The fact that large sections of the population are being consigned to a kind of lumpen-literacy sits uncomfortably next to the idea that the Internet is creating a new generation of readers. I have my doubts about the revitalization of a reading public. It seems more likely that what is left of a literate world is attracted to that facet of the web which best serves its particular literacy. Newspaper readers read online papers. Cookbook fanatics navigate in search of electronic recipes. Literary people end up at sites like Web Del Sol. And everybody checks out the pornography! The Internet is everything that we are; and it is everything that we are not, just as—in a certain disappointing way—life is.

We find ourselves, at the other end of history, in a situation much like that which the Eighteenth Century faced before the explosion in print media, the result of Gutenberg’s printing press. Both centuries experienced a revolution in information technology. The Internet is our vehicle, just as books, journals and broadsheets, were theirs. Today, millennial readers—what’s left of them at least—can pick up no end of what academics refer to as “secondary literature” on the web. There are a dozen or so magazines available—the best of which show a graphic intelligence so severe that I often use sunglasses to read them. Whole sections in bookstores are given over to the subject. Even television is getting in on the act. Here in Portugal I watch a weekly review of the WWW on the BBC’s “Europe Direct”, brought to us straight from one of London’s cyber cafés. It features a television camera zooming in on a commentator who interviews a webnaut hovering over her monitor like priest over a ciborium. The camera inevitably closes in on the computer screen, giving us that prehistoric flickering effect of wagon wheels in reverse. Television with its inability to get any closer to the net than a camera once removed, seems, as a result, hopelessly out of date, though I trust Uncle Bill is already solving that problem.

The fact that large sections of the population are being consigned to a kind of lumpen-literacy sits uncomfortably next to the idea that the internet is creating a new generation of readers.

The point is that each century gets the style of commentary it deserves. Addison and Steele’s “Tatler” and “Spectator” (prototypical cultural reviews of the 18th Century), and, later, Samuel Johnson’s Rambler (from whence my own title is so handily plundered) arose out of the need to mediate the growing middle class’s discovery of reading, and to educate it in the art of discerning. After all, book-culture was brand new! Almost three hundred years later, as our century begins to commit itself to its own demise, there is very little mature criticism on the web, which is strange, especially since there is a sense, even among those of us who refuse to believe it, that the book is dead.

Most of the commentary I’ve seen attempts to talk about the web as though it were a thing: e.g. another form of the book; a huge electronic magazine! Things, whether they are as large as cities or as small as quarks, can be held down, mapped, drawn and quartered. The problem with the web is its volatility. No one knows how big it is, or what it will contain from one day to the next. To delimit its material nature is impossible. It’s like conversation, or the air conversation floats on, ineffable. And it is changing the nature of everything it touches, from the information it purveys, to the machine we use to access it. Who would have thought that the computer might one day come to resemble the fraxinella—the gas plant—which emits a vapor capable of being ignited.

II

Jacket, like Web Del Sol, is an exclusively “literary site” which concentrates on contemporary poetry and on the critical culture which poetry—at this late moment in the Greco-Roman scheme of things—thrives by. Jacket’s timely strength is in its presentation of these two facets of the same coin—poetry and criticism—as though it were a thing that didn’t need to be flipped from heads to tails. Poetry, criticism, reviews, interviews, all dovetail to produce the effect of a palimpsest, of writing on top of writing. It is almost as though Shelley’s great Neo-Platonic text in the sky, to which all earthly texts contribute, had finally been brought to street level in the form of an e-zine.

Things, whether they are as large as cities or as small as quarks, can be held down, mapped, drawn and quartered. The problem with the web is its volatility.

Though some of the bugs, like crunched letters and day-glow collisions of color, have not been worked out, the graphic environment is warm and inviting, and manages to create a wonderfully bookish topos: a kind of retro version of the virtual world of late 90’s intertextuality . This is achieved through an artful blend of collage and color; photography (much of it the editor’s own work); and linkages and hypertext which mesh perfectly with the graphic rhythm of the page.

At the moment of writing, Jacket I is complete; Jacket II , a special Ashbery number, seems nearly so; and Jacket III is already previewed. The site is virtually—no pun intended—spilling over with a range of brilliant material. There is a mixture of the brand new and the resuscitated. One the one hand we have things like John Ashbery’s new poem “The Burden of the Park”, two pieces by Eliot Weinberger, and a debate on Bob Perelman’s newest critical work; and on the other: two marvellous interviews both from the mid-eighties—one of Roy Fisher, and the other of John Ashbery. They alone are worth the visit. But, once there, the reader will be faced with an array of choices, both archival and ground breaking, a few of which I’ll try to outline below.

