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Writing the elephant: Five books on modern poetry
College Literature, Fall 1999 by Thurston, Michael
Writing the Elephant: Five books on Modern Poetry
Bernstein, Charles, ed. 1998. Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word. New York: Oxford University Press. $49.95 hc. x +390pp.
Davidson, Micheal. 1997. Ghostlier Demarcations: Modern Poetry and the Material Word. Berkley: University of California Press. $35.00 bc. xvi +273 pp.
Ford, Karen Jackson, 1997. Gender and the Poetics of Excess: Moments of Brecade. Oxford: University of Mississipps Press. $45.00 hc 240 pp.
Perloff, Marjorie. 1998. Poetry On and Off the Page: Essays for Emergent Occasions. Evanston: Northwestern University Press. $79.95 hc. xv +376pp.
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Sellinger, Eric Murphy. 1998. What Is It Then Between Us: Tradition of Love in American Poetry. Ithaca: Cornell University Press. $39.95 hc xi +251 pp.
MICHEAL THURSTON
As a child I was fascinated, and frustrated, by that old story about the blind en and the elephant. You know the one: a bunch of blind men stand around an elephant and each of them thinks the part they're touching-a leg, an ear, a big, broad side-is the whole. So one thinks the elephant's a pillar, one a sail, one a wrinkly wall, and so on. Why, I would ask when told this story, don't they just talk to each other? Couldn't they compare notes and add the parts up to a whole, live elephant? Books on modern poetry can sometimes be similarly frustrating. The trunk, the toenail, the tail hanging long in back. Each is made by its critic to represent the whole. All modem poetry is east coast, Ivy League, formal feeling; all modern poetry is west coast, Pac-10, free-form slamdance; all modern poetry is trunk, toenail, or tail. And why, I wonder, can't these critics simply call a part a part? Why can't they compare notes and add the parts up to a living, tramping, trumpeting whole?
Fortunately, none of the books under review here suffers from such blindnesses. Each knows synecdoche on sight and builds upon this tropic foundation both a convincing survey of its chosen part and a compelling case for how that part illuminates the whole of modern poetry. Each knows full well that it addresses just a part of modern poetry, and each exploits the insights made available by recognizing parts as parts. Indeed, each powerfully demonstrates that by carefully attending to a leg or trunk or ear, always remembering that this part is a part and not the whole, we come to understand a lot about how elephants walk, eat, hear, reproduce and raise their young, and so how elephants live.
Incompleteness and fragmentariness are built right into the anthology of essays. Unlike the monograph, such compendia lack the single author's or single project's synthetic force. Though centripetally clustered around a topic or even written by a single author, these books' chapters retain a strong centrifugal idiosyncrasy. Essays, by definition, bear no claim of comprehensiveness; they are brief, exploratory, occasional, and necessarily sketchy. Gathering a pile of such bits all but guarantees a manifestly partial coverage of the collection's subject.
When the essays are trained on a target as narrow as, say, poetry performed, the collection stakes a modest claim indeed. Among the most rewarding and insightful books among this group of recent books on modern poetry is a collection of essays with just such a focus. Edited by the poet and critic Charles Bernstein, Close Listening: Poetry and the Performed Word brings together a diverse group of writers interested in poetry's deployment of its performative aspects and potentials. While many of the essays focus on contemporary poetry, the book as a whole, as Bernstein claims in his fine introduction, "extends well beyond the contemporary in its considerations of the history of the modern poetry reading, oral poetries, and the lyric in our own culture and other cultures, and in its attempt to rethink prosody in the light of the performance and sounding of poetry" (3). Heavily influenced by the experimental poetries with which Bernstein and Ron Silliman (whose "Afterword" concludes the book) are affiliated, Close Listening nevertheless demonstrates an admirable breadth of poetic tastes, critical positions, and potential applications.
The fifteen central essays are divided into three groups: "Sound's Measures," "Performing Words," and "Close Hearings/Historical Settings." This arrangement suggests something like a progression from theory to critical practice, but the essays themselves nicely problematize such easy distinctions. This is especially true of Susan Howe's contribution, an essay at once autobiographical, theoretical, experimental, and, sometimes, beautifually lyrical. Weaving anecdotes from her own past and present through discussions of Bram Stoker, Dracula, and Shelley, Howe explores the performed word not through argument but through a sort of demonstrative juxtaposition:
How do sounds speak to memory? I have brought you out of the land of Egypt and I have broken your bonds. Not true in music where the mind is chained to the vehicle of moving sound. Certain writers hear with their eyes are concerned in their poems and their prose with irregularities and dissipations with monsters of mutation. Dracula exists for Van Helsing as a continuum of changing forms. Here he is in facade language walking stilts half-mouthed and mincing as the French a with the open mouth or as ah in the English system of pronunciation. Mummy says when we boarded the Transylvania that October at Cobh pronounced Cove, ocean liners couldn't enter the harbor so they anchored beyond the Quay pronounced Key, somewhere in the sea-fog. (119)
