CODA:
MESSIANISM NOW, OR, OTHER VICTORIANS
What now remains to be saved? What hopes might we still harbor for the rebirthing of political or ethical ideals? What role can poetry play in saving, in invigorating, such hopes? Joan Retallack’s The Poethical Wager (2003), Andrew Joron’s “The Emergency” (2003), Christopher Nealon’s “Camp Messianism, or, the Hopes of Poetry in Late-Late Capitalism” (2004) ask these questions, forging defenses for twentieth and twenty-first century experimental poetry, a poetry that often does not address political problems directly, but which instead, like the Victorian poetry of surface tension, shows an explicit interest in dense and complex textual play. And like the poets we have been examining, these contemporary critics (who are also poets) tend toward a messianic tone in their arguments for poetry’s social usefulness, arguing in various ways that the intricate surfaces of poetry, by reflecting the intensities of present-time sensation, or by becoming an instance of such, act as “fragments of redemption.” clxxxix
These critics explicitly acknowledge a debt they owe to Frankfurt School ideas about the relationship between aesthetic production and social or political crisis, a debt to specifically Adornian negativity and Benjaminian messianism: Nealon writes simply that many “post-Language writers seem to have taken a kind of Frankfurt School turn in their poems” (579); Joron aligns himself with the utopian Marxism of Ernst Bloch (whom he translates)cxc; and Retallack draws heavily on Adorno’s “The Essay as Form” and on moments from Aesthetic Theory for her chapter titled “Wager as Essay.”cxciAnd yet, these critics are less engaged with how their staging of temporality, as well as their valuation of the difficult aesthetic surface, echoes sentiments found in British poetry of the latter half of the nineteenth century.cxcii I am not the first critic to note strong affinities between late twentieth and twenty-first century experimental American poetry and poetics and late Victorian poetry. Helsinger describes the influence of Pre-Raphaelite poetry on such contemporary poets as Charles Bernstein, Michael Palmer, Norma Cole, and Barbara Guest. For her it is the “thickness” of the language in Pre-Raphaelite poetry, its “tendency to multiply assonance, alliteration, rhyme, rhythm, or other forms of repetition [as] a strategy of erecting obstacles to reading for syntactic meaning alone,” which has inspired especially “Language” oriented poets (2, 16-17).cxciii In the terms of this study, then, she is noting that both groups are committed to a poetics of surface tension. Jeffrey Skoblow reads Morris’s The Earthly Paradise in the context of the Frankfurt School and “groups such as the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets” (xv). He does so by pointing out how Morris’s poem, like the works of Language Poets Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, and Charles Bernstein, create “discontinuous densities” which “resist appropriation quite explicitly” (20). He thus sees a relationship between Morris and the Language Poets both in terms of their shared critique of capitalism (which is specifically theorized by poets such as Ron Silliman and Bruce Andrewscxciv) and their textual density (though “density” as applied to The Earthly Paradise means something quite different from what it means when applied to Hejinian’s My Life or Silliman’s The Age of Huts).
I would like to continue this redressing of hereditary elision, to continue to extend the lineage contemporary experimental American poets generally draw only as far back as Stein or Pound (or sometimes Rimbaud or Hölderlin, but very rarely Rossetti or Hopkins). But I’d like also to draw attention to the eschatological structure that continues to inform even the most secular of our contemporary ideas about the social uses of the aesthetic. I would like to note, in other words, the affinity between some “post-language” contemporary poets and their late 19th century predecessors in terms not only of style, but also of attitudes toward temporality and change. To be clear, I do not wish to suggest that the influence of the Frankfurt School on contemporary poetry and poetics is less than profound. Rather, I wish to note the ways in which some of the theories poets and critics are attracted to in Adorno or Benjamin are interestingly comparable to nineteenth-century British debates about the place of the aesthetic in the social. And furthermore, as we saw in the previous chapter, messianic poetics—that poetics that takes the densely structured surfaces of poetry as at once an “unrepeatable chunk of worldly history” and an opening into the transcendent or redemptive—can be found not only in Victorian aestheticism, but also in the poetics of the American New Critics and their British forerunners.
I must attempt here to be clear about what I mean when I say “messianic,” for I am talking about an attitude toward change, an attitude of anticipation that relies on the aesthetic surface as a way of addressing, if not creating, the ruptural moment that would carry us into redemption. I do not mean, however, that the poets in question are repeating the theology of Jewish messianism per se; nor are they embracing an explicitly Christian messianic vision. Patrick Pritchett, in his study of post-war poetry and messianism, defines secular messianic poetry as, “a turn to Jewish textual tropes which allow [poets] to address the culture of disaster after Auschwitz” (2). My definition is even more general, for I locate messianism more in a set of affects driving the poetics in question than in any specifically defined moves or strategies. And I find that attitude of messianism in contemporary poetics (as in Victorian poetics) at moments frustrating for the vagueness of its goals and desires, and at other times exhilarating for its faith in the affective (if not political) work that the poem can do.
The crucial source for any consideration of Jewish messianism or its influence on Benjamin (and thus on some contemporary poetics) is Gershom Sholem’s The Messianic Idea in Judaism, in which Scholem emphasizes the “catastrophic nature of redemption.” Jewish messianism, he writes, demands that “transcendence break[s] in upon history, an intrusion in which history itself perishes, transformed in its ruin because it is struck by a beam of light shining on it from an outside source” (10). In his “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” Benjamin will also emphasize the ruptural nature of the messianic, and the present moment as the site of that rupture. As Stephané Moses writes:
[F]or Benjamin and Scholem . . . Utopia, which can no longer be thought of as belief in the necessary advent of the ideal at the mythical end of history, reemerges — through the category of Redemption- as the modality of its possible advent at each moment in time. In this model of random time, open at any moment to the unpredictable eruption of the new, the imminent realization of the ideal becomes conceivable again, as one of the possibilities offered by the unfathomable complexity of historical processes . . . [T]he idea of ‘now-time’ . . .that idea inspired by Jewish messianism, proposes a model of history that, after the collapse of the ideologies of progress, gives a new chance for hope by locating utopia in the heart of the present. (Moses, 12-13, 14)
Where these ideas find their cousins in Victorian poetics is well-summarized by Jerome Bump in his discussion of Victorian “Radicals,” who, he argues, “thought they could reach their [political/visionary/aesthetic] goals by going backward rather than forward in time. For some the goal was to break through linear time into a cyclical, reactualizable time and/or into an eternal presence” (Bump, 27). Included in Bumps group of “Radicals” are Hopkins and the Pre-Raphaelites. Bump reads Hopkins’s poetry as engaging with a “radical” notion of the Eucharist (or more broadly, God’s presence) in which, “we are not suddenly brought into the world of the eternal present, but reminded that we are already there” (38).cxcv Radical or avant-garde poetics is, for Bump, as for me here, tied to a notion of temporality that locates the suddenly transformed moment, the redeemed moment, in the now.