III

Knowing what we all know—that “scrolling” as a reading technique went out with the Egyptians—John Tranter, Australian poet and editor of “Jacket”, must have wondered, what we all wonder: is the computer screen really readable, and if so, by whom? He seems to have gone out of his way to attract the up-market—what used to be called “middle-brow”—reader, by calling attention to the bookish elegance of his site, and to the Old World care he has taken in its construction.

We learn that his page was composed by himself—harking back to those early times of cottage publishing, and the singular efforts of noble solitaries (vide Virginia and Leonard in homespun)—using Georgia, Trebuchet MS and Verdana typefaces with pixel grids hand-tuned for superior legibility.

As with most bibliopolic arcana, these new-age terms are lost on me, or were, that is, until I found my way—easily I might add, navigability being one of Jackets’ most apparent virtues—to Kurt Brereton’s “Cybernetics of Typography”, which wastes no time in announcing that “the passive page is dead.” To see just how dead, I scrolled down through the article picking up terms like “Haptic Typography” and “Genetic Aesthetic”, the last of which I plan to use for its beautiful cut-throat rhyme as soon as possible.

Brereton blithely blitzes us with the news of the day: “the page is not a surface”, “digital type has no body”, and “web typography now allows a kinetic plasticity of form not possible with the conventional printed page”, which is almost as good as Coleridge on “The Secondary Imagination” (it dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create)—except that the Coleridgian “kinetic” is not defining what a piece of paper, nor even a leaf of choice vellum, can do.

We find ourselves, at the other end of history, in a situation much like that which the Eighteenth Century faced before the explosion in print media, the result of Gutenberg’s printing press.

The danger of personal computing, and, at the same time, its most irresistible quality, lies in the way that computer technology has managed to externalise mental function. The formatting aptitudes of human intelligence are increasingly relegated to pre-programmation, and to that luminous, command sensitive environment, the PC. Is this just another tool—an innocent replication of that world of mind to hand, a hoe?

This is exactly what “Cybernetics of Typography” doesn’t talk about. That is, to what extent do the technologies of the day impinge upon the interior world of the subject? Are we not, in this age of information technology—or to use the more ominous sounding Greek term, this age of cybernetics—already damned? Orwell’s vision of Big Brother presumed a reluctant citizenry. Kurt Breredon proposes in essence—and I hope unwittingly—that we invite Microsoft Corporation into the garret.

IV

On a more rustic note, it’s the Coleridge of the notebooks and letters whom Jack Tranter sees as one of the Romantic antecedents to the work of John Ashbery. In his introductory essay, “Three John Ashberys”, Tranter makes the case for a poet of Romantic and Metaphysical temperament. This contention runs pleasingly against the grain of the current work on the Ashberian ouvre. The triptych poet of the title is comprised of first “The Primary or Mundane Ashbery”; then the “Secondary Ashbery”, which is the poet, or, as Tranter puts it, the “enchanted creature”; and finally the “Tertiary” or “Transcendental Ashbery”. This last incarnation is the Ashbery which circulates somewhere beyond the world like “Laika the Russian space dog, peering wistfully down on the inhabitants of Earth as the planet revolves slowly beneath.” Tranter justifies his triptych version of the poet by telling us that he is going “to reflect on the schizophrenia of fame.” And why not?

“Three Johns” is a charming portrait, made even more so by the fact that Tranter isn’t losing himself in a maze of obsequious jargon, or tying to employ the latest technologies of the Critical Industry. Adopting a more descriptive style, he does us real service by discussing Ashbery’s relation to the English tradition.

Marjorie Perloff , on the other hand, is certainly one of the industrialists, producing steel-sided, impact resistant argument at production-line speed. Her contribution to “Jacket” is an attempt to pull Ashbery—as though he needed it—from the river of growing acclaim.

