Poetic Machinations

Allegory, Surrealism, and Postmodern Poetic Form

Michael Golston

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2015
• eBook ISBN: 9780231538633
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism in Poetry
• Index: Literature

The shape, lineation, and prosody of postmodern poems are extravagantly inventive, imbuing both form and content with meaning. Through a survey of American poetry and poetics from the end of World War II to the present, Michael Golston traces the proliferation of these experiments to a growing fascination with allegory in philosophy, linguistics, critical theory, and aesthetics, introducing new strategies for reading American poetry while embedding its formal innovations within the history of intellectual thought.

Beginning with Walter Benjamin's explicit understanding of Surrealism as an allegorical art, Golston defines a distinct engagement with allegory among philosophers, theorists, and critics from 1950 to today. Reading Fredric Jameson, Angus Fletcher, Roland Barthes, and Craig Owens, and working with the semiotics of Charles Sanders Pierce, Golston develops a theory of allegory he then applies to the poems of Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker, who, he argues, wrote in response to the Surrealists; the poems of John Ashbery and Clark Coolidge, who incorporated formal aspects of filmmaking and photography into their work; the groundbreaking configurations of P. Inman, Lyn Hejinian, Myung Mi Kim, and the Language poets; Susan Howe's "Pierce-Arrow," which he submits to semiotic analysis; and the innovations of Craig Dworkin and the conceptualists. Revitalizing what many consider to be a staid rhetorical trope, Golston positions allegory as a creative catalyst behind American poetry's postwar avant-garde achievements.

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Entomologies

Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker

Yes, the mantis nails it down.

—Clark Coolidge, “Conversation with Clark Coolidge”

Early in the 1930s, Louis Zukofsky and Lorine Niedecker shared a fundamental disagreement about praying mantises and, by way of association, about the literary value of surrealism. Zukofsky’s disapproval of Niedecker’s attraction to the latest avant-garde interloper from Europe illuminates a rift in modernist poetics regarding both poetic allegory and surrealism, the latter historically having had a difficult time gaining legitimacy in American poetry and criticism. In this chapter, I examine the reasons for this rift by tracking the spectral figure of the mantis as it appears in the pages of the journal Minotaure and in Salvador Dali’s hallucinations, as it wings up out of the entrance of the New York City subway system and haunts the decorative ironwork around the Paris metro, and ultimately as it is treated in the poetry of these two objectivist writers. Zukofsky distrusted the way the surrealists treated this insect’s cannibalistic reproductive habits as allegories for human psychosexual relations; he called such art “predatory” and explicitly conceived objectivism as its polar opposite. The story I relate in the next section is thus itself a kind of allegory for modernist American poets’ antiallegorical inclinations.

A “Presence in the Air”

Zukofsky’s sestina “‘Mantis’” and its companion poem “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation” have gradually come to occupy prominent places in the reception of his work and in general discussions of the objectivist movement.¹ Critical accounts of the poems focus on one of three issues—their relations to Marxism or their relations to imagism or their relations to formalism. The latter is especially well represented in the literature: in the words of Zukofsky’s biographer Mark Scroggins, the general consensus seems to be that “the knowledge that [‘“Mantis”’] bears is a function of its relational structure rather than its referential reach” (1998, 321).

