[What is the relation between the creative and the critical? Told through an example from your own work.]
The Creative-Critical Constructed Space
While I was writing – what I then referred to as a ‘straight English Literature’ PhD on the poetry of W. S. Graham, I found my thesis guilty of a kind of double standard. I was arguing that the lyric poem after modernism, in particular Graham’s lyric poetry, had a distinct critical function. I pursued this idea by considering lyric self-consciousness as a kind of formal event, its own literary matter. I found the complexity of Graham’s rhythms evaded something about conventional metrical analysis – and as some of the most compelling close readers like Adam Piette have suggested – that the poems encode their own reading strategies. That, in effect, they read themselves. Even if that’s a just a sense – often a sense of haunting, in Graham – of their being read, or being one step ahead of our reading. This reinforces the sense that their lyric space is constructed by reading.[1]
[Slide:]
I say this silence or, better, construct this space
So that somehow something may move across
The caught habits of language to you and me.
This felt like a double standard because while I was arguing that the poems occupied their own critical function I was attempting to account for this in a kind of critical writing that the poems tacitly – but essentially – avoided. It is worth pointing out that Graham only ever published ‘one’ critical piece of writing in his entire career, and early on.
I began thinking I should engage with the poems on their own terms. I wanted to ‘answer’ the poems, which go to great lengths not only to speak to me, but to make audible their effort to speak. If my PhD had an interest in the critical function of poetry it made sense to reverse that in creative terms. I begin to think of my poetry as ‘continuous’ with the critical, and this talk is an attempt to flesh out what I mean that.
I requested my PhD include a creative-critical element. There wasn’t a program at York at the time, but the English Dept. recently hired their first CW staff member in order (in part) to do this. The closest example the department could use in terms of criteria was the practice-based model for Music, a fact Graham would have liked, himself using the ‘five lessons’ of flautist on which to hang his lyric experiments
There were discussions about preposition: English ‘with’ Creative Writing, English ‘and’ Creative Writing, that I cared more about than I’d like to admit. And, since we are talking about relations between creative and critical, why not English beside or through Creative Writing?
When I began looking at Graham’s archive, I found his papers easily satisfied my literary-critical instincts, but behind that lay roadmap for practical poetics.
I found that Graham’s notes and manuscripts make visible the poetry’s self-consciousness with regards to its status as a made object. If in Graham we are made to hear a scaffold within the text, in his notebooks we see it itemised into parts.
[Slide: Notebooks]
The next question was: how should we read these materials – who should?
While I felt a requirement to adapt my own thesis and creative writing, I also didn’t want to limit the idea of the continuous creative critical only to my work on Graham.
I began work on a book project, Try To Be Better, that enlisted a number of other practitioners – of all mediums – to work along similar lines.
While working on the notebooks my co-editor Lavinia Singer and I found a number of short, direct phrases resembling arrested thoughts or the sparks of ideas. Like Graham’s poems, they seemed to call out for a response.
We gave these to artists, sculptors, typographers, academics and others.
[Slide:]
To talk most richly universally the artist talks
to himself. – Subject for a poem.
To make a poem about some object in this room.
To see how it will change the object. (The poem short — 10-14 lines.
Maybe better fairly descriptive visually first of all.)
Singer and I sought to continue the dialogue between Graham’s poetry and the work of visual artists, attempting to extend what Graham, the former journeyman engineer, referred to as ‘The Constructed Space’ of his poetry, by shifting the coordinates and the materials. Each commissioned response was a provocation to originate work as well as an opportunity to interpret Graham newly.
The atmosphere of the festschrift feels particularly apt for Graham’s practice. Graham’s best work was produced among social networks – ones that materially supported his writing in a number of important ways – and his best work occurs in dialogue with artists in other mediums, notably paint and installation art, sounding out of his poems on them.
Kate Briggs and Lucrezia Russo’s The Nabokov Paper (2013) served as an excellent guide. In their book, the two editors asked a number of contributors (writers and critics, but also a computer engineer and two architects) to respond to the idiosyncratic literature exam questions that Nabokov set at Cornell – to expand his preoccupation with structure and style across disciplines. The idea most appealing of all was the editors’ aim that the publication ‘acts both as a record of the experiment and an invitation to undertake it again’. I wanted Try To Be Better to workshop Graham’s tools, but to also be its own kind of workshop.[2]
It was important, then, to present them clearly and playfully, so we came up with an unconventional indexing system (incidentally I can think of no index more playful than Nabokov’s in Pale Fire). We also included a booklet of anonymised statements on the creative practice volunteered by our contributors – to keep ‘live’ this sense of experiment, the movement of a mind (or hand) towards an idea.