I will return to this concept of temporality in a moment, but for now I would like to consider another way in which the complex surface of the poem can be thought to do political work. The Language Poets’ argument in favor of the “open text” and the “new sentence” (both terms used to describe non-conclusive, paratactic, or complexly syntaxed texts) was in part based on a valuation of the democratic ideal of reader participation. As described by Ron Silliman and Lyn Hejinian in their seminal books The New Sentence and The Language of Inquiry respectively, Language Poetry of the seventies and eighties had an anti-hierarchical, and in some cases, Marxist agenda. Hejinain writes, “The ‘open text,’ by definition, is open to the world and particularly to the reader. It invites participation, rejects the authority of the writer over the reader and thus, by analogy, the authority implicit in other (social, economic, cultural) hierarchies. It speaks for writing that is generative rather than directive” (43). In The New Sentence, Ron Silliman argues for a poetics that resists commodification processes. By allowing for non-referentiality rather than transparency, the poet refuses to reduce words to their use-value.cxcvi While the Language Poets thus tended to call on the reader’s experience of complexly surfaced poems as a metaphor for (or an example of) redeemed social relations, some post-language theorists, like the late Victorian poets we have been discussing, value the complex aesthetic or textual surface itself for how it might evoke or even produce such transformations.
Joan Retallack expands the ethics of the intersubjective—so necessary to Language Poetry’s political intentions—into a kind of cosmopolitanism, a global intersubjectivism that manifests in the complex folds of the poem:
As the formerly colonized now come to colonize the streets and imaginations of the new city-states of multinational empire, there are increasing demands that projects of a global political ecosystem come into conversation with articulations of localized desire. What poethical explorations are crucial to such a situation? Those, I wish to suggest, having to do with complex realism, reciprocal alterity, polyculturalism, polylingualism, contemporaneity. A search for new ethical and aesthetic models is inevitably, haphazardly, contingently under way. (13)
Globalization requires poetic complexity because only a multifaceted language-event can adequately reflect the entanglements of postmodern life, what Retallack calls, after Beckett, “the noise of the mess.” In this, Retallack’s poetic theory resembles the arguments of I.A. Richards and F.R. Leavis who similarly saw poetry as uniquely capable of reflecting the complexities of modernity. However, like Richards and Leavis, Retallack is not simply after an adequate mimesis; rather, she implies that the complex surfaces of difficult art can implode with redemptive meanings (though Retallack differs a great deal from these earlier critics in her sense of what a redeemed social space might entail and in her examples of the “difficult” poem). In an increasingly globalized society, the voice of the poet reproduces the poly-complexity of postmodern life. But more importantly, the poet, acting both ethically and aesthetically, might be “crucial” to the process whereby “articulations of localized desire” converse with “projects of global political ecosystems.” It’s unclear here what kinds of projects these might be (political, activist, artistic, economic?). But what does seem clear is that for Retallack, the poet has a distinct and important role to play in this process of exchange. By way of her complex and intricate surfaces, the poet is not simply observing, but participating in transforming the social world.
While Retallack’s cultural politics or political poetics sounds optimistic in its take on how aesthetic culture and politics might interact, she is explicit about the crisis facing politically charged aesthetic practice. “At some point I realized that the lurking question in everything I’ve written about literature is this: how can imaginative, responsible, meaningful agency thrive in such a complex and perilous world, fallen many times over, hardly off its knees when it comes to matters of hope?” (13), she writes. Some paragraphs later she acknowledges that, “The shadow question under which we live has become whether there’s a viable future for humanity—not just what it will be.” (14) Here is the apocalyptic dread motivating her call to action. But importantly, Retallack does not urge poets to write directly “political” poetry in response to such dread. Instead, she invites them to produce a “poetics of desire,” by which she means, “whatever moves us toward a responsive and pleasurable connection to the world by means of informed sensualities of language” (5). The question is not how effective such texts might be in inspiring social movements. Instead, one must read such texts for how they create what she calls elsewhere a “concrete utopianism that is not futuristic but is embodied in the composing moment of the contemporary” (59). “Utopia” for Retallack then becomes an “experience of the present,” and as such, what Benjamin called “a tiny fissure in the continuous catastrophe” (The Writer, 161).cxcvii Once again, the redeemed moment is now, and that “now” makes itself known and felt in the folds of the densely surfaced text.
Clearly, despite the polylingual, polycultural world we live in, we have certainly not collectively learned the lessons of “reciprocal alterity” that difference demands, and, as importantly, “politics” is quite challenged in its conversation with “culture” if by culture we include the “localized desires” of those with limited economic means, limited access to education, and limited public voice. And yet, Retallack, adopting Pascal as her guide, encourages poetic attempts to “launch our hopes into the unknown—the future—by engaging positively with otherness” (22). This wager on the side of an ethical aesthetic is, like Pascal’s wager before it, a kind of self-preservation—one necessary to the artist perhaps. However, optimism in the face of what feels and looks a lot like disaster, this optimism of those whose institutions (literary publishing, literary education, and the Humanities more broadly) are of diminishing impact and diminishing scope, is an optimism that is particularly close to despair, one which stays upbeat in the face of appalling odds only because, as Benjamin’s angel of history reminds us, we cannot see this future; the future is paradisiacal only by remaining at our backs.
