So, aside from Laura (Riding) Jackson whose writing I read
obsessively, I found myself turning back to an intense self-directed study of
two living writers whose work had been central inspirations for me: Leonard
Cohen and Amiri Baraka, two Libras born in 1934, whose work were in various ways marginalized by academia (although they were both more popular than those more sanctioned in academia). These two male (and obviously
male) writers had much of the intelligence that I admired in (Riding) Jackson,
but they also had many obvious differences…and they were still very active into their 70s.
These three writers were important to me, in part because
they had all begun their public(ation) journey with fine examples of gem-like
lyric poetry, but soon broadened the range and scope of their work in defiance
of the narrowness of genre conventions. In poetry, they went beyond the
“Perloff-Vendler” continuum, in whose parameters I safely operated in my 1996 “Against Lineage” essay, and even the
“Raw Vs. The Cooked” debates of 1960 if updated and applied to the contemporary
literary landscape at the turn of the 21st century. These writers even went beyond the wider narrowness
of “literature itself”--most markedly in the case of Riding and Baraka (by
comparison with these two, Cohen operated in a less inclusive Tower of Art).
The three formed a triangle; if these three proper names can
be reduced to points in a constellation (the stars that are really burning suns
far more vast than may seem when you view them in Orion’s belt), I found in
this imagined triangle more than enough space for every literary possibility I
cared about. If I were stuck on a desert island, and could bring only three (3)
writers—poets—with me I’d choose these three—over, say, Ashbery, Shakespeare,
Creeley and Dickinson--etc.
I.
As I thought of what it was that drew me especially to these
writers (who are not usually spoken in connection with each other), on one
level I was still thinking academically (I was, after all, still teaching):
thinking that my next book of critical prose—after my Shakespeare book—should
focus on a comparison and contrast of Laura (Riding) Jackson and Le Roi
Jones/Amiri Baraka—emphasizing some little noted or commented on similarities.
For instance, both these writers became known as “controversial” and even
difficult (as in difficult to work with) when they went through profound
transformations of writing style—which they announced publically and
dramatically with a name change—as Laura Riding became (Riding) Jackson circa 1940,
and Le Roi Jones became Amiri Baraka after Malcolm X’s death.
Perverse as this may seem, I felt that they changed their
names for many of the same reasons—in service of the mode of “truth” that
poetry often ghettoizes, a freedom not permitted by "free verse,"in standing against the “show, don’t tell” mode that
came to dominate the ostensibly wide range of contemporary American poetry sanctioned until today. In order to break from such confines, both knew they had to change
their names. Both clearly struggled against white patriarchal culture, and--—with
mordant brilliance and a love that becomes words—provided alternatives to it.
Both were theatrical (even in Riding’s alleged disavowal of theatre—which is
more complicated than her ‘purist’ fans—as well as her detractors--or those who
will offer her conditional love for her poetry of the 20s and 30s--will admit).
Both used as many rhetorical tools as they could get their pens on against the
master’s house while working to reconstruct a new master-less one that would be
better than a new movie).
Both Riding and Baraka were deep thinkers, and obsessive
writers who used the “normative discourse” that male Euro-American culture calls
Philosophy (and more recently Theory) against itself and its institutional
setting. They cast a wider, yet more existentially more rooted, net.
Philosophers become characters in their work, like they did in Shakespeare’s
plays. A (Riding) Jacksonian or Barakian reading of, say, Derrida or Ezra Pound
could yield more ethical fruits and truths than a Derridean reading of Baraka or
Riding, but this maneuver is more than the standard academic division of labor between
primary and secondary texts could handle.
This may partially explain why both writers were so baffling
and/or threatening to the literary/critical establishment, then and now (Experts
Are Puzzled) and why, in that world, both are placed in the outskirts of the
so-called “canon.”
Yet, my interest in Baraka differed from my interest in
Riding in at least one very profound immediate way: Baraka’s love of music (or
one could even say music of love) was and is so central to his oeuvre that his
work has been closer to my heart. In this, for me, Baraka went deeper, and was
more revolutionary, than Riding—especially because he was still alive and
working as a populist, as a public intellectual—or what could be termed “griot”
for the mass culture era (Baraka didn’t need to renounce electricity, though
much of the jazz he loves is acoustic). The music and the movement were one.
This spirit in the non-verbal aspects of art, the complex symbiotic
relationship between page and stage, always spoke to me, and I think our times
(our post-song lyrics-as-poetry times)—even had his content not been as blatantly revolutionary as
it was, this in itself was a political act that I felt was necessary if poetry
and literature was to ever do
anything in the burning house of contemporary reality even if Baraka had to
fan, rather than douse, the flames (though with much more prophetic foresight
than burning his own neighborhood after the death of MLK).
