Charles Altieri
on dif½culty in
contemporary
American poetry
Experimental poetry has fallen on hard
times. Poetry that makes its dif½culty a
basic means to accomplishing its ends
seems now mostly a throwback, a fan-
tasy that the excitements of modernist
art can continue into the present. It also
faces charges of privileging artistic com-
plexity over political obligation, Di
championing ambivalence over convic-
zione. E, ½nally, it is often dif½cult to
see the point of dif½culty in poetry: isn’t
the aim to give pleasure and thereby en-
hance life? So I sometimes wonder
Charles Altieri, membro dell'American Acade-
il mio da allora 2003, is professor of English at the Uni-
versity of California, Berkeley. His books include
“Painterly Abstraction in Modernist American
Poetry: The Contemporaneity of Modernism”
(1989), “Postmodernisms Now” (1998), E
“The Particulars of Rapture: An Aesthetics of
the Affects” (2003). Permission to reprint “Uto-
pia” was granted by C. D. Wright and the Univer-
sity of Georgia and Copper Canyon Presses; per-
mission to reprint “No More Bof½ns” was granted
by Joshua Clover.
© 2004 dall'Accademia Americana delle Arti
& Scienze
whether my commitment to dif½cult
poetry is merely the elitism of an aging
critic who mistrusts the simpler pleas-
ures. But then often when I do take con-
siderable pleasure in a poem that is not
provocatively dif½cult, that pleasure
turns quickly to guilt, to a feeling that I
am betraying allegiances and succumb-
ing to seductions that oversimplify the
intricacies of experience.
Partially to convince myself, I want
to trace such an event where pleasure
turned to guilt and I was forced to rec-
ognize by contrast why I persist in these
possibly ridiculous commitments. Questo
is a poem that I found quite moving,
C. D. Wright’s “Utopia” from String
Light (1991):
Inside of me
there are no cathedrals
even in the vaulted halls
where you thought you would come upon
some providential soul
letting go a cage of doves
there are only vaulted halls.
Inside of me
there is a period of mud,
flies and midges come with the mud
followed by a time of intense sun;
with the sun comes a cool room
furnished by a rotating fan, a typing
machine.
While there is the sun I type then I walk
often for long stretches
in search of hidden springs, curative herbs
or not in search of a blessed thing.
Inside of me
a stranger rubs its knees
against the palings of my ribs
someone who may be born to fail,
a drifter hunched over a cinder block
pitching rock at mounds of garbage,
someone who may catch and tear
like a plastic bag in a fence.
Dædalus Fall 2004
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Note by
Charles
Altieri
But beyond this zone
of tire heaps and oil drums
a clearing entertains one tree;
where you thought you would come upon
blades of steel light or where
you thought the doves would collect
themselves
there is only enough soil enough blood
and seed good enough for one tree.
Wright explores many styles, often far
more experimental. But I have chosen
this poem because I identify with it de-
spite myself, and because I think the ap-
peal to identi½cation is elegantly and
seductively handled.
The poem’s leisurely pacing sets up
the sense of surprise one experiences at
the suddenly pointed and parsimonious
ending. Three anaphoric stanzas elabo-
rate a single governing metaphor: IL
speaker’s inner self is available for a
guided tour. First there is the thwarted
possibility that the vaulted halls “inside
of me” betoken a cathedral, or even con-
stitute an adequate setting for a soul to
engage in religious ceremony. It turns
out that these vaulted halls are only
empty signs of what could host a spir-
itual life but does not.
The second stanza seems spiritually
less bleak, because there the poem ar-
rives at a better adjustment to powers of
agency that the speaker might actually
possess and ½nd appropriate for the ma-
terial conditions provided. These condi-
zioni, Tuttavia, are so distinct from the
world of religious expectation that now
the presence of an agent disappoints as
much as its absence had in the previous
stanza. Then in the third stanza the ana-
phoric structure arrives at someone “in-
side of me” who may be the poet’s de-
monic other, someone at home in the
sense of failure that pervades the poem.
The poem’s concluding stanza in ef-
fect pushes further inward, to a clearing
beyond the zones possessed by demonic
others. This clearing contains the realm
of utopian possibility, the inner garden.