Thus Retallack, like many other contemporary theorists of poetry, explicitly values an aesthetic that, by deemphasizing descriptive or nostalgic mimesis, casts its lot with a fantastic future-time of unlimited possibilities. Again, the unknowability of this future tense (what Retallack calls “new time,” perhaps echoing Benjamin’s messianic “now-time”) is the necessary component of its redemptive possibility. The difficulty of the aesthetic or textual surface plays an important role in this poetics, for if the poem, in inventing the new, stands in negative relation to “what is immediately accessible,” then, as Adorno argued, its language must be defamiliarizing (Aesthetic Theory, Lenhardt tr., 262, referenced in Retallack, 54). As Retallack puts it in another context, “silence itself is nothing more or less than what lies outside the radius of interest and comprehension at any given time”(“Re:Thinking:Literary:Feminism,” 346). Or, “Silence and unintelligibility are the loci of immanent futurity” (Poethical, 10).
The poem cannot, of course, really exist in the future; what it can do is engage the present moment so intensely that it appears to have been written on the edge of becoming—on the precipice between now and next. Importantly, as soon as the imagined future takes on a discernable shape, it becomes a dictation, a prescription, or an imposition from some authoritarian source, even if that source is the voice of the poet herself. It seems this “new time” retains an almost mystical edge precisely because its unknowability affords it its redemptive potential. This construction should remind us of Hopkins’s defense of “The Wreck”’s difficult language as discussed in the last chapter, for there too, the unfamiliar is ethical (or poethical) because of the redemptive possibilities of the “new time” it evokes.cxcvii
Christopher Nealon’s “Camp Messianism” experienced something of an electronic surge—circulating as it did for more than a year around poetry’s internet circles. The essay, which is far less celebratory in its defense of poetry than Retallack’s book, is nonetheless more specific in its “hopes” for what poetry can do, offering poetry as a defense against the crushing pressures, if not the crimes, of today’s global economy. Nealon argues that in the age of “late-late-capitalism” in which “most of us are at least intermittently aware of being solicited day and night by a kind of manic mass culture,” in which the interchangeability of goods, economies, and people “can now be said to have become entirely liquid, even quicksilver” (580), poetry can respond to, can resist, this trivialization of information, this abstraction of the human, by directing our attention simultaneously backward (thus camp) and forward (thus messianism).cxcix Most important in my understanding of Nealon’s argument is the redemptive possibility of this “forward.” Nealon reads poems by Joshua Clover, Kevin Davies, Rod Smith, and Lisa Robertson as articulating a Benjaminian “redemptive historiography” because of their nostalgic evocation of “things,” things that have either become obsolete (like the now campy phrase “time travel” in one of Davies’s poems), or that have simply been commodified out of their aura.cc Drawing on Benjamin, Nealon describes the “historiography” of the poem as “redemptive” because it recalls the lost object in order to project it into a time of “repair,” or as Nealon also puts it, “recuperation” (583).
Like Retallack’s celebration of “new time,” Nealon values “the presence in these poems of types of materiality so gossamer, so nearly abstract—so nearly nonexistent—that they feel as if they could come to us only from the fragile singularity of the history of the present” (596). This “gossamer” “nearly-abstract” presence becomes a method for freezing or perhaps stalling the ongoing destruction of history that capitalism’s “quick silver” movement wreaks, but the “messianic” part of this cessation is what I find most mysterious and most resonant not only with Benjamin, but also with Rossetti, Morris, Hopkins, and also Baudelaire.
Nealon writes, “[Joshua] Clover develops a quietly messianic sense that the city, and the aesthetic experience it fosters, awaits redemption” (589). Like Baudelaire’s modern painter, Clover, Nealon argues, aestheticizes his moment in order to allow that moment to be “born again on the paper” (Baudelaire 402). But while Baudelaire is explicit about the fact that this born again world is in no way politically redeemed—while his idealization is purely aesthetic—Nealon’s readings are distinctly political. Nealon is cautious in his claims, yet he nonetheless attributes to Clover (and the other poets) the intention, if not the capacity, to address the sociopolitical ills of this time, in particular, those produced by globalized capitalism.cci
Again, Nealon’s argument shares much terrain with British aestheticism. When Nealon complains of the trivialization of information and abstraction of the human occurring in “late-late Capitalism,” he is echoing across a century the anxieties of the Victorians who similarly felt that stable meanings were being swept aside by a market-driven data-glutted culture. “With the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensations . . . analysis leaves off—that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual, weaving and unweaving of ourselves” wrote Pater, anticipating the “quick silver” movement of bodies, information, and commodities that Nealon describes as constitutive of life in today’s economy (The Renaissance, 188). And Pater’s answer to this rushing glut also shares some terrain with Nealon’s “redemptive historiography.” Pater argues that we can “expand the interval” of the individual life through aesthetic experience—loaded with ore, the rifts get heavy, viscous, and slow. Just as Nealon’s poets reach back to rescue the fallen object, Pater’s “art and song” rescues the subject from its fall into obsolescence. In both cases, the aesthetic intensification of the present stills flux, creating a break in time, redemptive because it lifts the subject out of the torpor induced by overwhelming and meaningless impressions. If this temporal structure is messianic, then the aesthetic is itself the messiah.ccii
In the years since “Camp Messianism,” Nealon has continued to examine the question of poetry’s relationship to the political—specifically, to capitalism—but now with an historical arch. His The Matter of Capital: Poetry and Crisis in the American Century (2011) looks at some of the ways poets have engaged the subject of capital throughout the twentieth (and into the twenty-first) century; and while in this book Nealon is less “messianic” in his claims for poetry’s social uses, he does approach the subject of capital with occasional flurries of (perhaps justified) apocalypticism: “I use the phrase ‘late-late capitalism’ to measure something of the catastrophic character of the current phase shift that global capital is undergoing, both extensively, through globalization, and intensively, through the colonization of political hopes and affective survival,” he writes (33). Turning to Kevin Davies’s The Golden Age of Paraphernalia, Nealon argues that Davies “does not so much keep open a space of shared vulnerability as allow the reader to peer with the poet into a digital Inferno” (34). So much for hopes. cciii And yet, Nealon’s sense of “hopes,” of what I would call messianic anticipation, is nonetheless still found in his poems. Let’s turn briefly to the title poem of his 2009 book Plummet where we can encounter once again an invigorated, if equivocal, sense of messianic possibility.
