Abstract: Eliot Weinberger, An Elemental Thing. New York: New Directions, 2007. 192pp. $16.95 In a recent essay for the New York Review of Books, Eliot Weinberger wrote, "One always knew exactly what [Susan] Sontag was saying, even if one didn't think it was true." It would be imprecise to suggest that the sentence is vintage Weinberger, since vintage Weinberger more often looks like this-"Robert Bly is a windbag, a sentimentalist, a slob in the language"-or this-"Daryl Hine took America's most successful and prestigious poetry magazine and drove it to ruin." But that sentence, which so capably gives with the left hand even as it takes with the right, does adequately capture the two sides of Weinberger's critical persona. Weinberger loves and hates in fair measure, and the equilibrium he struck early on between celebration and condemnation has long made even his vituperations seem credible. Weinberger's essay is a masterpiece of critical back-and-forth, far from the nihil nisi bonum you'd expect for one of the nyrb's most distinguished alumnae. But there's justice here: Sontag wrote a similar piece on the passing of Paul Goodman, another nyrb mainstay. And judging from the two essays, what Goodman was for Sontag is roughly what Sontag is for Weinberger: not the ideal, but the example to be studied and then surpassed. In her essay Sontag says that Goodman was the critic she was reading at seventeen, and I imagine the same was true for Weinberger vis-a-vis Sontag: that at seventeen this precocious man of letters (who would publish his first translations of Octavio Paz just two years later) could scarcely have ignored Against Interpretation, which was published that year and was, in his words, "surely the best-known book of cultural criticism of its time." Despite the various enthusiasms of the three critics, there are similarities among them worthy of note. All three wrote widely, on subjects political and literary, foreign and domestic. For this breadth all three suffered what Sontag called the "terrible, mean American resentment toward a writer who tries to do many things." Sontag and Weinberger share even more. He detects in her work the "sign of a certain insecurity, as though she still needed to prove that she had arrived and that she was the best informed in the room." That same arriviste arrogance, however, is no stranger to Weinbergers own writing. Nor is he the only one with a well-placed backhand. Sontag, too, liked the art of qualified praise: "[Goodman] was capable of writing sentences of a wonderful purity of style and verbal felicity, and also capable of writing so sloppily and clumsily that one imagined he must be doing it on purpose." The most obvious difference between Sontag and Weinberger is her celebrity, of which he makes much in his essay. He calls her "that unimaginable thing, a celebrity literary critic"-a pardonable hyperbole, for as Weinberger knows, the celebrity literary critic predates Dr. Johnson. Less pardonable is his we've-been-here-before diminishment of Sontag's accomplishments, as when he calls the "structuralist analytic overkill" of "Notes on Camp" "something new in the us, though the French had been doing it for years." It takes more than a passport stamp for an idea to flourish in a new cultural setting, and even if importing foreign ideas were the whole of Sontag's achievement it would be an important one-of the kind, it should be said, that Weinberger has advocated for years. But "Camp" is more than Barthes in blue jeans: it's a brilliant and original analysis of a phenomenon that had not been considered, let alone analyzed, since Oscar Wilde. Nor do I agree that the essay has dated badly. It's true that "the word 'camp'...has long since reverted to its summer leisure connotations." But when I read, in Sontag, that "Camp sees everything in quotation marks," or that "the connoisseur of Camp sniffs the stink and prides himself on his strong nerves," or that "the traditional means for going beyond straight seriousness-irony, satire-seem feeble today, inadequate to the culturally oversaturated medium in which contemporary sensibility is schooled," I hear something true about the world in which we live. …

Abstract: For Us "Que l'on soit difficile et que l'on choisisse au sein de l'abondance... nothing could be simpler." -de Sade Love deepely grounded, hardly is dissembled. -Marlowe * A Lavrov and the Stock Wizard levitate over to the blackened dogmatic catwalk and you eat them. Now swap buy for eat, then fuck for buy, then ruminate for fuck, phlegmophrenic, want to go to the windfarm, Your *kids menu lips swinging in the Cathex-Wizz monoplex; Your * face lifting triple its age in Wuhan die-cut peel lids; ng pick Your out the reregulated loner PAT to to screw white chocolate to the bone. The tension in an unsprung r trap co * The tension in an unsprung trap. ck QUANT unpruned wing: sdeigne of JOCK of how I together grateful anyway I was Its sacked glass, Punto * What is be done on the sly is manic gargling, to to blacken the air