“Ornette Coleman said, “New York is now!” A meta-present…total living with the lights on 24 hours a day.” Ishmael Reed, “The Shadow World: New York’s Umbra Workshop & Origins of the Black Arts Movement.”
If I am to continue from the position of an isostatic poetics, what would that mean? How would it look? As the abstract to our panel (A Panel Consisting of Three Anti-Canonistic Poetic Events Undoing the Canon in Transreal Time) suggests, “to retain the power of anti-canonicity requires that we also re-think, or perhaps unthink, our conventional engagement with criticism and its objects, even going so far as to suggest that we dispense with convention altogether.” How does anti-canonical work like Pritchard’s continue, similar to dark matter, to propel the world forward without short-circuiting its radicalism, a radicalism legitimated precisely by its “anti-canonical being,” something I’m beginning to think means something like “obviously influential if unconsciously so.” Everyone knows that something of the bite, violence, and will to power of the avant-garde becomes anesthetic, aestheticized, and neutralized by its admission into The Canon (or even in discussing it at the university); and yet, at the same time, we have all had, for moments impossible to explain, that evental encounter with an irrefutably authentic avant-garde sensation even in the most “inauthentic” context, where across space and time, as though a wormhole had opened if only to take our heads clean off, the atopos / utopos / achronos / uchronos of a disorient(ing) avant-garde spoke from the plane of immanence in a voice as clear and transparent as glare off the surface of an alpine lake. Sometimes we can read one poem twice and the first time it inspires the sense of an avant-garde utopia, and the second time nothing, or, worse, we can’t even find the poem again. One poem, two experiences. Or was there a poem at all? One transformative, the other negative (not occurring). Elsewhere I’ve written: “What is the minimal invariance of a line or poem wherein it retains its identity? I think this is a major question of (at least) 20th ctry. poetics.” If so much of 20th ctry. avant-garde poetics sought readerly “collaboration” as the poem, what happens when that collaboration fails, and/or is exhausted, and or happens once and cannot happen again? Is there there no poem? We so easily take for granted the endless reserve of the poetic artifact, and yet, how do we account for the evaporation of meaning and significance into nothing when the conditions for a collaborative readership have become a poisoned well? If the poem is serious about “the death of the author,” can such a poem tolerate an anhedonic reader? Can a poem be “always avant-garde.” Can a poem actually be avant-garde and then not?
Just as the power a poem might have over us (with us) is not a guarantee, so any interpretation carries nothing with it but a contingent, temporary hermeneutical contract, one that occurs simultaneously with something else: the poem’s ultimate passivity, as Blanchot writes, that cannot be collaborated with — a kind of irreducible powerlessness. When we bring an avant-garde work into conventional understanding, into the profanity of the seminar room for example, we never bring the entire poem; something inappropriable, something completely inalienable, something passive and powerless, remains part of the poem’s topology, so long as we agree a poem has one. Maybe we can think of this as the phantom-limb of avant-garde recuperation. Kevin Young discusses this in relation to Pritchard quite evocatively, “Perhaps all of these creative and critical movements, while operating at the “cutting edge,” sometimes end up amputating the work they try to save.” From this image we have “the body,” the main corpus, or canon, and those “amputated” limbs, parts, authors, and poems so cut. What is “saved” literally cannot tolerate its unseen, “unsavable,” unsalvageable power(lessness): the limb without a body, dead in formaldehyde. This phantom-limb lurks as severed material from the poem but also not totally not the poem. If one had a sufficiently powerful machine, we might trace the influence of this dispersed, spectral, bodiless limb even as “the rest” of the poem seems to be “the powerful parts” that has been saved by whatever discourse backed institution of power has collected it. An isostatic poem and poetics would keep a notion of this phantom as a necessary correlate to the visible “body” of the poem (or corpus/canon). The poem’s isostasy, after all, is not just in the writer/reader relation. A takeaway from this is that there is something that is the poem that is neither author nor reader. This could be thought of as the poem’s technicity (as Brian Kim Stefans might have it), object-status, or externality, even the poem’s (“material”) Being, and it is as necessary to the poetic event as any writerly/readerly collaboration, precisely because the discourse mechanisms of Writer and Reader (What is an Author?) depend on both extramaterial social codes and intramaterial physical structures.
At its best, literary criticism enacts and signifies devotion. But such criticism is exceedingly rare, and even still, in truth the best literary criticism exceeds the limits of that staid professional category, entering back into the realm of the poem as though having crossed an irreversible Rubicon.
Poetics operates in this irreversible consequential shadowy meta-present as an alternative, mystical, sacred (non-discourse) simultaneous with its extension in the banal and profane. At its best, Poetics refuses the entire project of canonization, and rejects the argument that canon reform is a necessary tool for just transformation of the world. The practitioner of poetics takes as a risky given that their activity straddles the threshold between the sacred and the profane, and with this risk they abandon the authority vested in the professor (the authority of professionalization, the possibility of a canon) and skate along a thin-as-spring-ice lake of the unknown and the impossible.
Perhaps this goes some way in suggesting how we might follow Pritchard’s anti-canonicity. Not by recuperating the work into the properly sealed package of the formal academic essay, but by emphasizing that part of that sealed package always fails, outdone at every step as it stands in awe before the poem that is before it. The tragedy of the truly irrecuperable is precisely that it must die; importantly, however, it is a death that it can (and will) continue dying across the spectrum of the mortal professional’s alienated body. The irrecuperable scatters its aberrant dust over the profession like a noxious chemical agent.
Consider Pritchard’s own attitude toward “the center” (that we might extrapolate as an attitude toward “the canon” just as easily), while keeping in mind Pritchard’s own heterodox influences (Mallarme, Stein, the pre-Socratics, haiku, African languages, the Caribbean). Of Helen Ellsworth, with whom he lived from 1972-4, and whose son was the publisher of the NYRB, Pritchard notes she “was at the very center of literary life in America. Because there is…no more formidable journal in our country than the New York Review of Books. So I find myself right in the center of literary power. And, quite frankly, I was very much oblivious to it. When I say oblivious, and I was, needless to say, cognizant of it, but it did not affect me. I was very much removed from it. It held…no particular interest for me.” Once again the poet is indifferent, (perhaps the poetic is indifference as such. If, as Gertrude Stein writes, “the difference is spreading,” I’m interested in the poetic not as the spread of difference, but the indifferent force causing that spreading to occur), such that even “the center of literary power” holds “no particular interest” for them. “One must not become enamored with power.” If my thinking about an isostatic poetics continues to retain a purposeful, useful valence, it is as a lens on this indifference to centers (and peripheries); an indifference that instead operates in a force-field of ever-changing tensions, torsions, and isostasies on the precipice of the event, where rather than continually reinscribing hierarchical colonial thought in the form of an impoverished circular neo-Euclidean geometry, we learn to operate in a new isostatic (non)-geometry unafraid to dispense with the tyranny of shapes, even as we might use them to demonstrate the veracity, rigor, and boundless love for the object all poetry retains as its horizon: perfection.
