Notes on two critical volumes
Joel Betteridge’s Avant-Garde
Pieties: Aesthetics, Race and the Renewal of Innovative Poetics.
Oxford and London: Routledge, 2018; and
Reading
Uncreative Writing: Conceptualism, Expression and the Lyric by David Kaufmann. Cham: Palgrave
Macmillan, 2017;
and touching very
briefly on Oren Izenburg’s Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social
Life. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011.
I have been trying
for an age to finish reading Joel Betteridge’s Avant-Garde Pieties (2018)
and I’ve finally done it. (And I've taken even longer to get this post up and online.) I’ve been simultaneously re-reading Reading Uncreative
Writing by David Kaufmann (2017). Both books are rocked, I think it is fair
to say, by the affront of – intended – and the affront caused – probably
unintended – by Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘The Body of Michael Brown’ (2015, well
that's the date of its single performance anyway). Never has a text been so
central and absent to literary debate (since Goldsmith withdrew the work and
replaced it with a self-justifying Facebook post). With one enclosure does
Goldsmith refute his often quoted assertion that you don’t need to read his
work. In this case we do, but we can't. But, then, we should be wary of Goldsmith’s
pronouncements (I suppose we should call it ‘poetics’, but it appears too
finished to fulfil my definitions of it. See Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Necessity of
Poetics 1: The Identification of Poetics) His whole book Uncreative Writing (saintly white cover),
like its critical shadow, Perloff’s Unoriginal Genius – brilliant and
persuasive books both! – his book (as I say in my book The Meaning of
Form: see Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form
in Contemporary Innovative Poetry PUBLISHED)
offers a teleology that fashions all of avant-garde or modernist history into a
precursor of uncreative writing or, rather, to himself. I criticised this,
rightly, but what I failed to see was that his critics have also taken
him at his word. So that when the disgusting and ill-judged presentation (and
subtle rearrangements, or forming in my terms) of ‘The Body of Michael
Brown’ was attacked so comprehensively, some commentators used the opportunity
to dismiss all avant-garde art... particularly as racist. Where this
gets us – suddenly everything I've ever written is automatically racist! – is
unclear – but where it leaves Baraka or Mackey (etc… a long list in Betteridge
and Kaufmann) is much clearer: they stand as refutations of this simplistic
charge, by dazzling us, by simply existing. As I say, these critics (who have an
aesthetic agenda (mainstream writers) or a political one (they want directly
political work; what would they make of my sonnets? nothing, of course, the focus
is purely American, a blindness unaddressed…) These critics are only
following Kenneth Goldsmith’s teleology. We all go down for his crime,
in the worst form of joint enterprise.
The year 2015 is
an interesting one for the wheels to fall off the conceptualist wagon. (Vanessa
Place was also playing with fire by retweeting Gone with the Wind at
this time, and Kaufmann itemises the creative blindness of the gesture, and the
critical blindness of the response.) Somewhere I noted that I thought
conceptual writing would last until about 2015. (I wished I'd expressed that
publicly; I didn't, probably because I've been so wrong with predictions before!
Examples omitted.) If you believe Kenneth Goldsmith's self-serving teleology,
then all avant-garde work died in 2015. (With him.) It's not what he intended,
but that's the result of his argument.
Goldsmith's
intentions are of interest in this moment. Betteridge argues convincingly that his
justification of ‘The Body of Michael Brown’ – I feel like I'm re-inscribing the
pain, and ‘anti-elegy’ with each reiteration of his name in this context –
betrays most of the tenets of conceptual writing, largely through a very
traditional plea to ‘Truth’. It's like he's claiming to be some kind of
documentary poet (like Mark Novak for example, or Juliana Spahr, about whom Betteridge
writes so eloquently). But maybe Kenneth Goldsmith would sell his own skin to
save his body.
If you don't
believe Kenneth Goldsmith's self-serving teleology then avant-garde work didn't
die in 2015, not all forms led to Goldsmith. Indeed at that moment I was
working on The Meaning of Form, attempting to prove, in part, that
conceptual writing’s disavowal of form was not evidenced by the form, forms and
acts of forming involved in producing the works themselves. (See Pages: Robert Sheppard The Trace of Poetry:
Notes on Conceptual Writing and Form)
One of the problems with Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘The Body’ is that he does reform
the work – ‘translating’ medical terms,
it's a re-forming of an autopsy report, a transposition of its restricted code (and
quite unlike Goldsmith's American Disasters which uses PUBLIC language)
another of Kenneth Goldsmith’s self-justifications that deny and defy the
evidence is to suggest ‘The Body’ is an extra chapter of American Disasters.
