Merton on Marcuse and Anti-Poetry

From Greg Rappleye.

Hannah Weiner's Open House

Hannah Weiner's Open House is one of the most lovingly assembled (by Patrick Durgin, whose introduction is a significant and substantive work of scholarly commentary in itself) and attractively designed (by Jeff Clark) selected works collections I have ever seen. If you have only seen the few samples of Weiner's work included in anthologies like In the American Tree and Postmodern American Poetry, this is an excellent way to get a fuller sense of the scope of her total production. Pieces like "Radcliffe and Guatemalan Women," which combine discursive strains from different contexts, cohere into a sober and sometimes savage clarity of satirical and/or tragic vision, in ways that might come as a surprise to those who are familiar mainly with the more flamboyantly "clairvoyant" graphic arrangements of the more well-known poems (which are deservedly admired, and are represented here as well). Go to the Kenning Editions website and order this important book now.

Beyond Craft?

A few days ago Joan Houlihan left a remark in Reginald Shepherd's comment box, in reference to my blogpost of March 11th, in which I put forth the following four "minimal requisites" for what a course of study in creative writing ought to encompass, beyond "craft" narrowly defined:

1. Some degree of grounding in various historical and intellectual contexts for the production and reception of poetry

2. Some degree of immersion in contemporary poetic theory, as well as relevant political and philosophical studies

3. Some degree of engagement with the social and communal aspects of the poetic life, especially insofar as this involves stepping out of the institutional framework and looking critically at what it means to be within it in the first place, and what it means for other writers to be outside it

4. Some degree of consideration of what lies beyond "craft" as defined above: under what conditions might vagueness be considered a "style" worth taking seriously? when do the protocols of "precision, concision, and avoidance of cliché" fall short, and what might be the value of deliberate unwieldiness, ugliness, or banality in certain contexts? and what else is out there?

Here is Joan's comment:

I cannot understand Silem's response on his own blog wherein he seems to imply that the teaching of craft is not only within every student's ability to master, and rather quickly, but really it is just a stepping stone to what lies beyond it. Further, in addition to the mastery of craft, he wants students to get something about the history/context of poetry under their belts ("I want them to come to terms both with the standards of specificity, concision, and so on, and with the particular values that have historically informed those standards") and all within the time span of an MFA program. But what ARE these other things about writing poetry that are more important than craft (which, by the way, takes a lifetime to learn, if one ever does) and the study of poetic traditions and histories? (If that's what he means by "values" and I'm not even certain of that.) What is it that he wants his students to achieve? There are his four "minimal requisites"--and these resonate with my experience at the AWP panel (in the sense that they cannot be held too long to the light of inquiry without dispersing like mist). To look closely at one of these four items is to know the real nature of vagueness. I have to ask, along with K. Silem: What else IS out there? What is the study of poetry and a learning of craft preparation for?

Let me start with the second part of this, regarding the supposed unreasonableness--and vagueness--of my requisites. Joan isn't the only one who thought I was being unrealistic about the amount of information I expect students to be able to absorb, so let me clarify a little. For one thing, I'm envisioning the overall goals of a program as a whole, not of a single course (though Joan seems to find it too lofty an aspiration even for the length of an entire MFA program). For another thing, I believe that even in beginning courses it's not too early to start addressing the requisites that Joan finds so confusing.

For introductory courses, I emphasize inspiration, play, and "permission-giving" more than anything else. I have students read and imitate poems, I bring in journals and chapbooks, I talk a little about various poets' backgrounds and styles, and so on. I repeat the familiar (and valid) advice for beginning writers: read, read, read. I tell them to keep journals for recording ideas, dreams, overheard speech, and found text. I encourage them to share work with each other, collaborate, and form writers' groups on their own time.

At this beginning level, I mostly treat craft as something that develops organically from just fooling around with words. In order to get them to expand their existing notions of what constitutes poetic form, I usually tell them they can't write rhyming or traditonally metered poems for the duration of the term (except in special prosodic exercises), and I try to make a game out of getting them to spot and avoid cliches (except in special "a-cliche-in-every-line" exercises).

In addition, I ask students to think about what makes language "poetic" or "unpoetic" generally speaking, and to come up with examples from the world around them: from the poems they read in class, from things their friends say to each other on the phone, from restroom graffiti, from politics and world news, from zoology textbooks. We discuss whether "poeticity" has only to do with sound (assonance, consonance, mellifluousness, etc.), or also with context (negative and positive associations, novelty, strangeness, etc.).

