Editor’s Note: Agent and Agency
A good map
is Revolution’s best friend
and of course
a map can have
the dimension of time
— Ed Sanders, “Poetry and Revolution”
Don Bryd calls it “symbolic [Hegelian] history” and Jerome Rothenberg depicts it as something of a binge-and-purge cycle. And, you don’t argue with the co-editor of the anthology you’ll be mapping, yourself, in the single, inevitable seminar on “contemporary” poetry your graduate program promises.
In his “Pre-face” to the important history of small-press publishing, A Secret Location on the Lower East Side: Adventures in Writing, 1960-1980, Rothenberg performs the estimable task of explaining, in brief, the
“paradox” of American poetry’s development in light of resources for publication. The “mainstream” develops out of the “margin” or “gray market” of grass-roots publishing, publication born “of those poets who have seized or often have invented their own means of production and of distribution.” “[S]elf-situated,” he calls “us,” plainly noting the contingent factors weighing against this institutionalization of free-play and constant re-creation of the loci of the in and the out. The tradition, as the book makes clearer, is one of artists disseminating the work of other artists: the paradox seems somehow contained in Oppen’s apt title, “To Publishers.” Rothenberg recognizes the “gray market” as a self-fulfilling prophesy; each results in and grounds the next prophesy; it’s stuffed with itself as agency, “self-situated” as agent. The secret location has a symbolic history.
I live, for the time being, in Iowa City, where, among other assorted political atrocities perpetrated under the sign of ‘poetry,’ there flourishes what has come to be seen by many as the exemplary creative-writing ‘workshop.’ Reactions to my Kenning projects, in general and locally, have been as varied as those who’ve taken notice. I have noticed, however, that the bulk of the new breed here are confounded by my project. It is suspect, as far as I can gather, because it fails to resemble, for instance, the glossed and spiny workshop yearbook which now comes with the title, “The Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies.”* Apparently the cultures predominantly sampled therein will be typically exotic strains emitted from and native to the coasts’ Ivy League campuses. Iowa’s creative writing program, to its credit, accepts students from all types of educational (i.e. socio-economic) backgrounds as well as providing very ample financial assistance. My argument would be, despite an increasingly iniquitous range of students admitted recently, as the yearbook suggests, an argument with the structures of aesthetic / critical consent therein.
I’ve come to believe that the occasionally baffled browser, thumbing through these pages, can’t be blamed for her or his suspicions. (In fact, I’m more than happy to participate in fleshing out answers to meet them.) It merely serves to gauge their non- “self-situated” progression through their careers. Ultimately, seizing hold of the means of production is not what they’re paying for at Iowa. What could possibly be the intention of abandoning symbolic history for a material one, especially when the material is so, well, flimsy? I think it is important to the academy and to those from “privileged” socio-economic ‘groups’ to embrace the mistake of history for the past. Their livelihoods reside as symbolisms. The paradox, refigured, might be this: the mainstream does not understand its own desires, the margin defines its own in light of the uncollected desires of the mainstream. Shifting ground and groundless shifting.
But as small-press ‘zines and grass-roots distribution networks (a particular literary economy) become historical, it becomes necessary to put this economy, beginning with its material bases, in the service of opposition to capitalism. Reliance on “art” and the deluxe foundations of “beauty,” once the impractical resources at hand to the artist are fossilized with significance, are colonized by and made complicit with capital. And when capital is the means of securing the vitality of human social experience, all of aesthetics disappears. Revolution which tends toward purity of action may not abide history.
What’s now popularly recognized as ‘zine culture’ is, by way of such recognition, immediately relegated to the margins of culture. Where on the other hand, the proliferation of culturally viable formats (including cyberspace) has provided a wider opportunity for institutionalizing the margins. Unfortunately, this opportunity, mired in ever non-self-situated administrative structures, continues a commodification of access.
