Dear ****,
You wish to know what became of my poetry. Allow me to recount what happened in writing.
Some time last summer, I rummaged through a series of poems I had written in English over a period of three years. With the benefit of hindsight, I dismissed about a fifth of them and rewrote the rest. Little by little, a seemingly sound collection of verse began to emerge. I titled it Partita in reference to my love of music – undoubtedly the greater art – and to the schisms that lie at the heart of (my) writing: word & thing, truth & fiction, sound & meaning, first & second language, literature & philosophy, prose & poetry, here & there, being & nothing, either & or, etc. Feeling confident in the resulting manuscript, I mailed it, along with the requisite cover letter, to the Canadian publishing house that seemed likeliest to welcome my work. Two months later, the verdict came: a typically polite and lapidary nix. My poems, the editor claimed, did not suit the publisher’s aesthetic. Neither unruffled nor crestfallen, I began to mull over the process – from solitude to solicitation – by which I tried to share a set of sealed lines with a community of perfect strangers.
I was formally introduced to poetry in high school, but only started taking it seriously a couple of years later, as you well know. Inexplicably moved by certain combinations of words, I reread them until their weight gave way to inanity or until their depth revealed itself to be bottomless – a wonder to behold, even now. And whenever the latter occurred, it felt like the literary Absolute itself was disclosing itself to me. What’s more, it was as if I had suddenly been handed an unbreakable yardstick by which I could reliably separate the chaff from the wheat – a remarkable feat in a field as shifty as literature. Given my interest in the vagaries of criticism, it made for a much-needed set of assumptions, one under which I operated for the better part of a decade. Contrary to what the relativists argued, I was willing to claim that there is such a thing as an objective criterion in matters of aesthetics: infinite returns or the lack thereof. Not all poems are born equal before the law of poetry, and any practitioner worth his or her salt would do well to remember that. Even if, say, T. S. Eliot was unquestionably a questionable individual; even if his writing occasionally spells out his reprehensible views, The Four Quartets remains an eminently complex, rereadable cycle, and no amount of political posturing will ever change that.
So I reread my own poems and found some to be wanting, rewriting them anew in the process. But by and large, I was quite happy with the manuscript I had sent out. Insofar as every poem is a snapshot of a specific struggle with the ghost of language, I reckoned that the lines I wrote were clearly worth encountering more than once, because they bear witness to that struggle in a minimally interesting way. But, realistically speaking, who would read them again if not myself, and myself only? Had I not taken the would-be adage according to which the greatest writers write only for themselves a little too far? It hardly felt that way to me, but given the publisher’s refusal, that hypothesis could no longer be eluded. So I tried to push my reasoning, as well as that of the relativists, to its furthest limits in order to figure out what – if, indeed, anything at all – can be salvaged from the wreck of aesthetic certainty.
I had done this countless times before, of course. Just prior to mailing the envelope, for instance, as I was putting the finishing touches on my little poems, I hesitantly lingered: ‘what good’, ‘how is this not a waste of stamps’, etc.? But in choosing to study literature in an academic setting, I implicitly assented to the existence of a more or less ‘objective’ scale upon which to ground my judgments regarding aesthetic value, so I ended up trusting my more-or-less scholastic instincts, my critical muse. After all, she was sound enough to tell Stephenie Meyer apart from William Faulkner, just as she immediately intuited that Fifty Shades of Grey is more of a vibrator than a book. But aren’t these statements a little facile, a little too haughty and contemptuous? If my own, primarily experiential, criteria are anything to go by, wouldn’t a reader who consistently falls head over heels for Christian Grey upon rereading Fifty Shades undergo the same epiphany I do whenever I re-encounter, say, W. B. Yeats’s poetry? How are we to convincingly distinguish between the two? Millions of readers, many of whom are kinder, wiser and more intelligent than I am, hold such ‘dross’ close to their hearts even as they care nothing for Samuel Beckett’s prose. Assuming ‘you are what you read’, isn’t my judgmental attitude a lesson in the perils of hubris? And if aesthetic judgments are fundamentally groundless and fickle, why should anyone else care about Partita?
Just as Partita was about the difference between ‘a part and apart’, to quote Michael Palmer, so am I of two minds regarding aesthetic judgments, which are to be split into two transitory voices –
A voice
The poet is doubly given over to loneliness. He writes in order to cheat isolation (always in vain) but his lines are even lonelier than he is. This is what Maurice Blanchot calls the work’s ‘essential solitude’: the fact that a piece of writing is an inhuman object, a mere thing. Though we may interact with it, though its ruse draws us in – ‘look, a talking page!’ – it inevitably withdraws from us; it is, in fact, mum. That is why Socrates condemns writing and sees it for what it is: a monstrous tool, a corpse-turned-puppet. Indeed, as I type this, I yield to something murkier than the demand of communication. I come into contact not so much with you, dear reader (as of this writing you lie in a hypothetical future), as with something else entirely – a fantastical, textual stream made of more or less intelligible words – and that ‘something’ is so foreign and so opaque as to be ultimately incommunicable. It and I merely stand face to face, stranger against stranger, with the proviso that the other (that which is not human, that which I am not) cannot respond to my call, whereas I must echo it by writing further still, as though to verify that I am as alone as it is, over and over again. Given the implacability of such solitude, aesthetic judgments are of an invariably solipsistic nature. It all boils down to my impossible relationship with the work, whether this ‘my’ is yours or mine. We are thus taken down two distinct and mutually exclusive paths: either 1) all taste is purely solitary; solely the lone subject’s opinion holds sway; or 2) quality is intrinsic to the work of art itself and it is entirely up to the individual who experiences it to recognize its greatness or lack thereof.