I didn't really think my requisites in my older post were that vague in the first place, but I hope it's pretty clear from this pedagogical description I've just given how even at the introductory level, it's perfectly natural to start introducing the concepts they entail.

Now back to Joan's first objection: that I seem "to imply that the teaching of craft is not only within every student's ability to master [I assume she means the learning of craft], and rather quickly, but really it is just a stepping stone to what lies beyond it." The biggest problem with this objection is that it doesn't resemble anything I actually said. Nowhere did I suggest either a) that "craft" (whatever we mean by that term) is easy to learn, or b) that it should be treated as a purely preliminary stage in one's poetic education. What I actually said was that many teachers and programs assume that a certain approach to mechanical craft is all the scene of creative writing education should be concerned with, and that such an approach, in the absence of other concerns, leads at best to a superficial sense of mastery. Note, however, that "superficial" here does not necessarily mean "achieved with very little effort." There are legions of writers, painters, and musicians who reach a very high level of technical skill, over many years and at great pains, without becoming interesting artists in the process.

Writing as an artistic discipline has a pedagogical advantage over music and, to a lesser but still considerable extent, painting: language, its primary medium, is inherently referential. Because of this, it is only natural that the teaching of creative writing should involve a fair amount of attention to content. Content is important to the visual arts too, of course, but painters don't begin with content in the way that poets do; they begin with paint, whereas poets begin with words. Words mean things. Even made-up words remind us of real words that really mean things.

In a medium for which content is so integral an element, "craft" must have a very different set of parameters from those of other media. It cannot simply be a matter of listening to vowels and consonants and syllables and producing subtle metrical and syntactical effects. It must also have to do with ethics and politics and science and philosophy and all the other human content. Can a student learn all there is to know about these things in the course of an MFA program? Of course not. Such things can't be learned in a lifetime. But any program that doesn't wrestle with them in some way is trying to have poetry in a social vacuum. And what good is that? At bare minimum, any aspiring poet should have to think about what it means to write poetry--a form that lays claims to eloquence and insight--when eloquence and insight as classically conceived are historically (presently) proving themselves so inadequate for so many of the purposes they have been thought to serve.

Lytle Shaw, The Lobe

Lytle Shaw, The Lobe (Roof Books, 2002).

Neglected Poetry Books of the 21st Century Dept.: The Lobe is a collection I meant to review when I received it over three years ago, and somehow it fell through the cracks (it's not the only one that's done that). Well, better late than never.

The first couple of poems in The Lobe might put readers in mind of Jackson Mac Low's numbered dances from The Pronouns, with their unlikely descriptions of mimed maneuvers. For example, these lines from "Six Bodily Graphs":

Taking its horizon line from the belt of coverings affixed to the "free time" courtyard's marble piers, my sequence of bodily elongations and collapses attached quotation marks to the space's de facto protective custody effect.

Gathering momentum and pattern from the stream's silt fans, my reflective rapport with the slowly moving overflow pools took on macro-digestive aspects as I suspended myself on the improvised risers.

Jumping off from the squinted morphology between clumps of leg hair with their lower follicle patterns and sparse, previously logged, pine brush forests aspect, my time lapse display offered the leg-forest as a scene of colonial recodings, each with its projected values and not so hidden devastation.

Shaw goes beyond even Mac Low, however, in rendering these recounted procedures as actions whose already questionable physicality is finally subsumed under the bulk of elaborate phonetic and syntactic figures, resulting in a camped-up baroque loquacity that is reminiscent of Kenward Elmslie.

Other poetic echoes abound: O'Hara, Zukofsky, various Language poets (maybe heavy on Perelman?). This is not to say that the work is "derivative," at least not in any derogatory sense; it's to say that Shaw is clearly a poet who has listened carefully enough to a lot of poetry that he has thoroughly learned its character, strength, attitudes, contours, resonances--in short, that he has come to live with its voices as one lives with one's closest confidants. His own voice has in turn become a strong, flexible instrument capable of great range and nuance. Here is "Bummer Tent" (for Alex Cory):

These looser fleets come around
         time to time
lambasting water-slaps
         at your summer camp--
a song like "Lady Bird"
         brings them entwined
         horsy kundalini.

