More History (& Poetry) Again

This is my 101st post! I'll drink to that.

I said in a previous post that perhaps all historical poetry today is really a form of elegy. I should have qualified that statement by adding "in North America." Clearly, if there is tear gas wafting through your neighborhood on a regular basis, then history takes on a different valence, whether in a textbook or a literary work. It can get you killed (and has). By the same token, the question of the role of historical or "documentary" literature within authoritarian regimes has a fairly obvious answer - that history doesn't seem so far from current events as it is in the USA, for instance. Still, that gives the whole thing a rather functional cast - history as a means to make a ("moving"?) statement about the present, rather than about the past per se.

If our (N.A.) historical poetry is elegy (monody might be a better term, since we don't really have any collective mourning - or anything), maybe it's b/c we (literati) have given up on any possibility of actually affecting history (or even of knowing whether or not we have). And of course we want to distance ourselves from celebratory accounts of history from Homer to the Benet brothers.

There is also a certain memorial impulse - that someone must speak for the dead. This is legit, albeit a bit grandiose. Better if you're just curious about someone who was as obscure as oneself. But those folks don't leave as many records to write about.

The reason for writing history per se (as in "history books") is a no-brainer, for me. It obviously doesn't prevent "us" from making the same mistakes over and over again. But it does make one a bit more at home in the world - gives one perspective. That still doesn't explain why historical poetry in an era of prose.

The answer may be that poets can present the underside of history - the bits of evidence and testimony that don't necessarily add up - or the ones that add up without anyone's having to be told (or needing paraphrase or superfluous analysis). Myung Mi Kim and Mark Nowak, perhaps - the one writing through the gaps and perplexing (and temporary) relations that defy speech, the other, presenting (in a fairly coherent manner) multiple narratives, and letting us decide how they relate to one another. (Nowak's editorial collaborator, David Michalski, does this latter brilliantly in the piece "Africa," in Cosmos & Damian - no author pontification inserted, and none needed or desired - check it out).

The way history feels. The way time feels.

The story + the monody for the loss of the (our) story. Hence, the prose narratives at the front of Susan Howe's books, followed by her fractured lyrics. Or that beautiful lyric elegy/eulogy at the end of "Book of the Dead."

Or, more recently, Raymond McDaniel's book Saltwater Empire. Most of the book is rather lush, neo-symboliste lyric. But running throughout are multiple poems, all with the same title: "Convention Centers of the New World." These seem to be snippets of speech, of testimony, from people trapped at the New Orleans Convention Center at the time of Katrina. So, the disorienting, impressionistic, or inward-looking lyrics find their counterpoint in a radically found poem. So, in the poem "Zombi Phenotypes": "Only flesh can masquerade mechanical./Timorous, shopworn glamour, we walkaround./ We hold hands, embrace prettily./ Amazers, all gone down, a drowned township./ Unfleshed, enchanted skeletons." Then, the first "Convention Centers of the New World" begins: "I come from all over New Orleans. What I feel needs to be said/about this is that everything was done wrong.// From what I can see, the police could not control the crime/ in New Orleans. Before the floods and the hurricane."

It really is just one damn thing after another. And if you're not writing paeans in exchange for money or gold goblets, you either get the people into the streets, or you bawl.

Lists

"Bare lists of words are found suggestive to an imaginative and excited mind, as it is related of Lord Chatham that he was accustomed to read in Bailey's Dictionary when he was preparing to speak in Parliament." (Emerson, "The Poet")

the English carrier; the short-faced tumbler; the runt; the barb; the pouter; the turbit; the Jacobin; the trumpeter; the laugher; the fantail (some of the pigeon breeds mentioned by Darwin in The Origin of Species. "The runt is a bird of great size," he reports)

In Honor of the Collected Spicer's Finally Coming Out (so to speak)

". . . but we lose ever and anon a word or a verse and substitute something of our own, and thus miswrite the poem." (Emerson, "The Poet")

History Today

If you haven't already, be sure to read the contributions re: poetry and history by Brian (Nov 24), Henry (Nov 26) and Samson (Nov 28) - they're good.