PLUMMET
Down to stubble,
Will. You
Never. Learn
and then back up
—to match
varieties of jointedness in nature
with joints in thinking,
or line up modes with schemes—
Pastoral: clouds move
left to right
Gothic: clouds
move toward you
Think more
Think more
—and sink into a secular waiting, wait for
something self-sufficient
that couldn’t possibly be secular (38)
This hardly demands commentary, but I will note that the poem references Hamlet’s “the time is out of joint,” and in so doing prepares us for the crisis of “waiting” articulated in its final lines.cciv The references to aesthetic movements (Pastoral, Gothic) that have looked backward in order to look forward, as well as the recourse to “clouds” as exemplifying such modes, could not feel more Victorian, more Ruskinian, in its evocation of aesthetic history and its subtle connection of such history with political change (left to right). The urge to “think more / think more” and to “sink into secular waiting” reads as a kind self-motivating encouragement as well as an acknowledgment that any attitude of anticipation, any “waiting” stance, is always at once a turn toward optimism and a kind of “plummet” that runs the risk of passivity or complacency.
I would like now to offer what I consider a particularly striking and affective example of contemporary poetry which, with less hesitation, conjures utopian images embedded within a textual field thickened by surface tension, and that is the recent work of Lisa Robertson.ccv Robertson is one of the key figures in what we have been calling “post-language” experimental poetry (though such labels are purely a matter of convenience).ccvi Her work, from the 1997 Debbie: an Epic, to the 2001 volume, The Weather, the 2003 essay collection Occasional Works and Seven Walks from the Office for Soft Architecture and to her recent, R’s Boat (2010), has consistently concerned itself with a dense linguistic materiality, the semantically resistant phrase, sentence, or page, and the redemptive potential of the present. I’ll begin by turning to her 2009 volume, Lisa Robertson’s Magenta Soul Whip, in which she extends her densely surfaced poetics to directly embrace figures of redemption.
The opening prose poem, “Lucite,” begins with a creation myth of sorts: “Sit on Lucite gently and we will tell you how knowledge came to us.” What follows is the story of language’s birth: “First the dull mud softened . . .Then just the one vowel, iterate and buttressed and expiring; leaning, embracing, gazing. With our claw it devised identity for the sake of food. Selves, it says, feeding us, I adore you, you know” (7). The discovery of language (as a kind of mother) and the seemingly coherent self it generates, creates an ecstatic, if somewhat unreal, landscape for the poem’s subjects: “We said we saw Europes of hallucination, fatty broths sprinkled with deer, stenciled eagles, serpents and lurid rags” (7). It would seem that logos is a gift, one that carries a glut of riches, foodstuff, and power (nothing if not Victorian in its sensual layers), with just a hint of violence (those lurid rags). Having found language, the poem’s plural subjects have “selves,” selves aggressive in their pursuit of such pleasures and intensities. However, in the second prose block, Robertson shifts her tense from past to present, and we sense the beginning of crisis, a crisis of subjectivity and of agency. “Also we feel a sense of duality,” Robertson writes, then, “We feel this elsewhere sculpt our body” (7,8).
This is very short hand for what might be the story of disillusionment, either of the individual psyche or, perhaps, of a people. The poem seems to describe a historical shift away from an unquestioning embrace of language as pure tool, pure access, toward some unspecified failure at the heart of subjectivity. Whether read as a psychic, political, or intellectual calamity, the urgency of this disaster is clear: “Sincerity takes too long in an aggressive emergency” (7), writes Robertson, and we might think once again of the crisis of modernity articulated by Arnold’s Empedocles whose “wind-borne, mirroring soul, / A thousand glimpses wins, / And never sees a whole.” In Robertson’s language, “It is we who are one, and we who are scattered” (8).
And yet, it is the final turn of Robertson’s poem that I find most relevant to my argument, for now Robertson shifts into the future conditional, and in so doing imagines a utopian space, one that shares much with Rossetti’s protagonist’s London, with Morris’s Nowhere, and much again with Clover’s Baudelairian Paris. But this space, it is important to say, is inhabited by women and adorned with markers of the feminine:
We would be walking down the street in the city. Gauze would be everywhere. The day would be big, halting, gracious, revocable, cheap. We’d be the she-dandies in incredibly voluptuous jackets ribboning back from our waists, totally lined in pure silk, also in pure humming, and we’d be heading into the buildings with ephemera like leafage or sleeves or pigment. (8)ccvii
This feminist utopian fantasy continues for some time, with its inhabitants, like those of Morris’s Nowhere, positioned near a river—a metaphor, it seems (as in Morris’s News) of “liberation.”ccviii The poem’s final line reminds us that we have entered into a landscape not of imminent futurity, but of ruptured time: a space, it seems, of no-time: “Samesame pouring through it” ends the poem (8). Despite the voluptuous seductions of utopian ephemera (one is reminded of the belt buckles and tobacco pouches of Nowhere), this time-outside-of-time produces (as it did for Morris) a smoothed out uniformity, invoked by the doubling of the word “same” into an almost non-word, a surface of nearly unmeaning letters. Her dapple is at end.
Later in the volume Robertson is even more explicit about how poetry might, through its embrace of sensual, textual, and surface-y detail, invoke a break in time, a movement into the no-time of Utopia. In the second section of a poem titled “A Hotel,” Robertson writes, “I’m speaking of the pure sexual curves/ Of Utopia, the rotation / Of its shadows against the blundering / In civitas.” Importantly, the Utopia produced or evoked by the poem exists within and around the actual, rather than outside of it.
