Junk Shot! with Jennifer Scappettone

On June 11, in the midst of the BP oilspill, Jennifer Scappettone delivered a talk at the Penn/Columbia Poetics Conference: Rethinking Poetics, that, to my mind was one of the few satisfying re-thoughts, and which she described as a "post-Paterson" intervention. Her "Poetics of Enormity" is part of a larger multimedia installation project Exit 43 and questions such key poetic concepts--old and new--such as particularity, ambience, materiality, that, emerging from Williams' attempt to capture the city, shudder in the face of the new "impossible objects"--whole ecologies catastrophized by corporate malfeasance. I will post my first question and her answer as part of a larger dialogue with Scappettone, to be posted in installments as a kind of "junk shot" to the flow of this blog, as it moves towards a foreseeable conclusion.

Milutis: Let's start with a hypothesis. Big poems are about big things (e.g. the epic), small poems are about small things (e.g. haiku). With Paterson, Williams would transform this tendency by using the small to get at the big, (but without the slight-of-hand of, say, Virgil talking about his apiary to describe a military panorama.) Williams works through and ultimately against devices like analogy--with various degrees of success--so that the small keeps its smallness, and the bigness of Paterson is an accumulation of encounters with these particulars rather than a synthesis (5 or 6 books of "clarifying" and "compressing").

So, in what you term a "post-Paterson" intervention,"Poetics of Enormity" (a piece-in-progress for the larger book/installation, Exit 43), you take on the issue of the big, of "enormity," in our current context. You start off "It seems the trouble is enormity," and later, make a pointed reference to Williams' attempt to understand something really beyond his powers of understanding; you rewrite his opening invocation as: "To make a start, out of enormity, and make it particulate, scattering the sum,/The poem a site for the restreaming of post-pastoral, post-Paterson fact in motion/as junk in the limbs."

Given your move from particulars to enormity, how do we START with enormity? What are the devices to get at this enormity? And, if this is an ethical position, is it somewhat quixotically or ironically so, or do you sense a path through the enormous?

Scappettone (sent January 6, 2011): The move away from a modernist—or modernist-cum-late-20th-century-creative-writing-workshop—focus on building a syncretic work out of particulars toward an aesthetic undertaking to confront a massive scale from the start is of course pointed (pointed through dispersion of focus, that is). While our immediate ancestors may have felt themselves to be laying the groundwork for a life of enhanced production, health, and leisure, we found ourselves mired in an epos that perceives itself to be unfolding in the eye of catastrophe, faced by the sublimity of unprofitable alterations in arrangements of resources and power: a widening gap between rich and poor in the face of dwindling provisions, environmental devastation and the invention of new diseases, the collapse of long-performative fictions of value, to take a few salient examples, and the violent conflicts that proceed from these conditions.

Starting from enormity requires a hell of a lot of research. No longer can the poet make a promising start, it seems to me, by pausing to meditate on the minor souvenirs or phenomena of the immediate moment without some sense of their complicity in the greater web of relations. Artists committed to intervening in sublimity as opposed to representing it alone need to take a stab at comprehending the totality of trouble or promise as it is embedded in the medium at hand: language, its structures of feeling and cognition, now and here but also, ideally, over time and across space. Comprehension of systemic workings would permit us to choose our subjects or objects carefully—since part of our trouble as producers is a superabundance of possible willing object/subjects, a need more astutely to search and sift through them, or at least to identify good reasons for reproducing the circumambient tsunami of information/stimuli. Devices for getting at enormity include web researches, naturally and inevitably, but also the obsolescing library, as it turns out our problems aren’t altogether new after all, though our presentism suggests as much. It seems important to include traces of the arduous research process within the work, to function like the drips of painterly epochs past, signatures of care/curation. I don’t see this aspiration, which is also an ethics, as ironic in the least, though perhaps it is quixotic.