Horseshit, his brother rules
         an elbow knows
tables surround our eyes

         Beard finger
         neglected yard work

This arm chair tackle
has trouble with answers.

The shapeliness of this poem, like so many in the book, can be apprehended as materializing in a spatial column of delicate typographical balances that evoke, but do not necessarily require, vocalization: the music is both enunciated and silently telegraphed (I'm speaking here of the poem's printed identity above and beyond any spoken performance). In a sense this can be said of all lyric poetry, but only rarely is this quality fully realized as an integral component of composition and form; I think of Carl Rakosi as someone who moved continually within such a consciousness.

Something else Shaw shares with Rakosi is a broad sense of humor. Some of the titles are little masterpieces of slapstick in themselves: "Whoa, That Was Brian Eno"; "Dude Looks Like the Portrait of a Lady"; "My Mother Would Be on Falcon Crest." Sometimes this playful pastiching results in chilling historical al(/il)usions: "Poem (Bin Laden Is Coming on the Right Day)" is an unsettlingly light-footed rehearsal of 9/11--or I should say rehearsal for 9/11, as it was written a year before 9/11 happened.

The Lobe deserves a wide reading audience. I heartily recommend it to anyone interested in finding an example of a "younger poet" who possesses an impressive command of "torque" in its syntactic, conceptual, and moral dimensions.

Burt on Armantrout in NYT; Armantrout in Artforum

Stephen Burt reviews Rae Armantrout's eerily disembodied head in the New York Times...

...and Armantrout herself does a top-ten list in Artforum's Bookforum feature.

Gregory Betts, If Language

Thanks to Christian Bök for giving me a copy of Gregory Betts' If Language (BookThug, 2005) while I was in Atlanta. The book is a collection of 56 perfect anagrams of a 525-letter source quote by Steve McCaffery. The pieces are surprisingly expressive, considering the extreme artificiality imposed by the constraint. Here is no. 48:

War is different in Europe. People actually die
here, subsist with the familiarity of that outcome.
All the students in my class act as soldiers once
a month. In a talk on Gary Geddes' anti-Vietnam
poem, I confess that I've never held a gun, let alone
fire one. It is probable that Gary is also chaste.
The students glare at me, angry at this Canadian
innocence, at their sacrifice, or their opinions of
obligations of such conjugal rights. I suggest we
might talk of Vimy Ridge or Bill Bishop's fight-
worthiness, and the foul class, for this moment is
mollified, conceals this pulpit zest. I gulp up, half
blush, filling up this pacified critic-clinic war club.

At least one word (and never more than four, I think) in each of the 56 sections is printed in bold type. I haven't checked, but my guess is that all the bold words taken together would add up to a 57th anagram.

The balance between strict procedurality and inventive freedom this extended anagrammatic format affords is exciting. The poems hover on the edge of convincing signification, but lapse interestingly into arbitrary pseudo-sense and tonal oddness at every turn. The degree to which they do produce a semblance of motivated content marks a shifting liminal perimeter-line between focused communication and glossolalia.

If Language can be ordered through Apollinaire's Bookshoppe or through SPD.

Breaking the Self-Affirmation Barrier

From Reginald Shepherd's latest post:

We live in a culture which robs people of social, political, and economic agency, making them feel as if their experience counts for nothing, while simultaneously insisting that everyone's every passing notion and experience is of supreme importance because it happened to them. These two aspects are concomitant with one another, the second offering an imaginary (that is, an ideological) compensation for the first.

This is an astute analysis of the impoverishing ethos of empty "self-affirmation" that too often characterizes the teaching of creative writing as a cultural industry. Reginald's comments throughout the post resonate with much of my own experience, in particular his observation that one of the major pedagogical hurdles for any teacher of poetry is the popular belief "that poetry is too subjective to judge, because it's all opinion and personal preference."