Amiri Baraka, in his address to the “Poetry and the Public Sphere” conference in 1997, outlines his own “poetic tradition” (Monk precedes Olson), concluding that “Both Form and Content are weapons of Self Consciousness and Revolution.” The link between the material base of the literary magazine and the most radical and influential strains of American poetics is being pursued and solidified. And it is spine-less: DeBoer can’ t touch it.*
Still, this link between material resources and aesthetic achievement must not become a symbolic link. That is, if it were pursued that way, the material and the aesthetic would be lost from contemplation. And, ultimately, though unpleasantly (for some), implementation. What is it that conditions “us” to understand this as well and good or utterly malign?
The cultural, artistic, literary, philosophical traditions that dominate US imperialist society are confirmed evil by the lies and bloody violence necessary for their maintenance. Such a tradition is oppressive, whether it ’s expressed as a socioeconomic system or a poem. (Baraka)
Let me add that “the lies” constitute violence with a different inflection and that “evil” is a learned condition based on the myth (which Marx himself inhabited) of the inevitability of class, an inevitability presumed to be articulated by the heterogeneity of late-capitalist cultural forms. “Evil” is not material, and the term has bearing solely as a mythopoetic trope. It is largely a means of containing complex instances of material oppression and violence in a false unity. However, if mythopoeisis (linked to the symbolic, that is, such terms as “evil”) is to be understood in terms of “risk,” as Jed Rasula suggests, the rational and the intuitive grasp of violence and imperialism will have grounding in both the refusal and acceptance of the theogonic concept of “evil.” One would only deny evil by denying their part in it, and vice versa. We would be speaking in and of the same risk. And our democracy would achieve significance. In the meantime, you cannot argue with history, but you can only argue your position with respect to it.
° With respect to your position: This is the fifth issue of Kenning and the third to contain an editor’s note. Concluding my note in the second issue, I wrote:
Playful, performative, materiality, specificity, these terms are spoilt, or if they are not, I don’t consider this magazine the forum for imbuing them with any personal valence they may claim with regard to my politics. . . . we are contesting these terms, their efficacy, we are considering material change . . . what I believe ought to, and is, being done in these pages . . .
I was presuming too much, which brings me to these points a full year later.
Like any improvisation, the editing of Kenning takes the form of collaboration, whether that collaboration be with the authors whose work appears or with certain ambient features such as available funds or the situation in the communities the journal could possibly serve. My editorial policies are fashioned by the exigencies of determining the parameters of this collaboration. Juliana Spahr writes, in the editor’s note to the first issue of Chain, “editing forces an external median strip between the substance of the original and what it will become. Such mediation can create a powerfully dialogic space; it can also create a ‘culinary’ space that limits the possibilities in the act of reading.” My presumption in my previous editor’s notes was that my readers understood my sense that this “external median strip” was not, in Kenning at least, the intervention or determination of the supposedly improvisatorial gestures collected as a given issue. My presumption was that it went unsaid that these determinations were most significantly material. Still, it cannot be purely a matter of providing the means of production and distribution. As editor and publisher, I must choose who belongs in the discourses which are, whomever appears, presented in the guise of contestatory, contemporary, civic, “progressive” – etc.
The often over-determining factors of civic discourse are the pre-suppositions of those attempting to participate. These pre-suppositions are based, history often shows, on notions surrounding and themselves determining respective levels of material access. Which points back to the fact that, even if I were, in my capacity as editor, merely providing the means, instead of also determining the participants, ascribing claims to valence in light of the editor’s ideological framework would obscure the aesthetic fact of the work featured as well as the material fact of the work ’s relative degree of public-ation. Part of my efforts to extend the focus of Kenning as a collaborative and civic act has been to set in motion a collaboratively-edited issue, thematically determined, though ‘tentatively’ so. But in the meantime, as I wrote in my last editor’s note: “This is not my magazine. It is yours.” It is equally valid to add here: This is not your editor’s note. It is mine. One pre-supposes the other. The notion of improvisatorial editing captures, I think, the material and aesthetic “substance” of Kenning as (after Ornette Coleman’s description of the “Free Jazz” sessions) impersonal. Civic discourse without personal discourse, however, is not civic at all. It is inanimate.