And yet, the “Big problem of poetry,” as she puts it in this poem, is how to evoke this redeemed time, how to gesture toward redemption while immersing oneself in the here-and-now sensations of the text. This, one could say, was precisely Hopkins’s question too, and, to risk reduction here, was one the driving question of Morris’s literary work as well. As Robertson writes, “On this very beautiful surface / Where I want to live / I play with my friends.” But this admission of pleasure is not a rejection of political agency or urgency; quite the opposite: “I believe my critique of devastation / Began with delight. Now what surprises me / Are the folds of political desire / Their fragile nobility, Sundays of / Rain” (19). Critique begins and ends not with analysis, but with pleasure, the pleasures of play, the pleasures of the poem, the pleasures of the body. Thus the poem, as a surface dedicated to pleasure (“I’ll solicit nothing / But ornament” Robertson asserts later in the poem), is itself a form of critique (20). Again, Morris’s theory of aesthetic pleasure and the desires they evoke as the “motive force” for revolution shares much with this poetics. And yet, the tension between engaging in such pleasures, the pleasures of the text, and the “political desire” for a redeemed social space presses against this poem, forcing it into the mode of a defense. Perhaps this hint of self-implication provides the “whip” of Magenta Soul Whip.
The long poem, “Utopia,” which appears in R’s Boat, is similarly concerned with the relationship between dense surfaces and utopian renewal. “I wanted to study the ground, the soft ruins of paper and the rusting things,” Robertson writes, “I discovered a tenuous utopia made from steel, wooden chairs, glass, stone, metal bed frames, tapestry, bones, prosthetic legs, hair, shirt cuffs, nylon, plaster figurines, perfume bottles and keys” (51), suggesting that poetry, in its propensity to name, to gather, to engage language as thing, is a kind of scavenger hunt performed by the poet in the present and on the ground. A page later Robertson asks, “Which is a surface?/ What is the concept of transformation?” (52-3), offering quite directly the guiding questions of this book.
The poem presents time, the marking and dissolving of time, as one of its central preoccupations. All but one of its eighteen stanzas opens with a reference to a date or season: “In the Spring of 1979”; “The season called November”; “At about midnight in Autumn”; “At about four in the morning, that first day”; “It is late October” and so on. While some of these time-markers are quite specific: “On the second Monday of October, at ten minutes past eleven,” others are very general: “It was summer, a hot day.” No sense of chronology organizes these references; rather, time seems to be collapsing into itself. Even as the months and seasons pull us into the past, the paratactic mode of Robertson’s sentences bring us into present-time sensation again and again in a manner reminiscent of Callicles’s songs in “Empedocles on Etna”: “Pollen smears the windows. / The blackberry vines are Persian. / The boulder smells faintly of warm sugar” (62). (Here again is Callicles: “the sward / Is dark, and on the stream the mist still hangs; / One sees one’s foot-prints crush’d in the wet grass, / One’s breath curls in the air “ [12-15]).
Despite what may seem a deferral of resolution, as the poem moves on we do find Robertson’s “Utopia” beginning to take form. As she puts it, “Quietly, a shape becomes noticeable” (66). A fantastical version of the self (dog’s legs and a fish tail) drifts by a train window, “girls chat in trees about the mystical value of happiness,” other girls pick fruit from trees (64). Quite closely echoing an important Rossettian moment, as we will see below, Robertson comes as near as she will to defining her notion of “Utopia” with the line, “Everything is visible, barely disguised,” possibly referencing the “unveiling” at the etymological root of apocalypse. The poem concludes on an image of a decaying reading chair, reminding us first that any vision of redemption must include some idea of decay or destruction, and second of the close tie between utopian hopes and the practice of reading, the practice, one could say, of poetry.
“What good is poetry at a time like this?” begins Andrew Joron’s essay “The Emergency,” and we understand that this rhetorical defeatism will be answered with an affirmation of a particular “good,” a particular way in which poetry can redeem even “a time like this” (15).ccix Joron’s answer, his description of poetry’s redemptive capacity, like Nealon’s, Retallack’s, and Robertson’s, depends on how poems engage present moments. However, for Joron this engagement has very little to do with the poem’s mimetic relationship to present-time events or objects or to the sensations and desires they elicit. Rather, it has to do with the presence of poetic language itself, with the ongoing process by which “a word’s meaning is ‘edged’—and chaotically conditioned—by the meanings of all other words” (22). This is, of course, another way of describing “surface tension”; when the phonic, orthographic, and semantic associations between words are intensified, we arrive at a “condition in which single words have the widest possible range of effects” (Joron, 23). But what, for Joron, does this poetic expansiveness have to do with radical social change? Joron writes that when “the words of the poem leap spontaneously to a new interactive level,” they begin to represent “the self-organization of a cry emanating from nowhere to no one, but pervading all of language” (23). This “cry” or lament, as Joron calls it throughout the essay, is the basis of the poem’s political agency: “When laments are raised, they run together like water, collecting into a river that rushes toward an unknown ocean” (24), and this metaphor is followed by a direct statement of protest against the U.S. bombings in Afghanistan. (The essay was written in late 2001.) Again, a key word in this statement is “unknown.” Recall Retallack’s call for poems that will “launch our hopes into the unknown—the future.” The redemptive possibilities of poetry are dependent upon the unknowability (as opposed to the planned project) of this future. And yet, Joron’s poetics, grounded in the idea of the lament (which he links to the Blues), ties the hopes of poetry directly to the emotions. That is to say, Joron acknowledges the subjective experience of lyric but charges that lyric with a power emerging from the affects that lyric makes possible.
