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C.R. Nº 3: "Conjunctions—A Living Notebook"
- Who is this unmasked man?
Perhaps some readers—under the age of twenty (write to me if I am
wrong!)—will have found the print version via the web version—something
vaguely akin to seeing David Lean’s Zhivago, and only then reading
Pasternak. It’s no news to anyone that holding a book in one’s hand is,
for school children and university students, an increasingly novel way
to read. New generations of readers will no doubt come to books, if they
do so at all, through their Hollywood cousins and digital doppelgängers.
The demise of bibliohegemony is an assumption that already guides the
editorial posture of www.Conjunctions.
They are not alone. As with web versions of The Paris Review and the
TLS, to name just two cases, the idea is to give culturally adroit
webnauts a sampling of the more encompassing print version. I suppose
that it is all designed to attract new surfers to old beaches, as least
those who still shuttle between cyberspace and the massy quadrangular
world of print. But lest you be fooled, www.Conjunctions is not, as with
the two just cited, a glorified advertisement for its printed parent.
The editor, Bradford Morrow, has engineered a site, which not only
substantiates his original conception of the magazine as a “living
notebook”, but expands on this premise by exploiting resources which
only the web can offer. Taken together the print and the web version
provide readers with a comprehensive package that goes beyond what
either could achieve on its own. Considering Conjunctions in the round,
as one is now bound to do, we’d be hard put to find another leading
literary magazine establishing itself so pre-eminently in electronic
format. While many have this potential (just think of The Paris Review’s
historical interview series, APR’s catalogue of essays, The Iowa
Review’s poetic Mecca) none have moved so energetically and decisively
as Conjunctions.
This editing symbiosis is manifest on the opening page of the site. Our
eye is drawn to the cover of the current issue of the print
Conjunctions. Lined up next to this, as though waiting to be plucked
from a bedside bookshelf, the previous three or four issues show us
their spine. Something rustic for the digital age, this virtual
bookshelf is a sure sign that the magazine’s Old World literary values
are a top priority. These values—the smoky leisure of actual reading—are
manifest in the design of the site. With its crisp graphics and tawny
colors, we have the sensation of shuffling actual pages. Each section
has its own distinct uncluttered feel, which makes us want to linger.
And there is more here to linger over than simply excerpts from the
current issue. The Conjunctions site is really a work in progress. The
magazine’s entire history is dynamically unfolding via a comprehensively
hyper-linked index that ranges all the way back to 1981. It is as though
suddenly we had one of the commanding versions of the American
avant-garde accessible by the click of a mouse.
As well as the generous access to nearly two decades of recent literary
history, there are several other features on offer that extend beyond
the ambit of the print edition. The "Audio File" seems to me one of the
masterstrokes of this site. I can’t describe what a comfort it is to
hear, in the midst of my fastness, living poets reading their work,
their voices beamed down to my screamingly irrelevant little platform in
the middle one of Europe’s most edge-inflected countries. It is hard to
generalize from my own aural concupiscence, so I won’t try. Rather let
me stick to the facts. You can hear, from among various writers, Leslie
Scalapino reading from Friendship, Robert Kelly reading from his recent
“Berlin Sonnets” (some of which you can read, by the way, at another
wonderful site called www.Archipelago), or Rikki DuCornet reading "The
Many Tenses of Desire". There is also music by Manno Charlemange, and
Fred Ho.
"Web Conjunctions", another one of the half dozen features we are
presented with upon opening the site, is an autonomous zine, a digitally
molted version of its parent, which, rather than waiting for the new
issues of the magazine, seems to expand by fanciful osmosis. Take for
instance one of its latest postings from the 28th of November, excerpts
from Tangier Days: Conversations with Paul Bowles, 1984-1988 by Richard
F. Patteson. On the one hand, Paul Bowles, who writes, as Gore Vidal
once observed, as if Moby Dick had never been written, seems out of
place in this preeminently American avant-garde journal. When asked by
Patteson to arbitrate between Saul Bellow and John Barth on the question
of linguistic experimentation, Bowles sides with Bellow who considered
it close to irrelevant in serious fiction. Bowles wonders (and we can
almost here the Conjunctions staff chuckling behind the editorial arras)
why, for example, "one should strive to invent new language. You're
attempting to get across certain ideas. Experimentation should not
become a hindrance." Bowles’ eloquent tacitness and sand-pocked reserve,
not to mention his undying concern for classical rigor in prose, might
be serving as a lesson to experimental writers like Brian Lennon, whose
"Web Conjunctions" selection, "From Nineteen Italian Days: An Essay", is a
masterpiece of indirection.
