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Poetry at the Millennium: "Open on its Forward


Side"

Richard Quinn
The University of Iowa
Richard-A-Quinn@uiowa.edu

� 1999 Richard Quinn.


All rights reserved.
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Review of:
Jerome Rothenberg and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the
Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and
Postmodern Poetry. Volume Two: From Postwar to Millennium.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1998.

1. Talk-poet David Antin got it right when he argued that "it is


precisely the distinctive feature of the present that, in spite
of any strong sense of its coherence, it is always open on its
forward side" (98-99). That the present is always unfinished,
needing the future to provide closure, is a fact that has led to
both anxiety and optimism as the millennium turns. Y2K paranoia
and nostalgic recitations of old-fashioned values jostle with
enthusiasm for economic expansion and explosions of alternative
culture. Antin's own poetics consistently points to the "open"
nature of moments like ours, doing so with excitement rather than
ennui. Consequently, it makes perfect sense that a piece of
Antin's "Endangered Nouns" would make it into Poems for the
Millennium, Volume Two, a decidedly exciting anthology of
modernist and postmodernist poetry edited by Jerome Rothenberg
and Pierre Joris. Nothing short of a celebration, the anthology
returns to the past, peruses the present, and speculates about
the future of experimental poetic practices without ossifying
either history or poetry. The experience of twentieth-century
life, tempered by the horrors of war, genocide, and cultural
revolution, meets the cyberpoetic future in the works of over two
hundred poets included in this 850-page book. In its totality,
such a book can only be called what the editors themselves
recognize as "a mapping of the possibilities" (13).

2. Picking up where volume one left off, volume two continues the
project of constructing a millennial poetics outside traditional
canonical frameworks. Such a poetics, first and foremost,
includes both the oft ignored "experimental" wing of modernism
and the international postmodernisms of nations like Japan, Iran,
Russia, the United States, and Italy, to name a few. As the
editors put it, the anthology

is the celebration of a coming into fullness--the


realization in some sense of beginnings from still earlier
in the century. And yet the poetry like the time itself
marks a sharp break from what went before, with World War II
and the events of Auschwitz and Hiroshima creating a chasm,
a true aporia between then and now. (1)
Of course, one result of an anthology like Poems for the
Millennium is the continued questioning of monikers like "modern"
and "postmodern." While the disjunction between modernity and
postmodernity (epochs) and modernism and postmodernism
(aesthetics) has been theorized and historicized by artists,
philosophers, and scholars since at least the 1970s, the editors
doubt whether such a decisive rift truly exists. Despite their
claims that the included poetry represents both a "realization"
of prior processes (modernist becoming postmodernist) and the
actuality of new art (uniquely postmodern), wisely the editors
avoid indicating which poems fit within which framework. Words
like "modern" and "postmodern" may apply to the whole of the
anthology but certainly not to the constituent parts. It would
seem that the question of where experimental modernism ends and
postmodernism begins remains deliberately unanswered.

3. Nevertheless, the editors ask that we consider the relationship


between poetic practices, whatever their aesthetic status, and
the world with which they interact. Rothenberg and Joris state
that much of the poetry included within the anthology is driven
by "a renewed privileging of the demotic language" and "the
exploration of previously suppressed languages" (11). Moreover,
the poetry attacks "the dominance in art and life of European
'high' culture" leading to an "exploration and expansion of
ethnic and gender as well as class identities" (12). In this
sense, poetry is part and parcel of the fight for human
recognition, but with a "shifting connection to related political
and social movements" rather than firm ties to rigid ideologies
(12). Joining cultural critics like Paul Gilroy and Charles
Bernstein then, the editors argue for artistic practices that
reflect both millennial openness and reflective linkages to
particular human identities, though such linkages are always
"shifting."

4. And it is within the realm of language itself where such links


and shifting occur. Much of the poetry included herein
participates in the twentieth-century work of interrogating the
mediational function of language. Included work, ranging from Lyn
Hejinian's My Life to Ian Hamilton Finlay's "Poster Poem,"
attacks the notion of language as purely indexical, and suggests
the possibility of language entering into new configurations. But
of course much of "European high culture" raised similar
questions. The difference revolves around divergent perspectives
on the relationship between language, art, and the world at
large. High culture, in what the editors call "the Age of Eliot
(T.S.) and of the new critics," turned away from romantic notions
of spirit and began debating the intellectual authority of art
(3). Art, in new critical assessments, duplicates neither world
nor identity but maintains its status as a separate material
entity. High culture presented the world, but only through "a
dominant and retrograde poetics" which sought to create distance
between poet and subject (3). Through the use of aesthetic
distance, high modern art diminished life's complexity in order
to report from on high what it perceived as the universal
principles driving life itself.

