A few spoonfuls of Disch

The thought that Thomas M. Disch a.k.a. Tom Disch (he wrote poetry under the latter name) left this world at 68 because it seemed about to oust him from the nest where he had been happy and written dozens of books of poetry and and fiction and highly readable criticism still rankles. He lost the partner to death and then lost their house in Barryville, and he seemed about to lose the Manhattan apartment when he put a bullet in his sadly depressed head on the fourth of July more than three years ago.

But today I am thinking about his poetry criticism. It introduced me to the work of Kathleen Raine--a boon--and made me appreciate Kenneth Koch and a few others more than I did previously.  His essays could also be as hard-hitting and unswerving as the criticism of William Logan, the poet and critic said to be most feared by poets. (I enjoy his writing, even where I have a difference of opinion, but perhaps that is in part because I live in the happy, innocent state of never having been the subject of it.) Disch the critic was good on trends and summing-up, and he was good on individual writers.

You may disagree with him, but he remains challenging and interesting. Try and see:

from THE CASTLE OF INDOLENCE

The myth of risk
"Risk-taking" is my favorite blurb-writing maneuver, since rarely is the risk being taken ever specified. the suggestion is that the poet is somehow a member of that international band of persecuted geniuses on whole behalf PEN sends off protests to the dictatorial regimes of third world countries. Usually, of course, the opposite is true, for the political opinions expressed in the poems of reputedly "risk-taking" poets tend to be such as to make university tenure more likely.

Poets in academia
When bad poetry is valued at the going rate of good poetry, Gresham's law is bound to kick in. Bad poetry will drive out good. For bad poets are likely to be capable careerists, who will have the good sense, when they act in some related bureaucratic capacity, such a judging a contest or hiring a teaching candidate, to favor those as ill favored as themselves. In effect, Cinderella's stepsisters are in charge of the invitation list to the ball.

Andrew Hudgins
Hudgins is southern in that enviable sense that imparts to the work of Eudora Welty or Carson McCullers a cruel humor and linguistic crackle that derives ... from a community of, if you'll forgive the pun, wise crackers.

The myth of progress in the arts
The basic myth of the avant-garde (a myth implicit in the "postmodern" label) is that art progresses by historical stages, and each advance is perceived by the uninitiated rabble as sacrilege or nonsense. Painting provides the best paradigm: impressionism, postimpressionism, cubism, abstraction, pop, and then the Babel of the postmodern.

Updike the poet and the upper middle class
If the class that Updike addresses so cogently were in the habit of reading poetry, he would be America's Philip Larkin.

On confessional poetry
...there are no formal challenges, no musicality, no effort to find the mot juste or the telling epithet. There is simply candor, an effort to enlist the reader's sympathy in the circumstances of the poets' lives. All three poets have been award prizes for their confidences, and all three offer thanks to Yaddo on their acknowledgment pages, so however little regard this reviewer can muster for their work, their esthetic respectability is an established fact.

The myriad-minded poet
Once a poet has mastered his instrument, once he is a poet, he is judged--cherished, respected, or ignored--chiefly for his sense of poetic opportunity, for the ways he welcomes or courts his Muse; for his availability, as a poet, to the plenum of experience. Poets distinguish themselves one from the other less by the formal characteristics of their voices than by the occasions they elect to share with us, and while some poets are admired for their judicious cultivation of the same Parnassian half acre, in general the poets we prize most, and read most faithfully, are those whose lives, as reported, seem largest; who are able, in the most diverse moods and circumstances, to map a wide range of experience while maintaining the special alertness and afflatus poetry requires.

A Modest Proposal (Uncreation Project)

Photograph courtesy of sxc.hu
and Keith Syvinski aka LeoSynapse
of Franklin, Indiana.

Hop two posts back ("Unskilling, uncreation") if you want to see the post this one continues, dealing with Professor Goldsmith the conceptual artist. I invite you to answer any of the questions below as yourselves or as Goldsmith Himself. To usurp his identity and burble, sing, or lecture as you please seems entirely in keeping with his various undertakings in uncreation.