How Far We Fall

Best plans, first plans. I had originally intended for this project to be called Radiophonic Paterson, but then when radios ended up not as involved as I had originally planned (see early diagram below with schematics for 24 hr broadcast of the falls, electromagnetic capture and musication of EZPass signals), I decided to not confuse people with the name, even though I still thought of the project as deeply “radiophonic.” I was confirmed in my expanded use of the term while talking with Danny Snelson in Tompkins Square, late at night, while eating hermit crab pop-ems, the Japanese version of zero-nutritional-value food, yet more exact than a Twinkie, since you hold in your mouth the whole grammar of their carapace—dyed red, sprinkled with sesame, shellacked with sugar. Danny is an editor at ubu.web and various different projects and had in his bike bag a copy of Ronald Johnson’s Radi os—Milton’s Paradise Lost sous-rature, and an early example of the radiophonic technique of “writing through.” Why is this Cagean technique of transforming and recycling source material radiophonic? Danny mentions it goes back to the idea of poetry as a kind of “tuning in” that Jack Spicer talks about in his Vancouver lectures (I have a discussion of this in chapter 3 of Ether); I would think it also has to do with the way in which the text radiates or transmits, animated less by reproduction and affiliation, but by the noise that comprises (and compromises) a wireless connection. Sometime, just the thought-object of the radio is enough to inspire the wireless tune-in . . . that is, how great is it that “radios” is embedded in “Paradise Lost”? It’s as if Lucifer found his way out of the pit by setting up a radio shack in one of the less shielded rings of hell. Or that we find our way out of the sin of representation, its fallen form—which Milton seems to perform in his tortured elegant lines, as if his art reenacted Lucifer’s rebellion—into something more luminous, less guilty. I remember reading Paradise Lost over winter vacation when I was 18, and for a variety of reasons, becoming a little freaked out, longing for the Mediterranean sunshine even in the most blood-soaked lines of Homer and Virgil. Johnson’s blank space swarms with the knowledge of Milton’s empurpled empyrean of disimparadised ensinewed titanbodies, plummeting through the Luciferous ether. The connection is not lost, but barely perceived, screams through the sky now a whisper, a humm of static, a tinkle.
Danny is curating a panel on Radio Poetics as part of the Radio Festival at Ontological, October 16-18.

Et in Paterson Ego

Perhaps it is appropriate to talk about displacement after driving over 4000 miles and never once passing through our locus of inquiry. Along the way, I talked to some fellow-travelers of the Paterson poem in Philadelphia--tk in a future entry--and sat through a rousing 4.5 hours of Feldman's For Philip Guston in Charleston--which gave me some ideas for the progressing audio piece, or at least some insight into the true nature of stamina (the pianist endured a surreal wardrobe malfunction for close to 20 minutes, and I really don't know how they venture into such an undertaking without Depends.) I fear along the way, as Charlestons became Missoulas, that I might have forgotten some of the insights gained along the way, lost to an amnesia of miles. But that may be for the best, a letting-go which both astronauts and Morton Feldmans know something of. What would constitute a pastoral for our age of astronauts? Because it is Williams' use of the pastoral which I held-to as the next entry, since one of my conversants in Philadelphia, Randall Couch, brought up the genre in relation to the pastoral parody in Book 4, and sent on this link to a precursor. The pastoral is a genre of displacement: a way for mostly city folk to imagine their more authentic shepherd counterparts, like Rush Limbaugh conjuring Dakota. Williams places the pastoral conversation that begins Book 4 in New York City--it took me a couple reads to get this, given that one at least imagines the points-of-view, however fractured, to be limited by the poem's titular city. It could be that this pied-à-terre on the East River, inhabited by a lesbian poet (and this I totally missed, but thanks to Randall for pointing it out) is, in a pointed reversal, the Arcadian hinterland where one can escape the actual reality of the city or cities or "things" in their terrible intensity. No ideas but in things: et in NYC ego. "The whirring pterodactyl/ of a contrivance, to remind one of Da Vinci,/searches the Hellgate current for some corpse" and this helicopter is the snake in the grass, the shadow of death that haunts this "idyllic" escape. While Randall pointed out book four's relation to an 18th-century tradition, I think Williams maintains a discussion with poets much further back, especially Theocritus and Vergil. One thing that brought me back to Vergil was a passage that I kept recalling when thinking of Williams' use of numbers and the passage on page 18 of the two girls and their ribboned hair. This is from Eclogue 8, depicting the song-competition of Damon and Alphesiboeus "at whose rivalry the heifer marvelled and forgot to graze":

ALPHESIBOEUS
[64] “Bring out water, and wind soft wool round this altar; and burn rich herbs and male frankincense, that I may try with magic rites to turn to fire my lover’s coldness of mood. Naught is lacking here save songs.

Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!

[69] Songs can even draw the moon down from heaven; by songs Circe transformed the comrades of Ulysses; with song the cold snake in the meadows is burst asunder.

Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!

[73] Three threads here I first tie round you, marked with three different hues, and three times round this altar I draw your image. In an uneven number heaven delights. Weave, Amaryllis, three hues in three knots; weave them, Amaryllis, I beg, and say, ‘Chains of love I weave!’

Bring Daphnis home from town, bring him, my songs!

[80] As this clay hardens and as this wax melts in one and the same flame, so may Daphnis melt with love for me! Sprinkle meal, and kindle the crackling bays with pitch. Me cruel Daphnis burns; for Daphnis burn I this laurel.

Here is an early version of "no ideas but in things." While Damon frets over lost love and threatens to jump in the ocean, Alphesiboeus succeeds by busying himself with earth-magic and binding rituals. There also may be something to the relation between "in uneven number heaven delights" and Williams triadic line. Nevertheless, I think a look back into ancient pastoral points to a timeless struggle between vague lyricism and a materialist poetics, perhaps mistakenly limited to the innovations of the 20th century.

Rigor of Beauty

Book I of Paterson starts with what seems like an epigraph:
“Rigor of beauty is the quest. But how will you find beauty when it is locked in the mind past all remonstrance” (3). But who is speaking this? As Lexi pointed out earlier, Paterson is a multivocal text. Yet Williams signals different voices with quotations only rarely. Strangely, the note to the text tells us that this is Williams himself speaking: “WCW’s own prose. On the 1945 KS galleys WCW cut two additional sentences that were also contained within the quotation marks: ‘It is not in the things nearest us unless transposed there by our employment? Make it free, then, by the art you have, to enter these starved and broken pieces’” (253). So, it is perhaps not an epigraph as much as it is an invitation, but it is still unclear why Williams would want to set it off like he does, since he does not use quotes normally in this way; is it merely to create a physical, graphic separation, to literally signify the “locked in the mind past all remonstrance”?
I’m hesitant to buy the explanation of pure graphism here. I still wonder about the way in which these quotes elicit the voice, especially in such a crucial place, the place of beginnings (however much a readerly desire for a beginning is thwarted by Williams), the place of “arma virumque cano” [“of arms and a man I sing”: Vergil]. A reply to the Greek and Latin with the bare hands would get rid of the arma (maybe replacing it with the silk factory or writing itself), but to a certain extent Williams gets rid of the virum and the cano too. What’s left? Que? I think there is definitely some singing left in the midst of the play of things, in the mist of the Passaic falls. After all, the famous line “no ideas but in things” is actually “say it: no ideas but in things.” Not that saying is singing, but saying might be enough of a song in the face of the brute materiality of Paterson (he mentions in his 1951 statement about the poem that it will only be with Book III that the poem will attain language; ironically, this is the book with the mute geological cross-section.)
So is it Williams that suppresses sound in his text or, as Garrett Stewart claims, is it the critics who have suppressed the phonotext of modernist poetry? Perhaps both. For Williams, the white noise of the falls overcomes sound and song, even as they emerge from its cosmogonic chaos. Whatever the song of Paterson is, it is not as easy to hear as in the other modernist epics, where “sounds cut in, rise, then fade away as other sounds intrude, as if we were tapping into a party line on a municipal phone exchange, spinning down a radio dial, or sampling a stack of records.” (Adelaide Morris)
If anything, the quotes here—as citations go—imply the already-said of past and memory. Whatever is said or sung of the “starved and broken pieces” to come is a function of the present-tense activity of reading (or singing, if you wish to interpret his concretisms lyrically.) The rest lacks citation as if—and this goes even for the archival passages—it hasn’t even been said yet.