Another voice
Be that as it may, the writer speaks on behalf of a community, whether he likes it or not. Ludwig Wittgenstein teaches us that there can be no private language, because for a word to be a word, no matter how uncommon or insignificant, it must make sense to at least one other speaker. Though works of literature are able to foreground their opaqueness, they are written or uttered in a code that is shared by a nation or tribe, and their ultimate purpose is to account for the world around us. Literary canons, whether formal or informal, are conjured up by bodies of legislators – readers and critics – and it is these men and women who are the true ‘authors’ of the books they read, for they are the ones who hold authority over the work’s value. For a book to be called such, it requires a publisher: a reputable instance able to judge whether the manuscript is worthy of being shared and bought. Furthermore, for a book to be deemed ‘good’, it requires either a community of faithful followers or a critical institution. Otherwise, it is but a sheaf of pages that languish in the limbo of the mind or among one’s paraphernalia. Indeed, works of art require legitimization: a supreme judge – i.e. culture – must welcome them in its archives or museums or concert halls; it must render them public. Once again, two forking paths loom behind this assessment: either 1) works of literature are wholly subject to extraliterary edicts and do not exist outside of this eminently politicized decision-making process, thus overriding the works’ autonomy; or 2) the literary establishment exists in order to distinguish between good and bad writing, with the underlying assumption that these qualities, though intrinsic to the works themselves, lie dormant until a community of readers steps in to draw them out.
The first voice is dearest to me, although I don’t think it any righter than the other. Interestingly, both allow for the possibility of qualities immanent to the works themselves, but without going into detail, that hypothesis strikes me as the most nebulous one, as it is so much less gruelling and speculative to rely on the twin explanations of subjectivity and institutionalization. Either I like what I read/watch/listen to because it resonates with me, even if I don’t exactly understand why, or I gravitate towards a particular canonical work because its seal of approval is presumably deserved, just as I trust my GP even though I don’t entirely grasp the rationale behind his diagnosis. In fact, these two behaviours go hand in hand. Speaking for myself, I am instinctively drawn towards traditional Romanian music because I was conditioned to enjoy it, whereas my interest in the shakuhachi or Japanese flute is likelier to be a matter of personal taste. In other words, the sociological explanation works in most instances – incidentally accounting for the triumph of cultural studies – but even when it does not, the appeal to solipsism is there to save the day: de gustibus non est disputandum. After all, and despite the unsettling implications of such a statement, there is nothing inherently important about liking or disliking a work of art, and far greater human beings than I despise Western classical music as a whole.
This puts contemporary writing in a singular predicament. Either you write with a specific audience and message in mind, placing yourself firmly within the bounds of a sociologically definable community, or you do as I did and write as singularly as possible in the hope that such singularity will ultimately be diffracted into the work itself, i.e. that the resulting poem will stand on its own and radiate a more or less autonomous meaning beyond that of my intentions or those of a hypothetical readership. The former choice is by the far the more sensible one. It conceives of the text as a form of connective tissue instead of an alien entity or a black hole, and its aims are infinitely likelier to succeed as a result. Instead of Beckett’s Texts for Nothing, we get to witness a leap towards something that lies wholly beyond the text’s self-enclosed blindness – a welcoming opening or aperture of sorts. Why would anyone go against such a poetics?
For what it’s worth, the suspended state I am sucked into whenever I start writing consistently takes me down the opposite path. Under no circumstances do I want my verse to tell a tale or an anecdote, both of which are primarily the domain of the novel. I firmly believe that the poem’s ‘reality’ stems exclusively from its words and not from some underlying narrative. When the call surges, I write whatever courses through my mind and I erase or transform it as I see fit, without any reference to an event other than that which unfolds as of its writing. This is not to say that reality is somehow wiped out during the creative process; it simply means that day-to-day pragmatic concerns and mechanisms of cause-and-effect, regardless of their seemingly insuperable import, are no longer (my) language’s primary plane of reference. A different kind of ‘scape’ rises to the surface of things and saturates them with a new glow, or gloom.
The nagging question, then, is this: ‘why seek to publish such things at all? Why not just keep them in the drawer where they belong? If you’re not going to be part of a community and share its fundamental aims, if you refuse to ground your writing in the real, if you reject the “scene’s” judgment, then why seek a readership at all? Why are you so hellbent on communicating your brush with the incommunicable?’ In all honesty, I cannot provide a satisfying answer to any of these questions. At best I could attempt a lengthy explanation steeped in cheap academic rhetoric, but ultimately none of my reasons would be convincing to one – and I assume this is true of most people – who is insensitive to my sense of sense, one whose “selftaste” (Gerard Manley Hopkins) is radically at odds with mine. All that’s left, then, as always, is to search for what Georges Bataille called ‘the community of those who have no community’, knowing full well that such a promise is as theatrical as all others, and as inconsequential.