5. Rothenberg and Joris succeed in presenting work which dismisses


high modernist notions of a life/art distinction. Much of the
writing anthologized here concerns not universal principle but
rather the foregrounding of language itself as a constructive
tool. Poems from Paul Celan's "Breathcrystal" to Bernard
Heidsieck's Canal Street dismantle "the more tyrannical aspects
of the earlier literary and art movements" in order to create a
freer matrix of poetic reference, untethered to ideas of absolute
source. Rothenberg and Joris include poetry that rejects
"totalizing/authoritarian ideologies and individuals" through the
use of linguistic fragments, chunks of thought, and streams of
sound. Such poems, they argue, question established connections
between word and world by emphasizing a language that goes beyond
what is intended. Nevertheless, the writing included herein does
not deny meaning. It merely asserts that meaning is generated
through the processes of its creation rather than through the
deciphering of particular poems. In a sense then, reading no
longer takes a back seat to writing and becomes Barthes's
"writerly" text even without the text. In short, in order to
explore the complexity of late twentieth-century life, the texts
and artists in Poems for the Millenium seek to embrace the
subversion and irrationality which European high culture pushed
away.

6. Despite such an embrace of the radical, readers will find many


poets comfortably familiar from anthologies past. The text's
first two sections of poems, "Prelude" and "Continuities,"
include writings by canonical artists like Charles Olson,
Gertrude Stein, Wallace Stevens, James Joyce, and William Carlos
Williams just to name a few. Nevertheless, expect the unusual
even here. The piece by Williams is not about wheelbarrows but is
taken from the third book of Paterson ("It is dangerous to leave
written that which is badly written"). Similarly, the editors
bypass Tender Buttons in order to present the "Concluding Aria"
from Stein's The Mother of Us All. But it is not in its inclusion
of the canon's unrepresented works that the anthology gains
strength. Rather its most compelling turn is toward what we once
termed the "non-canon" but which makes more sense as the
"anti-canon." The goal is not to establish another privileged
grouping, this time of "alternative literature," but to banish
such groupings altogether. (Rothenberg and Joris themselves state
in their introduction that "it would be foolish... to view what
follows as an attempt to set up a new canon of contemporaries"
(13).) No matter how well read a person is, it would be a
remarkable reader indeed who had more than passing knowledge of
each writer represented here.

7. The "Prelude" section presents poets coming out of World War II


who envision both devastation and promise. Out of Toge Sankichi's
image of atomic destruction: "Loud in my ear: screams /
Soundlessly welling up, / pouncing on me: / space, all
upside-down," Olson asks us to "Put war away with time, come into
space" (29, 23). Following the war, life space seems both
"upside-down" and inviting ("come into space"). The poets
following in "Continuities" provide just that: connective tissue
between poetry of the past and that to come, what Muriel
Rukeyser, a poet in this section, calls "Resurrection
music, silence, and surf" (70). From the World War II
wasteland comes a redemptive music, pointing readers into a
poetic future, serenaded by the siren's song. Pablo Neruda
invites us to join him: "Come up with me, American love. / Kiss
these secret stones with me" (64).
8. Following "Prelude" and "Continuities," the book is divided into
two expansive "galleries," separated by a section entitled "The
Art of the Manifesto" and followed by "Postludes." The galleries,
making up the major portion of the text, include works by
individual writers and mini-anthologies of poetic "movements." In
the first gallery, The Vienna Group, The Tammuzi Poets, Cobra,
concrete poetry, and beat poetry have their say, while the second
gallery includes collections of oral poets, postwar Japanese
poetry, Language Poets, the Misty Poets, and finally, cyberpoets.
While the editorial apparatus is minimal, the editors open each
mini-anthology with a brief but extremely helpful introduction.
They also include short commentaries, usually a paragraph or two,
following some selections. Many of these commentaries include
insights from the poets themselves, offering fascinating insider
views.

9. While all of these mini-anthologies deserve mention, three stand


out: "Cobra," "Concrete Poetry," and "Toward a Cyberpoetics."
While anthologists past, victimized by space restrictions and the
demands of uniform presses, have been forced to reduce the visual
aspects of poetry to limited form, Rothenberg and Joris present
the visual excitement inherent in much experimental writing. One
reason for doing so is simple, along with a burgeoning
"intercultural poetics" seeking to "break across the very
boundaries and definitions of self and nation" upon which
corporate globalism is based, comes the concomitant investigation
of "poetry-art intersections in which conventional boundaries
between arts break down..." (12,11). In essence, once one
boundary is breached, all bets are off. Rothenberg and Joris
respect the linguistic-visual nexus through the careful
reproduction of spatial poetry by Cobra poets Asger Jorn and
Christian Dotremont, concrete poets Emmett Williams, Ilse
Garnier, and Pierre Garnier, and so-called cyberpoets Abraham
Lincoln Gillespie and Steve McCaffery. Add to this list work by
Susan Howe, Maggie O'Sullivan, John Cage, and Tammuzi Poet,
Adonis (not to mention at least a couple dozen more included
herein), and you understand why this anthology is such a
significant accomplishment. Certainly the editors face the
limitations of page size and are forced to shrink some work (a
black and white photograph of Duchamp's "Rotative Demi-Sphere,"
for example), but such complaints are petty when faced with such
an overwhelming collection of visual writing.

