“What an irony that the most exciting collection of essays on Postwar American Poetry should come, not out of New York or San Francisco, but out of an (evidently) brilliant conference organized by  Michel Delville and Christine Pagnoulle in Liège, Belgium! The Mechanics of the Mirage is remarkable for its range (from Peter Middleton's central reassessment of the early 70s to Steve Evans' prolegomenon for post-1989 poetry, from reconsiderations of Robert Lowell and Gary Snyder to first takes on Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian), and the essays also display real theoretical sophistication. Then, too, Mechanics features new poetry by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Paul Hoover and Maxine Chernoff, Kassia Fleisher and Joe Amato performing in collaboration, and Jennifer Moxley. Every student of the contemporary poetry scene will want to have a copy.”   Marjorie Perloff

David Zauhar, Samizdat, No 6 (Fall 2000), pp. 12-14.
http://durationpress.com/samizdat/

Generally, academic conferences are ghastly occurrences. Worst Case Scenario: hastily-written papers are ready by and for toadies who are present only to try on new poses. Conferences are easy to make fun of, which is why American journalists ridicule them whenever possible. But the works collected in The Mechanics of the Mirage (which emerged out of a conference sponsored by the Université de Liège in Belgium) are evidence that good things can happen when smart people gather at academic conferences.

     The Mechanics of the Mirage consists of three sections: essays addressing issues pertaining to American poetry; actual poetry by writers who attended the conference; and readings of a diverse range of poets, ranging from Robert Lowell and Bob Dylan (in the same essay) to Gary Snyder, Rosmarie Waldrop, Bruce Andrews, and Shirley Kaufman. Rather than pretending to offer a comprehensive account of the field, editors Delville and Pagnoulle, who teach at the Université de Liège, wisely attempt only to sample the fare offered by American poetry since the Second World War. To paraphrase Yeats, “The one thing is certain: / There is too much of it.” Even if one follows the editors and limits the scope of “American ” poetry to poetry written in English by writers living in one of the 50 United States, there is too much for any one collection of essays and poems to treat comprehensively.

      Before turning to the essays, I’d like to say a few words about the poems collected in this volume. These poems are not discussed in the essay, so one could wonder what they are doing here. It’s easy for me, as a recovering academic, to imagine English professors who think poetry is extraneous to the concerns of professors writing about poetry. The beauty of this book, however, lies in the fact that the poems are presented, bravely, as standing on their own. One could read them as exemplifying certain trends commented upon in the “Issues” section (which a few of them do), or one could see them as offering counterpoints to the practices examined in the “Readings” section (ditto).

     There are poems written by Keith Waldrop, Rosmarie Waldrop, Paul Hoover, Maxine Chernoff, and Jennifer Moxley, along with the text of a performance by Kass Fleisher and Joe Amato. There are obvious limitations to this selection, comprising as it does the writings of four households in the United States (only Jennifer Moxley is not married to another writer represented in this section). Again, however, in a book of 303 pages, 30 of them devoted to poetry, the reader shouldn’t expect much more than a sample. If these poems do have a unifying theme, it is best expressed by Paul Hoover in his critical essay from the “Issues” section, where he writes, “other realisms . . . are possible.”

     In Keith Waldrop’s “Standard Candles,” one finds a surrealism that has incorporated Wittgenstein along with surrealism’s usual suspects, Freud and Marx:

noon and the
brink of death and I
roll in the snow, depending
on the weather
Let us assume the saints had something besides gravity.

     In what sense does the speaker depend on the weather? In what sense did the saints possess (and use) gravity? Were the saint violating the laws of gravity, or social convention? Keith Waldrop’s realism is based not on the supposed clarity of the route from language to the real, but on the ambiguity that can make the trip more interesting. Similarly, here is the closing of Rosmarie Waldrop’s “Delta Waves”:

Sentences enclosing and opening out. Perspective changing endlessly around the interloper. In a fragmentary passage, I held a pigeon in my hand till the trembling stopped, but not the faint, rapid heartbeat. After such intimacy, how personify the holy ghost?

