Looking Back at ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ (and a half) and at some poems for, at, and beyond the millennium. (delivered to the 'Anthology as Manifesto' conference at the University of Glasgow: more on that here, item 2: Pages: Three March readings up the North West coast (set lists))
‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ is one of two acts of poetics committed as part of my long network of texts, assembled 1989-2000, and collected under the title Twentieth Century Blues: the first early on – crudely put – to get the thing going, the second anticipating the manner and modes of its ending, and with thoughts of a ‘beyond’. In the first I define Twentieth Century Blues formally as a
net/
(k)not
- work(s)
a glyph that guided its development and perhaps some of its poetic focus. It’s a net that works itself into knots, with multiple titles and connecting strands, some of them thematic, some of them formal, a few of them deliberate dead ends. They are almost hyperlinks, conceived before I had heard of such things.
I customarily define writerly poetics as: the products of the process of reflection upon writings, and upon the act of writing, gathering from the past and from others, speculatively and anticipatorily casting into the future. That’s precisely what ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ enacts. More magisterially, Jerome Rothenberg, in the introduction to his book of poetics, Pre-Faces, says, ‘The world we share, & our interplay with it, calls again & again for discourse: in the case of Poets, the setting forth of a poetics… I’ve attempted, like other poets so engaged, to create a new & coherent poetics for our time.’ (Rothenberg, 1981: 3) Poetics is thus both for the primary practitioner and for the wider poetry community.
Using ‘network theory’, gleaned from Caroline Levine’s 2015 book Forms which I’ve only recently discovered, we might say Twentieth Century Blues joins those networks that ‘are the forms that rupture or defy enclosed totalities and allow us to understand border-crossing circulations and transmissions.’ (Levine 2015: 117). I hope so (and it was a shame such theory, like the internet, wasn’t in existence when I conceived of the project.) ‘Networks are,’ Levine writes, ‘capable of unending expansion: once there is a link between two nodes, there is a network, and it can grow simply by linking to new nodes. Thus the network form affords a certain infinite extensiveness. But, in practice, many networks are limited,’ in the case of Twentieth Century Blues by the millennium; the work was time-based and scheduled for completion or abandonment at the end of the century, with ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ as a late staging post towards that. In terms of network theory, The End of the Twentieth Century is a node that pulls all the other strands together, through it, a great knotty not-worky flow! Levine puts it thus: ‘a few important nodes are simultaneously part of many large clusters.’ (Levine 2015: 126) All the strands pass through this node but I won’t list all the titles when I perform it. While taking a retrospective line, a taking-stock, ‘The End of the Twentieth Century’ is also – as poetics should be – speculative and anticipatory, and I consider some possible avenues of advance beyond the prescribed end of the project, the end of the century, my own personal poems for the Millennium.
It is no wonder that the anthology of that name Poems for the Millennium, edited by Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, particularly the second volume, which I was then adapting for teaching, comes sharply into focus as an education of my writing desires. I mention it as ‘a prospectus for reading’ at one point. And it was – although I still haven’t followed all of its prospects.
Named
after a monumental sculpture of Joesph Beuys, ‘The End of the Twentieth
Century’ is a hybrid poem, lineated prose, an essay, a rant, a series of bad
jokes, a confession, a book review even, a string of allusions and quotations, a
poetics piece and an inescapable node of the networked project. This ‘text for
readers and writers’ as I call it, was written on the 1st May 1999 and read at
the English Research Day at Edge Hill University the following month. Now it
arrives at Glasgow, 25 years after composition, but still capable of generating
a few sparks, I hope. As Rothenberg himself says, ‘The main activity of my
poetics has involved … acts of presentation: assemblage & performance &
translation’. (Rothenberg 3). Certainly, in my case, in this text, the first
two of those, with a touch of the third.
I can’t perform the whole piece; we
join it at page 12 of its 19 pages…
