What Can Poetry Do?

Abstract

What Can Poetry Do? John McGowan (bio) Review of Charles Altieri, Modernist Poetry and the Limitations of Materialist Theory: The Importance of Constructivist Values, Albuquerque U of New Mexico P 2021. viii + 280 pp. What can modernist art offer the present? Over the past thirty years, many readers have sought to mine that art for insights into the conditions of modernity and the forces that shape those conditions. Art represents or reflects the society in which it is produced—and thus enhances our understanding of the world and (perhaps) offers alternatives to taken-for-granted prevailing modes of existence. More recently, this brand of political materialism has morphed into a "new materialism" that purports to replace sociology with ontology. The world is replete with active forces whose interaction produces specific situations. Capacious artworks capture the constant flows and surprises of the dynamic scenes we all inhabit. In both cases, critics look to the descriptive power of the arts to deliver insights into the world. In his new book, Charles Altieri sees this "descriptive, epiphanic" mode as dominant within contemporary poetry specifically and in what literary studies generally looks to the arts to impart. Altieri's goal is to offer a strong alternative, one that depends on an allegiance to the non-representational work done by the modernist artists (Braque, Picasso, Malevich, Pound, Moore, Stevens, Eliot, Ashbery, and Geoffrey O'Brien) he calls "constructivists." These artists explore how "objects and persons might be able to display the force of their presence, and they establish a range of subject positions for which finding the appropriate concepts was less important than imagining how a responding consciousness might cooperate in making those modes of presence emerge. This imagining had to orient itself toward a questioning of who members of the audience might become by virtue of participating in what the making elaborates as possible distributions of subjectivity" (22). What is important is what the arts can create, the possibilities they can open up, rather than any report about the way things are. Not all artists are constructivists; it would be foolish to deny that many works of art do aspire to some version of realism, to tell us something about the world. (In what follows, then, take every statement about "art" [End Page 335] to only apply to constructivist art.) But Altieri thinks we lose perhaps the most valuable and distinctive thing the arts can do if we neglect how the arts can exemplify and celebrate the creative powers of the imagination. In addition, the arts display the various subtle ways that self-consciousness registers its encounter with the world and its experience of its own capacities. Political materialism, he believes, is mired in an inescapable ironic dissociation from a world identified as cruel and unjust, thus missing the affirmations that art can offer. Here is Altieri at his most exalted and most inspiring: "Poetry as a theory of life involves demonstrations that the imagination is not an evasion of the real but a way of complementing it by aligning it with our most intimate structures of desire. Such demonstration has to replace interpretation by celebration, or, more accurately, by the performance of celebration that aligns our capacities for affirmation to the world of fact" (150). Against the world-weariness and despair generated by our political obsessions, Altieri wants to offer the triumphs of art's engagement with its materials and its successes in constructing those materials into works that astound and delight us even as they invite us to join in the creative process. The new materialism, with its focus on activity, might seem more aligned with Altieri's constructivists. Certainly, in the current debates about "critique," writers like Bruno Latour and Rita Felski mobilize the new materialism to distance themselves from the kinds of political criticism that Altieri also wants to decenter from prevailing critical modes. But Altieri argues that the new materialism is reductive. It simply has no vocabulary or theoretical armature to handle the intricacies of consciousness and self-consciousness. No third-person scientific account can capture "the phenomenal awareness of what it is like to be in a given state" (231); "what is known [on the basis of that...