dissident intellectuals, Tomin moved around during his childhood, first to London, then France. Later he moved back to Prague, but by now he had made the choice to write in English, a third degree of marginalization, and one that, at first, alienated him from both the Czech and UK literary circles.
So does Tomin’s personal entanglement within the political turmoil of his time find direct expression in his writing? Is his writing positioned in opposition to the “normalizing” tendencies of the Czech state to which he returned? The answer appears to be both yes and no: Armand argues that Tomin’s writing is not overtly political, but that it is precisely in this rejection to engage with the political agenda as set by the state that Tomin creates works that think directly about “the secret life of what we call ethics” (118): “In the context of the post-Revolution literary nationalism, Tomin’s writing carries no instructive message — it remains alien, unassimilated and ostensibly inassimilable. Against the poetics of tribal evocation, Tomin’s is a poetics of dispossession” (123).
The Doll, for example (the first of three books that Tomin wrote), is on one level a story of the escape and travels of two children who plan to build a large doll as a symbol of hope, but with a Bataillean flavor and “steeped in the ‘perversity of innocence’” the children’s plan “gives way to self-flagellation, confusion, and dissipation” (118). Armand suggests that not only can this be seen as an allegory of itself, it can furthermore be thought of precisely as a critique of allegory, as a tired and ineffectual, and overly didactic form (popular we mustn’t forget, amongst exiled writers, artists, composers) that no longer sufficed as a vehicle for social change. It is not surprising therefore that Tomin, too, rejected a linear coherent style, but rather wrote layered texts which were “a surface kinetics of interpenetrating ‘figures,’” in which “one thing does not lead to another; everything is rather détourned.” (120, 122)
Despite the meaningful and lasting effort Armand argues that Tomin contributed through literature to that “secret life of what we call ethics,” Tomin did not live to see recognition for his writing: he committed suicide at the age of thirty-two (118). And although he is discussed as someone who was not interested in confessional poetry of sentiment, the fragment with which Armand closes his essay hints of the personal darkness with which this young writer must have been struggling:
With an ending.
Try to be homeward try to be sane.
In the river.
Of your choosing.
Secure the wranglings of madmen.
To a nowhere.
Another singular example in Hidden Agendas of a poet writing from the margins is the English poet Mark Hyatt (1940–1973). A drug abuser, gay, and semiliterate, the margins Hyatt was writing from were those of adaptation to the norms of society and “proper” standard English. An important point that Wilkinson makes in his essay is that if subjected to formalist, normative (or, if you will, normalizing) close-reading, Hyatt might not be said to have written many good poems; and yet, Wilkinson argues that Hyatt’s poetry holds up to extended and repeated readings. In a way, Wilkinson writes, Hyatt’s work can be qualified as, “stoner poetry; amidst a general vagueness more or less interestingly warped from poem to poem, something amazing occurs and amazingly often.” (52). Here are some of those lines:
and I am having one
of those sexless nights
where birds fly out
of the mouth
with their tails
on fire. (62)
And from another poem: “He steals a small poem / And scars it madly” (53). Lines that are — remembering Hyatt’s semi-literacy — pertinent, and even more so when we learn that he even often did not want his grammatical mistakes to be corrected.
Hidden Agendas as a whole is certainly a motley collection, both in the variety of obscure and unknown poets and in the different approaches taken to introduce them to the reader. Although this variegated approach mostly works, some contributions unavoidably seem to be less synchronized with the rest of the anthology. Huppatz’s essay on Flarf, for one, in its very structured and chronological presentation of the movement, feels strangely canonizing for a book about marginalism. Johanna Drucker’s playful essay offers a more titillating counterpoint to Huppatz’s effort. Drucker presents an episode in the history of Language Poetry in the form of a kind of fantasy novel:
The leaders of the LangPo were scattered, one of whom had chief influence in New York, exceedingly beloved by many people, and others among the Canadians, and the Californians, but their forces were still gathering out of sight to put down the Workshop poets and convert the Traditionalists. (189)
Michael Rothenberg’s contribution about Philip Whalen might for some also be somewhat awkward. Rothenberg’s piece consists of fragments of highly personal conversation and poems from what appears to be Whalen’s last few weeks in hospital, sometimes giving the reader an uncomfortable sensation of voyeurism and nostalgic sentimentalism. A different issue is whether Whalen can really be said to be unfairly forgotten — as recent as 2007 there appeared the nearly one thousand-page tome The Collected Poems of Philip Whalen with forewords and introductions by the likes of Gary Snyder and Leslie Scalapino.