in hot manic recitative from a storm throat, WLa-15 types to Tungsten electrodes Aaron Zhong, feazing that throat into fire / under its hot life the rope light thrashes in its suds, [is] Your chichi news noose / Dr. Unicef Cheng budget slasher movie hype on Late Review I keep dreaming about you every single night last night I you making love Stan, I didn't know him then it hurts, and / disappear but the nights stick. Abner Jon Louima Burge Cheng. * Ab... etc. I am adaptable for Binzel and Lincoln and Panasonic my swan neck my shielded arc, my gap of hot fire Lavrov sidesteps in the long arabesque of equivalence. What is being this lids clampdown, being this cheek slant onto something, being this duck breast implant but what is there to eat in a specific fang, defecation being otherwise a welding helmet, being a gas lens, being this hot skit spilt on glass eat all of me like a dispassionately incinerated fish cheek, I want being phonic into your intestine, to cry into my own blistered eyes on the inside of your stomach, not dead as the sea but cracking; disjunctive part lives will then cancel the asymmetry of self-inclusion, each of them will have the whole of love in it. You witness protection flourish as autonomy, CPA Order Number 22, Camp Bermel, hot white Vietnamization et. al. Things change. Outside, people are different. Lavrov becomes fraudulent. He and Johnson Lee no fuck you. Then everyone necks the gouache to dream her own acid scavengers, dream his own blood geyser knotted to cream tied out horizontally as a tripwire between foot-spas. WANT HOT ANDY CHENG? Want the enormous tragedy of the dream? Last night I of you very hard and real I have put my fingers on you and your fa ce if you were here Russ Cheng I mocking the crap Peisistratidai at reflector Ningbo, into dead right crunch up your debit virtu Baode, we present a fist with the power of law. Poetic sound bites down hard into the fire blanket. The enormous blackened air strives on toward production of the zirconiated stable arc, the price war in the mouth of: * a stupid inflatable thing "like to a bear." (pw symbolised by 3 gummy ribs: check http://lion.chadwyck.com/) * Andrew Cheng (pw is the passion of the non-identical in metre) Do not leave me for Stan whom you make love with. Each time they manage to levitate back what happens is you lose a life Hyundai and make the art screen go black. Beyond all this the city glows in natural repose, listening to Winds of Change or Kindertotenlieder. In an empty window love dead to the frame recapitulates its stare, you push it wrong flat lips to the dewy basin of tin and hang there, come wrong. …

Abstract: Georges Perec isn't typically associated with anything we might call "realism," but from 1959 to 1963, before joining the Oulipo, he belonged to a group of leftist writers who called themselves La ligne generale--after the film by Sergei Eisenstein--and with whom he collaborated on a program for a new realist literature. At a moment when disillusion with the French Communist Party (PCF) was intensifying, La ligne generale deployed a Marxian aesthetic and a revolutionary critique of contemporary literature that positioned itself against both a shifting party line and an uncritical cultural pluralism. "For a Realist Literature" first appeared in the fourth issue of Partisans--an unorthodox leftist journal committed less to art and culture than to social struggle and geopolitical analysis--where it kept world-historical company beside Fidel Castro's "Je suis marxiste-leniniste" and Francis Jeanson's "Problemes deformation dans l'Algerie nouvelle." The essay's hard line may seem at odds with Perec's reputation as a writer of lipograms, palindromes, and puzzles--or as a practitioner of an apolitical "potential literature" often characterized, if not caricatured, by its abjuration of semantic intention and its use of procedural constraints. "For a Realist Literature" may even sound doctrinaire, with its sometimes wooden application of categories and formulas derived from the criticism of Georg Lukdcs, whose Meaning of Contemporary Realism had just been translated into French. Yet it is by way of its rhetorical strain and polemical pitch that the essay registers a real political crisis for the left, which was then struggling to grasp, represent, and transform a postcolonial France unable to comprehend its recent history: occupation by Germany, occupation of Algeria, and postwar modernization in general. In relation to this crisis, Perec radicalized the question "what does it mean to be a writer on the left?" and sustained a response in a suite of essays that grew out of his early collaboration with La ligne generale. These essays address a range of cultural figures, movements, and works, including Robert Antelme's L'Espece humaine, Alain Resnais's Hiroshima mon amour, and Alban Bergs Wozzek. One edge of Perec's position cut against an attitude of cultural pluralism and its indiscriminating tolerance toward incompatible aesthetic trends, a tolerance arguably mirroring