° Hegel remarks somewhere that all facts and personages of great importance in world history occur, as it were, twice. He forgot to add: the first time as tragedy, the second as farce.
— Marx, The Eighteenth Brumaire of Louis Bonaparte
Artifice and Indeterminacy: My introduction of Marx’s commodity fetishization or (see note to Kenning #1) Debord’s ‘spectacle’ is well-precedented in the (still scant) literature on such topics. This is clear from Rothenberg’s “Pre-face” as well as Charles Bernstein’s important contributions: “What sells . . . is the apparatus of publicity itself . . . The resilience of the alternative institutions of poetry in the postwar years is one of the most powerful instances we have of the creation of value amidst its postmodern evasions.” A Secret Location begins with the Rothenberg, closing with a long quote from the Bernstein, and is published by Granary Books, an “alternative institution” whose wares tend toward the category of ‘artists’ books,’ whose often inaccessible prices reflect labor-time and thus provide the opportunity to take a Marx-inflected discussion (punctuated with the inevitable questions of “taste” and “pleasure” taken up in the editors’ statements of Chain and Fence, two glossy, spiny, and frequently aesthetically challenging small-press journals) to its logical extreme.
Instead of this extreme, we could do worse than to briefly point to the connection between the wheres and whos of aesthetic debates emerging within capital-cultural institutions such as the universities. I read, in this light, Christopher Beach’s edited collection, Artifice and Indeterminacy: An Anthology of New Poetics, as a continuation of the historicizing of small-press culture. The works collected therein, representing “the coming of age of the poetic avant-garde in the 1990s,” spent their youth paying dues to such elementary institutions as Paper Air and Open Letter. (Beach, vii) The acknowledgments in Artifice and Indeterminacy (Alabama U.P.), of course, refer to single-author critical collections from such university presses as Harvard, Princeton, etc. Coming of age is somewhat synonymous with graduation. The most radical and now historical aesthetics (it seems as though the academy’s profit margin corresponds to Arnold’s historicism), including important discussions of material-historical aesthetics as well as those that would undermine the ‘red-lined’ publics for poetry, conduct their interventions in the context of the most alienated commodity, education. How quickly the literary-historicists forget! A passage from a recent issue of Chicago Review deserves a reprint. Referring to truly new poetry and poetics periodicals, spiny and not, the equivocation over the ‘new,’ the “avant-garde,” the valuable, becomes patent in such confused pronouncements as,
for the most part, works in these magazines offer a kind of light entertainment . . . Small-scale, do-it-yourself magazines such as these usually invoke bohemian or avant-garde notions of poetic value, and address a coterie audience. If the success of such publications depends upon the liveliness of their coteries (or their “scenes”), then these . . . journals all seem to be promising enterprises. Each may be read cover to cover without too many dry stretches. (cited in Skanky Possum)
Oh, Chicago, yourself collecting Bernstein’s work, after graduation of course. The ‘course’ is not so “light” as the gravity of your attention. What must an enterprise promise to make history with the profession?
The confusion of history with sense (contingent time) is the basic unit, according to capital economies, of value. ‘Scenes’ are dismissed as
“light,” trite, but liminally cute – to the public, these are communities, viable as communities, civic sites. The civic discourses (living history) of contemporary poetry eventually graduate: “Few artists or writers were ab le to comprehend that structure, by the fact of repetition, implied
society.” Despite the yet vital efforts of Beach and others, the academy is still an implied society, and the community an applied society.