"Normalizing", as she is at pains to explain in the ominous sounding “Normalizing Ashbery”, is the attempt to situate an experimental poet in a traditional setting. Vanquishing any doubts we might have about her own position, she distinguishes herself from critics who would place Ashbery in outworn contexts, and refers to her own approach as one which creates a ‘breakthrough narrative’. This, she says, “claim{s} that there is, for better a worse, a genuine difference between modernist and postmodernist poetics”, a difference which James Longenbach—one of the “normalizers” she singles out—has yet to consider; for he commits what is for her the arch sin of late century critical decorum: he suggests that an Ashbery poem might be understood.

The danger of personal computing, and, at the same time, its most irresistible quality, lies in the way that computer technology has managed to externalise mental function.

Somewhere in her massive scolding, Perloff makes the point that, unlike with Eliot, the attempt to identify citation in an Ashbery poem is misguided. This issue is naturally linked—though not in this case by Perloff—with the larger one of mimesis. At stake here is how reality is represented. In an Ashbery poem Aristotelian notions of plausibility are often stretched to the limit, especially when Ashbery’s trade mark syntax (ultra rational, Proustian in carriage) grinds most sublimely against its own exploration of the bathetic inner life of the mind. In mimetic terms, Ashbery is more in the Wildean line, of life imitating art. But if Wilde wanted to represent the collision between contemporary mores and the ideals of aestheticism, Ashbery, more democratically, attempts to give voice to the aesthetic response in each of us. It is almost as though he were handing us the black orchid to pin in Oscar’s button hole.

Unlike the Anti-Absorptive School (which has always reminded me of the paper towel commercial in reverse) Ashbery does have his moments of didactic lucidity. Here in the double columned “Litany” the narrator describes the inherent restrictions of the craft.

Not that writing can transcend life,
Any more than the act of writing can
Outdistance the imagination it feeds on and
Imitates in its ductility, its swift
Garrulity, jumping from line to line,
From page to page....

(from the right column)

“Jacket II” publishes Ashbery’s “The Burden Of The Park”. This is a poem which describes, once it is underway, a journey down the “Great Array River”, that happens to be a talking river: “Egad,/ Trixie, the water can speak! Like a boy/ It speaks.” T.S. Eliot’s sullen, brown river god is cheered substantially by this poem’s hallucinatory collage of pistachio green inner tubes and rubber corsages.

By turns elegiac and slapstick, it is a poem which nevertheless seems haunted—just beneath its lyric skin (“The period of my rest is ended./ I shall negotiate the fall, and then go crying/ back to all of you.”) Yet, it is as though this angst were a parody of the real angst the poet is feeling. Out of a sense of propriety he has kept it to the margins, where it exerts a kind of peripheral pressure on the poem as a whole, sort of like the pressure Le Périphérique exerts on the city of Paris. Fernando Pessoa’s “Autopsicografia” comes to mind, as it describes just how poets sublimate dread.

O poeta é um fingidor.
Finge tão completamente
Que chega a fingir que é dor
A dor que deveras sente.

.........

The poet is a faker.
He fakes so completely,
He ends up faking
The pain he really feels.

-- Author's Translation

One sense I have of this “Great Array River” is that it behaves as a kind of paradigm for how an Ashbery poem—and this is a good example—will teach a reader how to read it as she reads it. The talking “current murmured to us mind your back/ for another day”, and then “Won’t/ you reconsider? Remount to my source?”

In this case the source is, indeed, Eliot’s “Fire Sermon”, which begins with that marvellous image of riparian drear: “The river’s tent is broken; the last fingers of leaf/ Clutch and sink into the wet bank.” In Ashbery’s poem the narrator is standing on “Mannhatta’s bleak shore”. In both poems the figure depicted is the poet-fisher. “While I was fishing in the dull canal/ On a winter evening round behind the gashouse” in Eliot’s poem, gets re-scripted in “The Burden of the Park”. Ashbery’s vaudevillian version is no less wrenching. In fact the comedy makes it more so, especially when read with a pre-knowledge of Eliot’s London.

Once, on Mannahatta’s bleak shore,
I trolled for spunkfish, but caught naught, nothing save
a rubber plunger or two. It was awful,
at that time. Now everything is cheerful.

The last stanza seeks adjustment, with the past, with all that life has wrought. The war years are conflated with each year’s return to Spring, and there is a sense, somewhere between relief and resignation, that everything has happened too quickly. Finally the poet has been a kind of “hooligan”, ready to cause trouble, but whose love of beauty has, thankfully, made him pause once again before—as Joyce’s Steven Dedaelus so wonderfully puts it—the ineluctable modality of the visible.

