review of Michael Heller's new book

This review will appear in an upcoming issue of American Book Review.

CERTAIN UNCERTAINTIES

Michael Heller’s Uncertain Poetries (Cambridge: Salt Publishing, 2005) concludes with two statements on poetics, but these being a poet’s essays, it is really the search for a poetics which drives them all, however much they might be investigations of individual poets. As he says in the preface, "These essays ought to be read as something of an intellectual biography of a working poet." Farther 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. Pound and Eliot insisted in their different ways 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 of the times. On the other hand, the Eliot/ Auden side of Modernism called for a deep steeping in existing systems and traditions, the chief of which came to be known, disparagingly, as the canon.

As such, Heller is a fish on land. The time he lives in has seen the giants of his tradition discredited or ignored as elitists or fascists, where they weren’t, like Lorine Niedecker, unseen and unknown. Kinds of Romanticism came to displace Modernism as cultural authority passed from the old elites to the masses themselves, or, to put it differently, from the authority of a tradition to that of the feeling self. Heller relates an interesting encounter between the products of these 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 said that "plenty of poets do not write a poetics, but only write poems." This gave Heller the chance to say, in the essay if not to the poet that night, "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, including language theory, and, in certain carefully-chosen instances, particularly in the work of Benjamin and Bakhtin, his acceptance of it. He also opens the Modernist cabinet wide enough to make room in it for some elements of Surrealism (I’m thinking of his essay on Lorca and "deep song," as well as "Avant Garde Propellents of the Machine Made of Words"), which early Modernists like Pound and Eliot had little or no interest in. Eliot’s flirtation with that medium in "Rhapsody on a Windy Night" and The Waste Land was the exception. 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. Where 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 or one subscribing to, as Heller calls it, a "missionary poetics." "Words are real, in the Objectivist formulation," says Heller, "because they instate an existence beyond the words." One can hear in this comment, I think," a veiled criticism of language poetry, perhaps also of contemporary forms of surrealism. Hence, the dogged insistence on the real we find in the work of Niedecker, Oppen, and others he admires. The Objectivists also were less interested in history, literal or literary, and insisted always on looking at the world as given them, in a manner that distantly echoes Emerson in "The American Scholar."
The title of Heller’s book gives us the word "uncertain" to consider in relationship to contemporary poetry. This, too, is a note sounded in his study of the Objectivists where he says in the concluding chapter that "The Objectivists, and this is a critical if not poetic difficulty, lean into uncertainty." A larger understanding of this term emerges in the new book in his review of Henry Weinfield’s translations of Mallarme. Weinfield sees Mallarme as facing "the crisis of modernity," which lies in the difficulty of establishing "meaning in a meaningless universe–that is, in a universe from which the gods have disappeared, with the result that meaning cannot be transcendentally conferred." In the essay on Ignatow, in fact, Heller says that we live in "a period of powerful secularization in all walks of life." This is the central dilemma in Stevens’ poetry as well, which he solves by the simple insistence that humans must invent their own gods, or as his adage ("The gods of China are always Chinese") strongly suggests, they always have. Heller and others see the problem as more than theological; they see it in ontological and epistemological terms as well, where the poet wrestles, to use Eliot’s word, to know the self and, for that matter, anything at all with something approaching, but falling short of, certainty. The supreme achievement in a world so described comes to be the act of clear description, of a thing that first of all exists outside language. In such an act the poet does not lull us into thinking that his or her descriptive skill, metaphoric extravagance, compulsive self-involvement, need for placation and assurance, and other platforms on which contemporary poetry rests, hides the fact that the thing at the center of the poetic act can be seen only with difficulty and fragmentarily.

Heller’s ideal poet, then, would be one who made little display of the self and took on, as principle task, the effort to know in a world where, not only is that difficult to impossible, but one in which the knowing or knowledge must be achieved on one’s own. Homemade worlds, as Hugh Kenner called them. Most of the poets discussed in the book are poets of microscopic realism and/or philosophical speculation: Moore, Niedecker, Ignatow, Bronk, Schwerner, Oppen, etc. The two essays on diasporic poetics, of course, have as their central problem the extreme need for accurate witnessing of events that very nearly defies language itself. Such kinds of poetry call for modesty and a quality he finds central to the Objectivists, sincerity, at least as much as it does individuality.

It is never Heller’s intention in these essays to survey the poetic scene, but phrases and terms unavoidably drop from his pen from time to time which reveal his dismay at one or another trend in our poetry. His chief concern is that the world not be locked up in some sort of fixed ideological view, that certainty or pre-judgment about matters not shut down perception and thinking. Very nearly the greatest praise he can give a poet is, as he says of Rilke, that he forswore "intellectual or psychological certainty." Against this openness to uncertainty, Heller ranks "the icy constructs of the language centered schools or the halls of the totally aleatory," by which I think he means contemporary surrealisms, and "the overplowed farmlands of academia." The essay on Oppen describes his poetry as being "at odds not only with the gelid wastes of official literary culture but also with the programmed experimentalisms of much of the avant-garde," a comment, the first part of which, that echoes Charles Bernstein’s denigration, "official verse culture." In a totalizing gesture, Heller speaks in the essay on Mallarme of "the progressivist climate of contemporary poetry." This must be what he means by "missionary poetics," poetry written to improve our condition or at least our understanding of our condition or poetry written out of a programmatic or technique-driven notion of what poetry should be. Very different is the "constant" aim he describes in Lorine Niedecker’s poetry: "to disabuse herself of the sin of self-regard by maintaining an attitude toward the world...where ‘external’ things have a more objective truth value than ‘internal’ things," a condition whereby the eye wars against "the erring brain."

As much as I am taken with Heller’s zeal, his taste, his "high seriousness," as much as I agree with many of his observations and conclusions, I am left with questions, in large part because of the not-so-vague outline of a missionary behind them. That figure is most visible to me in the essay "Poetry Without Credentials," where he says the poem "shakes up and disrupts our certainties. We could say it introduces uncertainty where perhaps there was none before....What is actually true is not the certainty but the uncertainty." As the passage continues, the tone becomes increasingly spiritual. "If we are willing to recognize that moment, to live thoroughly in that understanding, we recognize that it is just as we give up our views and our values, give up ourselves and our credentials that poetry takes place." It is a similar sort of giving up of the self that most religions ask of us, which is the exact opposite of what a progressive politics, as well, I presume, as a progressive esthetics, asks. I, too, would like to see a poetry that saw what could be seen clearly (and no more) and that did not see the physical universe subsumed by language, but I would not want, in making such a bargain, to give up my certainty that the world we live is threatened and the need for that to be known and expressed in poetry invalidated. We need to remember, as Charles Bernstein has said, that "Poetry, like war, is the pursuit of politics by other means." The danger here is that an esthetics of "uncertainty" can, in trying to avoid ideology, become ideological and, as John B. Thompson has said, help "sustain relations of domination" by implying that certainty is impossible or inconsequential.