I wish, however, to return to the poem’s “referential reach” because something has been missing from the discussion around “‘Mantis’”—that is, the figure of the praying mantis itself, clearly the “object,” the rays of which have been brought to a focus by this objectivist poem.² It is as if the rigors demanded of critical attention by the poem’s formal frame render invisible the figure at its center. In her essay on the poem, Susan Vanderborg mentions in passing Zukofsky’s sense of the “cost of isolating the insect from its past and present contexts” (1997, 196); and it is precisely these contexts—in particular the contemporary historical context of “‘Mantis’”—that I wish to reinvest in the discussion. After all, as Zukofsky says in his essay “Modern Times,” “art does not rise out of thin air” (in Zukofsky 2000, 57); and in “An Objective,” he speaks directly to the issue of historical and contemporary contexts: “A poem. Also the materials which are outside (?) the veins and capillaries—The context—The context necessarily dealing with a world outside of it—The desire for what is objectively perfect, inextricably the direction of historic and contemporary particulars” (in Zukofsky 2000, 15). Later in the same essay, he writes, “Impossible to communicate anything but particulars—historic and contemporary. . . . The revolutionary word if it must revolve cannot escape having a reference” (16). A poem’s “referential reach,” then, is the necessary other half of the objectivist equation, demanding the same grade of attention as the “relational structure” of its form.

Thus, in spite of the fact that Zukofsky stages the mantis as (literally) rising out of thin air—aloft on the updrafts from a subway tunnel—the praying mantis was visible in myriad contemporary contexts in 1934, the year the two mantis poems were written. My intention here is to recover these contexts, and my main point is that although critics have articulated the poems’ concerns with imagism, Marxism, and formalism, no one has adequately discussed these concerns’ relationship to surrealism: the praying mantis is the surrealist object as it was being theorized by painters and writers—in particular Salvador Dali and Roger Caillois—in the early 1930s. References to both of these artists appear in “‘Mantis’” and “An Interpretation,” and both prominently featured praying mantids in their works at the time. Hence, just like “the poor” in “‘Mantis,’” Zukofsky’s praying mantis “rises from the news”—or from the newspapers, journals, and art galleries of the day.

My reading makes visible a critical element in the lineage of the “object” in objectivism: that is, the surrealist object as it was being articulated around 1934. Both surrealism and objectivism are aesthetic epistemologies, concerned to understand how an object means what it means and to provide blueprints for producing what Caillois calls “lyrical objects”: paintings, sculptures, films, poems. The differences between these epistemologies, however, are profound, and for reasons that I detail in this chapter they preoccupied Zukofsky in 1934. In “‘Mantis’” he addresses them directly: his objectivist poem transforms the surrealist mantis from an archetypal and allegorical figure into a fully historical and political object. Situating Zukofsky’s mantis among the numerous images of mantids circulating through the surrealist art and theory of the early 1930s allows us to recover a generative tension in the aesthetic ideologies of late modernism.

This issue is important for several reasons, not the least of which is the fact that both objectivism and surrealism have until recently received short shrift from critics and historians—although for very different reasons. Objectivism, a distinctly American homegrown literary “movement”—whose status as such has always been problematical—has remained obscure, if not entirely invisible, even to American readers and scholars; I address this issue here. Surrealism, in contrast, although easily the most visible and popularly recognizable of the major twentieth-century art movements, has paradoxically suffered from its very successes, which have tended to diminish it in the eyes of critics and art historians. Thus, as recently as 2003 Jonathan Eburne could write of the “reductive tendency” that dogs much of the critical work devoted to surrealism, and although he argues that “the study of Surrealism has begun to move beyond the endless axiomatic work of summarizing and introducing the movement” (2003, 149), he also acknowledges that a great deal of work remains to be done.³ This is especially true in the North American context: here, the definitive work on surrealism is still Dickran Tashjian’s magisterial study A Boatload of Madmen: Surrealism in the American Avant-Garde 1920–1950, published in 1995—up to which year, Tashjian reminds us, “there had been no detailed study of Surrealism in its American setting” (xx).⁴ He goes on to disavow any “claim to be comprehensive” in this book, but it nonetheless remains a major benchmark in the study of surrealism and American modernism. However, despite Tashjian’s excellent chapters on American surrealist poets such as Parker Tyler and Charles Henri Ford, a definitive critical study of the effects of surrealism on American poetry remains to be undertaken.⁵

