Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Poetics (review)

Abstract

Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry, and Poetics, by Michael Heller. Cambridge, UK: Salt Publishing, 2005. 247 pp. $21.95. When poet and critic Michael Heller wrote his first book of prose, Conviction's Net of Branches: Essays on Poets and Poetry (Southern Illinois University Press, 1985), Objectivists were neglected stepchildren of American modernism, overshadowed by far more famous poets who influenced them (Pound, Williams) and by bravura public careers of poets that followed (Robert Lowell, W H. Auden, and New American Poets of 1950s and 60s). Twenty years later, core group of Objectivists are routinely anthologized, with Louis Zukofsky, Charles Reznikoff, George Oppen, Carl Rakosi, and Lorine Neidecker-all but last of them Jewish-seen as major figures in their own right and in history of American verse. Heller, too, has finally begun to receive attention he deserves, not least as leadoff figure in Objectivist Continuities chapter of Norman Finkelstein's Not One of Them in Place: Modern Poetry and Jewish American Identity. Uncertain Poetries, selection of Heller's essays, talks, and reviews twenty years, shows how far range of this poet's interests have carried him beyond tradition-and how thinking deeply within this tradition, as well as outside it, has carried him into distinctive, appealing account of relationship between poetry and more generally. Heller strikes keynote for collection in opening sentence of Uncertainty of Poet, meditation on painting of that name by Italian modernist Georgio de Chirico. I am he declares, investigating floating filigree of doubt and fear, that feeling of being on edge, which often accompanies poetic composition (p. 3). Heller's essays pursue edgy encounters incumbent upon writing poetry: encounters with oneself, one's culture, one's imagined future readers, and most profoundly with what Gershom Scholem described, in passage Heller cites, as the abyss in which freedom of living things is born (p. 230). By opening his collection with an essay on de Chirico's enigmatically allegorical cityscape, Heller joins fine tradition of poets who have explored their own poetics by writing about visual art. Heller writes with sympathy and sensuous intelligence on Pound's relationship with sculptor GaudierBrzeska and Rilke's interest in Rodin and Cezanne, painter who gave German poet a way to use past (p. 57), and uses contrasts between their disparate Romantic and Vorticist versions of modernism to triangulate his own about nature of form and uses of artistic tradition. The Rilke who set himself to study at Cezanne's easel, Heller writes, did so to learn to write a poetry in which precision and uncertainty were inextricably joined (p. 59). To Heller, lyric poetry ought to articulate both affirmation and doubt-ideally, in fact, it should do so simultaneously, although as several essays make clear, poem will be just as well off if it tracks poet's trajectory the museums of received ideas (p. 178) into open space of new, or from known into unknown, as George Oppen put it in passage Heller cites (p. 200). Heller's emphasis on this double-sidedness of literary act (p. 3) serves to distinguish his poetics those promulgated by Language poets, that radically skeptical, radically theoretical cadre of poets who announced their presence in early 1980s. That Language poets saw themselves as heirs to Objectivists seems to have sparked need, on Heller's part, to distinguish his vision of that inheritance theirs; several essays here, notably Avant-Garde Propellants of Machine Made of Words, take up how his own ideal of poetry that frees us intellectual dogma and orthodoxy differs their revolutionary ambitions. …