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Materiality / Orality
September 17, 2005    File under: Alabama , America , Information Technology , Poetry & Poetics , The South

I'm very much enjoying the breadth and clarity of this post over at Jane Dark's Sugarhigh.

I especially like the use of "residual poetics" to describe what I think Silliman would put into the "School of Quietude." I find that in my own work, I am using residual poetics but consciously, as I am most often writing about residues or traces, and it seems the right way to go.

I understand the critique of the "common sense" argument, which I find offensively ahistorical as well. So I want to separate the class of "residual poetics" into two classes at least, into "consciously (even ironically) residual poetics" and "residual poetics that presents itself as presiding poetics" (aka the common sense school).

For it seems to me that residue is not only interesting as fuel for nostalgia but as well as a form of recognition of the past's inflection of the present. It's hard to bring this off, and I think in many ways it's intellectually safer to enter into what Jane calls "emergent poetics" since the formal and significant forms this poetics creates clearly break from and can then more obviously comment on the past without being used or assumed by it. The "consciously residual poetics" I am interested in is always in danger of being assumed or subsumed by the presumptively presiding ahistorical "common sense" residual poetics, and indeed is often claimed by it and in some cases even becomes such poetics.

Take Seamus Heaney as an example. I think in his early work Heaney was playing very seriously with the traditional inheritance from both English and Irish prosody, and he used one to slighly destabilize the other, setting up through seemingly nostalgiac echoes of the Irish tradition, a kind of protest to English in his work. At the same time, his tactic was not to destroy or deform the English as sereverly as someone like, say, Medbh McGuckian, whose work is more clearly a linguistically and poetically formalized protest. So, Heaney, at once delightfully wry, is now claimed by the staunchest common-sensors (censors), as his late blank-verse and Anglo-Saxon work give him trad-cred, while McGuckian finds an audience in those who are interested in "emergent poetics."

But Heaney should not so quickly be aligned with, say, the William Logans and Timothy Steeles, those poets whose metrical histories are decidedly skewed to underwrite the claim of a "common sense" order and who more often than not seem to wish to live and write in another, earlier era. That is a more nostalgiac kind of residue, though it's not altogether clear that such a nostos existed, in the English speaking world anyway.

I'm particularly interested in this as I consider my own writing, not so much because I'd be surprised to discover that I'd been characterized as a School of Quietude poet or as a residual poet, but because I find myself uncomfortable with some of the company I'd be given in such characterizations (there are disagreements, fundamental ones) that seem to me like so many false distinctions. It's not that there's no difference in color that could or would sustain a line of demarcation, but that there's a middle ground --- and it's not just one where (as Silliman implies) people don't think about what they're doing, but a place where the gestures of encampment cannot be made with the same clarity. Some are interested in working in that area of potential dissonance achieved by emulating both signals at once, or by using one for a purpose that's been unforeseen.

Admittedly, such ruse is hard to keep up, and one can find a comfortable embrace by a community with whom one disagrees significantly, but sometimes comfort overcomes disagreement. It makes the lines even harder to discern properly, but if we're cartographing, I want some more complicating shading on this border.

...

Such strict marking says the Southern accent (and it always assumes there's only one) is a sign of ignorance and bigotry, or a witness to it, or a sign that it once existed.

But even if this sound long ago became the auditory marker of these behaviors, does that mean that its survival or its use today should so clearly be nostalgiac, retrograde, Stephen Foster?

Must the Southern diasporite always be representing the planter class or the poll-tax class?

When the answer is yes but the Southerner does not harbor such characters or positions, then there is that doubleness, a necessary, a militated betweenness.

Must I shed my accent to become emergent? Or can I emerge with these ghosts in my mouth?

...

All this to say that while I'm taken with the clarity and the general cartography of Jane's schema, I'm concerned especially by the ways in which emergence is witnessed by and militated by a demonstration of a decidedely Marxist interest in the materiality of language, over and above its oral qualities. I'm concerned because I think the belief that language can ascent above or can transcend the accident into the materialization of language is an especially middle- and northeast-American fantasy.

It's been shown again and again that there is a lattitude that marks what we enshrine as a culture as "standard" American English, and the line runs through Pennsylvania all the way west into South Dakota (Tom Brokaw, anyone?). Those who have lived near the line to the north have been allowed to participate in the fantasy that their accent is not only specifically but significantly different from the accents below the line, as if an auditory map of the United States could provide a spectrum from ignorance to genius. Those below the line carry the accent and the marks.

It is not possible, in the dominant parlence, to be both Southern, in a culturally recognizeable or meaningful sense, and emergent.

Yet we emerge.

Can't you hear it?

Posted by Jake Adam York at September 17, 2005 10:29 AM



COMMENTS

You know where to find my response to this post.

Posted by: Kevin Andre Elliott at September 17, 2005 7:59 PM




I've read Jake's and Kevin Andrae Elliot's posts. Haven't read Jane Dark's Sugarhigh carefully yet, but you guys will be on another subject before I can give it a thorough reading.

Southernness and emergent poetics. I don't have enough background to write about emergent poetics, but I am Southern diaspora. As a white girl born in Louisiana, raised ("right", of course) in Arkansas and Alabama, and living in Colorado, I hear it.

I can't say I understand it, but I hear it.

I'm still trying to grasp what "emergent poetics" means. The word "emergent" brings "birth" to my mind, probably because I'm a mother. Every crowning infant looks the same. You have to wait for the rest of the head and body to "emerge" before you can identify which side of the family the child favors (or if it's the milkman.) Some would say that all newborns look like Winston Churchill, so it may require waiting even longer to say anything about family resemblances, those "residues" of genetics. Anyway, I think most judgements of what's emerging are premature. Yet, it's important to pay attention to what's present.

As a relatively new poet, (old, but new), what is happening now is overwhelming. In the sheer number of choices it's like Poetry Walmart. Forget understanding every camp--I can't even identify them all.

Probably best to apply myself to learning the tradition first. Blogs like this one keep me thinking about current poetics and help me to avoid seeking a nostrum in the past.

I have lots of questions. For example: how can the materiality of language be separated from its orality? Isn't that like separating matter from energy? One may be more interested in the material than in the oral, but to try to sever these fundamental aspects of language seems like a pointless destruction. I'm oversimplying, yes.

I've already wasted most of my life in comfort, so I'm not seeking a camp. Intellectual safety doesn't concern me as much as developing intellectual integrity--which probably implies safety in pylons or guy wires or something that grounds even the most flexible of structures.

Even with my limited ability to contribute to the conversation here, I think I can assert that the "middle ground" Jake refers to makes possible the "meeting place" Kevin mentions. A meeting in the middle (as opposed to a merging) would require both parties to maintain their stances while being willing to be influenced, or perhaps even transformed, by the other. A peculiar reciprocity.

I agree with Kevin that a "meeting place" is where one is to begin, and I'm excited that in the midst of what appears to me ridiculously shrill partisan politics it is still possible to consider the middle a viable position, but exactly what is "middle"? What characterizes "meeting"?

These are important issues, I think, not merely for poetry and discourse about poetry, but because literature cannot help but be political and is therefore of wider importance and impact than merely a distaction from the "real" world.

I want so much to participate in this and other conversations you have opened in these rich posts, but I'm obviously beyond my depth here.

Changing metaphors--let me get these corncobs out of my ears so I can hear better. It may take a while--they're wedged in there pretty good.

Thanks so much, Jake and Kevin, (and Jane Dark in the near future) for your blog hospitality, for your wrestling and climbing. It's inspiring.

Posted by: Dee Casalaina at September 18, 2005 12:14 PM