In this regard, it is telling that neither Louis Zukofsky nor Lorine Niedecker—nor, for that matter, Roger Caillois⁶—is mentioned in Tashjian’s book: for the two Americans poets, surrealism was a contentious issue in the 1930s—for Niedecker, it remained a critical point for decades to come. The absence of their names does not so much indicate an oversight on Tashjian’s part as it illustrates the two writers’ relative invisibility at the time of the publication of A Boatload of Madmen. Indeed, since 1995, scholars and critics have gone a long way toward making these poets and the objectivist movement in general both more visible and more tangible.⁷ Something of a sea change is currently under way in the ongoing rewriting of the history of modernism as it becomes increasingly clear to many people that the objectivist poets represent a compelling alternative to the canons of high modernism as they have been articulated over the past half-century and that these writers asserted—and continue to assert—a profound influence on poetic practice after World War II.⁸ The works of Zukofsky and Niedecker and of the other objectivists are currently being rescued from decades of neglect in a salvaging operation that is changing the landscape of modernism and its poetic legacies.⁹

In Zukofsky’s and Niedecker’s mantis poems, the initial collision of these two undertheorized movements of late modernism—surrealism and objectivism—occurs. In them, we witness the opening salvos in a debate that will modulate throughout American poetry and poetics of the latter half of the twentieth century and on into the twenty-first, a debate involving fundamental questions regarding poetic agency and the nature of the poetic object, the role of cognition in poetic production, the issue of form and its relations to content, the possibilities for writing a political poetry, and the use of allegory in modern and postmodern poetry. When John Ashbery writes in 1968 that “surrealism has influenced us in so many ways that we can hardly imagine what the world would be without it” (1991, 5), he invites us to think more critically of the role that surrealism played both in aesthetics and in larger social circumstances of the midcentury. Because Zukofsky’s “‘Mantis,’” in dialogue with Niedecker’s early poems, stands at the beginning of this critical preoccupation with the practice of surrealism in American poetry, it is important that we understand the issues at stake in this poem.

Zukofsky and Surrealism in the Early 1930s

It is by no means immediately obvious that “‘Mantis’” and “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation” deal in any substantial way with surrealism; this apparent lack of connection again has something to do with the fact that the poems have to date not garnered much critical attention. To begin, then, most simply: “‘Mantis’” deals with surrealism because in a letter dated March 15, 1935, Zukofsky tells Ezra Pound that it does so.¹⁰ However, although Zukofsky does indeed include the stray phrases “Surrealiste/Re-collection” and “Millet in a Dali canvas” (followed by “Circe in E’s Cantos”) in “‘Mantis,’ an Interpretation” (1991, 69, 70), he nowhere else mentions surrealism in the two poems, which are in no technical way surrealistic. It would have been difficult for Pound to do much with these cryptic gestures even if he had read the poem, and they haven’t lost their obscurity for most readers in the ensuing decades.

But if we recall the role that surrealism was playing in the arts in America during the early 1930s, we can begin to see Zukofsky’s poems as an urgent response to the movement’s presence. Although officially founded by André Breton in Paris in 1924, surrealism did not become a force in American art and literature until the early 1930s.¹¹ Its full impact had to wait until the Newer Super-realism show at the Wadsworth Atheneum in Hartford, Connecticut, which opened on November 16, 1931, and the same exhibition, retitled Surrealism, when it moved to the Julien Levy Gallery in New York in January 1932.¹² In March of the same year, Julien Levy premiered L’Age d’or, the collaborative film by Dali and Louis Bunuel—the original program of which, by the way, featured on its cover a drawing of a praying mantis by Max Ernst. Thus, by the middle of 1932 surrealism had become the subject of a great deal of attention in the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Frontispiece
• Contents
• Polemical Preface
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction: Etymologies, 1980—the Allegorical Moment
• 1. Entomologies
• 2. Epistemologies
• 3. A=L=L=E=G=O=R=I=E=S
• 4. Semiologies
• 5. Fictocritical Postlude: The Melancholy of Conceptualism
• Notes
• Works Cited
• Index