The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral
edited by Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep
Ahsahta Press, 2012
576 pages / $28.00 buy from Ahsahta Press or SPD
1. The Arcadia Project is not in the least a conclusive project, but rather quite inconclusive. As stated in the Introduction: “an anthology such as this one must be a living and motile assemblage.”
2. Editors Joshua Corey and G.C. Waldrep do not contribute any of their own poetic work. This cuts both ways, as while it shows a measure of humility on the parts of any editor not to grandstand it is also nearly always worth having an editor’s own work (if existent) on hand for clarity of comparison’s sake within the presentation of any selection. How a poet writes interestingly reflects on how a poet reads.
3. Corey pens the Introduction, attesting: “certain tendencies are discernible in the work presented here, all of it first published after 1995” and that “Postmodern pastoral offers a means of mapping the shifting terrain of that world while maintaining its ethical consciousness that the map must never be mistaken for the territory.”
4. Waldrep doesn’t add one word of his own to the book itself. But elsewhere: http://arcadiaproject.net/the-woods-the-technology/ He offers up that it was questions such as:
Which factored into how the anthology came to be, and he adds:
Between 2008 and 2011 Josh and I sifted through hundreds of books—published since 1995 by North American writers, generously defined—as well as hundreds of submissions that came in over our electronic transom, looking for work that would guide us into the forest and try to show us something: work that would leave us alone together (in or in spite of our discrete alonenesses); work that challenged us and terrified us and moved us, that spoke to or around or from within our ecological predicament as 21st-century human creatures.
The resulting anthology is not meant to be definitive, rather provocative and generative, an early draft version of an ongoing conversation between a wide array of poets and the world we live in.
5. The lack of having any such editorial presentation of the framework behind the book’s conception within the book itself feels a disservice to readers.
6. As presented, there’s little tying together of these texts. They are left as isolated cries in a wilderness of language.
7. Poems are divided into four sections: “New Transcendentalisms,” “Textual Ecologies,” “Local Powers,” and “Necro/Pastoral” without any explicit rendering of what may or may not be meant by any of these broadly inclusive and quite permeable categorizations.
8. Questions linger, such as why not include some prose? Both statements of any kind from contributors and/or fiction, non-fiction, or works of theoretical positioning.
9. There’s a band but no bandwagon. Dozens of wheels but no cart.
10. As a reader I yearn to relate these texts in some way. To locate some vein or—what one feels is heard as a bad word by many poets these days—tradition within which the work does participate and indeed does seek continue. Of course doing so may prove some “Romantic inheritances” unavoidable.
11.
“God’s art,” Dante says in De Monarchia, “which is nature.” In our own arts, striving to speak, with words, pictures, gestures, buildings, assemblings of objects in ecologies of feeling-thought, we in turn create a little nature of we are, ideas of Man.
– Robert Duncan “San Francisco, June 1968”
12. I note obvious semblances of such “ecologies of feeling-thought” throughout this book, but aside from my own knowledge of where interest in Duncan happens to be shared within the critical work of some contributors (notably Stephen Collis and Peter O’Leary) I find little to nothing which directly mentions, let alone addresses, his work and/or influence.
13. It is similarly the case with Ronald Johnson. I especially keep wondering why nothing of his is included… The Shrubberies (Flood Editions) appeared in 2001 well after 1995. And what a splendid poem-series that is, which would easily seem suitable for inclusion under any, or all, of the section-titles.
14. On a side-note, I discovered one of the most pleasing things from reading the bio-note for Johnson’s literary executor, Peter O’Leary: mention of a forthcoming new edition of Johnson’s postmodern epic poem Ark. Why not a Collected Johnson as well? And/or his prose?
15. O’Leary’s own long poem included here, “The Phosphorescence of Thought” is itself nearly worth the purchase of the book.
16. Ronald Johnson is of course dead. Gustaf Sobin is dead too, but he’s been included.
17. Enough ranting. Have I been ranting?
18. Jack Collom’s and Lyn Heinian’s collaborative collection Situations, Sings was published a few years back by Adventures in Poetry, it’s totally great. “The Woods” appears here grouped under “Textual Ecologies.” Dig these lines:
Suspicion. Sometimes through the unperceived nights that surround all dreams
there emerge
Explanations in the form of spandrels, to read as we read a redstart,
Employment as a nurse, or rolypolies (pillbugs) in the dirt
Tracks which are closer to nature than mind but not as close as insanity,
Healthily entertained. I too have been nuts, loopy, hopeful, ungrammatical and
out of tune.