I want only to add that I think the problem is yet more difficult than getting students to realize "that specificity, particularity of image and language, precision, concision, and avoidance of cliché are aspects of all good poetry." In the first place, I'm not sure if that's entirely true, or if it's always true that "vagueness is not a style." I will probably concede if forced, however, that it's generally beneficial for students to engage at great length with the kinds of poetry for which these statements do hold true before they go on to other, vaguer terrain. I want them to come to terms both with the standards of specificity, concision, and so on, and with the particular values that have historically informed those standards. I know, I want a lot. In the second place, even when a teacher is successful in instilling a diligent respect for such standards, I would maintain that this is not enough on its own to lift the pedagogical scene out of the "self-affirmation" level. It may serve to generate an impressive bank of professional "output" that students can use to establish and enhance their artisanal status, just as painting and music students can be taught certain techniques that mark them as "accomplished." This also--or most importantly--provides a way for the program to advertise its success: it has produced subjects who function as living testimonials of its efficacy in instilling recognizable, marketable aesthetic skills. A context for institutional competitiveness is manufactured thereby. The only difference between this and the carefree "express yourself" model of less competitive pedagogical situations is that the self being affirmed extends beyond the individual and into the corporate body of the institution. The program, institution, industry, all affirm themselves along with the student--whose affirmation remains largely at the level of imaginary compensation, except for those fortunate few who are actually able to ride that affirmation all the way to a paying career (and who then, likely as not, perpetuate the whole predatory pedagogical system via their own students).

What else, then, is needed to break all the way past the "self-affirmation" model to a truly substantive poetic education? In addition to the aspects of craft addressed above, I would suggest that the following are minimal requisites:

1. Some degree of grounding in various historical and intellectual contexts for the production and reception of poetry
2. Some degree of immersion in contemporary poetic theory, as well as relevant political and philosophical studies
3. Some degree of engagement with the social and communal aspects of the poetic life, especially insofar as this involves stepping out of the institutional framework and looking critically at what it means to be within it in the first place, and what it means for other writers to be outside it
4. Some degree of consideration of what lies beyond "craft" as defined above: under what conditions might vagueness be considered a "style" worth taking seriously? when do the protocols of "precision, concision, and avoidance of cliché" fall short, and what might be the value of deliberate unwieldiness, ugliness, or banality in certain contexts? and what else is out there?

Kate Greenstreet, case sensitive

Another AWP Book Fair item: Kate Greenstreet's case sensitive, from Ahsahta Press (2006). The poems in this collection make liberal use of collaged quotations from various sources, including the letters of Lorine Niedecker, Heidegger, the Bible, various biographies, and many other texts. Some passages in quotation marks are unattributed, suggesting either that they are Kate's own invented language, or that the original sources have been inter-combined so extensively that citation is impractical (or, of course, that for she just decided some reason not to cite those quotations). Here's an excerpt:

phone tap

Where nothing was, it had to be created.
We can't make everything we need inside.

I was looking for a sound. The energy called "drive."
Almost peaceful. But--how are you?

your foot?
your black and whites? your "prose"?

(I prescribe it for myself sometimes.
Where else could I find this kind of radio?)

Nothing from this poem shows up in the notes at the end of the section, but to my ear it reverberates with the sound of borrowed language, whether this is actually the case, or just a sense created by the ubiquity of the passages that are marked as quotations. It's not just the presence of quotation marks; it's a palpable textural or tonal quality--a feeling that these are just not the kind of phrases someone would "make up." If they are in fact made up, it's a sign of how successfully the quotational aura has permeated the text as a whole.

Kate will be reading in the Emergent Forms reading series here a week from today, with Janet Holmes. Stay tuned for further details (or go now to the Emergent Forms blogsite).

Torque, the Formal, and the Superformal

Louis Cabris writes again:

Kasey's third question/scenario that ends his post today on torque deprecatingly implies that his own desire to articulate a neutral taxonomy and Ron's desire to evaluate under-40 poetry both may be equally reifying a literary past of collective prose-poem practice. So or not, I believe there's a missing, larger point in "all this," and it peeks out in the language of Kasey's third scenario that asks: "How much of all this really has to do directly with any formal considerations of syntax or grammar or lineation or whatever, as opposed to drawing on a set of associations which have accreted around surface features of Language writing, but which ultimately have much more to do with superformal considerations (political contexts, statements of intent, social dynamics, etc?" It strikes me that a larger and more challenging point stems from a directly opposed premise to that of Kasey's third scenario, namely that the "formal" and the "superformal" are not differentiable (Kasey's scenario suggests they are differentiable, it would seem). Or at least they are not differentiable except in a guidebook way (as in a guidebook to form and ideas about poetry). Surely form as inherently neutral pure essence doesn't exist except in guidebooks and the rhetoric of criticism ("A sestina is..."). Frankly the social as neutral pure essence of "sociality" doesn't exist except in the loins of partygoers' heads and the drawing rooms of Georg Simmel. As Adorno a window no writes: "In order for the work of art to be purely and fully a work of art, it must be more than a work of art"--which sounds like an enormous challenge for any of us. The "more" in this quotation points to a different understanding of "torque" than as either "formal" or "superformal" elements of a "work" and its context. Le torque, here, however, is no longer Ron's torque (as he outlines it in his torqu-ography--the recent blog-post that I only just read), nor is it Kasey's torse / torsion / torque triad, and yet Le torque informs both Ron's evaluative comments and Kasey's umbrage to them. As I said, it sounds to me like an enormous chilly lunge for any of us to take.