The period of my rest is ended. I shall negotiate the fall, and then go crying back to you all. In those years peace came and went, our father’s car changed with the seasons, all around us was fighting and excitement of spring. Now, funny enough, it’s over. I shan’t mind the vacant premise that vexed me once. I know it’s all too true. And the hooligan ogles a calla lily: Maybe only the fingertips are exciting, it thinks, disposing of another bushelful of ripe nostalgia. Maybe it’s too late, maybe they came today.

It is appropriate that Jacket pay tribute to John Ashbery, as much of the tone of the site is Ashberian. John Tranter, the editor, has inherited Ashbery’s aesthetic temperament: a levelling and democratizing inclusiveness. Ashbery’s pertinence to contemporary readers—and Tranter’s presentation of the poet recognizes this—is that he has stayed always one step ahead of his critics, the apologists as well as the nay sayers. And he has remained an outpost, a beacon, for younger artists. Much of the work Tranter presents in Jacket—from Perelman, Lauterbach, Bernstein, Corn and others—would be unthinkable without the backdrop of Ashbery’s seventeen volumes of poetry, not to mention the ever timely lyrical bombs like “The Burden of the Park”, which he continues to drop serenely on the heads of all.

V

Not to be outdone by history, Tranter sets the mandatory place at the table for what Ron Silliman refers to as “language writing”, a term which rivals even the wonderful redundancy of that earlier designation, “Language Poetry”. We find—a half-scroll down from the Ashbery bouquet—a cluster of blue and red indicators which seem to coalesce around a single, provocative title: “The Marginalization of Poetry”—a phenomenon, we’ll all remember, that’s been going on since Quixote. Bob Perelman’s new book is hotly debated by four other writers, including Silliman, one of the first generation language schoolists, and Ann Lauterbach, a New York poet with, happily, only a vague affiliation to that school. Perelman then responds with equal parts bewilderment, hurt, and brilliance (though I suspect that the modulated restraint is half put on: a kind of language school politesse).

It is, in fact, the perfect poetry for the death of history, an attempt to invent through a re-ordering of traditional praxis, a thoroughly new agenda, a poetry without a past.

Poetry is the conservative art. Radicalism and experimentalism in poetry have always looked to the past for renovation and inspiration. In the 14th Century Geoffrey Chaucer, the first great innovator (some would say the inventor) of English Poetry peered back into the dark age of The Crusades, to 12th and 13th Century French and Italian models, and to the world of knights and the garden. T.S. Eliot, high priest of Modernism, formulated a theory known as “Objective Correlative”, a way of creating—by drawing on “the tradition”—a mythological and historical parallel to personal experience. Ezra Pound, in “The Cantos” created an elaborate system of historical collage. Even William Carlos Williams, in looking forward, looked back at European peasant life, namely in Breughal, for some indication as to how he might unlock the American vulgate from the industrial world of mechanized speech. Louis Zukofsky after him devoted his hermetical poetry to the spirit of Shakespeare and Bach. Charles Olson saw Gloucester Massachusetts as a kind of lost Atlantas of poetic reason. All of them, great innovators, are sifting the past for clues as to how to proceed.

Language Poetry begs to differ. Contrary to this conservative tendency, even in the most radical of poetries, it is fueled by a political agenda—always a danger for poets—which is avowedly Marxist, and therefore utopian and future-oriented. It purposefully avoids the English tradition in favor of recent French theories of words as signifiers adrift from meaning. It is, in fact, the perfect poetry for the death of history, an attempt to invent through a re-ordering of traditional praxis, a thoroughly new agenda, a poetry without a past.

The poetry of the Language School can be most easily characterized by its break with two thousand years of sense making, and by its insistence on the material basis of language—as though language itself were no more than a system of musical values, and words only referred obliquely to things in the world. Released from the onus of content, or the need to refer to anything beyond itself, its difficulty is in the way it upsets every expectation that the history of discourse has provided us with, and, in turn, offers us, as a consolation, what, for most readers, are only very dubious returns.

While the jury is still out on the value of the poetry of the so-called Language Movement, it would seem clear to anyone who has tried to read it, that the prose is, to put it nicely, overladen. Their claim, oft repeated, to a monopoly on experimentalism is no excuse for a prose style which resembles bad translation. This is not suprising for a group of writers who have borrowed their style and philosophy wholesale from Derrida, a writer so marvelously unsuited to the tenor and texture of English.