I think the woods is made of many minor keys. Mornings
Confuse the song so as to continue the lives that dreams criticize
Keeping them from entropy—then all too often being accused of
Existentialism, as if that were the same as despair. …
19. My favorite selections are the longest ones. Such as Brian Teare’s “Transcendental Grammar Crown” a ring of sonnets whose lines are widely spaced which is found grouped under (no surprise) “New Transcendentalisms.” Teare’s poetry keeps what’s precious hanging delicately perched on tips of language’s beauty but rather miraculously avoids inflecting any damage upon itself, despite its risky behavior.
to detail starting small with grasses
flowers then trees we don’t know nor rocks
days to recite the names of them all
seems heaven enough to us because what is
language that “categories of thought
embodied in individual living forms” thread through us
& things equally —matter a sidereal charity
& doesn’t it bract doesn’t it sepal & send seed splitting sheath
into soil doesn’t our flesh the very fossils tremble bedrock
(from “The very air (Faith Reason)”)
20. Other notable lengthy poem-sequences, include: Jennifer Moxley’s “The Sense Record,” Peter Gizzi’s “Some values of Landscape and Weather,” Brenda Iijima’s “Panthering,” Will Alexander’s “On Scorpions & Swallows,” Juliana Spahr’s “Gentle Now, Don’t Add to Heartache,” Amy King’s “A Geography of Pleasure,” and Stephen Collis’ “Blackberries.”
21. Again and again, I find myself wondering about the selection process. For example, Standard Shaefer’s sonnet-length “The L.A. River” is here, but none of Lewis MacAdams’ book-length poem The River addressed to the same body of water in the same city and which is just as adventurously on point in terms of fitting in quite nicely as “Necro/pastoral,” or most certainly under “Local Powers.”
22. An obviously incomplete and quite random list of The Arcadia Project’s unrecognized predecessors, progenitors, peers, and life-mates from out my own reading (in no particular order): Lorine Niedecker, Gertrude Stein, Whitman, Dickinson, Hawthorne, Emerson, Melville, Poe, Charles Brockden Brown (talk about “Necro/Pastoral”! his Wieland introduces Charles Dickens’ spontaneous combustion of a literary character into American Lit), Faulkner, Charles Olson, WCW, Robinson Jeffers, Gary Snyder, Lew Welch, Jack Kerouac, Ed Dorn, Philip Whalen, Lisa Jarnot, Ted Berrigan, Joanne Kyger, Alice Notley, Bernadette Mayer, Eileen Myles, John Cage, Elaine Equi, Jonathan Williams, Jack Spicer, Anselm Hollo, Hannah Wiener, Filip Marinovich, Susan Howe, Anselm Berrigan, Etel Adnan, Ornette Coleman, Sotére Torregian, John Wieners, Amiri Baraka, Charles Bukowski, John Coletti, Chris Martin, Gerrit Lansing, Gregory Corso, Kevin Opstedal, Brenda Coultas, Eileen Tabios, Micah Ballard, F.A. Nettelbeck, Cedar Sigo, Jack Hirschman, David Brazil, Julian Brolaski… all whose work is deeply at play in any sense of North American Pastoral. There are so many more.
23. C.S. Giscombe’s prose poems “from Inland” earthily dunk the reader in unexpected poetic turns of cultural utterance.
Trim photographs of uninflected speech hung over the prairie, sound’s origin. Eros came up out of its den in the embankment—came out tawny, came out swarthy, came out more “dusky” than “sienna.” The sky was a glass of water. White men say cock and black men say dick. One gets even in the midwest, one gets even in the midwest, one gets even in the midwest. Eros was a common barnyard pest…
(“Day Song”)
&
Open love. In a recurring dream about the prairie, a thin hedge—along some railroad embankment—in which there’s a gap to step through again and again, for me to step through, out onto the view itself. Not the literary ballad, articulated, but out onto the continent.
(“Afro-Prairie”)
24. A sense of “Necro/Pastoral” is well summed up in Catherine Wagner’s “A Form of Verse:”
Master,
make me collage it.
Wagner’s opening puts out the call, asking to be ordered to get to work. She’s looking for the means to create from out the ruins of society’s flailing about with language, as it were. But she’s too full of verb and sass to simply trust in poetry’s lot.
“Recycle language
for a greener consciousness”
—that’s easy.
Everyone’s always done it.
We must be getting greener
by the hour.
25. Ironically (or perhaps not so much, considering his own interest in poetry from North America) British poet J.H. Prynne strikes the perfect closing note in his poem, “Star Damage at Home:”
…this fecund hint
I merely live in.
& leaving that in the air I return to my reading.