     Despite the subject of this poem—a speaker interacting with the animal world and suspecting a religious significance— it’s hard to imagine Bill Moyers interviewing Waldrop for his next PBS mini-series on poetry.

      Nor for that matter will any of the other poets be appearing with Moyers (though it is fun to imagine Moyers interviewing Kass Fleisher and Joe Amato, but more on them later). Paul Hoover, for example, writes unsentimentally of a ubiquitous American place, “In the Landing Zone”:

Where the proud and the vacant
don’t live up to their names, where the unconscious hammers
inside a clean cupboard, where civic is ironic
and a salesman’s shadow burns, where you lie in the shards
of the metaphors of the age, citizen of a place
yet to be discovered but soon to be replete. . .

      This poem, which unfolds one continuous sentence over 30 couplets, can only be damaged by selective quotation. So I can only apologize as I quote the ending, which also captures a sense of living in millennial America.

where clean and well-lit
are all you can remember,

where truth is approximation
and time the best disguise.

     Besides being fun to read, this poem also suggests why, though we are in the midst of a New Dark Age, no one seems to mind: we live, as the nearest shopping mall will demonstrate, in a clean, well-lighted Dark Age.

     Maxine Chernoff’s “Todorov at Ellis Island” uses the image of a migrating theorist to speculate on the hazards of migrating theory:

He felt swallowed up
by the 200 stairs,
by a procedure based on
external criteria,
plot and genre likely
to become a public charge.

      Theory travels in other poems here, too: the use of French thought to comprehend the American theme is the topic of one of Jennifer Moxley’s works. “The Lock“ is based on a painting by Jean Honoré Fragonard. Here Moxley enacts a meditation on form as something which both restricts and permits exploration. The second stanza opens with an ambiguous statement:

Locked by the practiced sense, our intimate, stubborn,
memories are textured,. . . / . . . roughened by ignorance
but not yet gallant for the love of frank luxury. . .

Building on this passage, the next passage meditates on the erotics of form:

We are exactly aroused by arrangement,
as the unaccustomed eye in too much light
does redden, weep and shut. . .

      If I were more of a Foucauldian than I am, I would here launch a meditation about the relationship between bondage in the S & M sense and the liberating illusions of pleasure unlimited. But I’m not, and besides, Moxley’s poem, entitled “The Lock,” pursues these speculations quite well on its own: “what sort of man / would leave us here, resistance out of reach?”

     Before moving on to the essays, a few words about Kass Fleisher and Joe Amato’s performance piece on the erotics of collaboration, or more precisely, the erotics of conflict in the guise of collaboration. This work, called “An &/or Peace Performance,” is presented as two texts facing each other across the same page, and thus cannot be quoted in this format. It is, however, terrific to read aloud, especially with someone else taking the opposing role. For me, the highlights come with Amato’s line, “let us not to the marriage of 2 minds admit collaboration,” and Fleisher’s declaration, earlier in the piece, “I am not a post-feminist, I’m a postal feminist” (as in “going postal,” which in American media-speak refers to behaving like an armed and dangerous “disgruntled postal employee,” whereas “post-feminist” judging from the magazines and websites I’ve seen is the retro-bimboism of 20-something professional women whose mothers broke glass ceilings for them).

      I’ve quoted extensively from these poems because I wanted to demonstrate that the poems are, for lack of a better word, “theoretically” insightful and engaged. Poetry is perhaps the oldest form of cultural engagement, and the poems in this volume, few though they are, illuminate contemporary culture more thoroughly than most of the critical interventions launched from the range of humanistic disciplines.