I can only assume that the editor’s intentions run to the dialogic. By
letting such different writers hash it out in close proximity, a
reader’s angles of opportunity are everywhere, and so her evaluations
are drawn naturally like sniper fire down a cold alley of winter air.
After Lennon, one clicks with relief on Martine Bellen’s entry, “Song of
the Little Road”, posted on the 1st of October. Bellen, a senior editor
at Conjunctions whose latest book, Tales of Murasaki and Other Poems,
won the 1997 National Poetry Series, is an unabashed exotic. She writes
with the verbal precision of Marianne Moore, her words and phrases
almost crocheted into the line, so tight are they, but with a different
palette entirely. Her lines, even if they are only a word long, have a
flushed, inscriptive quality. The effect is of flashes of luminescence
held against a blackened ground.
This is a daughter’s tale of woe, as I suspect much of her work is; a
tale of "Bamboo birds and girls in gardens" and "Oil, salt, chilies
stolen from the kitchen". Bellen’s voice is unmistakably her own,
chronically beautiful, and always embroidering the silken threads of
lyrical desire over a taut strung mesh of pain, weaving and unweaving
the lush provisos and terms of continuance which are part of her tragic
heritage. For it is obvious that she has aligned herself with a
tradition of long suffering women, from Dickinson to Akhmatova. This
poem ends with one of the sacred dicta of that very tradition:
"Sometimes it is necessary to leave home."
We might move on to Peter Handke, Antonin Artaud, or to one of my
favorite postings in this evolving selection, Rachel Sherman’s "Nose"
("Noses give the father in the girl away."). Yet we’d still only be
scratching the surface of the site. To really delve we must pursue some
of the actual issues, that is selections from Conjunctions proper; and
to get there you must click over the archive link. In preparing for this
column, I looked at some of the authors in the 30th issue, Paper
Airplane, which opens with a commentary on the first chapter from a new
translation of Kafka’s Trial, and ends with another estimable K. from
contemporary America.
One detects, in Robert Kelly’s fabulistic oeuvre, a great patience for
the world, and for all its solitary architects. His narrators are
inevitably existential characters bound round by their own freedom:
eclectics, haunters of foreign sidewalks, students of crows, studied men
of leisure exquisitely ill at ease in their perfection, and hell-bent on
doing the ultimate good before the gods of articulation.
Kelly writes with the aggressive precision of his European masters; one
supposes Kafka. Maybe too we read the influence of the Paris-based
Oulipo (Queneau, Mathews, Perec, Calvino). He shares the manic
exactitude of, especially, Harry Mathews, contemporary literature’s most
important researcher in the science of formalism. Though one doesn’t get
the feeling that Kelly’s muse is, a priori, a woman of strictures and
arcane debts. There is more languor and ease in his approach. He has
Huysmans’ love of the exotic, yet he is more curtailed, as though by
some after-breath of New England Puritanism, mixed with the dabbler’s
self-consciousness. He is a Romantic disguising himself in 18th Century
légerté.
But Kelly is a Master and it is fitting that this issue, which starts
with a discussion of Kafka's Trial, should end with a story which evokes
high modernist stakes, of dream and deep reading, and actually attempts
to describe Edmund Wilson’s problems writing a work he never wrote.
"Edmund Wilson on Alfred Musset: The Dream" is a fantasia in Z sharp
minor, and in it Kelly brings the world of dream into drawing room
focus.