But this is a late-twentieth-century gar-
den, where “there is only enough soil
enough blood / and seed good enough
for one tree.” Why only one tree? Why
the insistence on blood as the means of
nourishing this tree? And why repeat
“enough” three times, as if the repeti-
tion were also its own denial, since
more than one “enough” can only call
the assertion into question. Does the
poem suggest that this single tree in-
dicates a willful loneliness excluding
the person addressed, or does it gesture
toward inclusion? I want to say both.
Then the repeated “enough”s would reg-
ister the uneasy dif½culty of both desir-
ing to share the soil and recognizing that
this may be a limit case where sharing
would be destructive.
I admire the poem largely because
this ending refuses clear answers to such
questions while managing at the same
time not to rest in indeterminacy. IL
point is not that language fails but that
language succeeds by bringing us to a
sense of its inherent limitations. IL
speaker has arrived at a clearing that
yields an intimacy and a sense of the
speci½city of one’s own being that beg-
gar description. And in this clearing
what playful metaphor has created
yields to something else–to the con-
vincing presence of a self who can
assert a self-suf½ciency won out of
facing disappointment.
Now that I have shown why the poem
gives me pleasure, I have to ask if the
pleasure is a suf½cient compensation
for my years of learning from the avant-
garde to distrust the theatrical way the
poem manipulates emotions. Much as I
admire the poem’s self-con½dent pacing,
I have to admit there is a luxuriating in
the domain of metaphoric possibility
that is deeply at odds with the bare sense
114
Dædalus Fall 2004
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of suf½ciency celebrated by the ending–
a luxuriating that seems to bring the po-
em dangerously close to the self-indul-
gent portentousness that constitutes
one common strand in contemporary
lyricism. Of course the poem presents
a good deal of irony in relation to its
quest to understand the conditions of its
own saying–but it does not subject the
promise of an inner principle of identity
to that irony. Nor does the poem register
its species of inwardness as a now anach-
ronistic model of subjectivity, nor does it
make any effort to explore alternative lo-
cales for selfhood–for example, in qual-
ities of sensation or habits built on ways
of engaging social relations.
Yet the poem is beautiful (consider
just the vowel music in the second stan-
za with its elaborate harmony of long o
and i sounds). And the portentousness
works because the spare concluding
stanza de½nes so dramatic a contrast
with the utopian possibilities raised by
the anaphoric rhetoric in the rest of the
poem. I cannot not acknowledge this
beauty, nor my increasing sense that this
suf½ces for what poetry can offer social
life. And yet there is in this very seduc-
tiveness proof that the avant-garde spirit
from Eliot on has its own crucial social
role to play in challenging the ease of
identi½cation produced by elegant rhet-
oric. That modernist spirit wants poet-
ry to take on other roles–to insist that
beauty is not enough precisely because it
can be so seductive. To fall for beauty is
to ignore how much we need the imagi-
nation to devise models of the self and of
intimacy that make identi½cation prob-
lematic and that test other resources for
elaborating utopian social relations.
Now consider Joshua Clover’s “No
More Bof½ns,” not by any means his
best poem, but one that I can handle
here. This poem is utterly different in
pacing, preferring constant impersonal
Dif½culty
in contem-
porary
American
poetry
ironic motion to Wright’s elaborate
focusing. In the place of inwardness,
Clover seeks a different locus for subjec-
tivity based on resistance to lyrical and
social conventions. Rather than project-
ing this inwardness for the subject,
Clover makes poetry a site where the
subject has to experience the strange
impersonal or transpersonal dependen-
cies that bind us to our cultural moment:
We were drinking gin and tonics on the
terrace when the midi skirt
Came back into style. At this time movies
were extremely popular
Although no more than usual, after which
many people stopped in
At the Liberty Equality Fraternity Café for
ice cream,
The ice cream of novel thoughts. Everyone
was wearing
Those sunglasses everyone’s wearing. Just
a few felicities
Make a movement, the kind that should
really have its own comic book
Exploring the great issues of the age but
still with boffo action
And a speaking part for the lightbulb.