that of the market itself. This was an attitude tacitly suggested by the PCF's own fickle, if not contradictory, position on art and literature during the years following Stalin's death (1953) and the suppression of the anti-Soviet uprising in Hungary (1956), as French intellectual life turned toward softer Marxisms and new language-centered forms of critique. In "For a Realist Literature" Perec ruthlessly scrutinizes two irreconcilable literary forms, both of which aligned themselves, however differently, with leftist critical practices: Robbe-Grillet's nouveau roman, and Jean-Paul Sartre's "engaged" novel. Robbe-Grillet's "revolution" of high French literary production aimed to purge meaningful human relations from the representation of the world of things. As the fully realized form of a new literary tendency, the nouveau roman was curiously mimetic insofar as its appearance imitated the petrified world of the commodity and its depthless elision of social life. By contrast, Sartre's "engaged novel," to which Perec was more partial, presumed literature's responsibility to represent the social world and the individual's position in it. Sartre ascribed a certain agency to literature: to write was to act, and to act was to choose freedom, not only for oneself but for the world. Consequently, to privilege literature as a form of communicative action required Sartre to minimize the attention literature draws to itself as art. So while Robbe-Grillet sought to minimize the human, Sartre felt obliged to minimize the aesthetic. These were exemplary figures and objects for Perec's critique insofar as they represented the most advanced programs within the literary field at the time. …

Abstract: The governing tone of Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young's "Numbers Trouble" is indeed one of trouble--in their words "a combination of annoyance and confusion"--at what strikes them as a serious mistake about the current situation of women poets--the very situation, they argue, that so-called "innovative" women's writing has tried to redress. Spahr and Young's troubledness is initially focused on my essay "Our Bodies, Our Poems" and its "assert[ion] without analysis" that "on the numerical level the problem of [women's] underrepresentation has been corrected" in the communities and institutions most commonly associated with the practice of poetry. More specifically, they suggest that my essay constructs a picture of equity--in the form of approximately equal gender distribution throughout the major arenas of poetic production and recognition (publishing, arts organizations, prize committees, magazine editorial staffs, creative writing faculties, etc.)--that does not correspond to reality. They counter with a tally of their own, surveying anthologies and book series from the 80s to the present and extrapolating from published studies of prizes and higher-education hiring. What they offer are numbers suggesting that at the present moment women are getting something closer to 25% of the poetry pie than half of it. Not surprisingly, they end up "fairly convinced ... that things haven't been that great since the mid-80s." I don't really know whether theirs is a more accurate picture than the one they are contesting. To convince myself I would need access to much finer instruments and methods for data collection and analysis than either I or Spahr and Young possess. But while it might be interesting and even salutary in some contexts to see a truly accurate picture, I want to make clear from the start that the accuracy or inaccuracy of that picture is completely irrelevant to the argument of "Our Bodies, Our Poems." If it were relevant, I might have done what Spahr and Young seem to think I should have done--I might have had a lot more to say about feminism. (In that case I also would have had a lot more to say about the degrees to which feminism has and hasn't been able to further the causes of social justice. And about the value, for example, of a feminism that concerns itself as much with whether women poets get equal time on Ron Silliman's blog as with the discrepancies between the wages men and women earn for the same work--and that concerns itself more with both of these than with the social and economic structures that prevent most people, men and women alike, from ever having such concerns to begin with.) But in fact, and as Spahr and Young themselves rightly observe (yet seem to forget whenever they point to the assertion about numerical representation as if it were the thesis of my essay), "Our Bodies, Our Poems" was about something else altogether. Spahr and Young correctly identify "essentialism" as the target of my analysis. While they seem to want to disagree with me about what essentialism is ("We are fairly sure we define essentialism differently than she does. And to us, essentialism is not as damning as her article assumes it to be"), they nevertheless choose to set aside the topic from the outset ("we are not jumping into that big, endless debate right now"). But since it is the main issue in my essay, I'll start by clarifying my own position and what I take to be theirs. Spahr and Young may claim to "define essentialism differently than I do," but they never actually say what their definition is. However, when they remark in one of their notes that "Foulipo," the performance piece I criticized in my essay, was not intended "to reinscribe ... 'biological constraint,' or to argue that men's writing processes are innately formal, while women's are bodily," it's easy to see what they think my definition is. Or, at least, it's easy to see what they think I'm attacking in their performance piece and in the discourse of "innovative" women's poetry more generally. …