Joron’s “lament” may be achieved through textual play, but it expresses, somehow articulates, grievances that have actual, and political, content. (Joron’s entire essay functions as an act of protest against the wars in Afghanistan and, retroactively, Iraq.) This is not to say that the lament has only a pragmatic political purpose. Instead, the lament that arises from the poem is importantly other than direct words of anger or argument. These, Joron makes clear, are needed, but the lament is its own kind of opposition: “The lament, no less than anger, refuses to accept the fact of suffering. But while anger must possess the stimulus of proximate cause—or else it eventually fades away—the lament has a universal cause, and rises undiminished through millennia of cultural mediation” (24). Formed through the present-time of language’s surface tensions, Joron’s lament, as he argues, has universal cause and timeless effect; its temporality rushes forward and backward endlessly. Thus despite the contrast between Joron’s leftist political critique expressed in “The Emergency” and the generally conservative politics of the New Critics, we can hear in Joron the echoes of Cleanth Brooks’s conception of the poem of densely woven surface as a vessel for eternal truths. Again, Brooks’s reading of Keats’s Urn: “[T]he ‘truth’ which the sylvan historian gives is the only kind of truth which we are likely to get on this earth, and, furthermore, it is the only kind that we have to have” (134).ccx As in Hopkins’s “Spelt from Sybil’s Leaves,” the formal play of language’s interactions, while seeming in tension with the apocalyptic moment the poem “strains” to, is in fact that moment’s gate. And yet, in this argument, as in those of Retallack and Nealon, we must also hear echoes with an even more distant, and theological, origin.
In Joron’s book of prose, The Cry at Zero, for which “The Emergency” is the opening essay, he discusses the poetry of Robert Duncan, Philip Lamantia, Clark Coolidge, Will Alexander, and others as he develops his theory of poetic agency. Here, however, I’d like to look instead at two of Joron’s own poems that I think reveal a close relationship to late Victorian poetics. These poems, like the others we have been reading, mobilize their dense textual surfaces and their thematic of desire toward an imagined rupture in time. Here, in its entirety, is the first of Joron’s two “Orphic Poems,” from his 2009 book, The Sound Mirror:
NIGHTSUN, SIGN
Red, unread, as Eurydice’s indices––
Why Orpheus? Why encipher fire?
Let the violin’s violence tell the turn of the
tune—
All’s involuted volume, light as heavy as heaven.
A foot after a bent verse, averse, but for
Before.
A mind met out of time, the shared shard.
Necessary errancy. Push of apparition, ash of
pure relation —
The content not content to spare the spirit.
What? Whiter water, arriving raving?
Strike instrument, the the is too definite, too
deaf to infinity.
To send is to end.
Recall that Orpheus earns the chance to reverse time’s forward thrust, to gain Eurydice back from the dead, specifically because of the beauty of his music. He fails because of his desire to meet the gaze of his beloved behind him. The myth claims that the poet is unique in his ability to seize time, forcing it to stop or rupture. But this same poet returns to ordinary chronological time when his desire to be with others, to live in the social world (represented by his “marriage” to Eurydice), gets the better of him. In Maurice Blanchot’s famous reading of the myth, which almost certainly informs Joron’s poems, Orpheus’s descent and his glance back at Eurydice are metaphors for the artist’s calling. Orpheus must not see directly into Eurydice’s veiled face because, though she represents the aim of aesthetic creation, she also represents its limits: “for [Orpheus], Eurydice is the limit of what art can attain” (99). Orpheus’s “failure,” his turn, is for Blanchot necessary, for one cannot create unless one is compelled to experience the “depths” for their own sake, unless one is thus willing to sacrifice the work for the work. Blanchot’s reading therefore takes Eurydice and the desires she provokes to be emblematic of aesthetic practice itself. She is Orpheus’s beloved only in the sense that the artist is compelled toward her as his vocation.
While no definitive reading of a poem as sonically constructed as “Nightsun, Sign” would be honest, it seems that even from its title the poem suggests that the reversal or refusal of time, emblemized by Orpheus’s descent and contained within the phrase “nightsun,” is in tension with the socially demanded work of language. Perhaps it is the “sign,” the word itself, which ties us to social relation and thus to ordinary, killing, time: “to send is to end.” Burdened by language itself, or language’s social function, the poem cannot escape time: “The the is too definite, too deaf to infinity.” Thus it might appear that, in contrast to Blanchot, Joron reads the “turn” in the myth as a mark of poetry’s failure to achieve temporal rupture.
However, if we are alert to the surface tensions in this poem—its off-rhymes and alliterations, its anagrammatic play—we arrive at an alternate conclusion. Joron imbeds his poetics in the body of the poem when he suggests that the “violin’s violence” might “tell the turn of the tune”: in other words, the music of the poem is a type of violence, but one that is productive of paradox, of reversals, of the “involuted” and “averse.” Poetic language, by breaking words apart, by reconstituting meaning via associative and sonic play (everywhere evident in this poem), can, it seems, reverse or “turn” narrative thrust. Thus, in the poem’s center we have, “A mind met out of time, the shared shard.” This meeting can only be the glance that Eurydice and Orpheus “share” just before she is lost to him forever. In this meeting, then, the “Push of apparition” becomes “the ash of pure relation.” The first phrase transforms itself through sonic and orthographic echoes into the second. The ghost of the dead Eurydice transforms into ash—which suggests death, but also that pure carbon that is the chemical basis for all life.ccxi Time has been curved, “involuted,” as Joron says, so that the ghostly can become matter once again. Orpheus’s glance backwards in this sense succeeds in creating a break in time; the poem’s word-shattering methods perform a generative violence.
In Joron’s second “Orphic Poem,” titled “As Ending, Send,” the redemptive nature of this ruptural temporality is made evident. In this poem, Joron has Orpheus sing a rather Keatsian celebration of the self’s non-identity with itself: “Cast to type, I ride to return to my native, candescent nothing” (2). This “nothing” is, to my mind, the non-empirical self, what de-Man called the “literary” self. This is Keats’s “chameleon poet,” existing through and in language, rather than through and in lived experience. Therefore, this Orpheus does not sing of specific personal complaints, but instead of more generalized trouble: “The leaders of, the looters of, all toil & tarry, / A world, perhaps word, is tipped on its side, and pitted with days” (6-7). The response, the poetic response, to this off-kilter world, is not to attempt to solve the particular problems of these “days,” of “the day,” but rather, as the poem’s next line suggests, to “lament” human losses: “How now to lament a man’s late mentality, his night-knotted mantel”(8). Again, Joron’s theory of the lament argues that poetic language, because of its ability to stretch beyond mimetic representation, is uniquely capable of speaking for universal grief. And the poet, this poem suggests, achieves this tragic vision only by returning to the “nothing” of his non-empirical self.
