Reinventing the Life of a Poet in the Modern World
So for the last post this year I wanted to link to this lovely nature piece by Shelly Jackson called "Snow," a work I read about very early this year in Poets & Writers (from a Jan 2020 issue! I'm very behind).
She's slowly writing a story in the snow. That would be so much fun! (And yes, I realize certain people have been doing that for centuries now by other means. Let's just leave that there.)
You can read the story in progress on Flickr or Instagram.
Merry Christmas! See you next year.
In one of my final posts of the year, I wanted to check in one last time with a bunch of thoughts about digital lit. This past year I cracked the gargantuan New Media Reader textbook (this thing: it will take me years to finish it!) and I’ve continued working on my own digital lit projects.
The introductory chapter itself was blowing up my head, “Inventing the Medium” but Janet H. Murray and it was basically a review of the history that got us to this point.
She talks about technology’s “breathless pace of change” and “braided interplay of inventions mid-century” (1950s/60s). She believes new media solved the issue of “linear media’s failure to capture structures of thought.” I would agree that linear media has limitations but we’re finding now that digital media is also struggling to keep us from a new kind of madness and that when Murray extols the new “consciousness reforming itself” we can now see that this is not always in positive ways.
She says the “shelf of Knowledge exploded.” Unfortunately, so did the shelf of false knowledge, (oh yes, the earth is flat again), to which Murray says this might speak more to the gaps between technical prowess and social development.
Digital tools have also increased, she admits, weapons acceleration, “killing someone as a way of information processing” in a deadly proliferation of creation and destruction. But Murray ultimately has (or had, this book is from 2003) faith in the same progress that led us to the atomic bomb. We are smart enough to find a way out.
And here is where I found the essay pretty illuminating. She divides us into two camps: the engineer and the humanist. This demarcation pretty much can be applied to any argument you’re having with someone over technology. (Oh well, you’re just a humanist!) But seriously, it shows us the roots of all the enthusiasms and resistances. And I have great sympathy for both sides, being in a humanist avocation and having an engineering vocation.
According to Murray, the humanist is worried the technological changes will lead to cultural confusion and existential befuddlement. The engineer would say we just need to invent the proper fix or instrument to solve any problem that comes up. The answer, for them, is problem-solving systematically.
To which the humanist (in me) might argue there are a lot fewer people thinking systematically these days.And when Murray speaks of the failed promises of print, I can’t help but think of the failed promises of the internet.
Murray invokes Hitler when she talks about the trajectory of unchecked rationalism (it would be most efficient to eliminate people draining the system, the elderly, religions we don’t like, etc.) but unchecked irrationalism is also horrifying she says. Humanists the see limitations of systemized thinking and the ultimate unknowability of life, its absurdities, suffering, longing, and needs. Engineers are solutions-based but often blind to the sufferings their solutions can inflict.
Murray says digital artists are interested in the exploratory processes of the mind. And personally, I find this to be a very, very interesting idea but I just wonder if we're in a better place than after 25 years of tinkering with mental processing.
New media artists are attracted to random combinations, the arbitrary nature of stories, choice and the garden of forking paths. Murray says in this way, we have “outgrown the garments of print” (and yet books, to a lesser degree than before, still thrive). She points to the failures of newspapers and their slowness to recover from inacurate news (Paul McCartney is dead, Ernest Hemmingway is dead, Dewey won) and yet I can’t help but think about the statistic that false news travels on the internet 10-20 times faster than the truth.
She takes us through a historical tour of the decades.
In the 1950s we saw quantitative data manipulation, artificial intelligence, databases, networks, multi-user terminals, the first formulated idea for the internet and hypertext as a term was coined, early ideas about networking that would one day transform institutions. In fact, she says, many of the ideas ended in the 1960s, but machines were too slow and those ideas didn’t get far at the time, only becoming realized in the 1980s and 90s.
The 1980s and 90s brought us personal computers, word processing software, storyspace, hypercard, video games, immersive worlds, cooperative programming, easier user interfaces, the second self, projected consciousness, an online community and complex social relationships. By the end of 1990s digital media had swallowed entertainment and education.
And by now, banking, commerce and almost everything else.
So here we are today with some great muti-media experiences, and yet corporations still have too much power over consumers and we suffer under the illusion of choice. We are more alienated from the real world and the damage humanists predicted is not just a dark fantasy anymore. We have seen an increase in surveillance, exhibitionism, stalking, threats to our productivity, shared hallucinations, disorienting data overload and Murray does admit this was all predicted by the post-modernists who “no longer believed anything [previously] asserted.”
We’re also now experiencing the death of expertise (unintended consequence of DIY and self-help).
Murray describes computer scientists as having an “exhilarating earnestness” while learning about “active construction of meaning” while at the same time humanists were celebrating deconstruction and the unraveling of meaning. Humanists have been exploring fragmentation, distrust of the imagination and a “loss of faith in the great meta-narratives,” a distrust of endings. They revel in the middle.