Abstract: Peter Finch, The Welsh Poems. Exeter: Shearsman, 2006. 146pp. $16 The Welsh Poems doesn't make much new. But that's not Peter Finch's project. Across the book, Finch figures the poem as a site of cognitive waste, a word-fill. The collection includes extended permutations, poems gleaned from websites, found-language chunks, and stream-of-consciousness blocks-all pointing away from notions of originality and toward ideas of infinite transformation. Regrettably, however, Finch's ideas are often more compelling than their realization. One long poem, "Easy X-Rays" includes four columns of words in reduced font spread across four and a half pages. It ends in eighteen repetitions of the word "waste" (which pick up three earlier iterations and a single "waist"). The poem draws a connection between language and discarded excess; it works best as a visual exemplification of the mind's detritus. Reading it, you have to wade through an awful lot of verbal rubbish. Those familiar with experimental poetry will quickly recognize the strategies required to read Finch's work. (The best experimental poetry, on the other hand, challenges the conventions that allow for its categorization.) Uninitiated readers may simply refuse to read the refuse, as the book is chock-full of fluff like the following from the poem "Tea Room": They took the road back in a car that leaked marking its territory as it went like a cat. Cat. Cart. Critch. Kringle Cat. Coot. Cooloop Cat. Cancan Teenadan Can Deeta Canrowtoo Canreeta Canrowtoo Cancreela Crimb Crime Crark Cat. Cob had two one huge with a lazy tongue one black and white with fragile bones so deep down in the fur you knew it had to be old. Such stream-of-consciousness heaps leave readers without a sense of destination or satisfying necessity. The "huh" or "huh?" that follows may be the most illuminating criticism available. To balance this engagement with excess, Finch also consistently alludes to spiritual encounters with blankness: "I favour the cessation of particle movement, gaps between, cold." This, of course, recalls some eastern spiritual traditions, which clearly inform Finch's work. He overtly points to such an influence in the poem "Past Interests," listing, along with many other interests, "The martial arts aikido, tai chi chuan and tae kwondo" and "Tibetan Buddhism." What Gary Snyder describes, Peter Finch enacts-a transitory dwelling in "That place where the outgoing breath ends and the incoming has not yet begun. …

Abstract: Juliana Spahr and Stephanie Young's "Numbers Trouble" (which appears on page 88 of this issue) counts men and women in various poetry media to determine gender representation in "innovative" poetry communities. Intrigued by their findings, we decided to look at a medium they did not count, periodicals. Our counting project had two aims: to determine the gender ratios in different types of magazines and to chart the changes in these ratios over time. Accordingly, we looked at the number of men and women in twelve magazines, counting one full year every five years between 1970 and 2005. We examined a range of publications: university-affiliated journals, independent little magazines, and mainstream outlets. With their long runs and contributor rolls, these magazines provide excellent data for charting gender distributions over time. They provide a real-time history of the art: not only by introducing poetry to the public, but by contextualizing, categorizing, and sometimes canonizing it as well. Our results are summarized in the table and graph on pages 227 and 228 and briefly analyzed below. We are extremely grateful for the help of Rachel Weiner, who did the actual counting for this project. The first significant feature of our data is an increase in the percentages of women published through the 1970s and 80s--an increase that occurs (with the exception of the New York Review of Books) in all the magazines, independent of size, affiliation, or (presumed) political or poetical orientation. Around 1990, however, these percentages tend to level off around 37%. The real story of our survey, therefore, may not be the gains of the 70s and 80s so much as the fact that gender inequality persists. Chicago Review, for example, jumps from publishing 11% women in 1980 to 36% in 1990, and