The poem’s final line is a fragment: “Fecund cave.” Here is an apt metaphor for the emptied subjectivity in and through which poetic language emerges. But here too is a reference to Christian culture’s dominant myth of redemption. Again, poetry itself plays the role of the Messiah: it would rise out of the fecund cave in order to cry for mankind—to suffer the sins of the populace on a global scale and for all time. Taken together, then, Joron’s two “Orphic Poems” exhibit an extravagant surface tension, employed in order to help us imagine that poetic language can indeed rupture time and, in so doing, release a redemptive force into the world.
Whether we share in this belief has to do, I think, with how we feel when reading these poems, with how we feel about the relationship between affect and transformation (political or otherwise). Both Robertson and Joron present affect—pleasure, lament—as the poem’s primary territory, and their model of aesthetic agency relies on the poem’s capacity to generate such affects at the level of its surface. For those who want to divide political content from the complexly patterned or even ornamental surface pleasures of a text, or who want to divide such content from subjective desire, this model of poetic agency will not seem viable. But for those—like these poets, like the radical poets of the late Victorian period—who sense that ruptural change, transformations of all kinds, must be emblazoned with desire, such a model will be the only vital option.
By way of comparison and conclusion, I’d like to turn finally back to Rossetti, to his famous sonnet “Heart’s Hope.” The often quoted lines, “Thy soul I know not from thy body, not / Thee from myself, neither our love from God,” taken out of context (as they often are) seem to express a conventional deification of love and a conventional (Victorian) fantasy of the fusion of lovers. However, as we read through the poem, we find that rather than simply re-inscribing such familiar tropes, Rossetti is advancing a theory of language and time, or, more specifically, a theory of poetry’s ability to break through ordinary time into an endless, and endlessly redemptive, temporality.
HEART’S HOPE
By what word’s power, the key of paths untrod,
Shall I the difficult deeps of Love explore,
Till parted waves of Song yield up the shore
Even as that sea which Israel crossed dryshod?
Lady, I fain would tell how evermore
Thy soul I know not from thy body, not
Thee from myself, neither our love from God.
Yea, in God’s name, and Love’s, and thine, would I
Draw from one loving heart such evidence
As to all hearts all things shall signify;
Tender as dawn’s first hill-fire, and intense
As instantaneous penetrating sense,
In Spring’s birth-hour, of other Springs gone by.
Much more directly than in “The Monochord,” Rossetti employs the crossing of the Red Sea as a metaphor for rebirth or restitution. He calls on poetry as the enabling force that would allow such a crossing. The “word’s power,” once discovered, becomes a key that “unlocks” the untrod path, the waters of “song” part to allow a crossing. But what is on the other side of this journey? The promised land is described here not in terms of freedom or sovereignty, but as the space (or time) in which “to all hearts all things shall signify,” in which, for each individual, the world becomes entirely legible. (Now recall Lisa Robertson’s line from “Utopia,” “Everything is visible, barely disguised.”) A focus on language’s agency runs throughout Rossetti’s poem: “word’s power,” provides the key, the speaker would “tell” the truth’s he hopes to discover, he draws his evidence in the “name” of God, himself, and his love.
Language, or poetry, as in Joron’s “Orphic Poems,” is imagined as carrying us into such utopian (because radically shared and absolutely legible) space, our time outside of time, for importantly, as Rossetti concludes this sonnet, he shifts from the dominant spatial metaphor (crossing), to a temporal one. Moving associatively, rather than causally, from line eleven to lines twelve and thirteen, Rossetti aligns the sudden legibility of the world with the “instantaneous penetrating sense” of endless time within the now, of all springs within this one.
Crucial to my reading is the surface tension of lines twelve and thirteen. Just when Rossetti wants to introduce the notion of timelessness, he creates a moment of intense textual density. Think here of Joron’s poetics: when, “a word’s meaning is ‘edged’—and chaotically conditioned—by the meanings of all other words . . . the words of the poem leap spontaneously to a new interactive level.” “Intense,” “instantaneous,” “penetrating,” and “sense” create an echoing rally of assonance and consonance until the line becomes, to quote Gallagher once more, an example of what she calls “little knots of impacted, concentrated, dense language” which consequently seems to “thwart forward movement.” Thus Rossetti does not simply describe, but attempts to enact this ruptural moment of timelessness that is at once a moment of absolute interconnectedness. The sonic density of language becomes an example of such “thwarted” movement and, at the same time, the words themselves in their anagrammatical relations perform their own radical blending of selves. This instantaneous penetration of not only “sense” but of time itself can be understood in Benjaminian terms as an example of the “straight gate of every moment that allows the Messiah to enter,” for what is the Messiah but a messenger of love? Yet if “Heart’s Hope” is a love poem, the love it depicts pushes far beyond the amatory themes Rossetti is known for. Rather, the poem imagines itself as producing a break in historical time and an entry into a radically (utopian) intersubjective space, one thoroughly legible to all.
To consider literature of any kind as messianic is to suggest that the written word can in some way evoke the unknowable, the unrepresentable, can invent, in a sense, this unknown. Of course, in theological terms, the poem can never represent the redeemed moment itself because, as William Franke puts it in his book, Poetry and Apocalypse, “The mediation of the letter no longer has any place in the face of the immediate presence of apocalypse, and neither can anything be revealed any more, especially not in the literal sense of `re-velation’ or re-veiling, when all veils have been stripped clean away by apocalypse” (ix). The case also stands when the imagined redemption is political, for, as we saw in the work of Morris, the pure utopian landscape, cleansed as it must be of all disrupting desires, threatens to kill off the unsettled striving that is aesthetic production. However, contemporary poetics has not relinquished its faith in poetry as a prophetic practice, even as the prophecies attributed to the pressed, compressed, and layered languages of the poem are couched in the cautious language of wagers and hopes.