The narrative begins with a description of that essential piece of
reader’s equipment, the chair. It’s almost as though we need the weight
of what I can’t resist thinking is Kelly’s own reading chair to set the
scene for Edmund Wilson’s realistically improbable La Vie d’Alfred
Musset. For the story will play seriously with the conventions of
biography, the consistency of reputations and literary lives, and
examine the paradigms of historical imagination through the inverted
world of the dream. It somehow helps that we are seated comfortably in a
real chair. The narrator has fallen to sleep reading Malory:
The heavy body reading heavily is so lightly rendered that it almost
escapes our attention. But subtle wit is what our oedipal bachelor’s
tale is about. Why Kelly chooses Musset’s muse-wrecked life to re-write,
and not another, is the question which lingers. The autobiographer’s
ruse at first seems just that, a ruse, sharing something perhaps with
the mise-en-scène of one of Harry Mathew’s maddeningly torqued recipes
from Country Cooking and Other Tales. But there is some degree of
self-portraiture here, where there never is in Mathews. Musset, known
for being le plus classique des romantiques et le plus romantique des
classiques, crossed with Edmund Wilson, as strange as that seems, might
just give us Robert Kelly. Isaiah Berlin’s description of Wilson, in a
1991 interview with Lewis M. Dabrey, is to the point. Wilson is referred
to as an "old-fashioned 19th century critic who, whenever he wanted to
write about somebody, went off for two months and read everything [in a
red leather chair?] –accumulated an enormous amount of information until
some shape emerged, built itself in his head…He interpreted
literature." I’d be hard pressed to produce a better description of
what Kelly, with his twist on the pliancy of fact, is doing in "Edmund
Wilson on Alfred Musset: The Dream".
As so often when reading literary journals—on the web?—one finishes one
section and easily clicks to another without the requisite retooling,
without changing the filters, or even basking a bit, belly up, in the
word bath. Moving too quickly through this site might find us one minute
suffused in the dream realism of Robert Kelly, and the next gasping on
the ascetic asperity of Susan Howe’s "Rückenfigur". This is a poem that,
patiently, over the course of sixteen linked sonnets, lifts Tristram and
Yseult into the realm of "bitter sound".
Reading Susan Howe’s poetry has, by definition, to be a labor of love:
love for the word; love for that strange cohesion of words we call
syntax; and love for the ideas towards which words tend. True, this kind
of love is necessary for reading any poetry worth the name. Howe’s
poetry simply demands more of it, and more of those other qualities
which allow love to go to work: patience, flexibility, trust, and the
willing suspension of disbelief.
At the level of ideas, her poetry rises out of the American vatic, is
puritan to the core, and hinges always on the individual’s capacity for
revelation, in the "mind’s trajected light". The sine qua non of
revelation is for her — as for Protestant revelation always — the marriage
of correct living with metaphysical deferral. For poets, Howe included,
correct living boils down to purifying the language of the tribe. This
is the devotional side, the praxis whose ethic rises out of work and
solitary application. Our tradition is rife with hair-shirted priests
and priestesses whose urge toward various forms of Calvinistic privation
has been transposed into one of America’s central myths of freedom, that
the freedom of the poet is always the inverse of everyone else’s
freedom. On the other hand, metaphysical deferral, the incomplete
utopia, the unfinished scripting, ensures continuance for a nation of
narrative-deprived poets as they turn weightlessly to praying in the
woods. The oldest truth in the book: when you run out of things to write
about, do what all great American poets end up doing, write about the
revelation of writing.
Once we understand her terrain, the Emersonian diaspora, the difficulty
in Howe’s poetry fixes itself at the level of syntax; though this bears
little relation to the willfully contorted language of many poets of our
day. It reminds me more of the inherent difficulty in Hart Crane, or
even Laura Riding—a difficulty that comes from compression rather than
the struggle for effect.
Syntax in poetry is the mathematics behind desire. As desire leans away
from the Eros of description, and towards the purely vatic (the
metaphysical utterance) syntax tightens and contracts, discovers a
glowing simplicity within the basic difficulty of having traveled such a
sheer distance from actual life. Blake and Emily Dickinson are two great
examples. Celan is another one. They honed the sheer edge of the
sentence, and parsed it to its beautiful nub.