remains in the mid-thirties to the present. Paris Review and Poetry display a steadier rise before leveling off in the high thirties around 1990. Meanwhile the mainstream magazines--The New Yorker and The Nation--reach their peak in 1990 and then begin to decline. The one major outlier in the study is the New York Review of Books, which displays neither the initial increase nor the final plateau of the other magazines. In the eight years we surveyed, the NYRB published poems by women four times. (Patricia Storace appeared twice in 1995; April Bernard and Elizabeth Vreeland appeared in 1985.) A full survey of the NYRB from 1970 to 2005 revealed a similar pattern: men appeared 382 times, women thirty-five times (8% women). (1) The data do not tell us anything about the causes of these changes, so what follows is speculative. The increase in the number of women published coincides with an increase in general female employment in the same period--an increase usually attributed to the success of second-wave feminism. According to the US Bureau of Labor Statistics, women composed 38% of the US workforce in 1970 and 46% in 2005. Likewise the American Medical Association reports that in 1970 8% of physicians were women, a number that increased to 24% by 2000. It seems likely, then, that the increase in our numbers reflects broad social changes, which probably had several local effects within poetry communities: editors became aware of their biases, anti-discriminatory practices gained favor, and, most significantly, women gained access to careers in poetry and publishing. Assuming that second-wave feminism is the cause of the increase in our numbers, there are at least two plausible explanations for the graphs plateau, a pattern that also occurs in the general workforce data (where the plateau is 46%). First, we can hypothesize that around 1990 external factors interfered with the steady gains of the previous two decades. (One may speculate about the anti-feminist backlash signalled by the Clarence Thomas confirmation hearings in 1991.) Second, we could attribute the plateau to structures of inequality that survived the interventions of second-wave feminism. …

Abstract: Gael Turnbull, There Are Words: Collected Poems. Exeter: Shearsman (in association with Mariscat Press), 2006. 496pp. $30 The poet and publisher Gael Turnbull (1928-2004) was born in Edinburgh, grew up in Canada, studied medicine in Cambridge, England, and by the late 1950s was working as an anesthetist and general practitioner in Ventura, California. It was there in 1959 that he founded Migrant, one of the first and best of the mimeographed little magazines that transformed the poetry scene of the late 1950s and 1960s. Migrant, and the small press into which it evolved, formed an essential line of communication between poets in the UK and North America, publishing Ed Dorn's What I See in the Maximus Poems and Robert Creeley's The Whip as well as celebrated early books by Anselm Hollo, Roy Fisher, and Ian Hamilton Finlay. A generous and independent figure, Turnbull was one of the finest Scottish poets of the gifted and adventurous generation that also includes Finlay, Hamish Henderson, and Edwin Morgan. Playfulness is the engine of Gael Turnbull's poetry. Again and again in this remarkable and often very moving Collected Poems, Turnbull reminds himself, and us, that it's OK for poetry to not absolutely always be a matter of life and death, that the acts which best define us as human might, in fact, be the things no one needed us to do, but we did anyway. Gael Turnbull, remember, was a medical doctor and a morris dancer. Late in his career, he wrote a wonderful strand of poems in praise of the gratuitous, like "A Racing Walker": who is the self-mortifying saint of travellers, ascetic of movement, clown of urgency, even a sort of hero of the ungainly and commands our amazement by the ferocity of his intransigence. Turnbull had a fascination for such curiosities. In Transmutations (1997), he describes another: A VERY INGENIOUS MECHANISM, keeping time to within half a second a week, the limit of such device when not running in a vacuum: the hands driven by an electric motor which raises a gravity arm which in turn falls to drive a pendulum, which, by its position, determines that period of swing during which the motor is made to run faster so that over the whole period the rate is most precisely varied, and thus, though pendulum and movement are never actually connected, yet the latter drives the former and the former controls the latter. Turnbull himself would take the idea of the poem as a "machine made out of words" to its logical conclusion (he had a deep respect for that other poet-doctor, William Carlos Williams), constructing hand-made machines for displaying moving text. There's a real sense of the physical pleasure of making in Turnbull's work, from his early struggles with the ink duplicator in printing Migrant to the beautiful late poem-installation, printed upside-down to be read reflected in a Glasgow