Acts of publication in the US have, historically, been driven by the exigencies of profit, on the one hand, and the nebulous category of “prestige,” on the other. Prestige must be understood in terms of a conversation between publishers, while profit is certain to be understood as a conversation between publishers and consumers. It is true that the “popular” notion of prestige is confounded with profit: popularity is sought because it brings returns on both ends, status to the verifiably belonging consumer and status to the verifiably profitable publisher. One would rather belong to profit than profit from belonging to one another. Only profit-seeking and profit-making publishers bring out works for the sake of “prestige.”
Prestige can be understood another way, artistic affiliation. The same attitude that fosters the dilapidated sense of the “popular” in terms of cash receipts generally responds to the testimony, material as well as rhetorical testimony, of critically established artists (artistically established critics). And here is where the tradition Rothenberg correctly points out as beginning with Dickinson and Whitman and their self-made books (Dickinson, of course, in single, undistributed editions), of artists publishing artists, opens onto questions of affiliation which appear in various guises today. Prestige for the Iowa Writer’s Workshop consists largely in its faculty, which exercises a, sometimes imagined, power over the future accessibility of the works they have helped to fashion in their image. And, failing this, the critical establishment of workshop alumni provides a certain prestige, which is also completely imagined and manufactured by means of the academy which underwrites critical establishments for nearly all “poetry” in the US. This system will remain the provenance of the miseducation of a public still clamoring for access to it in the fear of the productive uncertainties that poetics as social discourse so uniquely provides. From the “Paris houses” of expatriate modernism to the University Press currently picking up the pieces of the recently disabled National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act of 1965 which so enabled presses such as Sun and Moon, we see parallel patterns in both corporate merger (book, film, soundtrack, merchandise) and intellectual sanctions merger (training for book, book, book on book, book on book affording recognition and admittance of new trainers and trainees). The conglomeration of “aesthetic” and fiscal power-centers leaves the structural tradition of American literary economy in recognizable condition while channeling the production value away from those who create the value, now, and of necessity, “outside” the tradition. (McLaughlin) Creating an “outsider” tradition has become less glamorous in itself due to increased access to the means of production (desktop publishing, as you have it before you), and thus a glut of one-shot literary journals that seem to sing to themselves loudly before trailing off in a direction their unfocused and ahistorical motivation did not foresee: revolution requires forcible entry. Perhaps I should amend my earlier point at this point: Only profit-seeking and profit-making publishers bring out works for the sake of “prestige,” more than once.
Not only the intellect, but other social margins are understood as consolidated by the exigencies of capital, such as ethnicities, sexualities, genders, etc.; what André Schiffrin, the former head of Pantheon Books and founder of the New Press, calls “intellectual redlining” occurs; entire communities of potential readers, Asian Americans, African Americans, Native Americans, Hispanic Americans. (McLaughlin) Identifying with such categories is bound up with patterns of consumption which are often determined statistically. Heritage and choice become blurred by the over-determination of such patterns.
The senses (that is aesthetic significances) of fusion and difference the title “Kenning” can evoke are dialectically opposed to such commodity-based designations. And all the determination to situate myself in light of the fusion and difference of these orders depends upon my civic responsibility as an editor and publisher to make good on the notion of kenning as ascertaining history in light of the moment in time, the present moment, the most impersonal collaborator.
° Recursive & regressive symbolism: University presses, their academic departments, other (spiny and non-spiny) literary magazines, and well-underwritten independent presses (such as New Directions, let’s say) do manage to utilize the structures critiqued above to disseminate potentially revolutionary work through venues inaccessible to Kenning (at least as the project is currently conceived). And to wallow in glib generalities when these displeasing paradigms might rather be upset would be to continue the great humanist-liberal faux-pas of modernity: attempting to forge communities via certain, as Rebecca Wolff, editor of Fence, has it, “divisionary tactics that our literary community applies to itself, and with which we confound ourselves.”*
Fence itself, as a venue, is valuable insofar as its bureaucratic organization, tempered by its singular editorial focus, resembles our cities ’ museums and non-profit arts organizations. The board working to carry out its mission grapples continuously with “confound[ing] ourselves.” Which is an admirable task, indeed. The value of the spiny, even if they court the conglomerates and thereby do not follow Rothenberg’s (or my own) paradigms, is the inclusion of such eccentricities as the highly questionable “history” without “evolution” article on “Language” poetry by Joshua Clover**, right alongside, say, the very different eccentricities of Rae Armantrout. Any less reductive (or sweeping) consideration of independent, small-press activity simply mustn’t make the mistake of excluding these eccentricities: one’s welcome to situate oneself, even live out her or his imaginary revolutions in the pages of her or his own little ‘zine, but to do merely that is to negate the force inherent in the material and choke on one’s own medium.