But there is something to be said for the potato root system, of a growth with no beginning or end, as long as it’s ultimately digestible (to stay in the metaphor). Digital media has also given us new avenues for whimsey and all the “good” kinds of communication and expression.”
And it bears a reminder, this is a 2003 book. Murray made grand predictions about how new media would resist commodification (it didn’t), that we would not crushed by our own knowledge (we did become crushed by our inability to parse the good versus the bad knowledge), and that our machines would not become our Gods (uh…yeah), and that new media would somehow miraculously escape ideologies (about that…).
10 Finds This Year:
So all my angst aside, I’m keeping-on with exploring digital media and some of it is delightful.
I’m still seeing some problems with accessing digital works. A lot of these older sites were not build as https, today’s secure protocols, and the authors have not upgraded them for usability. This is not unusual. It’s so much work to launch a project as it is and then by the time you move on to your next project, there’s no time to continually return to older ones and update all your old stuff. It makes the pieces highly perishable and costly, especially considering the time involved in making them.
Also interesting:
https://breathe-story.com/ You have to read this short story on your phone. It doesn’t work well for ipad or computer because it uses your GPS location to build suspense into the story. It was short and too much of a sketch than a finished piece. Plus the GPS insertions were more unintentionally funny than suspenseful. (Even my dog Franz was captured in the first screenshot part of the story).
The next essay is from editor A. Poulin Jr. talking about "Contemporary American Poetry" (soon he would have a 1991 anthology of the stuff, my copy looks like this) in a piece called Contemporary American Poetry: The Radical Tradition.
And this is a good time to stop and reflect on the quite significant narcissism of those early 20th century poets labelling themselves 'modernists,' thinking the word modern would always apply to them and somehow defy the march of time. Similarly, post post-modernism (which technically could mean anything in the future) poets subsequently understood the problem and started labeling themselves 'Contemporary' like they were doubling down on a delusion. Their 'contemporary' poems are now 60 years old and as far from contemporary as poems could possibly be. I wouldn’t be surprised if poets now start calling themselves the Right-Nows. It's a straight line for there to here, narcissistically speaking,
In any case, we’re all soon Long-Agos, as are those modernists and contemporaries. But this little essay of self-congratulations actually has some interesting things in it. It attempts to define this body of “contemporary” poetry as poets writing since 1945 up to the current year (1980).
Poulin starts by exploring how all generations tend to rebel against previous ones, the previous generation's “essential beliefs….its excesses, principle atrophied into prejudice….petrified into cliché…[and] tyranny” but Poulin maintains that “the revolution doesn’t always realize a clean break….the blood, the genes remain, camouflaged by a radical façade.”
He then talks about what revolution these poets represent, their ceasing to believe the “orthodoxy of T.S. Eliot and the New Critics.”
And at this spot of the essay I have a crazy bit of marginalia right here talking about prescriptive craft advice and how it somehow corresponds to diet advice and how that makes us all fat” and I read it today thinking well maybe that’s true in some weird way, but what the hell does it have to do with this essay? Who was this person?
There is one word in this essay that is probably my least favorite essay word in these academic essays: unquestionable (unquestionably, kin to undeniably). A few sentences later there a phrase that something “is simply untenable.” All of a group, those words. Nothing is unquestionable.
He then lists the cast of New Critics,
Allen Tate
John Crowe Ramson
William Epson,
those poets who were an addendum to modernism and enforcers of Eliot's ideas, those "who transformed the experiments…into a legislative critical system…the New Critics…no longer regarded as sacred commandments”).
He lists the influences of the new poets, but during the entire essay fails to name the women who probably had more influence on experimental contemporary poetry than anyone else: Emily Dickinson and Gertrude Stein, a good example of how important women were marginalized during this period of mythmaking about contemporary poetry. Poulin credits the French and Spanish surrealists as influences, Neruda and Vallejo and the popular arts (singling out Lana Turner, Joan Baez and Bob Dylan).
Like the Modernists before them of these “contemporary” poets, Poulin says, read the English Metaphysical poets and John Crowe Ransom…and that "the most adequate and convincing poetry” for them “accommodates mixed feelings, clashing ideas and incongruous images.”
Where they parted with the Modernists was regarding intimacy, the personal revelation, removing “artistic distance between the poets and their subjects, the poets and their poems.” Contemporary poets use persona and sometimes other formal devices but focus on “individual personality” and “intimate experiences” in disagreement with T.S. Eliot who claims that “poetry was an escape from personality.”
Contemporary poets incorporate “biographical details” and make the speaker, the “I”, themselves…writing “as if that reader were a confessor, psychiatrist, intimate friend, or lover.” In fact, a lot of these poets are interested in exploring the borders and depths of the Freudian subconscious and multidimensional personality….the self’s discovery of the outer world…sexual honesty…personal illness, madness, failure and self-destruction” And here he says something about the “near hysteria of Sylvia Plath.”
Oy.
But this part is good: “…the requirements of technique and craftsmanship raise…questions about just how personal and immediate a poet can be…any poem is a fabrication and takes time and calculation to complete. Like any other art… [it] is selective, calculated, and public gesture, a formal utterance for which the poet selects a language and voice, even if they are approximate to his or her own as the poet can manage.”
