Learning from Louisville
Poetry, sandwiches, and societies
Spring break has arrived, and not a moment too soon—though it’s been an exceptional semester in terms of the quality of my students and the high spirits of our class meetings (it feels like we are finally out of the COVID doldrums), there have been many distractions of an institutional nature, and it’s good to let those go for a week to focus on my novel. My novel, my novel! I am childish enough to cherish the phrase, the way I used to cherish my toy Millennium Falcon (the one with the lid you could lift so as to seat your Chewbacca and R2-D2 action figures by the holographic chess table) and the other toys about which I told countless stories to myself and sometimes to my amused father, sitting on my bed as I sat on the floor with my creatures arrayed before me, explaining that upside down the Falcon became the U.S.S. Gargantua, the biggest starship ever made. I know no greater pleasure than to live in and alongside dreams made tangible—the way a writing project turns into a kind of attractive magnet (when people learn that you are writing about the Kennedy assassination they will tell you all sorts of things), so that eventually almost everything becomes grist for your mill. But there’s a paradox that comes with this bliss of creation: while I will ultimately be able to share the creature, the product, in the form of a finished novel (I hope), it’s impossible to communicate the bliss of creation itself. At its best, writing expands my sense of my own mind’s possibilities, turning it into a kind of forest through which I might wander, naively delighted at how easy it is to get lost. But I have to walk there alone.
The closest I’ve come to really sharing this sort of mental universe has come not with my attempts at fiction but in poetry. A couple of weeks ago, for what must have been the fifth or seventh time, I attended the Conference on Literature and Culture after 1900 that’s been going on every February at the University of Louisville for the past half-century. I was first lured there by my friend and colleague Bob Archambeau, a poet and critic and newly minted novelist (Alice B. Toklas Is Missing is a beguiling story about an American innocent’s infiltration of the Gertrude Stein circle in 1920s Paris; it’s like that Woody Allen movie only it’s a lot smarter about the art, and the artists, and everything else). Every year we rent a car and drive the length of awful Indiana to Louisville, check into the Brown Hotel, and hobnob with poetry friends whose work inclines toward the esoteric and modernist (shout-outs to Mark Scroggins, David Kaufmann, Lea Graham, Norman Finkelstein, Sally Connolly, Peter O’Leary, Michael Anania, Joe Donahue, and the many others whose work and company I’ve enjoyed there). Though I spend a fair amount of time giving or listening to papers and readings in the cinderblock nightmare that is the university’s Humanities Building, the best parts come, as with every conference I’ve ever been to, in the interstitial and off-site moments: dinners, drinks, getting lost looking for the dinners and the drinks, wandering bookstores and record shops (if you are in Louisville you must not miss Brett Ralph’s lovingly curated shop Surface Noise, where this year I acquired, with Mark’s encouragement, a fistful of old Michael Moorcock and Poul Anderson paperbacks, plus Hugh Kenner’s A Homemade World, plus on a whim Terence Stamp’s bizarre little memoir The Ocean Fell into the Drop, which lays gossip about Marlon Brando and Brigitte Bardot cheek by jowl with his lifelong fascination with Hindu mysticism and yogic techniques. But I digress).
Louisville has become, for me, a state of mind: even when I’m not there, the existence of this little community of people devoted to poetry as the most significant adventure of language acts as a bulwark against isolation and cultural despair. It can seem like the world is running as fast as it can from books, from literature, from the humanities writ large, even from thought. Thanks to AI, artistic production is becoming just another form of consumption, and we seem to be falling into an abyss of machine-produced texts nobody actually wrote that nobody will actually read. Growing up, I wanted to know everything—a naive desire that nonetheless pushed me into feeding my head a sizable archive of history, science, philosophy, and literature that I now have on tap along with the lessons of lived experience. Does anyone value erudition anymore, or understand the difference between being able to Google, say, a line of poetry from actually having that line, in the old but powerfully affecting phrase, by heart?
Well, at Louisville they take these things to heart, and a poet like Mark Scroggins in his newest book, Zion Offramp 1-50, can take this despair and wring it into something funny and wrenching. If Proust had read Kafka and Tolkien and gone on to binge a thousand seasons of reality TV between visits to CBGB’s, he might have written something like this. Then there’s Peter O’Leary, the William Blake of the Midwest, or the astonishing Joe Donahue, whose work, by turns humorous and austere, depicts like a Catholic Wordsworth the growth of a poet’s mind; or Norman Finkelstein, a psychoanalyst drunk on the X-Files and kabbala, or maybe it’s the other way around.
I could go on. Last year at Louisville I felt a little out of place and self-conscious: I was so deep into fiction writing, into trying to reinvent myself as a novelist, that I wondered if I still had a place among these poets. This year I felt rejuvenated, and the desire to reclaim the identity of poet, even if I am presently fascinated by the challenges of storytelling. Poets have the most freedom—maybe that’s a by-product of our seeming irrelevance. But as I move more deeply into my fifties, I am more interested in writing as a by-product of living, rather than an end in itself, and poetry is peculiarly well suited to this stance. Even if the poems I write turn out in the end to be prose.
Bob gave a paper this year in which he talked about literary scenes, or really just social forms, in three categories: crowds, communities, and societies. A crowd is an alienating profusion; a community is devoted to an idea; a society is devoted to itself. Bob described Stein’s circle as a community, devoted to the ideal it called “genius,” and later groupings of poets have tended also to be communities—I think of the Language Poets, the last coherent American avant-garde, and their devotion to an aesthetico-political ideal of poetry as a grammatical derangement of forms of hierarchy and power. The Louisville poets, Bob suggested, are more like the Bloomsbury Group (Virginia Woolf, Vanessa Bell, Lytton Strachey, John Maynard Keynes, etc.)—a society for whose members the greatest good is the society itself. Bloomsbury is of course open to all sorts of criticism on the basis of class privilege, whiffs of imperialism, mutual masturbation, etc.; there’s a reason D.H. Lawrence couldn’t stand them. Then again, Lawrence couldn’t stand anybody. Of course, as Bob pointed out (he might have been quoting somebody), the real qualification for being a member of Bloomsbury seems simply to have slept with or at least been erotically fascinated by the painter Duncan Grant. Perhaps Lawrence couldn’t manage that. On the other hand, just look at him!
Maybe you’re with Lawrence, the collier’s son, aghast at the snobby privilege of a group of poets and academics carrying a torch for the power of language to be rather than to say. But I love to spend a weekend in their company, then hop in the car with Bob to drive back to Chicago (always stopping for a reuben at Shapiro’s in Indianapolis on the way—sometimes we run into O’Leary there). Home again, I find my writing life has reacquired something of the glow it had for me when I was a much younger man. Only connect, as the Bloomsburyian E.M. Forster once said. He was right.
Postscript: On Saturday, February 24, many of us gathered in a classroom at Louisville for a tribute to the life and work of Lyn Hejnian, the Language poet who has likely written the most enduring and beautiful work of that cohort, only to learn that she had died that very morning at the age of 82. Lyn was supposed to have joined us virtually from her home in Berkeley to hear tributes to her work; instead the panel became a memorial. Her work has meant a lot to me; I regularly teach My Life and her essay “The Rejection of Closure.” May her memory be for a blessing.