Baraka’s work, even in its most Marxist manifestations,
cannot be understood except in service of this (black) music which must live
beyond the (white) page. And, academically speaking, I could see this project,
as a return to the primordial unity of word and sound that the academics saw
most acutely in Ancient Greece (as, say, Trimpi’s study of the pre-socratics
like Hesiod—The Muses Of One Mind).
But even that Greek “starting place,” I soon discovered
(with Baraka’s help, once freed from the shackles of a Ph.D. in English) was a
watered down borrowing of an African sense of art and culture. And in America,
as Baraka taught, the African-American tradition has been a vital parallel
tradition to the Euro-American one, a tradition that existed somewhat
underground—or unacknowledged, unlegitimized by white folks (like drums being
taken away by slave masters on Congo Square, for instance). Sometimes it was even unacknowledged by black
folks: “Oh, we don’t really have a literary culture like the white man does.”
Some called bullshit on this before Baraka, but he went much
further in theorizing and enacting it than any before him. As William J.
Harris argues, the fact of Amiri Baraka did, and does, change American
literature. Some know it…some don’t, or fear to admit it to themselves. And
this is part of why the fight (of love, of music) must and does continue after
his death. His legacy can be seen in his biological offspring---his artist
daughter he had with Hettie, or his mayor son with Amina, as well as his daughter
who was brutally murdered by a homophobe who taught him to understand more
intimately the struggles of the LGBT community. But Baraka has a larger family….
II.
I must stop myself at this juncture to revisit my love-hate
relationship with Leonard Cohen. Cohen, by most measures, is not nearly as
radical or revolutionary as either Laura (Riding) Jackson or Amiri Baraka. But
an interesting essay or book could be written, and an interesting course could
be proposed, to show how Cohen and Riding (both Jews) challenge the gendered
aspects of Western Religion and metaphysics since the erasure of Lilith from
the Bible. Furthermore, like Baraka, Cohen embraced music (they both released
their first album in 1967, after their publications of poetry and narrative
prose).
To be sure, it is a very different kind of music than
Baraka’s, a much more Euro-American (or Euro-Canadian-American) music that
emphasizes the popular song, the formal rhyme schemes of ballad, and the near
rhythmless “singer/songwriter” craftsman—but, still, a music with words, or
words not confined to the “unheard sounds” so beloved by those who crave and
promulgate the well-wrought urn of gem-like lyrics, or even the hybrid texts of
the Vendler/Perloff continuum. And this becomes radical, or challenging, in the
context of contemporary American “Poetry”—especially because, like Riding and
Baraka, he also worked within those
confines.
Cohen’s songs, and song-like texts, could also be set to, or
enlivened by, many different kinds of music than the styles he himself performed them in:
from Philly punk band Ruin to Buffy St. Marie’s psychedia to R&B and soul:
“When it comes to lamentations, I’d much rather listen to Aretha Franklin than,
say, Leonard Cohen,” as he put it in his book Death of a Lady’s Man, as if he too knew the necessity of the Black
Art Aesthetic, or even suspected its superiority to the tradition he worked
within more as a reformist than a revolutionary).
Cohen wasn’t even rock and roll (though he was inducted in
the rock and roll hall of fame the same day Madonna, who wasn’t really rock and
roll either), much less R&B or Jazz, but some of his songs were like blues
and spirituals (especially if sung by Nina Simone), and matriarchal at that, as
he gladly risked charges of being called a sexist or chauvinist to be more
matriarchal than many male feminists who don’t take that risk. In a secular
society, Cohen’s lyrics are often understood in terms of “the battle of the
sexes,” but his back and forth stranger/manger bipolar dichotomy between a
(non-Western Judeo Buddhist) sense of God and woman cuts far deeper than, say,
Bob Dylan (who David Berman, back in 1998, accurately called mean spirited and
misogynistic.)
Part of my renewed obsession with the range of art embodied
by Cohen around 1999 (coinciding with the publication of the second edition of
the Le Roi Jones/Amiri Baraka Reader) was due to the somewhat fortuitous
accident of having worked closely on a somewhat legendary album by David Berman
and the Silver Jews. Berman had been called—by some—the Leonard Cohen of my
generation (X), and certainly there were some notable similarities. Many who
loved this band also loved Cohen—especially Death
of a Ladies’ Man—the album, if not the book. And from the perspective of
the world I was either trying to widen, overthrow, or simply leave, the Silver
Jews, as well as Leonard Cohen, represented a legitimate opening---albeit one
that was still met by resistance from many who still had a stake in keeping
“poetry” generically specialized and distinct for the slightly more popular
song.