And so the crowd promenaded, lacking a
manifesto,
Yet to have condemned the passésists or
started the exclusions,
Scarcely aware they were (in the words of
Archigram–
Clever boys, give them their own terrace
immediately!)
A moment-village. They goeth abroad in
la terra.
How long have we been discussing
whether we are a part
Of what passes by, and at what point did
that become
The main conversation, replacing the
summer, our cadastral survey
Of its many crowded quarters, its tuned
suburbs and departments,
Its way of being a different sort of parade,
Dædalus Fall 2004
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Note by
Charles
Altieri
The kind which can be conveniently
depicted with a spectrum?
Paint samples from Jane’s Hardware will
do in a pinch.
Already the fete is erasing itself from the
popular memory
Like exploding instructions, in partenza
stained confetti as a reminder
You were supposed to get something done.
Little tasks,
Large problems, philosophers say: Who
will do the laundry
Now that history is coming to an end?
What advantage
Would someone have over me who knew a
direct route
From blue to yellow, far from this shady
way-station
Where we dream aimlessly of love in the
afternoon,
The post-historical kind? However big
you grow in my estimation,
You will always be a dwarf compared to
these buildings,
Their skins glassy and inviting as that lake
just to the west
Of wherever we grew up, you remember,
Something Lake.
The information lurks in the shoals in
forms by now
Almost unrecognizable. Now if only you
could dive sideways.
When is the real holiday, the one for
which everyone gets a sharp haircut,
Cruel atonal singing seeps from the crypt
and the meaning of objects
Is once again up for grabs? Even bricks
were once straw.
The poem begins by quickly surveying
several social locales; in effect the poem
wants to know what kinds of informa-
tion might sustain and give substance
to its own desire to speak as and for the
½rst-person plural. Clearly this world is
too dispersed to allow an “I” to emerge,
except in the form of a lamentation for
all that it cannot possess of its own so-
116
Dædalus Fall 2004
cial conditioning. But even its “we”
comes to our attention as states of con-
sciousness where the festive flow of pos-
sible identi½cations has no anchor, NO
site where examination and judgment
can take hold. And the possibility of a
manifesto to give meaning to this flow
is quickly dismissed, because the move-
ment that would pen it is only a “mo-
ment-village,” united not by ideas but
by these proliferating processes.
Lines 15 and 16–“How long have we
been discussing whether we are a part /
Of what passes by”–thicken the poem’s
obsession with information, with how
one comes to terms with all the ways one
registers oneself part of a world–or, In
our post-Stevensian climate, parts of
worlds. Notice how the lines intricately
place time elements against space ele-
ments so that geography and history
pull against each other. Each dimension
is necessary for grasping the “Now,” but
each involves different kinds of mea-
surements, and each demands different
kinds of self-consciousness. Positioned
in time, we have to work our way
through narrative forms; positioned
in space, we ½nd the movement condi-
tioned by the many crowded quarters
through which the parade passes. No
wonder the poem is driven to surreal
notions of how depiction might take
place.
The sense of festival made us attend
to our social place. But as that sense ex-
plodes, the feeling of sociality takes on
content primarily as a set of questions
that comes to structure the poem. E
two interesting aspects of the social
come to the fore. Primo, second- and ½rst-
person pronouns now enter the poem
because the issue of person is insepara-
ble from these questions about what
kind of place the individual might have
in working out the consequences of the
initial attention to festival. Secondo, IL
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Dif½culty
in contem-
porary
American
poetry
speaking presence seems increasingly
locked into the postures Clover takes as
basic to capitalist society. On the one
hand, insecurity reigns because there is
fear of being disadvantaged in relation
to others; on the other hand, there is the
temptation to cultivate one’s private
being apart from all social relations.