I will take my leave shortly, but before I go, I’d like to provide you with a less abstract explanation of what happened, even if it won’t clarify everything. Its terms will be mainly sociological – the approach likeliest to cover the most ground, in my opinion. Let’s start with the Canadian poetry scene’s criteria, which, admittedly, aren’t all that different from the rest of the Western world’s at this point in time.
1. I say ‘Canadian’ because unless you’ve reached the upper tier (the laureate’s pantheon), no one abroad would even so much as consider getting a foreigner’s work published in print (and this is equally true the other way around, by the way).
2. Depending on your temperament and/or aesthetic preferences, you start by sending out poems to magazines. Better yet, you should move to the city likeliest to be inhabited by influential poet-editors whom you admire, even in our internet-ridden age. Then you must scheme your way into their cocktail parties and shamelessly imitate their writing – with a slight twist, so as to not come across as an outright plagiarist – until they admit you into their ranks and publish your submissions before they even take shape.
3. By this point – it doesn’t take much! – you may or may not have already relinquished whatever singular thing made poetry tick for you in the first place, so you might as well go all the way and network your way into ubiquity on the internet. Get in touch with out-of-town poets via e-mail; try to get invited to their readings and invite them to your own.
4. In the meantime, continue writing as much as possible. Remember, you are a disciple of the venerable X and possibly the august Y as well, but you also belong to a newer generation, so make sure to pick up on whatever fashionable effects your contemporaries are currently peddling. By blending the two orientations, you will give rise to a simultaneously recognizable and purportedly forward-looking product.
5. Regardless of your aesthetic persuasion – are you an avant-garde sympathizer or a narrative descriptivist / confessionalist? – remember that, as a Canadian poet, you are expected to deal with recognizable themes, themes that are roughly identical to those explored by other living anglophone poets the world over: national & international history / identity politics / environmentalism / post-colonialism / consumer culture / the internet / politics writ large / obscure historical figures, etc. Ideally, your writing should be impassioned when dealing with injustice and ironic when tackling the rest. And no matter how far you swerve from the nexus of narrative discourse, don’t forget that it is the fountainhead, now and always. What’s in a name like ‘poetry’ anyway?
6. Once you’ve thoroughly absorbed these (mostly) unwritten rules, increase your institutional, academic presence by all means necessary. Your aim shouldn’t so much be to write as to tattoo your name on everyone’s lips. Keep up the good work for a few decades until you become canonized.
7. Congratulations, you are now a poetic institution unto yourself!
So I how well do I fare against this set of commandments?
1. Though the poetry I wrote was in English, it conducts itself as if it were French, not least because it is the language closest to me at this point in time, but also because I am generally unimpressed with the Canadian tradition. Setting aside the francophone scene, US and British poets are, on average, far more interesting to me, but their venues are off-limits.
2. I would consider sending individual poems to Canadian magazines, except I don’t care for any of them as far as I can tell.
3. For better or for worse, I take issue with poetry’s descent into aggressive marketing tactics. I subscribe to poetry as a ‘test of solitude’ (Emmanuel Hocquard).
4. I have my models – Paul Celan, Jacques Dupin, Michael Palmer, Rosmarie Waldrop, Charles Olson, Barbara Guest, T. S. Eliot, Stéphane Mallarmé, Jean-Michel Reynard, etc – but literally none of them are Canadian. Clearly, I should move back to France and leave English behind for good or pay more attention to the Québécois scene – except I have no desire to do that. I am Canadian, after all, which affords me the right to remain here amidst strangers, and the music of English metre pleases me more at the time of this post.
5. Though I highly sympathize with all of the aforementioned causes, poetic militantism strikes me as the worst kind of armchair activism. No one reads poetry aside from poets and unsuspecting students. The latter instance notwithstanding, which generally implies reading canonical (dead) poets, your sestina or post-Mallarméan throw of the die on the environment is a sermon to the choir, so you might as well stick to what is properly poetical about poetry (if such a thing exists) and seek to impel a much-needed political revolution through other means.
6. See #3.
7. Need I say anything?
I suppose two things remain. First, to gain a better understanding of my literary predicament, which is undoubtedly that of countless others as well (this is the aim of my doctoral thesis, at least in part); second, to write in spite of it all and with no future and no expectations. Though there are more published writers than ever, there are more unpublished ones, as well. There is a sense in which obscurity is the destination and wellspring of poetry. Marjorie Waldrop calls it ‘blindsight’: when you write, you believe you see through your tongue but you are in fact as blind as the pitch-black darkness of your closed mouth. Some of these attempts will seep through the cracks and reach a wider audience due to partly explainable, partly aleatory factors, but most of it will starve and pine and perish.
So with this and so much else.
Ever yours,
CT
cosmin toma 