We approached those who have developed and promoted Graham in fascinating ways: like Denise Riley and Lesley Harrison, and those new to the work, like Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine.
[SLIDE: Amy and Oliver – ATOI slide]
I read this as an allegory for the experience of W. S. Graham’s rhythm, which offsets idiomatic expression and impersonal, abstract form – the tremor held by and exceeding its frame. A structure that is, to use Graham’s preferred terms for the particular kind of formal tension his poetry enjoyed, both obstacle and vehicle. It also acts an embodiment of Graham’s compelling and pragmatic notion of ‘The Constructed Space’.
There are a number of ways we might frame this kind of response: as an extension of the poet’s project, as ‘readings’, given that they equate reading with response, or perhaps as ‘speakings’, entering into conversation with the author and with the anthology’s other contributors, as well as pressure placed by lyric on the event of speech. Or they are ‘answerings’, speaking back.
This connects with the thorny relation not just of the creative critical, but between translated poems, and ekphrastic poems and their visual source. To attribute a poem as ‘for’ or ‘after’ another is generally accepted to mean that we’re reading a ‘version’ of the original poet’s language, style or more irreducible quality. (I have also known it used more to forestall accusations of plagiarism than as conceptual underpinning.) ‘Version’ is etymologically apt – rooted, like ‘verse’, in the turn, although it may reduce the poems as indebted to a Platonic original (thereby not fulfilling Graham’s desire to make ‘An object that will stand’?).
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An interesting question we might ask is: what specific quality does a writer or artist’s work have that suggests it should be continued in creative terms, rather than responded to critically? There are many contextual and historical factors here that condition and generate responses, but can we point to inherent formal qualities?
I want to turn now to that other captivating maker of ‘The Constructed Space’ working in roughly the same period in another medium and place, Cornell – and not the Cornell that accommodated Nabokov’s generative readings but the artist Joseph Cornell.
[Show Cornell portrait]
If Graham is a writer whose lyric aspires towards elements of the visual, Joseph Cornell was a writer who saw his box constructions as – if not exactly poems – a form of poetry, saturated as they are with poetic references. Cornell himself felt a particular kinship with Emily Dickinson.
Like Graham’s poems and notebooks, Joseph Cornell’s box constructions have become significant not only for their pioneering status as modernist objects, but for enabling other writers and artists to make work.
Indeed, Cornell has the potential to possess writers like the (then unpublished) Jonathan Safran Foer to write to his favourite authors to solicit their own creative responses.[3] Is this connected to the fact the work is often (perhaps in decidedly uncritical terms) referred to as being elusive and mysterious?
Are we to call Safran Foer’s commissioned responses to Cornell ‘possessions’ of the artist? Do the resulting works remain possessions of the artist himself, given that they would not have been conceivable without his work? To be possessed by the work enough to respond in their own medium – as a poet I find this the highest praise conceivable – can easily translate into a possessiveness of the artist, in terms of one’s (over-identification), that Maureen McLane riffs on so magnificently in her ‘literary memoir’ My Poets, itself written ‘after’ Susan Howe’s My Emily Dickinson. Any critic here today who has dedicated themselves to a single author study – but indeed perhaps any critic at all – will sympathise with the degree to which we feel we ‘possess’ our writers with our research. (No doubt this is due partly to the increasing professionalisation of our work that encourages territorialism and a sprint to publication, although perhaps there are more interesting question around praxis at stake, and the seductive, affective intimacy of literary research.) McLane, a Romanticist by training and a celebrated cotemporary critic and, not least of all, poet, dramatizes the strange condition of poetry ‘research’ in knowingly playful and provocative ways.