Like these writers, Susan Howe tends toward mantic utterance, "Bitter
sound as truth is / silent as silent tomorrow." Her syntax is
appropriately unforgiving, demandingly passionate, admonitory — in the
sense in which it calls upon the past to witness the present — and driven
by a kind of sublimated wrath, as though it were still feeding off the
energies of Hutchinsonian homily. Most often she dispenses with the
niceties of the sentence and lets nominating energies subsume
predicating ones—the effect is of motion poised above its depth. Her
stanza approximates the luminous strictness of a Quaker chair.
"Rückenfigur", which literally means "back-figure", and might be
interpreted as "image without a front side", is a sonnet sequence based
on the story of Tristram and Yseult. The origins of this story are lost
in medieval twilight. It went through at least four major re-workings
before Gottfried von Strassberg (fl.1210) produced his amazing German
poem, "Tristan". Those of us who don’t read German, are indebted to its
translation into Modern English prose by A.T. Hato, whose wonderful
introduction (Penguin Classics) I have just reread. In it he justifies
offering Gottfried’s "Tristan" (which was written in the colloquial
language of the Hohenstauffen courts) "in a form which (whatever its
defects) is not intrinsically absurd—plain prose."
We can only imagine then, those of us who don’t read medieval German,
what it would be like to experience Gottfried’s language first hand.
"His verbal subtleties and intricacies are," Hato tells us, "unmatched
in any period of German literature." Hato hoped that his prose version
might be "found useful for a good English poet one day."
Howe — whether she reads medieval German or not I don’t know — has not given
us the verse translation that Hato seems to have been waiting for, but a
penetrating commentary on the successive re-workings of the story. Her
interrogation is aimed at the language itself, its "literariness", which
she sees underpinning the dense psychological fabric, the tragic
motivations of the lovers, and all who get caught up in their plot. Like
Gottfried himself - who diverged from the ordinary Christian apologetics
his staunch community demanded — Howe lays claim to the moral history of
antiquity, as she attempts to find her way back to "Ysolt’s single
vision of union". She calls, by turns, upon the story of Antigone, and
on Ovid’s Orpheus and Eurydice.
Gottfried’s heroic conception of love depends, in practical terms, on
social resistance. His lovers would be reduced to dithering in a world
Hato describes as "free of mésalliance". Susan Howe retains this
paradigm of resistance, of love as essentially "other". But while
resistance in Gottfried is colorfully comprised of an array of spies,
jealous husbands, and willing corrupters of the truth, like the rascally
dwarf, Merlot, in Howe it is language itself, the materia prima, which
provides the necessary resistance. The poet must struggle against the
banality with which expression cages sentiment; against the closure
implicit in narrative and lyric form; and against language’s capacity to
resist its own erasure in the merging apotheosis of lover becoming one
with the object of her love.
The task is an ambiguous one. The goal is at once heatedly pursued, and
hedged. Waiting is implicit: "Eurydice sits by/ the bank of a river
seven days"; Mark waits in a tree to trap his wife. Howe, swift on her
appointed assignation with the truth sees, as Isolde did, "Mark’s shadow
in the water". The husband’s "moral right" is played off, as it is in
Gottfried, consummation with her lover. Suspension. Above the river.
Leaning against the handrail.
Her poetry can cause dislodgements of memory. Reading “Rückenfigur”, by
tropes and slips of association, suddenly I am in Jenna again, on my way
from one place to another, in the snow with the acrid tinge of cheap
East German coal in the air. I am standing in front of the two-story
brick house in which Novalis lived.
What a poem like this can do ("face/backward", like the Rückenfigur?),
as we spall off its wounded surface, is lift us into our own experience,
even as it keeps us gripped by the lyric sway. Why Schlegel all of a
sudden? And how that tips me out of the poem, back to 1992 when I went
traipsing about on a drunken tour of the town, leaning over such bridges
and watching the snow swirl into the brooks beneath them, as focused as
Schlegel must have been on the "motion/ of chaos". Evocation in Howe
sneaks up on you. Suddenly you are shunted into "the pastness of
lanscape". There is a component in Howe that is vastly expressive of our
period. In the best sense she is a poet of her day.