10. Like the collection of poetry-art and mini-anthologies, the


text's galleries range widely. Olson, Amiri Baraka, Adrienne
Rich, and a number of others are represented by more than one
poem, though their texts are frequently dispersed throughout the
book. Rothenberg even organizes his own work this way. His "That
Dada Strain" and sections from Khurbn and The Lorca Variations
surface in the second gallery, while his "Prologomena to a
Poetics" closes out the anthology as the final piece in
"Postludes." The effect of such dispersion is to minimize the
poet's power, in essence putting poems before poets. Readers
looking for poetry as an expression of individual authority best
look elsewhere. The editors dispense with lengthy sections of
individual poets for the same reason they dispense with
biographical blurbs. In an anthology so dismissive of boundaries,
individual ego should not compete with the interpersonal flux
streaming through the pages. My only complaint here is the
predictable one: without biography or context, historiography
suffers. Knowing something about Amiri Baraka such as his
relationship to civil rights struggles, the Black Arts movement,
and black nationalism can enliven "Black Dada Nihilismus" in ways
that formalist readings alone cannot.

11. The central section, "The Art of the Manifesto," includes "Black
Dada Nihilismus" and breaks yet one more convention through its
dismantling of the practice/theory antinomy. I have already
indicated how the post-structural ideas of authorial demise and
the mediational function of language interact within Poems for
the Millenium. In "The Art of the Manifesto," theories are stated
directly as poetry and poetry as theory. Included here is a
selection from Charles Bernstein's now famous poem-treatise
"Artifice of Absorption," discussing the interaction between
"absorptive" and "impermeable" poetic techniques, considering
their relationship to a disempowering and "absorptive" politics.
Similarly, an equally well-known portion of Rachel Blau
DuPlessis's Otherhow: Feminist Poetics, Modernism, the
Avant-Garde wonders about avant-garde writing, the very writing
comprising the anthology within which her own work appears: "Does
it secretly lovingly to itself hold the idea of poet as priest,
poem as icon, poet as unacknowledged legislator?" (433). If so,
the text argues, "turn yr. back on it. Or, not to tell you what
to do, My back" (433). The fact that such statements appear
between galleries (the simple fact of their appearance in a
"poetry" anthology makes the text unique) speaks to the value
such thinking places on interaction over hierarchy. The
poetry-theory included in "The Art of the Manifesto" responds to
and with the writing which surrounds it.

12. Ultimately, anthologies like Poems for the Millennium will be


judged on questions of inclusion. Anticipating such, Rothenberg
and Joris offer a rationale for their selection process: "the
question of inclusion and exclusion, which can never be properly
resolved, was less important with regard to individuals and
movements--more with regard to the possibilities of poetry now
being opened" (15). Furthermore, "[w]here a choice was to be
made... we put ourselves deliberately on the side of what we took
to be the 'experimental' and 'disruptive'--in U.S. terms the 'new
American poetry'..." (15). That Rothenberg and Joris see their
text as revolutionary rather than reformist is laid bare here,
and my own feeling is that careful readers cannot help but take
up the flag. To include Eduardo Caldersn, Miss Queenie, Robert
Johnson, and Tom Waits in a section on "oral poets" dismantles
all notions about what an anthology is about or should be. More
revolutionary would have been the inclusion of sound
(particularly given the intermedia focus of the book), since
printed versions of works like Johnson's "Hellhound on My Trail"
fall a little flat without the blues progression ringing in one's
ear.

13. Such minor complaints aside, the two volume Poems for the
Millenium stands alone in the history of literary anthologies. It
addresses questions of completeness through a celebration of the
incomplete and runs roughshod over boundaries established to
protect and preserve established aesthetics. In doing so, it
participates in a process once described to me as "the
maximization of the principle of non-exclusion." As such, the
book not only includes the unrepresented of the poetic past, but
through its foregrounding of an "open" poetics, it includes the
very principle of inclusion we hope will reign in the next
millennium. Poems for the Millenium is nothing short of heroic.

Department of English
The University of Iowa
Richard-A-Quinn@uiowa.edu

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COPYRIGHT (c) 1999 BY RICHARD QUINN. ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. THIS


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Works Cited

Antin, David. "Modernism and Postmodernism: Approaching the


Present in American Poetry." Boundary 2 1.1 (1972): 98-133.

Rothenberg, Jerome, and Pierre Joris, eds. Poems for the


Millennium: The University of California Book of Modern and
Postmodern Poetry, Vol. 1: From Fin-de-Si�cle to Negritude.
Berkeley: U of California P, 1995.

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