I don't get how the Adorno quote relates to any notion of torque--I'm probably missing some pivotal cultural reference or other, and/or revealing the shallowness of my theoretical range. I will say, however, that as much as I agree with Louis that the formal and the superformal "are not differentiable except in a guidebook way," our very ability to make that kind of differentiation in itself speaks to what I was trying to get at: when Ron writes in "The New Sentence" of torque as a (presumably) measurable quality of the phrase or sentence, he implies that it is something one could diagram or define in relatively definite grammatical/syntactic terms. Kaz's post from the other day is an example of just such an effort. I am thinking of the superformal as an unstable horizon that recedes at the encroachment of definitions like Kaz's, or for that matter, mine. When Tom initially took issue with my account of torque, I suspect the problem he perceived was only superficially that I had neglected syntax in its strict grammatical sense; to borrow a phrase from Barrett Watten, I was not acknowledging torque's relation to a "total syntax" of radically embedded linguistic/social/political tropes, tropes that are/were specific to a moment or scene of Language writing's positioning vis a vis the literary climate of its inception and continuing reception. By (perhaps willfully) ignoring that dimension of torque (a dimension, as I've said, that I associate with Ron's original usage, but that he himself may or may not have consciously intended to be understood), I was making a bid for the formal over the superformal, or for the possibility of physical analogy. Did I ever believe this bid would pay out? I don't know. I remain (or am at last?) suspicious of both, on the one hand, "guidebook" definitions of mechanical poetic technique, and on the other, the kind of resistance to mechanical summation that the desire to render "torque" and similar terms somehow conspicuously superformal evinces. I am suspicious of this latter resistance not because it ideologizes (everything is ideological, including any notion of the "purely" formal), but because it ideologizes anxiously, wanting to substitute an abstract notion for a concrete one in such a way as to render that subtitution conspicuous and provocative. Putting it that way, maybe "suspicious" is the wrong word to describe my feelings about it: I actually think it's an appealing strategy.

One of the things that makes torque attractive as a candidate for a poetic concept in the first place is the obliquity of the physical metaphor in relation to whatever material textual phenomenon it is meant to be mapped onto: I mean, honestly, finally there is no real relation between the idea of an angular force that causes a change in rotational motion and the idea of some mysterious species of syntactical defamiliarization. It's a sexy (okay, geeky) postmodern metaphysical conceit. As, I might add, is the idea of the differentiability vs. the non-differentiability of the categories of the formal and superformal. My thesis is that what poet-theorists tend to be after are not expressible concepts, but concepts that hover on the brink of expressibility but don't ever quite yield or resolve. This is what I have in mind with my pet variation on Stevens' formula that I like to repeat every chance I get: the poem (or in this case, poetics) should resist the intelligence almost unsuccessfully.

3 from Instance Press: Lyons, Waldrop, Watson

More items from the AWP Book Fair: three titles from Instance Press.

From Kimberly Lyons' Saline (2005):

COUNTERPOLE

I came across the word counterpole.
Trees in the Gustave Dore woodcuts.
If words can be guardians or
vertical presences.
As the ninth of the twelfth task.
To originate.
Embroidered pink suns
in which the threads
resembling the rays have loosened.
Construction of some kind,
machines at 4:00 a.m.
The grinding process.
The silence of a figure
entering a forest "at the midpoint
of their life"
Going into the words like that.

*

From Keith Waldrop's Haunt (2000):

BETWEEN THE STRAITS (23)

if in a
dream the so-called
conscious

organism if in
dreams
the shadow of a

body if

sense selects as
of a galaxy of
galaxies no
interest in the
past behind us, if there is

another way of saying this

*

From Craig Watson, True News (2002):

COMM.