Nothing could be further from the truth than to declare that the paradigms set out above adhere to particular instances outside my own limited frame of reference. This is why widening and mingling such frames becomes the task of this magazine. That is, poking holes in paradigmatic thought (historical thought) in order to leap back into time. Some matters were well-determined before we ever turned up to decide them. However, our assumptions of these matters comply with their inevitability, and this is the trouble with the way we understand the history of revolution. And when capital declares the criteria for revolution, it declares it impossible. If I trust in my project as servicing a resistence to capitalism, it’s not by means of stifling paradigms of inevitability. Improvisation banks on the come-what-may. This is my conviction and my method as I continue to map my project of editing and publishing Kenning.
-- Patrick F. Durgin
-----Original Message----- From: Peter K. <peterk at enteract.com> To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com> Date: Friday, April 21, 2000 9:31 PM Subject: Re: independent journals, the future of
>Please do.
>
>>Fence is a literary review with a highly problematic stance on the
>>confluence of aesthetic and civic politics. If interested, I can post an
>>editorial from my own literary "newsletter" vaguely detailing that stance.
>> Patrick
>>
>>-----Original Message-----
>>From: Peter K. <peterk at enteract.com>
>>To: lbo-talk at lists.panix.com <lbo-talk at lists.panix.com>
>>Date: Friday, April 21, 2000 4:44 PM
>>Subject: independent journals, the future of
>>
>>
>>>[For all you lucky folks in New York City. What's Fence?
>>>What's Open City?
>>>Coincidently and trivially, about a month ago Suck.com ran
>>>a letter of mine where I responded to a earlier letter by someone
>>>who said he agreed with Eggers who in an interview with the
>>>Village Voice had said that he could only read Suck once in
>>>a while b/c it was like having someone yelling in your ear.
>>>Tongue in cheek, in my letter I said if forced to choose I'd take Suck
>>>over McSweeney's because Suck is free and I accused
>>>McSweeny's of more or less copying The Baffler's old-timey
>>>look. Suck on Eggers:
>>>http://www.suck.com/daily/2000/03/07/
>>>
>>>
>>>Monday April 24th
>>>6:30-8:00 p.m. Columbia University Graduate
>>>School of Journalism (116 St. and Broadway)
>>>Lecture Hall, Third Floor
>>>
>>>THE LITTLE MAGAZINE IN THE AGE OF
>>>MASSIVE MEDIA
>>>
>>>Four Editors Discuss the Future of the Independent
>>>Journal Featuring:
>>>
>>>DAVE EGGERS Editor, McSweeney's; Author, "A Heartbreaking Work of
>>Staggering
>>>Genius"
>>>
>>>TOM FRANK Editor, The Baffler; Author, "The Conquest of Cool"
>>>
>>>REBECCA WOLFF Editor, Fence
>>>
>>>Moderator: DANIEL PINCHBECK Editor, Open City; National Arts Journalism
>>>Program Fellow
>>>
>>>Hosted by the National Arts Journalism Program For more information call
>>>212.854.1912 or e-mail
>>>najp at columbia.edu The event is free and open to the public RSVP calls not
>>>necessary but appreciated
>>>
>>>
>>>
>>
>>
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