pond (not in the Collected Poems, but reproduced on Turnbull's page at the British Electronic Poetry Centre). The book is a monument-too static a word-to possibility, the possibility of continuing to write, of continuing to perceive and respond, over fifty years of a life lived at a pitch of sensitivity which could easily have battened down the hatches for self-preservation. I don't think Turnbull was big on self. One poem paraphrases David Hume: he allowed others might be different in this particular of their being but for his part, when he entered intimately into what is called himself, always stumbled upon some perception, never caught himself without a perception, never could observe anything but each perception and were all removed should have been entirely annihilated Note the characteristically swallowed pronouns. Throughout the poetry, Turnbull seems most himself where his self intervenes the least. There are the fine, late "texturalist" poems, each a "reweaving of an existing text into another texture, previously only implicit. …

Abstract: Keston Sutherland's poetry is hard to understand. One way of whipping up attention around it would be to say that it is unprecedentedly so. This would be untrue. In the recent history of British poetry alone there are at least three poets to whose work Sutherland's could be closely compared: J.H. Prynne, John Wilkinson, and Drew Milne. For the moment, I am not going to claim that these are the most significant precursors. But the link makes a crude lever, useful for opening a can. All four poets share much. To name only some of the most obvious characteristics: extension of lexicon into areas more often reserved to specialisms; energetic work on twisting and innovating in (but not usually in merely abandoning or disarranging) syntax; violent shifts of register. It might be best to start not by drawing large pictures but by narrowing the focus to metrico-rhythmic questions. Among the poets named, the most resistant to metrical patterning is Prynne. His work has markedly different rhythmic characteristics in its different epochs. In recent years it has sometimes seemed driven (with exceptions such as the sequence Pearls That Were) by a deliberate asceticism with respect not only to the possibility of rhythmic recurrence but also to all sorts of other "graces of harmony." This restraint can produce writing of lunar beauty. Milne's work, by contrast, is deeply and pervasively musical. Large stretches of his earlier work are strongly metrical, but almost all his verse involves some pronounced form of rhythmic patterning. A line such as "Down to the last tilt of the wish split head" could quite easily take its place as a finely subtle variant in the metrical set of the English heroic line. Its internal chiasmus and assonance would be nothing without the way its delicately judged melody of emphasis accompanies a compressed thinking. This happens quite often in Milne; the line I quoted need not bear any specially symbolic burden of the kind that Coleridge took to be an inevitable feature of metrical language. The line does not stand for some order of value merely by virtue of the way it recalls some metrical set, whereas if such a line were to have appeared in the middle of one of Pound's cantos it would have concentrated all the pathos of lost value upon itself. Leaving aside the uncontainable Wilkinson--whose "Speaking Twins" cranks up "The Triumph of Life" until it breaks down and beats its own bounds--for a moment, this appearance of possibly metrical lines, especially those belonging to the heroic set, in verse not obviously metrical, can give us a point of entry to Sutherland's practice. It was the astonishing achievement of the new kind of blank verse that Wordsworth began writing in about 1797 deliberately and passionately to detach meter from lexicon. The verse repeated at every line the act of integrity required to think metrically without relapsing into an automatism of register. But it need not be the case that all good uses of this line after him must apply the same razor. The eighth poem of "Fit B" of Sutherland's Mincemeat Seesaw consists of fourteen lines, ten of which would cause little or no metrical difficulty for a poem written in the heroic line. In this poem Sutherland uses the line flexibly. First he appropriates into it the most unpromising matter ("the bees drowse out, investment peaks and suds"); next he springs up with sounding apposition like Shakespeare or Pope ("not of yourselves, nor yet to tease awry"); then he dresses an apparent image of starvation to troubling advantage in the old clothes ("an Afric baby slender as an elf") before throwing a meant and felt spanner into the works ("time to the beat of the fist in your heart which sprung"). The poem piles into the crash barrier with a final fifteener ("as you see fit to lunge at it, timing a gag in the dark"). What should we make of the differing approaches to rhythm which I have tried, much more briefly than the subject deserves, to sketch? …