Dear echo: shut up.
What you call writing we call waiting.
Now tell us the story of the future familiar
Or who do you want to fuck.

At last we can see what a goal solves:
A bird instead of flight, a house
Of temporary separate angles
One gene pool in perpetuity.

Put that in your own words.
Every question ends in a question
And description offers a rent-to-own option
Of spontaneous doctrine and simultaneous translation.

Later, we will turn into an occupation
And organize a government self-legal
From simple grammar and private perjuries
That is, survival by the neck.

----
Note: all three books have very interesting cover art. Waldrop has his own text/image assemblage on the front cover, Watson's front cover has a collage by Barbieo Barros Gizzi, and Lyons' front and back cover are filled up with an absolutely lovely painting by Brenda Iijima that I could stare at all day.

Torque Report

Louis Cabris writes:

Zukofsky's "Mantis" is probably the precedent for how Ron uses the word torque in his "New Sentence" essay. Torque seems a novelty in Ron's essay, as it provides some high contrast with other terms he uses there such as measure, paragraph, syllogism, sentence, polysemy / ambiguity. Zukofsky characterizes (among other things) how he writes the sestina "Mantis" by the parenthetical phrase "thoughts' torsion." Torsion would then refer not only to the "twisted" normative syntax displayed in "Mantis" but to the multiple twists performed on the sestina form invented by troubadour Arnaut Daniel by evoking a particular use for it in 1933-34 Depression America (after a late-19C sestina splurge by Chucky Al et al). And since it's Zukofsky, torsion away from historical precedent toward contemporary particulars is going to hold you at every level, down to the syllable and into the letters if you care to go.

In other torque news, Kaz Maslanka offers an ambitious demonstration of how to apply the physical metaphor of torque even more literally and extensively, using my Creeley example.

Also, check out this engaging discussion at The Attentive Worker on the general phenomenon of applying scientific terminology to fuzzy arts-and-humanities concepts.

One other point I meant to pick up before, which Tom begins to address in his last torque post, is the question of whether, as Ron suggests, younger poets really do have atrophied torque muscles. Like Tom, I immediately bridle at this. But once more I fear that this brings us back to a question of definitions. If we understand "torque" narrowly as an effect specific to certain styles associated with "Language-centered" writing, as practiced by Ron and his cohort, there might be a way to interpret the claim so that it has some truth value. Let's back up a little and differentiate between at least three registers in which one might invoke "torque" as a poetic term:

1) A very general sense of poetic "swerving" or "turning," even at the level of basic semantics. This would encompass ideas as fundamental as metaphor, irony, ambiguity, etc. This usage indicates not a determinate device, but a broad conceptual framework for thinking about how poetry writ large works through indirection. As such, it may not even be useful to include it.
2) A way of talking about a relatively wide range of controlled interferences with syntactic "flow," at the level of phrasal construction, or of spatial distribution of verse units, or both. See my previous posts for a more elaborate discussion of this idea.
3) A particular Sillimanian or "Language-centered" effect, typified by the New Sentence and related forms, in which a certain kind of syntactic interruption becomes the dominant rhythmic and semantic feature of the verse.

The more I think about it, Tom might have a point in one of the original remarks he made in response to my first post: in some ways, it communicates more useful information to refer to "torque" in the limited sense of 3 than to apply it generally as in sense 2, which might better be framed simply as "torsion." As I understand the relation of torsion to torque (and here I may betray my pitifully stunted scientific comprehension), torsion is the twisting force or motion itself, and torque is a measure of the "moment" of application of torsion as a force. Both terms entail a twisting motion, but with torsion, the emphasis is on the motion itself, and with torque, the emphasis is on the introduction of motion to a condition of axial stasis, or the interruption of a pre-existing axial motion.

Thus a key index of much Language writing is a verse format that foregrounds such disjunctive interruptions, making them a constitutive feature of the poem. Now, even here, one might object to Ron's proclamation, saying that lots of younger writers use such an approach to verse, borrowing liberally from New Sentence and other Language-centered structures. And in return, someone else might answer that these formal gestures are recontextualized in recent practice so that the overall aesthetic orientation of the poem is more often than not toward smoothness and uninterrupted "flow," rather than the kind of disruptive antisyntactic values associated with Language writing. I would then step in and ask: 1) Is this really the case, or are there not many significant contemporary counterexamples to this claim? 2) Even in "classic" Language writing, can't we find many examples of the same kind of flow-privileging aesthetic one sees in younger poets' work? and, maybe most importantly, 3) How much of all this really has to do directly with any formal considerations of syntax or grammar or lineation or whatever, as opposed to drawing on a set of associations which have accreted around surface features of Language writing, but which ultimately have much more to do with superformal considerations (political contexts, statements of intent, social dynamics, etc.)?