I am not sure how to read the last sec-
zione, or whether it is best to treat the rest
of the poem as a single unit. But I think
the dif½culty is not a problem with the
poem but a problem for the poem–
given the situation that has been depict-
ed. Trapped by what we might call the
historical geography shaping cultural
identities, the speaking presence wob-
bles between a tentative, unrealizable
lyricism addressed to the “you,” and an
unbearably clear awareness that the facts
sustain an order of information more ca-
pacious and more determining than the
positioned intellect has the resources to
grasp. When the speaking presence tries
to be expansive about the “you,” it is
instantly forced to recognize how pa-
thetic the human seems in relation to
the buildings that frame the scene. Ma,
good interpellated subject that it is, IL
speaking presence also lets its fascina-
tion with the buildings provide a lyrical
hope of reconciliation with the environ-
ment. Ancora, the terms of reconciliation
depend on the fantasy that the glass of
those buildings will dissolve into the
waters of an idealized lake visited in
childhood.
The impossibility of that action pro-
duces the urgent direct wish for the real
holiday, only to bring into the present
the sounds of an atonal operatic funeral
procession. Dreaming and dying turn
out to be dangerously close to one an-
other. Tuttavia, even if people cannot
dive into the lake-buildings, the dream
of revolution persists in the reminder
that even meanings reduced to straw
can become the bricks that get hurled
against the dominating glass. The poem
is left in the horrible position of refusing
to give up on the dream of revolution
while it has to recognize how this dream
makes every present attachment to the
social a source of alienation.
Were an individual to offer this ac-
count of alienation, many of us would
½nd his pathos self-indulgent. But if po-
etry can imagine itself into the symp-
toms, into an abstracted and nonsubjec-
tive version of the pains and uncertain-
ties that shape our relation to our sense
of what the social might be, then the
dream of revolution, suf½ciently tem-
pered by despair, might seem itself an
ineluctable part of our culture. Theory
can explain why revolution may be nec-
essary and analyze what constrains us.
But perhaps only poetry can show how
that cry emerges from modes of aware-
ness more intimate, more widely shared,
and more desperate than theory can de-
velop.
Identi½cation then is as fundamental a
concern in Clover’s poetry as in Wright’s
“Utopia,” but almost never in ways that
can reinforce us as subjects. As in the
work of John Ashbery, we are always al-
ready coming upon the identi½cations
that shape us. But Ashbery’s fluidity
among personal pronouns becomes in
Clover a constant sense of how weak a
hold we have on the various permuta-
tions of self-reference. The ideal of fluid-
ity becomes a measure of the impotence
felt when one looks at the many ways in-
dividual subjects become utterly bound
to their roles and narrow interests.
Clover’s poem is not uplifting, even as
a bare personal resolve. Infatti, its dif½-
culty may be necessary for expressing
such bleakness, because then that bleak-
ness can be at least tempered by the play
of intelligence. But the dif½culty also
helps interpret the impotence it renders:
Dædalus Fall 2004
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perhaps such impotence is an inevitable
result of poetry’s inability to ½nd con-
vincing collective voices that might
make revolutionary sentiments less
wistful and less dogged by irony.
118
Dædalus Fall 2004
Lynn Margulis
on syphilis &
Nietzsche’s madness:
spirochetes awake!
In the foothills of the Italian Alps, in un
snow-draped piazza in Turin on January
3, 1889, a driver was flogging his horse
when a man flung his arms around the
poor beast’s neck, his tears soaking its
mane. The horse’s savior was the Ger-
man philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm
Nietzsche (1844–1900). His landlord
later found him collapsed in the square
and brought him back to his room,
where Nietzsche spent the night writing
a flurry of bizarre postcards. As soon as
his friend and colleague Jacob Burck-
Lynn Margulis is Distinguished University Profes-
sor in the department of geosciences at the Univer-
sity of Massachusetts, Amherst. A Fellow of the
American Academy since 1998, she is the author
of “Symbiosis in Cell Evolution: Microbial Com-
munities in the Archean and Proterozoic Eons”
(2nd ed., 1993) and “Symbiotic Planet: A New
Look at Evolution” (1998). She coauthored “Ear-
ly Life: Evolution on the Precambrian Earth”
(2002) with Michael F. Dolan and “Acquiring
Genomes: A Theory of the Origin of the Species”
(2002) with Dorion Sagan.
© 2004 dall'Accademia Americana delle Arti
& Scienze
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