In the Christian temporal model that informed just these patterns of thinking in the poetry of late nineteenth century England, the present moment, with all its material immanence, all its mortal ephemerality, is not simply the waiting room for the paradisal epoch; rather, the present moment holds that epoch within it. ccxii To be saved we do not need to wait; we simply need to look at the present in the right way—we have to recognize within that present the revelation that is always already happening.ccxiii And, as in the aestheticism of Baudelaire, Ruskin, Pater, D.G. Rossetti, Morris, and Hopkins, our contemporary secular messianic poetics blends the language of theology and aesthetics, borrowing the concept of messianic redemption for the purposes of defending the complex aesthetic surface as an agent of social change.
Of course an eschatological horizon, such as the one before Hopkins, is in no way the same as a political revolution. The ideas motivating Morris are fundamentally different from those motivating Hopkins, for example. Similarly, personal or psychic transformations, such as those imagined in the work of Rossetti, are not one and the same with political transformations; some would say a focus on the personal necessarily eclipses the pressing need for social or political change (and some would say the opposite). Our contemporary poets are, I would venture, closer to Hopkins and Rossetti in their ambitions than they are to Morris, whose nearly untroubled Marxism now might feel outdated (to some). What remains, however, is a desire for art to indicate some hope, even in the face of what might feel like art’s total capitulation to advanced capitalism, even, or especially, in the face of the disasters—economic, ecological, political—that our century continues to deliver, and even in acknowledgement of the powers of our own time’s “devious coverts of dismay.”
Perhaps the connection between the temporal structures these contemporary poets present and the redemptive temporality embraced by the Victorian poets is not surprising, for the contemporary writers, advocating twenty-first-century experimental poetics and resisting the militaristic and socially and environmentally damaging pathology of late twentieth and early twenty-first century America, share with these predecessors a certain position of cultural, if not political, exile. (“[T]he apocalyptic protests; it protests against the political, social, moral, and spiritual situation of being in exile”[Gitenstein, 18]). To envision redemption emerging out of an intensely aesthetic experience of the present is, I would argue, a way into and out of time at once; it is a way to imagine oneself—one’s community, one’s nation—as escaping the particular political or ideological binds of one’s moment while at the same time celebrating the aesthetic moment as somehow an answer to these pressures. While not prescribing the specifics of the newly made world, poetry might engage pleasure and desire through an embrace of sensation, one that occurs not only behind the language, when language is most deictic, but in the very surfaces of the language itself, when language is most reflexive. And yet, to invoke the complex aesthetic object as capable of delivering us (however imaginatively) from the very political and economic environment that produced it is to present a very difficult paradox—the paradox, perhaps, that visionary artists must always confront.ccxiv
What Gershom Scholem says of Judaism might thus resonate with some contemporary poets:
From the point of view of Halakhah, to be sure, Judaism appears as a well-ordered house, and it is a profound truth that a well-ordered house is a dangerous thing. Something of Messianic apocalypticism penetrates into this house; perhaps I can best describe it as a kind of anarchic breeze. A window is open through which the winds blow in, and it is not quite certain just what they bring in with them. (21)
Perhaps poetic difficulty, poetic complexity, is that open window. ccxv
We tend to, and must, think of the Victorians as reformists: as they expanded democracy, expanded their international influence, expanded their literary output with ever increasing monuments to psychological and national development, it seems they were fed by a ceaseless and energetic optimism. And yet, this progress was experienced and recorded by many as a crisis and a threat, producing, in the wake of expanding capitalism, a market-driven commodity culture, a suffering working class, a compromised environment, an aggressive empire, and a stark gender divide. Our political and economic climate has produced a similar sense of crisis, a similar need to imagine sudden, total, unprecedented change as immanent or at least possible. Wary of expressing this need in concrete political terms, or unable, in “late-late Capitalism” to imagine just what those terms might be, some manifest a messianic hope through the veiled language of the aesthetic.ccxvi And yet, the politically motivated desire to make poetry act seems to be met with an equal desire to resist rhetorical intentionality, and at this crux we risk falling either into silence or into the silence of incoherence.ccxvii
When in 1995 Giorgio Agamben borrowed Valery’s definition of poetry as “a prolonged hesitation between sound and sense” for his lecture “The End of the Poem,” he noted that it is enjambment—the tension, or sometimes “antagonism” between the “metrical limit” and the “syntactical limit”—that distinguishes poetry from prose. Poetry is poetry because of its capacity to mean in ways supra-syntactical. Agamben then draws our attention to what he calls the “crisis” of the poem’s last line when enjambment is no longer possible. Here, the opposition between sound and sense can no longer shimmer, and thus, the last line, Agamben suggests, might not be verse at all. Just where the poem announces its completion, its “very identity is at stake” (113).
As this study has emphasized, it is not only, or even mainly, enjambment that affords poems the capacity to “hesitate” between sound and sense. Language’s own multiplicities, its physical and sonorous values, when recognized and emphasized, keep the poem from falling into what Agamben calls “the abyss of sense.” And yet, Agamben’s argument is certainly relevant here at the end of the book, for finally it seems that the effort to determine poetry’s ends, to claim the poem as an act of healing, pedagogy, or politics, threatens to end the poem, to push it toward this abyss. Arnold’s desire to reduce poetry’s surface-disturbances in order to make it serve the bidding of criticism led to his fall into poetic silence, a fall prefigured by Empedocles’s fatal leap. And Keats never did end the poem that meant to define the ends of poetry. Instead, his gods, Apollo and Hyperion, flared onward, producing purely sound: “Apollo shrieked—and lo! from all his limbs / Celestial . . . ” (“Hyperion,” 135-6); “Anon rushed by the bright Hyperion . . . / And gave a roar, as if of earthly fire” (“The Fall,” 57-59).
As much as the end creates a problem of identity for the poem, the effort to determine poetry’s ends creates for poets and critics a similar crisis. And while one answer to this crisis is silence, the silence of Arnold, the silence of Keats’s unfinished poems, another answer, one that late Victorian poetry offers, one that is reflected in some of the most engaging and complex work of our own moment, is to continually discover, critically and creatively, the ways in which the play, the hesitation, the desires, and the tensions of textual surface can meet and respond to the deep, abyssal, and political longing finally to make sense.