Turning to the essays (which I am not disparaging by virtue of that last comment nor the next): they are all well written and soundly edited without being bloodless. This is praise directed at each of the writers and both of the editors. If I had a choice, there would not be two essays devoted to Bob Dylan’s lyrics, though Christophe Den Tandt’s “Dylan Goes Electric: Inventing a Lyrical Idiom for the Postmodern Distraction Factory” is a good essay that does what it sets out to do. However, given that the strength of his essay is in relating Dylan’s work in the pop industry to postwar poetic practices, this essay may have been better placed in the “Issues” section than the “Readings” section. Similarly, Astrid Franke’s “Public Voices in American Poetry: Robert Lowell and Bob Dylan” has some very intelligent things to say about poetry in a culture of celebrity, where the only way that a poet can be a significant public presence is, it seems, through becoming a part of the media circus. Lowell could be a ringmaster because of his Boston Brahmin roots, Dylan (and Ginsberg for that matter) had to risk being clowns.

     The other essays in “Readings” cover a surprising range of poets. There are two essays devoted to giants of the New American Poetry from the early 60s: Frank O’Hara and Gary Snyder (by Sarah Riggs and Nick Selby, respectively). Also, two essays treat writers to whom the label “Language Poets” is often applied: Bruce Andrews and Lyn Hejinian, discussed by Mark Leahy and Peter Nichols, and there is an essay on the publisher, translator, and fine poet, Rosmarie Waldrop, written by Kornelia Freitag. Finally, there are a pair of essays dedicated to writers of the more conventional post-confessional lyric, in this case Rita Dove (written by Valérie Bada) and Shirley Kaufman (written by Frank Kearful). Unlike the other essays, which call attention to a neglected aspect of a writer’s work, Kearful’s inquiry calls attention to a writer pretty much neglected by all circles. Unlike the other subjects of these essays, Kaufman has in fact lived abroad, in Jerusalem, for much of her adult life. Her poems are of the plain lyric variety (of the sort presumably favored by “Official Verse Culture”) but with a historical and rhetorical depth that I hadn’t realized until I read Kearful’s essay. In fact, it is Kearful who points out the connection between Kaufman’s work and the not-so-obvious formal innovations of one of her teachers, George Oppen. And as I’ve said before, I’m sure that any reader will find something to pursue in the work of at least one of the poets discussed. I only focus on Kearful’s essay on Shirley Kaufman because, for the most part, her work is new to me.

      Finally, the most interesting of the essays collected in The Mechanics of the Mirage occur in the section called “Issues.” Here one finds a variety of attempts to make sense of postwar American poetry. The editors make no discernible attempt to forge a consensus (the way one would forge a check) here. The essays do, however, appear to build on a couple of common themes. Paul Hoover’s “Murder and Closure: On the Impression of Reality in American Poetry,” along with Pierre Lagayette’s “‘And We Must Rise, Act:’ Postwar Poetry and the Aesthetics of Power” explore the relationship between aesthetics and the larger world in poetry. Robert Archambeau’s “Roads Less Traveled: Two Paths out of Modernism in Post-War American Poetry” extends the meditations of the first two authors, while attending to the historical dimensions of any aesthetic activity.

     The next two essays are a bit more chronologically specific: in fact, Peter Middleton’s title is about as chronologically specific as one can get: “1973.” Steve Evans’ title covers a little more ground: “The American Avant-Garde After 1989: Notes Toward a New History.” The final three essays, by Antoine Cazé, Michel Delville, and Maria Damon, deal with the important questions of margins, in terms of theory (Cazé), practice (Delville) and society (Damon). The Mechanics of the Mirage is worth reading for the poems and for the essays in the “Readings” section. It is worth owning for these essays in “Issues.”

     Archambeau’s essay explores the continuing legacy of modernism, arguing that “it probably isn’t going too far to say that all poetry being written in America now could usefully be discussed under rubrics that attach one prefix or another to the term ‘modernist’: anti-modernist, late-modernist, post-modernist, neo-modernist, maybe even pop-modernist.” For his case-study, Archambeau takes some poets who were taught at Stanford by minor poet and cranky critic Yvor Winters (whose own relationship to modernism dramatically changed as he aged). Poets like Robert Pinsky, Robert Haas, John Peck, and John Matthias each related differently to their former mentor, and consequently each poet offers a different way of writing “out of” modernism (and Archambeau is aware of the ambiguous meaning of the phrase “writing out of” as “going beyond” and/or “being grounded in” modernist poetics). While not making excessive claims for the value of Winters’ poetry, Archambeau brings together poets not previously considered in the same essay, and shows how their disparate practices are related to the still-ongoing evolution of modernism.