Safran Foer gives an uncritical ‘love’ for Cornell’s work as the motivating factor that led him to want to continue the artist’s project. ‘Love’ is no longer the derided critical faculty it once was, now consciously underpinning methodologies like fandom and Barthes’ ‘pathetic criticism’ that have emerged post-Affective Turn. ‘Pathetic Criticism’ works against ‘structural analysis’ in favour of ‘powerful moments’ generated by a source text [KB]. Aaron Kunin twists both in Love Three, a book-length reading of George Herbert’s ‘Love (3)’ presented as numerous restatements of Herbert’s poem, told through Kunin’s sexual history (particularly his interest BDSM), rhetorical power in the renaissance and the formal achievements of Herbert’s lyric. The poet Ben Fama writes that Kunin’s is ‘a gift to writers of contemporary poetry […] a hermeneutics we can use’ [Poetry Foundation], which could be said of Graham, or Cornell, if we accept that, particularly in the case of Cornell, such a hermeneutics operates on more of veiled or implicit level. Could a ‘gift [of] hermeneutics’ be another way of saying the poem encodes its own ways of reading?
Safran Foer’s account for his own book is a sentimental and anecdotal one based on his proximity to a signed Cornell poster once given to a friend’s late sister, an object that was – due to its affective charge – passed between people, ‘a gift of a gift of a gift’. It naturally speaks to his novelist’s instinct, while his phrasing evokes Kunin’s hermeneutical gift or a game of literary telephone.
If poetic responses are anything to go by, Cornell’s work is the gift that keeps on giving. There are a number of what we might call ekphrastic poems for Cornell by John Ashbery, Octavio Paz (translated by Elizabeth Bishop), Stanley Kunitz, Timothy Donnelly and at least one novel (by Gabriel Josipovici).
More unusual is the subgenre of book-length engagements that have cropped up in the wake of Cornell’s life.
[SLIDE: Show Foer, Simic, Elegy, Dreams, Coover – I’m including the latter as it’s published by Burning Deck and could be read as prose poems.]
Simic opens his book with the declaration, ‘I have a dream in which Joseph Cornell and I pass each other on the street. […] I walked the same neighborhoods that he did between 1958 and 1970’ [ix], indexing his (over-)identification with this poet. Simic says that he ‘hoped to emulate [Cornell’s] way of working and come to understand him that way’ [ix-x]. This is telling: Dime-Store Alchemy reflects the poet’s familiarly tart and surreal lyric idiom, suggesting he finds in Cornell a stylistic kinship, rather than an emulated way of working.
His book is made up centrally justified (i.e., boxy) prose poems, echoing superficial analogies between Cornell’s box constructions and a sonnet’s rooms or Rosetti’s ‘moment’s monument’ (alluded to by Paz), as if to suggest that Cornell’s boxes are on some level already poems. Boxes, like poems, could also be perceived to be closed objects, like dreams.
These poems are made up of biographical accounts and details, ekphrastic descriptions, inventories of works like The Duchamp Dossier, dream journals (akin to the notebook) and so on. An almost identical formal and stylistic strategy is adopted by Elegy for Joseph Cornell, except the focus is on Cornell’s films, and there are references to Simic’s book woven into that fabric. What is it about Cornell’s work that prompts this way of working (recalling, after all, that poets are not working from a set of explicit prompts, as they might with Graham)?
The poets seem to want to both extend and preserve the oneiric and fetishist quality of Cornell’s works – the fact that they are consciously ‘unknowable’, in Simic’s words – which itself could be said to be a perverse act. Like the haiku or the photograph were for Barthes, something about their chemical process is ‘undevelopable’. But it also reflects these poets’ faith in poetry to not spoil the work they so adore, to know too much.[4] It is like an interpretation of dreams that seeks the work of vaporisation rather than condensation. Perhaps in this it might encode its own ‘gift of hermeneutics’, to poets and scholars alike.
[1] Graham’s poetry reads itself in ways both superficial and not: by exposing its own language apparatus; narrating its own objecthood; dramatizing the arena of lyric; offering a roadmap of recursive repetitions (Since All My Steps Taken). If the poems give a sense that they read themselves, and reading can be constituted – partly by the example set by Graham – as writerly response, do the poems also write themselves?
[2] Where Kate Briggs has, with The Nabokov Paper and her translation of Roland Barthes’ lecture courses and seminars at the Collège de France collected in The Preparation of the Novel, done much to show how pedagogically motivated material might be re-read, Try To Be Better is centred more on the distinctly interiorised quality of Graham’s prompts given their basis in lyric.
[3] Cf. Adelaide Ivanova, who has referred to her Marxist versions of a poet as ‘occupations’, politicising the ‘possession’ we feel towards our inspirations.
[4] As abundantly creative-critical as accounts of Cornell by Michael Moon and Carol Mavor are in their queer fabulation and character, they commit themselves to know things about the work’s critical contexts, its intertexts, its desires, and so offer a differently creative-critical form.