Poulin also discusses irony and paradox and raises the issue of irony's problematic distance: “Irony may thwart much genuine emotion, its absence also makes genuine emotion virtually impossible.”
How’s that for a paradox?
Poulin shows how irony helps in certain cases, like for Plath and O’Hara, to “temper the intensity of suffering by undercutting the vehement…” Camp irony can find a sense of humor in Plath’s suicide or O’Hara’s descriptions of emptiness and decadence. “…[where] laughter camouflages horror."
I would also argue that irony done well can express its very own deep-seated emotion, like hidden Easter Eggs, to reward the most engaged and patient readers. But that this technique wasn't being used as much with this set of poets, more so a technique used with later Generation X and Millennial poets.
Poulin talks about levels of ambiguity where reader interpretations are encouraged (Ashbery), where punctuation and pronouns are manipulated (Merwin and Berryman). Metapoetry is discussed, and allusions after "The Waste Land."
These poets, Poulin says, are not as interested in mythology in the classical sense. They are not likely to allude to ancient Greek poets. They are having a contemporary experience and are concerned with their own survival, not mythmaking except for “the suffering, middle-aged, white ‘human American man’…[the idea that] I am my own myth.”
Poulin then categorizes these poets as decedents of the Puritans or Whitman, basically pessimists and optimists.
The Puritans (ex: Robert Lowell, Sylvia Plath, Anne Sexton) are descendants of the fall of Adam, they see “humans as essentially corrupt, limited spiritually and physically and deteriorating. There poems tend to be “complex, emblematic, and metaphysical.” The Puritan poet is threatened by madness and…tempted to self-destruction.”
The Whitmans (ex: Allen Ginsberg, Louis Simpson, David Ignatow) “assert the holiness of Adamic self…a holy universe.” These poets are “often scornful of intellectualization” and believe in the “self’s limitless potential for transcendence.” There poems are often “open, loose product of emotion rather than of intellect or conspicuous craftsmanship, its language…more recognizably ‘American.’”
That’s a pretty good distinction. Poulin then lists poets inspired by the French symbolists, Chinese and Japanese poetry (Gary Snyder, W. S. Merwin, James Wright), the Spanish Surrealists (Philip Levine and Robert Bly), those who experimented with the prose poem as action painting or verbal jazz (John Ashbery, Lawrence Ferlinghetti).
He admits there was an “obsession with originality” and that
“each age discovers or fabricates one or two all-encompassing metaphors for the quality of human experience that it confronts or seeks. It was T. S. Eliot, of course, who fabricated the first encompassing metaphor for the twentieth century: the waste land was the image of human spiritual and cultural sterility…a powerful mise en scene of the modern situation, to a large extent its characters were composite ghosts, unreal men and women in an unreal city…Eliot set the scene, but contemporary poets have peopled that waste land, mostly with their individual selves.”
And they’ve done it with language, “by making poetry out of the full range of everyday speech—including obscenity, vulgarity, and slang.”
These poets are also very political and create a poetry that “responds directly” to the “broad spectrum of everyday political realities.”
Then he drops this bomb: “the political tradition was all but ignored during the first half of the century” completely ignoring the group of socialist poets of the 1920s and 1930s who wrote extensively about social conditions during the depression and against the Spanish Civil War, many of whom were blacklisted to such an extent they now literally don’t exist in the minds of New Critics and contemporary poets. There’s a whole book about this historical blacklisting called Revolutionary Memory by Gary Nelson.
Poulin talks about the “imagination of commitment” which he classifies into three groups. The first is the sociopolitical consciousness and nuclear holocaust. He lists the poets that deal with this:
The second is historical events, personages:
More specifically, the Vietnam War poets. Poulin says it is interesting that “despite the fact that many of today’s poets were active participants in World War II—or perhaps because they were—the experience did not seem to grip their imaginations as much as the conflict in Vietnam did.” He says not since World War I has there been so many poems about a single event.
He lists a few World War II poems here for contrast:
The Vietnam poems he lists are:
This raises questions, Poulin says, about where poetry leaves off and propaganda begins and can propaganda poetry be any good. He also notes that all the poets writing about Vietnam were noncombatants and had never “been in the embattled country in contrast to “Wilfred Owen’s poems in the trenches.”
These poets experience only “the removed reality of the media…atrocities were not witnessed, but were ‘viewed’” and that their poems deal more with “the perpetrators of war” and “the language of war” and “the policy of war.”
The third group involves sexual politics and explorations of sexuality from poets like Adrienne Rich, James Wright, Gary Snyder, Robert Duncan, Robert Bly and Anne Sexton writing a celebration of her uterus.
Poulin then talks about the ecological poems of Gary Snyder and John Logan and the meta-poetries:
He ends talking about spirituality in poems:
All in all this is a good summary of this group (which we totally need because the moniker is so unhelpful). Here's the big list I compiled from the essay:
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