     Steve Evans’ essay is the most ambitious in the collection, one better suited for a book than an article. “The American Avant-Garde After 1989: Notes Toward a History” heroically attempts to trace the ongoing transformation of American poetry in the past decade-plus since the collapse of the Soviet Union. After Evans provides historical contexts, he makes a survey of six younger American poets. Most of these poets are writers known to Evans (and others) through a variety of recent journals and anthologies like The Exact Change Yearbook, Aerial, Crayon, Poetics Journal, and the Impercipient Lecture Series that Evans co-edited with Jennifer Moxley (one of the poets he profiles, incidentally). Acknowledging that his “constellation” of poets is “neither entirely objective nor remotely exhaustive,” Evans does what he sets out to do, which is, simply, to define the criteria by which a “contemporary” avant-garde can consider itself to be contemporary. Evans’ essay, combined with Archambeau’s essay, offers about as close to a comprehensive map of American poetry as anyone could ask for in this age, an age which Evans aptly characterizes as “resistant to synopsis and paraphrase.”

The Mechanics of the Mirage is itself resistant to synopsis, which is, of course, what makes it a valuable collection of essays and poems. After reading the book, it becomes clear that the subtitle, “Postwar American Poetry,” is not a closed-off period, but an ongoing process. The strength of this book is that it will not date as rapidly as most books published in the year 2000 concerning recent American poetry or poems.