Kaufmann's thesis – in brief –is a parallel one to mine. Where I find form
where it's been liquidated by the theory, he finds affect, ‘subjectivity’,
a ‘trans-subjectivity’ belonging to a mass of quoted people, and ‘expression’
in Adorno’s sense, i.e. it's not self-expression.
[I will now interpollate
some earlier notes I made on this use of ‘expression’: First he redefines ‘expression’:
The truth of
dissonance is expression.
‘Expression
renders audible differentiated state or mood... Expression... marks the
critical function of art and its concomitant utopian hope.’ (Kaufmann 2017: 7)
My language.
Expression is not self-expression. Indeed, in The Meaning of Form
I say something like this: Pages: Robert Sheppard: A Note on
Self-Expression and Conceptual Wriitng]
The rejection of
lyric subjectivity is not as absolute as it might be for Marjorie Perloff.
‘A critique of
actually existing “official verse culture” is not a criticism of lyricism tout
court. It is a critique of the current state of play,’ (Kaufmann 2017: 9)
the ‘workshop poem’, for example. Thus he can say of Emily Dickinson: ‘a
determinate negation of the lyric of her time, not the blanket negation of the
lyric, as such.’ (Kaufmann 2017: 10.) (Such negations are part of its history.)
A turning from that
lyric, not from the long tradition. Or returning from it, within the tradition.
Kaufmann has
serious wonders on the way, but by page 125, we're back to Adorno’s ‘expression’ that is not self-expression: ‘Artworks
bear expression not when they communicate the subject, but rather where they reverberate
with the proto history of subjectivity’... Expression ‘approaches the trans-subjective.’
(Kaufmann 2017: 125))
I'll leave his
thoughts about lyric to one side for now. [Actually, these notes do not return
to the subject.] The more satisfactory conceptual work for Kaufman is that of
Robert Fitterman and it is interesting (to me, anyway), that James (Byrne) and
I should have selected his work for Atlantic Drift. (See Pages: Atlantic Drift launch in London: 5th
February 2018 (some photos and a few comments) (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) The language of affect, argues Kaufmann,
saturates conceptual writing when it shouldn't. The ‘shouldn't’ only
works if you exchange the flexibility and developmental gymnastics of poetics
for the sclerotic diktats of a manifesto – but that's exactly what conceptual
writing did in its (or Kenneth Goldsmith's) attempt to be the only avant-garde
practice in town.
It's not. It can't
be, given continual avant-garde poetics and practice, of course.
And it isn't, if
we are looking at the other writers Betteridge treats (chiefly Spahr and Buuck,
Kaia Sand, Peter O’Leary, and Clauda Rankine (another inclusion in Atlantic
Drift)), and the scope can be widened to include many many other writers,
as ever when one writes a critical work).
‘Race’ in
Bettridge’s subtitle ‘Aesthetics, Race and the Renewal of Innovative Poetics’
is a live issue, in a particular, global way, post-Black Lives Matter (his book
is pre-BLM, of course, given the delays of book publication). It's never been a
not-live issue for Poets and People of Colour, and - without sounding like
Kenneth Goldsmith and his self-justifications, I'm pleased with the diversity
of coverage in Atlantic Drift though that's probably more James Byrne’s
doing than mine.
No, it's racism
that's the issue here. Betteridge puts up an argument against directly activist
poetry that isn't worth repeating here, since I'm more interested in his ‘renewal
of innovative poetics’.
Because a poem
doesn't mention race it doesn't mean it's racist. (That should be obvious, but
it's not.) If a person doesn't mention race that doesn't mean it's not racist;
obviously, to be overtly racist (rather than institutionally racist) you'd
probably need to mention race, possibly obsessively so. Of course, my use of ‘mention’
is playing into certain presumptions about the referentiality of poetry - it's
not helpful…
One of the things Betteridge
touches upon at the beginning is dealt with precisely by the rest of the book:
the notion that some ‘avant-garde’ gestures (I'm using his terms but ‘formally
innovative’ might do just as well) – some such named gestures just aren't. I
came up with the aphorism: ‘A writer (an artist) must both derive and dérive – and both must be unruly,’ after reading Betteridge
(on Robert Duncan, as it happens). I do see surrealist writing, Oulipo
techniques applied on far from the fruit fly material Queneau stipulated,
decorative concrete poetry, ineffectual erasure, pointless cut up, etc… etc… but to note that is only, really, to notice
that being derivative is not the same as deriving the work – Bettridge has no
problem with an avant-garde tradition – so long as one does something
with it, ‘working the work’ as I've long said: ‘derive and dérive’ seems to me
an epithet-prophylactic for that problem. It's a minor point and it doesn't
need returning to. (I take it up in a piece of poetics intended for
publication, called (at the moment) ‘My Own Crisis’. Really!) ‘Right imitation’
is no longer part of our poetics, but neither is wild novelty. It is part of
good aesthetic judgement to deal with it. It is partly poetics’ task to derive
and to suggest the dérive. (Oh no, not another definition of poetics!)
