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"Izenberg, Oren"
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Being numerous
\"Because I am not silent,\" George Oppen wrote, \"the poems are bad.\" What does it mean for the goodness of an art to depend upon its disappearance? InBeing Numerous, Oren Izenberg offers a new way to understand the divisions that organize twentieth-century poetry. He argues that the most important conflict is not between styles or aesthetic politics, but between poets who seek to preserve or produce the incommensurable particularity of experience by making powerful objects, and poets whose radical commitment to abstract personhood seems altogether incompatible with experience--and with poems.
Reading across the apparent gulf that separates traditional and avant-garde poets, Izenberg reveals the common philosophical urgency that lies behind diverse forms of poetic difficulty--from Yeats's esoteric symbolism and Oppen's minimalism and silence to O'Hara's joyful slightness and the Language poets' rejection of traditional aesthetic satisfactions. For these poets, what begins as a practical question about the conduct of literary life--what distinguishes a poet or group of poets?--ends up as an ontological inquiry about social life: What is a person and how is a community possible? In the face of the violence and dislocation of the twentieth century, these poets resist their will to mastery, shy away from the sensual richness of their strongest work, and undermine the particularity of their imaginative and moral visions--all in an effort to allow personhood itself to emerge as an undeniable fact making an unrefusable claim.
eBook
Poems out of Our Heads
Let's start with the old new lyric studies. W. K. Wimsatt and Monroe Beardsley begin their classic essay “The Intentional Fallacy” with a few propositions, “abstracted to a degree where they seem to us axiomatic.” To elucidate the first of these (that although a poem is an intentional object, its author's intentions are not the standard by which artistic success is to be judged), the authors cite in passing Elmer Edgar Stoll's remark that “the words of a poem … come out of a head, not out of a hat.” Wimsatt and Beardsley do not linger long enough to provide a source for Stoll's aperçu; they move swiftly on from their initial metaphysical claim that the work of art is caused by the intentions of a “designing intellect” to the epistemological problem that the poem poses for the reader and critic: “How is he to find out what the poet tried to do?” (4). In answer, they famously declare that a poem, like a pudding or a machine, must “work”; that the evidence of its working is entirely “internal,” located in “the art of the poem itself” (4), its “semantics and syntax” and its “feats of style” (10, 4); and that these features, like puddings and machines or like the human beings that poems are about, are “object[s] of public knowledge” (5). Together, these propositions systematized for a second generation the program of reading—demanding, democratic—that had come to be known as the New Criticism.
Journal Article
Language Poetry and Collective Life
BOB PERELMAN’S 1996The Marginalization of Poetry¹ ends its scholarly and autobiographical account of the recent American poetic avant-garde with an allegorical fantasy. Before Perelman’s dreaming eyes, Frank O’Hara—discerning lover of the world, aficionado of the mess of experience—and Roland Barthes— passionate reader of the world, systematizer of the codes of experience—meet for the first time in death as they did not in life. Appearing in an ersatz heaven crowned with haloes and wreathed in fog-machine smoke, the two trade barbs and witticisms, quote poems and texts back and forth. As they speak, it gradually becomes apparent
Book Chapter