The Mechanics of the Mirage: Postwar American Poetry gathers together papers presented at the 'PostWar American Poetry' conference held at the University of Liège in March 1999. It may seem an unlikely place for critics, poets and readers from across the world to congregate to consider the trajectories, arcs and cul-de-sacs of the cultural politics of American poetry; but this is part of a concerted effort by the editors and the Department of English at the university to institute a rolling programme of conferences, readings and edited books which foster debate about American poetics, for which we ought to be very grateful in this age when poetry always appears to be the poor cousin in the field of literary study. And if this programme promotes the quality of some of the work found within this collection, then we have even greater reason to be grateful. For this collection, although something of a miscellany, contains within it a clutch of excellent essays.
      The structure of the book is tripartite: the first section, 'Issues', contains essays which raise general concepts and matters which deal with the more abstract concerns of poetics; 'Poems' contains what is something of an odd conjunction of poetry by Keith and Rosmarie Waldrop, Jennifer Moxley, Maxine Chernoff, Paul Hoover, and the transcription of a performance piece by H. Kassia Fleisher and/or Joe Amato; while the final section, 'Readings', contains essays which are individual 'case studies', essays more closely focused upon the work of individual writers. These include essays on Frank O'Hara, Gary Snyder, Robert Lowell, Bob Dylan, Bruce Andrews, Lyn Hejinian, Shirley Kaufman, Rita Dove and Rosmarie Waldrop.
      Most of the writers in this volume are concerned with the contribution of contemporary poetry to the feasibiliry and possibility of a political dialogue. They are also concerned with the cultural marginalization of poetry, and whether this undoes the prospect of a poetry which can make an impact in the world. The title The Mechanics of the Mirage is borrowed from a poem by Rosmarie Waldrop, and points to one of the central thematic preoccupations of the essays in the section 'Issues', which is the processes of representation and realism in poetry. In particular, essayists seem to concentrate on the way language conjures up absences to forge the illusion of presence, a feat of legerdemain which makes the unreal appear real. This is an aspect about which Paul Hoover's essay is especially concerned, scrutinizing as it does the mechanics of aesthetic realism, in particular the work of the so-called Language writers. Sometimes sceptical of the interruptive rhetoric of Language writing, Hoover nevertheless offers some interesting remarks about Ron Silliman's 'new sentence' and the ways in which 'a difficult realism is part of language poetry's moral agency - the refashioning of meaning to reflect the technological, perceptual, and moral remaking of post-Vietnam society'.
      This essay forms only one of a set of essays that are concerned with the poetics and practices of Language writing. Peter Middleton's essay is a very incisive and interesting attempt to trace the genealogy of Language writing, focusing upon the year 1973, and amounts to an excellent example of a synchronic literary criticism without the exaggerated Foucauldian genuflections so often brought to bear in the new historicist mode. Juxtaposing anthropology, history, poetics and sociology, this important essay isolates the emergence of Language writing in what amounts to a matrix of failures within public space. The political and social function of poetry in public space is a crucial element of the debate in this book about feasibility and possibility of a poetry as political discourse. Antoine Cazé's essay addresses itself to the marginality of poetry, focusing particularly on the work of Bob Perelman and Charles Bernstein; while Michel Delville also tackles the politics of marginality, and offers a very useful discussion of the presence of post-lyricism in Language poetry, which is often criticized for ts abandonment of the lyric 'I'. Delville shows how the writers have not so much abandoned the lyrical 'I' as inscribed 'an awareness of the complexities of narrative as weIl as of the irremediable fissure betWeen the writing and the wri tten self'. Far from abandoning the self in poetry, Delville argues that language poetry explores the inbetween-ness of the public language of prose and the private realm of the lyric, by giving us access to the changing present of the poet's consciousness which focuses upon the self's strategies of self- expression and therefore anticipates and invalidates possible objections to the poem's sentimental or epiphanic orientation.
      One of Delville's examples of a Language writer who exemplifies this shift in the sense of the autobiographical is Lyn Hejinian. In an absorbing essay, Peter Nicholls picks up and teases out this strand, turning his attention specifically to the repeated claims that Hejinian's work exemplifies a focus 'almost exclusively on modes of self-reflexivity and on a subversion of conventional models of the self'. Nicholls is concerned with the manner in which Hejinian opens up ethical dimensions, and 'to read her attention to forms of introspection as a means to negotiate particular social perspectivrs. In short, what ties might be seen to bind experimental poetic forms to a responsiveness to the world which, in turn, might embody a certain responsibility?' ln a close scrutiny of Hejinian's engagement with Gertrude Stein and her development of a 'phenomenological literature', and ranging widely across Hejinian's works from Writing is an Aid to Memory to the latest ollaboration with Leslie Scalapino entitled Sight, Nicholls continues and extends his ongoing important consideration of the way in which poetry can contribute to an ethical perspective.
      Yet these essays are not only focused upon the Language writers. Robert Archambeau considers what he discerns are the two paths out of modernism in postwar poetry, the anti-modernist 'discursive poetry of someone like Robert Pinsky, and the 'postmodern intertextuality poets like John Matthais and John Peck. Pierre Lagayette considers other avenues in postwar American poetry, in the work of poets like Adrienne Rich, Robinson Jeffers and Robert Lowell. Yet perhaps the most polemical essay belongs to Steve Evans, who sets out a manifesto-Iike claim for the emergence of a new generation of young American poets in the year 1989. Evans argues that these poets (such as Lisa Jarnot, Lee Ann Brown, Jennifer Moxley, Bill Luoma and Rod Smith) refuse to subordinate the social to the linguistic, and constitute a swerve away from the Language writers in their desire to rehabilitate lyric and figurative strategies neglected or otherwise rejected by many Language writers. Whether the Language writers were involved in smothering the social under the linguistic is a contentious argument, yet Evans nevertheless makes a case for taking this group of poets as the 'new kids on the block'.
      As I have noted above, many of the remaining essays are case studies of individual poets, among which Nick Selby's essay on Gary Snyder and the American epic, Mark Leahy's essay on repetition and rereading in Bruce Andrews' writing and Kornelia Freitag's essay on Rosmarie Waldrop are worth attention. The editors of this collection of essays are clearly setting their sights high and aiming for an ambitious critical intervention in various debates about American poetics. Committed to fusing critical analysis with performance and practice, this book ought to be consulted by anyone with a serious interest in the trajectories of contemporary American poetry.