Yesterday was the first time in my life I have ever heard my father use the term "African American" without apparent irony or sarcasm.

This was probably for the benefit of my partner, who is from St. Louis, and therefore a "Yankee" (which is analogous to "goyim"). Later, we were at the art museum. He saw the exhibit of historic photos from the Memphis World (African-American newspaper) and said, "I'm not gonna go in there."

I got yer history - right here.

But I'd like the think the Millennium really has arrived.

Perhaps history in poetry (or poetry re: history) at the present time is necessarily a variety of elegy. Or a memento mori.

Blogfull

I am so thankful for blogs, for the way they reaffirm our existence back to us. I am so thankful for the internets, with all their skeins and keens and tangles. I am posting every day to my blog, so I am full of plentitude to bursting. And stuffing. But not like stuffing in a doll. A doll is not a blog. A doll can have a blog, in which case, the doll exists, but that's ALL. I've never claimed to be a doll, and nobody would accuse me of it, I assure you. A blog is not a clone, but is the next best thing. But I am a blog, whatever else I may be. QED.

Feliz Dia de los Pavos Muertos

History is the nightmare from which I try to take a break, every now and then. Poetry, too. So I'll take the occasion of an officially recognized national holiday to note the dramatic geographical feature I experienced yesterday, viz., the drop-off from the Arkansas Ozarks to the alluvial plain of the Mississippi River, in eastern Arkansas. If you've driven from the coastal range of California into the Central Valley, you have some idea of the impact. But this is even more abrupt - the "hills" a little higher, the flatland just as flat. You're up on a high ridge looking out on others one moment; then you go down a hill to the Black River, and bam - nothing but rice fields. The Mississippi Delta may start in the lobby of the Peabody Hotel, but the "Arkansas Delta" goes a lot farther north and west.

The American Poetry Antiques Road Show

What I mean is that, while "the stones hold secrets," they don't narrate those secrets. Like on the Antiques Road Show - the people don't know the history of the objects they bring in. It's the appraisers who are the storytellers.

But that begs the question of who cares. Well, the owners of the objects care - usually b/c they think they're worth more than they are, sometimes for sentimental (family) reasons. If history is written by the victors, or by the losers writing against the victors (which is part of the same story), then it's ideology - we're all always already interpellated, etc. - so what's the point? And what difference does it make, even if you feel like you're telling the Truth, if you're not willing to do anything about it - or think that you can't?

I guess that's what I'm sensing at the present moment. Virgil was the child of the empire ascendant - he may have just been kissing ass, but odds are he really believed in Augustus. Catullus, by contrast, was watching the decadence of the Republic. (See, this is what history gets you - cornpone analogies between US and Roman history).

But, like I say, it's a compulsion - a necromantic fascination with past people (personages) - a feeling that somebody ought to write it - a desire that someone will write about us, after our demise(s). It has to break down or break up, too. As in that beautiful, final lyrical section of "Book of the Dead" (the Rukeyser, not the Ani) - we've left the stock reports and committee minutes behind, but the paean or whatever it is would seem unmotivated without it - and, I think, vice versa.

From the sublime to the absurd: i'm off to Memphis . . .

Historical vs. History

Sure, anything is historical, if it has a carbon-14 reading. But does that mean it engages in an activity called "history"? I'm almost ready to go back and read Hayden White - tho my recollection is that he doesn't really go into what "narrative" means - which begs the question; but I think he was just trying to get those who write history to realize they were writing.

Then there's "historicism" and "historicity." Historicity : history = "governance" : government. Hence, the neoliberal desire for history to "end."

Is there any good history??

Then there's the topic of gender - and why history is his - esp. when you consider who writes it, in prose or verse. Is it that men are pompous weenies, so the Historical Sweep comes naturally? Well, you tell me.