Tags: 25 Points, Ahsahta Press, G.C. Waldrep, Joshua Corey, The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral
Here’s an earlier, still recent take on the anthology by Jeff Nagy,
co-editor of Claudius App and brilliant contributor to BOMB and Artforum
magazines. Joshua Corey also responds here to Nagy.
http://bombsite.com/articles/6928
And speaking of Claudius App, the new issue is just out two days back. Four
issues on and in, CA has quickly become all the poetic chatter: a location
like no other in web space for poetry-of-the-now matters. Each issue an art
installation of design and techno-wizardry on its own… This issue is
conceptually stolen from the Poetry Foundation’s app (TM). Watch out. The PF
has been known, in past year, or so, to call the cops on clever poets who test
their Museum-like territory–and to then petition judges to send the
mischief makers to prison.
http://theclaudiusapp.com/
5., 7., & 21. However inclusive and permeable the section categorizations, they do–as do “Arcadia”, “postmodern”, and “pastoral”–constitute editorial presentation.
“wondering about selection process” — Endemically inspired by any anthology. I think you’re right; no talk at all (if there isn’t any) about principles is a mistake–especially the principle et ego in Arcadia.
10. –and not just in “pastoral”: Romantic might be continuing to be undisinheritable and impossible thoroughly to reject.
18. She’s hejinous, not heinous. (It’s ‘Hejinian’.)
22. As a pre-’95 North-American-pastoral legator, I’d add Elizabeth Bishop.
I’d also make room for the urbanity of George Oppen, keenly sensitive to ‘pasture’.
I’d also be surprised and disappointed if many or most post-’95 postmodern-pastoral poets were insensible of the mutual invasion of ‘nature’ and ‘tool’ in Paul Celan.
24. Don’t know about “sass”, but ‘wise-ass’ greatly–and with great welcome–leavens any enviro loaf.
25. Another not-nearly-well-enough-known postmodern-pastoral cousin: Bill Griffiths
–from The Primrose City, a great poem in a wonderful book (The Mud Fort)
26. You don’t mention Walter Benjamin. Do they?
[…] 25 Points: The Arcadia Project: North American Postmodern Pastoral | HTMLGIANT. […]
One stunning piece in the Claudius App, by the way, is
a brand-new, extensive interview by the editors with the great
conceptual/institutional-critique artist Daniel Buren, who sent the Guggenheim
Minimalist crowd into a major snit back in 1971. It’s an important document,
with much in it that has suggestive relation to the unfolding fad for Conceptual
Poetry hereabouts.
Also of note is a new essay by Chris Nealon, author of The Matter of
Capital: Poetry and Crisis in The American Century, published by Harvard last
year. The essay in CA is an appreciation of the UK’s major a-g poetic figure,
J.H Prynne, though at a critical angle to Prynne’s Adornian “motivations.”
Motivations that have very much informed certain vanguard currents here in the
U.S., too, of course. The issue has much other material by younger key UK
poets.
Rob Halpern’s translucinated essay on Conceptual Poetry’s ideologies is
priceless… And the translations by Monica de la Torre from the
recently late Uruguayan poet Amanda Berenguer are too, and to which I’m
especially partial, since they will be in a book selection of her work I am
preparing. Please check these out: Berenguer is an astonishing poet!
Nagy’s dismissal of the anthology–that is, of the premises he abstracts from it–is interesting: when nature is everywhere and everything is ‘natural’, pasture is everywhere–there’s no discernment to make between ‘jungle’ and ‘garden’, nor recognition of ‘country’ as a zone between ‘city’ and ‘wilderness’. Everywhere is a suburb and Arcadia is an Everything Word, and “pastoral”, a heap of ideologies rather than a place whence critically to expose dominant self-understandings.
For decades now, these perspectives have been contended when (some) classicists talk about, say, Theocritus and Virgil.
I see from Corey’s response to Nagy’s criticism (that Kent links to) that the anthologists do acknowledge Benjamin’s ‘non-hierarchical archive’.
The argument that the book isn’t well-ordered enough and clear in its premises seems to fly in the face of the anthologists’ (I guess) desire not to impose order too heavy-handedly on what they understand to be a heterogenous mass of poems.
One could argue against non-hierarchy (and it would be against Benjamin’s book and a lot of postmodern thought–maybe all of it) — that non-hierarchy’s positions and processes are incoherent, that it’s self-congratulatorily deluded, and so on. Nagy, for example, seems to me to be saying that (at least) this ‘non-hierarchical archive’ of poems is not only ideologically powerless, but that it would eat away at any critique of ideology that might arise from “pastoral”.
Is that your – Patrick’s – criticism, too? –that the lack of organization of the book dismantles and prevents (and advances the prevention of) any use of “pastoral” to criticize ideological self-understandings of dominant agencies of world-manipulation?
I see in Corey’s response to Nagy’s criticism (that Kent links to) mention of Celan, whose poetry is shot through with pieces of ‘nature’, but whom you’d be hard-pressed to demonstrate as a ‘nature poet’.
Here’s my translation of that little poem Celan wrote under the sign of Rilke:
Threadsuns
over the gray-black desolation.
A tree-
high thought
resonates with the tone of light: there are
still tunes to sing beyond
people.
(“Hejinian’s,” not “Heinian’s.”)
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