Nevertheless, Hidden Agendas is a welcome stringing together of diverse and forgotten poetic fringes into one diverse collection. It is devoid of the snide competitive remarks sometimes found in academic writing, perhaps since the emphasis in these essays is on personal tribute to a particular poet or poetics. Also, the fact that there is no real organising principle to the book apart from its eclecticism really complements its starting point of poetry as emerging from a complex of factors. It is definitely exciting to have the feeling of sifting through fragments of the past and learning about nearly forgotten poets. The thorough documentation, research (including some nice chapbook cover artwork), and close-readings in many of the essays certainly add to this experience. Hidden Agendas is another of many innovative volumes brought out by the prolific Prague based publisher Litteraria Pragensia. - Jeroen Nieuwland
There is trouble here, starting with the title: the lower case monicker, and the upper case subtitle. This is an anthology of essays and surveys of various figures and literary scenes plucked from the multitudes of poets and scenes operating in English in the second half of the 20th century. Subject to the vagaries of writers who actually contributed -- many were asked, but few responded-- this book is nonetheless true to its dubious title and subtitle. Are there purposefully hidden modern/postmodern/linguistic/ conceptual agendas? Hidden from whom? By whom? Why? Certainly not by poets, included or not included. The poets under consideration here have done their best to make their agendas public, or at least to get their work and their names before the public. The works may have been hiding the poets' bad habits or sexual histories from the poets' parents or other kin, but they were not shy in informing the public at large as to just what their agendas were. The best essays in here, for my money, are Louis Armand's preface and Jeremy M. Davies consideration of Gilbert Sorrentino's love/hate problem with writing, writers, and himself. Armand gives voice to the inevitable critical anxiety brought about by the internet. He worries that the internet archives are "unstable," while being so capacious as to absorb everything, including the careful distinctions poets have worked their entire lives to establish and make visible. It's a warranted anxiety these days when "archive" is the second-best known word in the English language, the first being its daddy, Google. This anxiety is felt by everyone in the book under various forms: fears of being forgotten and fears that what one writes will be forgotten no matter how much of it one writes. Most of the poets under scrutiny exhibit these fears themselves, though considerably less than their critics. The critics have subjects (the poets), while the (most interesting) poets had the whole world for a playhouse, and they were hardly worried at their peak about the eventual disposition of their oeuvre. The "most interesting" meaning precisely those poets who cared little about their posterity or their archives. They all cared somewhat, and, if they lived long enough, they did start caring when they got older, if only because some of their letters and manuscripts were occasionally worth some money. Another take on "hidden agendas" would be the reassuring malevolence of an "establishment" that hides literary work from public view on purpose, like the government does with "the truth." There is some validity here, because the government does hide the truth (see Wiki Leaks), and the literary establishments (such as they are, appendages of welfare states mostly) do hide outrages against language and propriety in order to not lose their funding. This latter kind of establishmentarian skin-saving is mostly a thing of the past four decades of the 20th century, when hopes for therapy through art were aided and abetted by audiences fooled (like any audiences, like the idea of audience itself) by the hope of miraculous cures. The poets served snake oil made from powedered alphabets and the witnesses walked away healed, leaving behind a pile of crutches (essays). In the case of the better-known "official" poets, the snake oil was fabricated with the aid of public-language machines already set in place by the "entertainment industry," a collaboration that was met with rightful indignation by practitioners of more honest writing that intended to be both critical, political, and esthetically distinct. The trade-off was that "collaborators" (with the machine, the prize/grant/job pie) were "hidden" by posterity, left to "mainstream critics" (also doomed by that special, discriminating "posterity"), while the practitioner of "poetics" threw their lot in with a critical posterity that is somewhat late in showing up. Some of the poets here (principally the "Language" crowd, exemplified by Bruce Andrews in this book) were aware of this possibility, so they did their best to include as many possible clues to their own work as their esthetics allowed. Others, who are the subject of painful cataloguing and tormented attempts at description of their work in the language known as Critiquese, didn't care so much because they had their own gangs, they were mini-pop stars who had a great time boozing, talking, smoking, staying up all night, and having girlfriends, wives, breakdowns, visions, and arrests, in short, lives. Either way, there are no "hidden agendas," per se; on the contrary, the figures here have self-exposure agendas. Not even the "high" modernists (Joyce, Beckett, Stein) had "hidden" agendas: they set up writing cults and invited everyone to "share" the mysteries, a task that proved way too daunting for non-members of the gang. The "high modern" mysteries were then made compulsory by the lesser gang members who became professors and assigned them. As compulsory reading, the rag was off the bush as quickly as you can say "Fiction 101." The inventors of "hidden" agendas are none others than their keepers, who must proclaim the esotericism and hiddenness of their subjects at the peril of losing tenure. This might sound cynical from the editor of "Exquisite Corpse," a journal that paid attention for many years to the very writers whose "hidden agendas" are discussed here, but the "Corpse" claimed only that it was dead from the very start: "exquisite" yes, like all dead things. Once dead, things can't talk back. That's exquisite, don't you think? One could look then at the "hidden" agenda of Exquisite Corpse as a mausoleum for those choosing to be entombed. The fact that the voluntary entombees were/are some of the liveliest humans around, made the mausoleum a great party pad for decades. We had fun. "Fun" is the chief "hidden agenda" missing from this book of "unreported poetics." I won't even go into the silliness of the notion of "unreported," which smacks of the school and the police. Jeremy M. Davies' esay is interesting because it deals with the paradox of Gil Sorrentino's reputation as a "comic genius," acquired somehow despite the fact that he is a bitter, uncomfortable, judgemental, nasty writer, whose best sentences make you feel like shit. Davies is good enough to distinguish Sorrentino's sociopathic despair from William H. Gass' equally despondent insights, but commits a sleight-of-hand in order to do so: he claims that Gass was affectionate toward the literature, while Sorrentino hated it. The problem is that Gass' "affection" is mostly his personal desire to be loved, hardly a genuine feeling of empathy, while Sorrentino (to his credit) doesn't give a fuck. The problem remains, of course: if he didn't give a fuck, why did he bother? One cannot answer that: he did give a fuck, he had to give a fuck, just like Robert Creeley, in his bitterest "love" lyrics does give a fuck, a lot of fuck (motly about not getting fucked). The weakness of this collection is not the palpable anxiety of its academic collaborators, but the lack of big, generous essays about writers who really matter: Tom Raworth is mentioned but his work is not, Anselm Hollo is mentioned, but his work is not. I learned a lot about the British poetry scene in the Sixties and Seventies, but none of the information is live. The beginning of the 21st century is the site of archival anxiety, and until it subsides there will be no relxed, extended appreciation of just how great the poetry scenes and their best figures were. Let's hope they make some special Xanax for the Humanities divisions before they are completely eliminated, so fine minds like the ones partially visible here, can get down to the work. Such as it is. Meaning that most of the "work" of the last decades of the last century was in its making, and that in talking about it one has to make more, not just translate it like forensic detectives. This is a cheerful prospect, actually, because the internet (since when was "stability" a value of any "poetics," "hidden" or not? allows for social projects with a participatory audience. What's dead, and has been dead since 1916 Zurich Dada, is the passive audience. In calling for an "audience," these critics are invoking "the hidden" as a (feint) lure to the unwary (students), but there hasn't been such a thing for a long time, and it's becoming obvious right now that there will never be.- Andrei Codrescu
Louis Armand, ed., Avant-post: The Avant-Garde under "Post-" Conditions, Litteraria Pagensia Books, 2006.