I promise my posts on this topic will become more coherent (and continue) after El Dia de los Pavos Muertos. But I shall continue to post daily. Excelsior!

In the meantime, there is this, from Gabe Gudding's R.I. Notebook:

"The Literary Narcissist begins purposefully to conflate criticism of his social behavior into an indication of his/her literary worth. That is to say, the Narcissist will try to show that the reason others despise or are disgusted by him is in fact because he or she is a 'Rebel,' a true Literary Revolutionist - and that the statements of disgust others publicly make at his behavior is merely an indication of (a) their necessary denial of the work because they are threatened by it, or (b) their jealousy of the work."

Add butt-kissing, and you can see how this might be a problem. However, this passage also describes me and most of my friends (& former friends) at our worst. Let he who is without narcissism cast the first -

The Test of Time(s)

Poetry shards.

Under glass.

Or not.

One of my students made a poem about a recent historical event. But the poem didn't mention the event. Or the date. If a paleopoetologist found the poem 100 years from now, s/he might not know what it commemorated.

Churchill supposedly read "If We Must Die" on the floor of the Parliament during the Battle of Britain. And why not? But the predicament of the British nation at that point was rather different than that of African America in 1919 in the face of racial violence, which was McKay's occasion for the poem. But you wouldn't necessarily know it, to read it. There's lots of poetry from the 1910s like that, of course (see my chapter on Arturo Giovannitti).

But then there is "occasional" poetry - which is supposed to be fugitive, or ephemeral. To me, the specificity of the historical milieu is precisely what gives poems a punctum for those living in later years - this person, this place. Like me (see time stamp, below - or my chap. on Anna Louise Strong). I just can't get with the platonists.

This is all old hat. But why is it a perennial issue in poetry? It's Romanticism what did it, sez me.

[thanks to Ron S. for posting a link. Please add your 2 cents, y'all. I'm not kidding re: the "throw me a bone" thing - incl. citations, references, quotations, referrals]

On Wed., we go to Memphis, and I am going to try not to gloat. There's no escaping history there . . .

Particularity vs. Generality; Epic vs. STUFF

Bill Brown gave an interesting talk here the other day - about things, of course - and objects (and Man in the High Castle). Seems to me he was circling around the general/particular opposition - which is a version of the realist/nominalist opposition. He elided the terms "binary" and "dialectic," which don't hardly seem right to me. But anyway, this issue is a propos to the whole history/theory thing I've been talking about. If you get too hegelian about it, the specifics of history disappear, and it all gets religious (cf Marx on young hegelians). But if you get too specific, then, so what? Brown pointed to W. Benjamin's obsession with examples (particularity) as such - which he characterized as an unwillingness to theorize (not a totally unique reading, but, well, a propos).

There is something utopian re: the Arcades Project - the notion that voices from the past (the Great Beyond?) can "speak for themselves." Or kabbalistic, perhaps. But if you actually read a good chunk of the AP, you fancy you get a feel for the Paris of the 19th c. Self-delusion? Maybe. I guess it's a matter of which side you want to err on - the grand recit or the stuff.

I'm reading Gabriel Gudding's Rhode Island Notebook, which is nothing if not stuff (times, dates, mileages, routes, rest-stop ratings). Interspersed with hip-pocket, driver's-side theorizing. But a torrent of particularity, in any case. And of course there are a lot of books like that. Does the whole add up to more than the sum of its parts, these books seem to dare us. I'm an afficionado of trivia, and naive enough to think that, given a fundamentally sound mind, enough trivia can be processed into something like learning - even partial understanding. And, as a nominalist by disposition, I go in for trivia - or at least, stuff. Inductive, not deductive. I'm awed (and educated) by Arendt's narration of the origins of totalitarianism, but the quotations in Nicholson Baker's Human Smoke convey many (incredilbly surprising) obdurate particulars that no overarching narrative could convey.

Maybe I want the sweep of history to feel like my workaday life.

If you have any thoughts on any of this, pls speak up.