War by Other Means

Abstract

War by Other Means Roger Mitchell Uncertain Poetries: Selected Essays on Poets, Poetry and Poetics Michael Heller Salt http://www.saltpublishing.com 264 pages; paper, $21.95 Michael Heller's Uncertain Poetries concludes with two statements on poetics, but these being a poet's essays, the book is really the search for a poetics that drives all poets, however much it might be comprised of investigations of individual poets. As Heller says in the preface, "these essays ought to be read as something of an intellectual biography of a working poet." Far from being ancillary to a poet's needs, this search among the chosen monuments of the past for a place from which to speak as a poet is central to the tradition out of which he writes, namely, modernism . In their different ways, Pound and Eliot insisted that the poet's first task was to increase one's learning, mostly through a study of the past. Heller's allegiance belongs to the Pound/Zukofsky /Olson side of modernism, which demanded a radically shuffled tradition in which history was a mega-store where one could pick and choose at will, often from sources at great remove from those typical of literary practice ofthe times. On the other hand, the Eliot/Auden side of modernism called for a profound engagement with existing systems and traditions, the chief tradition of which came to be known, disparagingly, as the canon. As such, Heller is a fish on land. The era he lives in has seen the giants of his tradition discredited as elitists or fascists, or, like Lorine Niedecker, virtually ignored. Variants of romanticism came to displace modernism as cultural authority passed from the old elites to the masses themselves— that is, from the authority of a tradition to that of the feeling self. Heller relates an interesting encounter between the products ofthese two cultures when he describes a question put to him by a young poet after one of his (Heller's) lectures on poetics. The young poet had asserted that "plenty of poets do not write a poetics, but only write poems." This gave Heller the chance to respond, as he quotes himself: I don't believe we can say with any surety that poets "only write poems," for such a notion of innocent composition flies in the face of what we do know: that each of us...[is a product] of traditions , of wars with traditions, impulses and hopes, and that we are informed, inhabited, guided, even unconsciously, by such traditions and psychologies . As tempting as it is to call Heller the last of the modernists, two obstacles stand in the way. The first is his familiarity with a broad array of postmodernist thinking, evident in his fluency in language theory, and in his affinities in particular with the work of Benjamin and Bakhtin. He also opens the modernist cabinet wide enough to make room for some elements of surrealism— I'm thinking of his essay on Lofca and "deep song," as well as "Avant-garde Propellents of the Machine Made of Words"—in which early modernists like Pound and Eliot exhibited little or no interest (Eliot's flirtation with surrealism in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" [1917] and The Waste Land [1922] the exception here). Also, as his previous writings on the objectivists make clear, Heller's view of modernism, even the Pound side of it, insists that Zukofsky and the others clearly departed from their Imagist beginnings. Whereas the Imagist branch of modernism stressed the image as metaphor or symbol, thereby subsuming the thing seen to the poet's imaginative power (the act of seeing), the objectivists insisted first that the thing be seen and not blurred by too aggressive or enlarged an act of seeing on the part of an ego-driven poet, one subscribing to, as Heller calls it, a "missionary poetics." "Words are real, in the objectivist formulation," says Heller in Conviction's Net ofBranches (1985, reissued 2002), "because they instate an existence beyond the words." One can hear in this comment, I think, a veiled criticism of language poetry, and perhaps also of contemporary forms of surrealism. Hence, the dogged insistence on the...