More on Torque

Since I started drafting this post, Tom Orange has posted his own entry on torque, wherein he repeats part of his comments from my comment box for my torque entry from the other day. In his original comment (which I quote from at length throughout the rest of this post), Tom points out that I neglect to mention directly one of the most important aspects of torque: "twists or turns in normative syntax or grammatical sequence, which one can conceive of as following a kind of trajectory or vector: in its most basic form, subject-verb-object." I agree that this emphasis on syntax is crucial. Ron Silliman offers a similar formulation in his post of a couple days ago by referring to torqued syntax as "syntax that start[s] to go in one direction, only to veer off at unpredictable angles, creating ... something of far greater power than referential or abstract meaning would lead one to suspect."

Tom adds:

I do not think torque has much to do with "the shifts of direction and attention performed by line breaks, stanzaic configurations, and other aspects of spatial arrangement on the page" as you have it in your first point: remember, torque was above all a feature of "the new sentence" as Ron [Silliman] was elaborating it, where line and stanza breaks were eschewed in favor of sentence and paragraph breaks.

Here I'm going to stand by what I wrote. Although Ron's use of the term is certainly one that sticks in my head, and perhaps even first brought it to my attention as a poetic concept, I see no reason why its application should be restricted to the context of the New Sentence.

This leads us to Tom's next objection:

I think torque refers to something more specific than just "a poem's ability to dodge readerly expectations, to swerve or twist away from a strict construal or single valence." That is, again I see torque operating not at the level of meaning-making in general but specifically as a function of (normative) syntax.

I'm not sure how meaning-making (in language, anyway) ever occurs at any level other than the level of syntax, so I guess I don't quite understand what the problem is. Certainly one can inhibit meaning by extrasyntactical means (the use of gibberish, for example), but in order to make meaning, one must have recourse to normative word order. Only once such meaning has been established syntactically can one "dodge readerly expectations" or "swerve or twist away from a strict construal."

Tom continues:

Chomsky's famous example, "Colorless green ideas sleep furiously"--owing to the fact that it fits seamlessly into normative english syntax--has far less torque than "Furiously ideas colorless green sleep."

In the first place, I think it's quite possible for a sentence to display torque within a normative syntactic structure--for example, at the level of grammar and diction. In fact, Chomsky's sentence is itself a good example of this. The adjective "green" puts a twist on the grammatical expectation raised by the prior adjective "colorless," just as the noun "ideas" swerves away from the expectation raised by both these adjectives, and just as the verb "sleep" does in turn to the adjectives and the noun, and finally the adverb "furiously" to every word before it: all these swerves occur as a series of linked turnings-away from a general set of expectations activated by normative syntactic structure. In other words, here normative syntax enhances torque rather than diminishing it. In the second place, I would further suggest that Tom's reworked sentence has far less torque than the original, unless by "torque" you mean simply being all mixed up. In order for language to achieve torque, there must be some consistently maintained tension between continuity and disruption; if grammar (or the effect of grammar created by a minimal amount of normative syntax) is negated altogether, there is no axis around which a force may produce torsion and rotation at all.

I take it as a fundamental principle of poetic language that it can be characterized broadly by some form of semantic swerving facilitated by specific mechanical (syntactical, grammatical, lexical) means. I see torque as a projection of this basic principle onto particular strategies. To refine my definition from the other day a bit, these strategies may materialize as the following forms of syntactic torsion (which invariably overlap):

1. Inversion of normative word order
2. Substitution of an unexpected syntactic/grammatical resolution for an expected one
3. Interruption of syntactic/grammatical continuity by some spatial or otherwise extralinguistic means

I might try to expand this post soon with some examples of torque from various poems. I also may want to posit a further category of "ethical torque," for lack of a better term: a kind of swerving that draws on and subverts syntactical expectation not at the level of the word, phrase, or individual sentence, but at the level of multiple connected utterances.