I tried to fight on this front primarily, in the largely
white world during this time—though it was difficult not to get bogged down and
tangled up in the material conditions, the daunting logistics of trying to make
some kind of peace with the contemporary entertainment industry (since Cohen
and Berman were often termed "rock stars”—as well as poets, authors, and thinkers). So I could puff myself
up with statements that seemed unheeded by the recalcitrant entrenched on
either side of this reductive divide: art is entertainment; entertainment is
art; stand-up comics are teachers and vice versa. Don’t you see! Don’t you
hear! It’s not that crazy of an
assertion---this is a compromise position, or something I thought we could
establish first without me scaring you away as a “vulgar Marxist” or “Black
Supremacist.” My mistake? I was too timid to alienate my old audience with one
dramatic gesture?
In short, in contemporary poetry (excluding Riding, or
Shakespeare, et al and others who were dead), I developed a Cohen/Baraka
duality that I thought could explain my mission as a teacher and writer more
than the (narrower) word “poet” could. While Cohen may not be especially useful
on the political sphere (“democracy is coming to the USA”) as Baraka is, Baraka
could be seen as less useful when it came to male-female relationships, or
so-called “love poems,” especially for men or women who love “psychological
romance.” But Baraka, like the band Cameo (on their charming 1986 hit “Word
Up!”), doesn’t have the time for psychological romance. That doesn’t mean that
Baraka didn’t write love poems (see his great 1966 poem to the woman who would become his wife)—only that he didn’t need psychological romance as much as Cohen and his admirers—both male
and female—did and do.
Someone (I forget who) once told me they were in a creative writing
class Baraka taught in which someone brought in what many would recognize as a
“love poem” (a man to a woman, a woman to a man, a man to a man, or woman to a
woman, etc). Baraka said something like, “Great, but when are you gonna write a
love poem for the rest of us!”
Indeed. Baraka believed in his best poems as love poems to black people, and
eventually to all oppressed people---collective
love poems. I say this not to diminish Cohen’s accomplished oeuvre, but
only to show that the political doesn’t have to be “personal” to be intimate.
And I found myself wrestling with both writers intensely, as
a way to achieve balance as a writer, reader and culture worker. Yes,
wrestling---perhaps a very male-ist term to describe the process (Duncan spoke
of a process, a conk) of response, and you may put this in your “anxiety of
influence” pipe and smoke it. And the balance is just the set up, the outlines;
some “me” or fragmented community of “self” emerges in all this, as I began to
realize I could actually do more good if I traded the crown of poet laurel for
the teacher’s dunce cap.
III.
But what this tells you about “me” isn’t as important as
what it speaks about contemporary possibilities in literature—the contexts in
which it is written and read. This is why around 2003, I began feeling a
burning need for something like an “MFA Degree in Non-Poetry” to supplement the
MFA Degrees in Poetry (as the school in which I taught had begun an Degree in
Non-Fiction to supplement the degree in Fiction). And, by “Non-Poetry,” I mean
something different than what Oren Izenberg does (though there are some
overlaps with Izenberg’s definition, which could be the subject for another
essay). I bring up writers like Riding, Cohen, and Baraka because they all
brought a wider sense of “the whole art” into the 20th century
notion of poetry that threatens to be the 21st notion of poetry.
Each of them provides models that, in their own ways,
profoundly challenge the dogmatic adherence to lyric, and provide very useful
tools to restore poetry to what it was in a less specialized and insular era. You may call
it “the return of the repressed.” But these three writers—as well as many
others—fought to free themselves from being confined in what Riding calls “The
Poet Role.” This inevitably paves the way for a more engaged poetry. In an
essay on Aime Cesaire, Baraka quotes the latter saying: “Even tho I wanted to
break with French Literary traditions, I did not actually free myself from them
until the moment I turned my back on poetry. In fact, you could say I became a
poet by renouncing poetry.” Genre isn’t just about genre (unless you’re stuck
in one; non-poetry, unlike what’s
called poetry these days, is not a
jealous god—but can make room for performance, politics, philosophy, drama,
fiction, stand-up comedy, music, dance, and even revolution….as well as the "poet's poetry" that is currently called poetry…
….to be continued….(do I have a choice?)
++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++++
No comments:
Post a Comment