Goldsmith always insists on primacy of the talk about the so-called book--talk about the object rather than any kind of encounter with the text (and since the text might not be nothing but an out-of-date train schedule, say, that is a profound relief to him and us--whereas I'm always thinking that what writers say about their books is interesting and sometimes very delightful or fascinating but in general doesn't really matter because: a. they might be wrong or misleading or have forgotten what they were doing ten years ago; and b. after art goes into the world it belongs to the world.

Of course when I say that, I am still saying something, and I may be entirely wrong... Afte all, I generally feel that I know what I am talking about when I talk about my work.

However, since it's talk about the book that matters and not the book itself in Goldsmith's case and according to his avant garde lights, I shall deal with his entire oeuvre by talking about it and him without reading it or knowing him (though I should very much like to see him in his paisley suit.)  In this way, I shall perform an uncreative act in keeping with his own beliefs.

Since Goldsmith likes to talk around his work, perhaps he will show up here in one of those marvelous paisley or striped or polka dot outfits and answer in some circuitous (or direct--he can be direct) fashion. But since nobody has any authority, feel free--whoever and wherever you are--to answer on his behalf and become Goldsmith. In that way, the meaning of Goldsmith will be altered (if you want to give your name and be some hybrid of Goldsmith-and-another, feel free to do that or link to your identity or else encode your real name in the text) and the project will become interestingly muddled. Oh, I like the idea of encoding your name in the text!

1.  Do you believe that every story has been told, and so there is no sense in adding to the world?

2.  Is the lyric gush of words from the fount alien to you?  Have you ever felt it, or would you manfully (or even womanfully or childishly) suppress such a thing in the interests of the avant garde moment?

3.  Goldsmith, some say, is the foremost figure in conceptual writing these days, and I for one am perfectly willing to believe them.  A curious thing to me is how your work is considered so new when really it is a deliberate, purposeful recycling of long-familiar ideas, which you appear to claim because written arts are "behind" visual arts--as though art was about progress somehow. Do you think art is about progress? On one hand, the avant garde appears to worship "progress." On the other, the avant garde artists or, as you say, "word processors" seem to believe that there are no new ideas.  Duchamp, Warhol, Borges--these are progenitors of the avant garde of 2011?

4.  Would you follow Borges's Pierre Menard and steal a novel in that "intellectual" way?  Would it have to be in public domain before you had the courage of your convictions? (Are they convictions, or are they just playful? Is conviction utterly irrelevant?) Would your attempt stand up in court if you, say, snitched the latest novel by Danielle Steel or some other empress or emperor of the popular with a lawyer at her or his beck and call?

5. If you knew the world would end (i.e. uncreate) in December, would you still bother with your uncreation? Why or why not?

6. If a student showed up in your "Uncreative Writing" class and insisted on usurping your role as professor and leading the uncreation, would that be all right with you?

7.  How about if that student appropriated your signature and then that rectangular text, your paycheck? Would that still be all right--I mean with you, rather than with the eminent University of Pennsylvania? Why or why not?

8.  How about if he adopted your Goldsmithian name and tried to go home to your family?

9.  I can't find any images of your sculptural work that preceded your verbal uncreations.  Why did you stop sculpting--and what was your medium and what were your concerns?

10.  Is the avant garde secretly horribly puritanical and adverse to pleasure?

Unskilling, uncreation

Photograph: courtesy of sxc.hu and Jef Bettens of Herk-de-Stad, Limburg, Belgium.
As Jef Bettens and sxc.hu do not ally themselves with long-dead Duchamp
or with Kenneth Goldsmith, I here acknowledge their rights to this work!

According to its author, I have neither to credit nor to do anything but claim as my own the passage about "uncreative writing" below. But as I do not wish to claim it, I will say that it comes from an article by Kenneth Goldsmith, "It's Not Plagiarism. In the Digital Age, It's 'Repurposing,'" published in The Chronicle of Higher Education on the tenth anniversary of 9-11.