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"Avant-Post engages the question of whether or not avant-garde practice remains viable under the prevailing conditions of a whole series of "post-" ideologies, from Post-Modernism and Post-Structuralism, to Post-Historicism, Post-Humanism and Post-Ideology itself.
Contributors include a range of artists and theorists, such as Johanna Drucker, Michael S. Begnal, Lisa Jarnot, Ann Vickery, Christian Bök, Robert Archambeau, Mairead Byrne, R.M. Berry, Trey Strecker, Keston Sutherland, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Robert Sheppard, Bonita Rhoads, Vadim Erent, Laurent Milesi, Esther Milne..."
"The success of the collection should be attributed to its two editors. Their brilliant understanding of the conditions of the novel after modernism has allowed them to revive this ‘distant dream’ and follow the red line which offers an explanation of the cultural situation from the 1930s to the 1960s and after, from high modernism to late modernism, through their interpretation of the realisms (of intermodernity), all the way to awkward postmodernism. This collection – whose Leitmotiv is that ‘historical considerations became ontological condition’ – offers a new vision of late modernity. It effectively explains the ‘filmic narrative,’ the montage and pastiche techniques. It also shows that in the overall mid-century re-writing of modernism, an appropriation, adaptation and adoption of modernist features was actively taking place. Randall Stevenson asserts that this is what generated a new ‘innovative and creative cultural response’ in the work of novelists like Rushdie, Mo, and Ishiguro. Contributions on Doris Lessing or Iris Murdoch would have enhanced this critical rereading of modernism.
The title of this collection of essays chiefly exposes the main contradiction implicit in some contemporary theories sharing a widespread misconception of the Avant-Garde: that ephemeral aesthetics are unlikely to survive in “post”-movements. As R. M. Berry reminds us in “The Avant-Garde & the Question of Literature,” we have to regard the Avant-Garde as an advanced position – for it takes its name from a military term – “running counter to the main current in history” (35). Do we still find this opposition in our days? And most importantly, is it still running? This is the area under discussion from the opening line of the introduction: “Is an avant-garde viable under the conditions of “post-modernism?” (1). The assumption is that it is possible, and the real question that remains is ‘How?’ The sixteen contributions to this collection examine the different “qualities” implied in the avant-garde, and how they have evolved, from Post-Modernism and Post- Structuralism to Post-Historicism, Post-Humanism and Post-Ideology. In this close examination of past, present and even future we find post- and re- terms in plenty. However, the profusion of these prefixes is not a bad sign in this particular case: contributors to this compilation range from university professors to poets, from artists to editors, and provide this ensemble with a sound basis and a new twist. If we look at the table of contents of this collection, we are bound to think that its organisation is also part of the avant-garde flavour. The sequence is not effective for the reader who is not in the picture. A good point of departure is the essay by editor Louis Armand, together with the contributions by Milesi and Berry. These essays embrace the ideas inherited from a first stage of avant-gardes and chaperon the reader to the crucial avant-garde junctures of the 20th century. Armand’s “Avant-Garde Machines, Experimental Systems” is a theoretical analysis of the historical interpretations of mechanisation, as “less a historically-determined” concept and more as an instrument “to signal a condition at the very core of cultural experience and cultural production” (194). Jargon is abundant. But so are the elucidating illustrations from the literary work of Swift, Sade, Joyce, Perec and Robbe-Grillet. Berry’s essay examines some of the well-known assumptions about literature during the first half of the twentieth century, and redefines Modernism not as a “response” to historical conflicts but as arising “from necessities internal to literature itself” (36). This assertion serves his purpose when investigating such concepts as time, space, art, and politics. Berry’s focus on a 1936 lecture delivered by Gertrude Stein and on AVA, a novel by Carole Maso, bridges the gap between historical avant-garde and avant- post writing. Milesi contributes an illuminating research paper on “mythopoetics,” retracing the connections between poetry and philosophy. Particularly interesting is the idea of having a contributor whose literary work is another contributor’s essay topic…" - Yolanda Morató
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