The strangest thing about Silliman’s piece, is to see the man writing out of Language-drag. His “street” prose strikes me as slightly bored with itself . The clauses of a typical sentence are coupled together like sections of irrigation piping, transported here and there across a muddy field to wherever more water is needed. His main gripe is, put plainly, that Perelman—having been obligated to figure out some way to raise a family (Silliman mentions the fact that he has kids)—has become a college professor, and that his book is at least three quarters academic. Silliman wonders: “What might this book have become had it been written for poets instead of as a strategy for professional advancement?” This strikes me as rather like Thomas More complaining about the production of beefsteak mid-way through digesting the latest one eaten. What does Ron Silliman consider himself if not a professional?

Perelman’s response is one of bridled outrage. He accuses Silliman of paranoia: “There is a very unnegotiable fear in Ron's comments about the university as destroyer of the book's form”. However, Perelman is aware that he is walking through the valley of shadow of death, and that his book might indeed be a betrayal. He asks, “Can real poetry only exist in autonomous margins? If your answer is an unqualified yes then my book will be a complicitous, not to say a fallen, act.” There is something elegiac about all this, as though the whole torpid proceeding were really about the unstated death of a movement, and Perleman himself fast becoming the Gorbachev of Language Poetry.

In response to all this, Ann Lauterbach proemiates in what she refers to as “sloppy arbitrary couplets.” The talky, versified essay has been de rigueur among our leading experimentalists ever since the publication of Charles Bernstein’s A Poetics, with its long verse essay, “Artifice of Absorption”. There is nothing new about this form. Indeed it has its origins in Chaucer’s “Prologue” which has the poet extemporizing, seemingly, over what is to come in his great poem; a kind of very early meta-text: “ Me thynketh it acordaunt to resoun / To telle yow al the condicioun...”. In our century it is probably John Ashbery who first rekindles the spirit of the “Prologue” in “Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror”, a poem which, as Ashbery says in the interview published here in “Jacket”, he doesn’t even like. Perelman uses the form in The Marginalization of Poetry, and Lauterbach responds in kind.

Her approach is to call into question various issues in Perelman’s book, and she manages this more gracefully and compellingly than Silliman. There are some stunning passages in which she worries over the “ironization” (a word which even Helen Vendler uses, in her new book on Shakespeare) of emotion in post-modern verse, but more interesting than this, and very much in elegiac keeping with Perelman’s tone, is the way she worries over her own production.

Lauterbach’s poem ends with her fretting (we wonder how ironically) about her credentials. Again the question of time—the restricted time poets in our society have to operate within?—is highlighted.

I suppose if I were a really
good deconstructive post-Freudian  

with lacings of Lacan and Kristeva
I might want to say something  

about the return of the repressed
or the mirror stage or symbolic orders  

or something obvious
about intimations of immortality  

but luckily I am running out of
time.

“Luckily”? Whose luck? Ours? Hers? I, for one, want more time with the poet!

VI

There is much to read in “Jacket” and I, too, have “run out of time”, and forgotten to talk about the wonderful interview of Roy Fisher, about Charles Bernstein’s debut as Philip Larkin, or about David Lehman’s fabulous essay, “The Ern Malley Poetry Hoax”; not to mention poetry by Paul Hoover, Alfred Corn, and Pamela Brown. Eliot Weinberger’s musings are important and should not be overlooked. I plan to touch on them in a future column. I could go on, and I’m sure I will...but not at the moment.

It strikes me that it might be interesting for my readers to know that I am penning (yes, I am actually using a pen) these last paragraphs on a Friday night, late in December, a month in which rain has dominated, in a student café on the Rua de Brazil—Brazil Street—in Coimbra, that very city where Candide and Doctor Pangloss are re-united, and then nearly hung by the Inquisitors.

Martin Walter Earl

Martin Earl lives with his wife Luísa in Coimbra, a small city about two hundred kilometers north of Lisbon. He was raised in Duxbury Massachusetts and lived in New York City during the early eighties before moving to Paris in 1984. In 1986 he left Paris to live in Portugal, and has been there ever since. His book, Stundenglas, was published in 1992 in East Berlin by Edition Maldoror. His poems have been published in magazines in America and the U.K. Some of these include Conjunctions, The Iowa review, Denver Quarterly, Metre (U.K.) and PN Review (U.K.). His work has been translated into French, german, Portugese, and Swedish.