Goldsmith was a RISD-educated sculptor for a decade until he shifted over into conceptual poetry. His Duchampian recent books are Sports (Make Now, 2008), Traffic (2007), and The Weather (2005), transcriptions of a baseball game, traffic patterns, and the weather. He retyped the New York Times for a single day to make his book Day (2003.)

These days he is a professor at The University of Pennsylvania (the avant-garde got in bed with the academy long ago), where he often teaches a course called "Uncreative Writing." According to Goldsmith, "the students are penalized for showing any shred of originality and creativity. Instead they are rewarded for plagiarism, identity theft, repurposing papers, patchwriting, sampling, plundering, and stealing. Not surprisingly, they thrive. Suddenly what they've surreptitiously become expert at is brought out into the open and explored in a safe environment, reframed in terms of responsibility instead of recklessness. . . ."  He claims that "even when we do something as seemingly "uncreative" as retyping a few pages, we express ourselves in a variety of ways. The act of choosing and reframing tells us as much about ourselves as our story about our mother's cancer operation. It's just that we've never been taught to value such choices."

Take a look at the excerpt or article.  Any thoughts?

***

Goldsmith:   Over the past five years, we have seen a retyping of Jack Kerouac's On the Road in its entirety, a page a day, every day, on a blog for a year; an appropriation of the complete text of a day's copy of The New York Times published as a 900-page book [that's Goldsmith's book Day]; a list poem that is nothing more than reframing a listing of stores from a shopping-mall directory into a poetic form; an impoverished writer who has taken every credit-card application sent to him and bound them into an 800-page print-on-demand book so costly that he can't afford a copy; a poet who has parsed the text of an entire 19th-century book on grammar according to its own methods, even down to the book's index; a lawyer who re-presents the legal briefs of her day job as poetry in their entirety without changing a word; another writer who spends her days at the British Library copying down the first verse of Dante's Inferno from every English translation that the library possesses, one after another, page after page, until she exhausts the library's supply; a writing team that scoops status updates off social-networking sites and assigns them to the names of deceased writers ("Jonathan Swift has got tix to the Wranglers game tonight"), creating an epic, never-ending work of poetry that rewrites itself as frequently as Facebook pages are updated; and an entire movement of writing, called Flarf, that is based on grabbing the worst of Google search results: the more offensive, the more ridiculous, the more outrageous, the better.

These writers are language hoarders; their projects are epic, mirroring the gargantuan scale of textuality on the Internet. While the works often take an electronic form, paper versions circulate in journals and zines, purchased by libraries, and received by, written about, and studied by readers of literature. While this new writing has an electronic gleam in its eye, its results are distinctly analog, taking inspiration from radical modernist ideas and juicing them with 21st-century technology.

Far from this "uncreative" literature being a nihilistic, begrudging acceptance—or even an outright rejection—of a presumed "technological enslavement," it is a writing imbued with celebration, ablaze with enthusiasm for the future, embracing this moment as one pregnant with possibility. This joy is evident in the writing itself, in which there are moments of unanticipated beauty—some grammatical, others structural, many philosophical: the wonderful rhythms of repetition, the spectacle of the mundane reframed as literature, a reorientation to the poetics of time, and fresh perspectives on readerliness, to name just a few. And then there's emotion: yes, emotion. But far from being coercive or persuasive, this writing delivers emotion obliquely and unpredictably, with sentiments expressed as a result of the writing process rather than by authorial intention.

These writers function more like programmers than traditional writers, taking Sol Lewitt's dictum to heart: "When an artist uses a conceptual form of art, it means that all of the planning and decisions are made beforehand and the execution is a perfunctory affair. The idea becomes a machine that makes the art," and raising new possibilities of what writing can be. 

For more from the "original" article, go to the link above.