And what might that mean? I think that at this point it is superfluous
to say that we live in a world of fragments and image nodes, and that
there is no longer any means of making sense of our experience. By doing
so we grossly underestimate the experience of those that have come
before us, even as we pander to our own deficiencies. Gloating over the
so-called collapse of meaning represents a failure of historical
imagination, elucidates nothing, and serves only to inflate our
vanities. Hamlet it seems to me, skull in hand, mud clods clinging to
his boots, had just as much trouble to sort through the ontologies of
his day. And besides, his girlfriend was mad. Chesterton, talking of the
mistake which people made by underestimating the pre-romantic’s ability
to represent nature says that "They preferred writing about great men to
writing about great hills; but they sat on great hills to write it."
Seamus Heaney once said that one of the qualities of real poetry is that
the tone of it is somehow at odds with the content. But what strikes me
in this poem is not that the tone is at odds with the content, but that
the method is. For the beauty and the crisp slanting of the piece, one
would like the poet to relax a little, fall back into a line closer
somewhat to the spoken. Instead there is a driven and methodical syntax
from beginning to end, even though the poem is all about hesitation, and
half-proffered gesture.
A justification for Howe’s style, if one wants to read it as such, can
be found in her criticism. It is in the way she equates "Americanness"
with the antinomian tradition of Anne Hutchinson, a tradition which she
extends to Emily Dickinson, and, to a certain extent, Emerson, Thoreau
and Melville. This correlation is based on various arguments that run
the gamut from textual criticism to the metaphysical.
This supposition and others like it are augmented by the almost
irresistible eloquence of statements that lean more towards Old World
philosophy.
Other such statements outlining the "American" project, and basing it on
a "language of the heart" that "has quite another grammar", are
sprinkled throughout Howe’s critical work. At one point in The
Birth-mark, she asserts that after "1637, American literary expression
couldn’t speak English." Meaning of course English English. This kind of
literary nationalism contrasts sharply with the generation of poets and
critics from the 1950’s. John Berryman, for instance, wasn’t even
willing to admit that there was a national American literature. American
literature could not be separated from English literature, and American
writers were nothing more — in literary terms — than English writers born on
the other side of the Atlantic. Even Ezra Pound’s search for a more
demotic poetics to replace the Anglo-American obsession with iambic
pentameter, was based on the contents — the prose, as it were — of world
literature, as opposed to the syntax of earlier American writers.
I, for one, find all brands of literary nationalism at this late
date — shadowed as they inevitably are by all sorts of political
nationalism — more than somewhat distressing. The quasi-religious
justifications for a language placed "at a miraculous reach" from the
syntax of ordinary discourse are common to such searches for identity.
In fact, beyond poetry, this is in many cases what is wrong with our
century. The gap that opens between justification and motivation is like
a grave. In Howe’s case, the sacredness that she bestows upon the
fragment as a modus operandi rises out of the traditional antinomian
trust in wild and unrestrained speech, in the voice of the enthused, and
the touched. As with Anne Hutchinson — mustering a fragmented rain of
scripture against the "legal" articulation of a court that sought to
banish her — the struggle for identity in Howe is paradoxical. In the end
it is a struggle to be articulate, limpid, and free of babble.
Similar tensions — between the disintegration of languages and the urge
for spiritual consolidation — might be said to mark Conjunctions itself.
Writers like Martine Bellen and Robert Kelly, and a host of other
writers read at Conjunctions.com, seem to be pulling against that geist
which ostensibly sponsors them, toward more deeply imagined fictions and
a more eloquent relation to narrative. They still hold the conviction,
of course, that meaning is indeed a construction, and never more than
provisional, yet do not preclude the possibility of its substance and
largesse, of its elegance. Their ideological slippage in relation to
writers of more standard experimentalist pedigree is remarkable
particularly in this setting, and by virtue of the variety of authors
Conjunctions publishes. The magazine itself becomes the scene of an
argument that deeply implicates our present literary life. It is a scene
in which the tug between polarities we are all so familiar with is
allowed, in the "spirit of a living notebook", to find expression.
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.
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