This brings me to
another minor point. Betteridge occasionally gestures towards the religious
and, even if his suggestion that the language poets’ commitment to language is
not unlike a sect’s commitment to its principles (I always think of the Muggletonians!)
I would want to steer away from that, and stay secular and linguistically
materialist.
That said, his
account of the ‘pieties’ of the avant-garde suggest ways towards ‘renewal of
innovative poetics’. Another way of saying this, is to say that I want to re-
read his book – or parts of it – as poetics. Or rather, to read the parts which
are poetics. Betteridge is a poet, after all. That demands a different
way of reading parts of the book, for example, his discussion of Claudia Rankine
which includes the words ‘the book’s form of politics – its avant-garde belief
that aesthetics are political. The avant-garde values of multiple genres, use
of sources, etc…’ (passages on page 29 and 151-200 for those who have access to
the book)...
[These notes
become more notelike from here on, as I ran out of energy. I’ve also not taken
up the suggestion to re-read parts, but I suspect I will. In the meantime I
have been writing (as I said) ‘My Own Crisis’, which overlaps with some of
this, BUT began life as a writing-through of Capitalist Realism by Mark
Fisher. I got halfway, and then wrote through my own notes backwards. It has
the virtue of compression which these notes don’t.]
Betteridge tells
us that Rankine takes elements of a ‘racist violent culture’ and ‘redirects
that culture by means of the poem’s friendship’. (Betteridge 151). This use of
‘friendship’ derives from readings of Stanley Cavill, (but I believe the modes
of ‘hospitality’ Derek Attridge writes of (in writers and readers) serves just
as well; see Pages: Robert Sheppard: The Meaning of Form
and Derek Attridge’s The Work of Literature). (304) Betteridge talks of ‘its avant-garde belief that
aesthetics are political. The avant-garde values of multiple genres, use of
sources, and commitment to a form of literary poetics... They ‘simultaneously
illuminate the problem of American culture and produce a solution to it.’ (151)
He calls it an ‘impossible
avant-garde politics’ as I think it might be for me!
‘A multiform
tradition’ (163) ‘multiform avant-garde tradition’ (165-6) The danger he calls ‘moralising’.
It destroys the multiformity of the avant-garde (171)
Wendy Brown. We
must develop a ‘vision about the common’ (‘what I want for us’) ‘because it
aims to create a collective future by transforming where one lives out of love,
and it takes political acting and conversation as the means of such correction’.
(73) We mustn't ‘abandon … the sheerly political domain in favour of moral
judgement and identity … particularly injured identities.’ (174) Identity + Ressentiment
= Moralism (which cuts us off from anything that offends us). Isn't this obvious? Perhaps it is, but this ‘conclusion’
does provide some terms to use, a few useful quotes for critical writing and –
more importantly – poetics.
Here's a particularly
useful passage: ‘Just because lyric poets and their apologists find the
avant-garde tired, annoying, and out of fashion does not mean that it is; it
just means that those writers bent on realism and representation can't read the
avant-garde in the required spirit.’ Says Bettridge (197). And even better:
‘We have no idea
which poem will be the catalyst for which particular readers and keeping this
fact of reading alive and vital for specific readers is what a multiform
avant-garde permits.’ (195) (Could equally argue that of the mainstream, of
course, that that would be less multiform.)
The rousing chorus
of the avant-garde seems more like a single strained note, or a breathy
obviousness. Let's end this (failed?) summary with a quote from a different
book: ‘Radical poetics... is not radical for its political commitments but for
its pre political or ontological commitments.’ (Isenberg 35), a book I'm slowly
rereading at the moment.
Later: I haven't
returned to these thoughts – perhaps they are finished, what they are, and are
destined to remain where they are, informing practice, as poetics is meant
to do, according to me!
The Tesco delivery
has arrived so I shall stop my dictation from my poetics journal and engage (briefly)
with capitalism.
A previous set of journal
‘notes’ from my reading of critical works may be read here: Pages: Re:Pulse – on pulse and Richard
Andrews’ A Prosody of Free Verse: Explorations in Rhythm (robertsheppard.blogspot.com) and also (further back in time) these
thoughts on postmodernism came from my poetics journal: Pages: Robert Sheppard: Supplanting the
Postmodern (notes).
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