MORNING IN AMERICA
A Poetic Assemblage from the Long Decade

Igenus Press/Eccsbooks,

Morning in America is a unique poetic work posing a challenging question:  What if the past is not, as Aristotle said, "that which has been," but that which has been lifted from the crypt to serve the purposes of the future-blind?  That the past lives on is not news.  That it should be reanimated and subsidized to keep Wall St. in the money is a different kettle of fish, one that drives an eco-conscious political poet like Laska to satire, irony and splenetic invective.  His mix of anti-lyric and dialogue assemblage fills a gap in contemporary verse culture.  As the celebrated poet-critic Donald Hall observed, "Curse and invective are strangely missing from American poetry...we lack public denunciation."  Morning in America reviles the depredations of the unregulated "free” market, which the poet condemns as an "infernal machine" tethered to a chthonic political religion, an old world solecism masquerading as a "new world order."   The book as a whole forms an idol-wrecking constellation of counter-truths that expand the range of resistance and return poetry to its avant garde critical function. 

POETIC NARRATIVE AND THE ADAMIC FUNCTION IN BLEVINS’ GADSDEN [formerly titled Corrido of Bolano] by Rich Blevins, w/“Afterword” by Peter Kidd, New York: Spuyten Duyvil, 2014

by PJ Laska

by PJ Lask [formerly titled Corrido of Bolano] by Rich Blevins, with an “Afterword” by Peter KiddNew YorK: Spuyten Duyvil, 2014

Blevins prefaces his collection of poems with an essay titled “An Exposition,” published previously as the introduction to a selection of corridos “for” the poet-novelist RobertoBolano, who died in 2003. The essay deals with the history of recent poetic narrative, which, depending on the poet, may or may not offer an individual perspective on the current cultural era or on “what is happening“ in the greater global dimension ofanthropos on the planet. Narrative, spoken or written, constitutes a language “text”organized by form=word structures.  Blevins’ interest is in “the poet’s account of what is happening in [the] poem as it is being written” (i.e., brought to creative form and madeintelligible for communication), but he also interested in the formation of oral texts, and makes reference to some that he has witnessed or participated in (e.g., one by RobertKelley on the topic of imperialism on the North American continent).  

When is a text a novel and when is it a poem, and can it be both at the same time, are good questions.  Bevins says Gadsden’s narrative poems do not make a novel, and he offers a puzzling reference to “Thilleman‘s thinking” as to why it doesn’t:  “you wait long enough/there’s a bi-plane overhead“[xviii], which translated into the language of causality in narrative form, I take to mean ‘form will take care of itself,’ or, as Olson put it usingCreeley’s words: “form is merely an extension of content.”  Plot, essential to the novel form, may be

completely absent from the narrative poem, which remains a narrative nonetheless. Thisbecame an essential nugget of postmodernist poetics. There is no need to plot the text of a“story,” and there may be considerable poetic loss in doing so. It is more creative andavant garde, so the argument goes, to let narratives unfold without the intervention and control of formal design feedback.  The wisdom in this thinking is its warning about “overdetermining” texts (to use the language of philosophy and ideology). In the latter case, “what happened” or “is happening,“ gets precast by thought (ideas and ideology),whether as plot (novel) or poem (form), and begins to dictate what creatively has toemerge from the creative writing experience and what Peter Kidd in his Afterword toBlevin’s collection calls “imaginative cognition.”  The prioritizing of plot and conceptual design is a marker of what happens “in fiction or historomance“ [Blevins, p. ix].  The role of the design “dominant” in media and mass culture of the postmodernist “moment” gets exaggerated, and as Blevins says, its narratives morph into something that is“manufactured.”  He’s speaking here, I believe, for postmodernist hard-liners who can spot an overdetermined text a mile away.  In popular culture, where this overdetermined, pre-casting is fueled by profit-driven commercial interest in quantity over quality, we have the failure of the poetic and the marginalization of poetry in the marketplace.   

Consequently, regarding Blevins’ insight that “Doubt has refigured literature” [p. ix], or what used to be called literature, emerging post-postmodernists now recognize that “refigured” has a deeper dimension of meaning, closer to something like “refrigerated,” or“deep-frozen.”  In the waning cultural dominant now stagnating along with the neoliberal

free-market economic “miracle” that birthed it, the non-wisdom of avant-garde doubt can be spotted in its failure to confront the issue of content selection and the conscious, and even more common, conscious and unconscious de-selection.  With the evental emergence of the new in the global world-picture (starting with the failure of neoliberalism and its on-going regression toward older feudal forms of predation), the wisdom/non-wisdom question takes us to the heart of contemporary poetry’s agon by posing the questions of where poets of the emerging age will locate their primary objects of interest and what sorts of narrative they will employ in the pursuit of those interests.

Blevins’ prefactory essay speaks of exercising “the so-called Adamic function when we become namers of the world that is our narrative” (ix). This states the restricted, language and textually–focused, postmodernist version of the rebel-Romantic avant-gardetradition, in which the ‘namers’ attention is fixed primarily on “acts of mind” [Jerome J.McGann: The Textual Condition, p. 5]. The earlier rebel-Romantic tradition saw a larger“Adamic function” exercised by poets when they become legislators of the world—a significant and far-reaching function not confined to naming in the world of poeticnarrative, but extending beyond to actions and events in the temporal life steam. It was perhaps the felt loss of the possibility of exercising this function in the world of everyday life that drove postmodernist culture to nostalgia.

“Reading Bolano,” Blevins says, “we join in his search for what has been lost…” with “an unabashed nostalgia.” Blevins’ book celebrates Bolano’s search and records his own. He rides with Bolano down “corrido” road in the mode of nostalgia that helps define the

postmodernist “moment” in art and literature. Originally a ballad form accompanied by guitar, the corrido becomes a long-form poem, a narrative without a plot, like the fifteen page “Sedan Corrido” travel poem down poetry road with his companero, Roberto Bolano,at his side that Blevins chose to open his book. In the poem, he questions Bolano: “Did you quit poetry/…/ As a stolen vehicle for social change/ After the death of Allende?”– butreceives no answer. Blevins selections in Gadsden are not dialogues—as one might anticipate from his preface, where he speaks of “this sustained and sustaining conversation among poets, and groupings of poets.” They are monologues that take place “in the solitary writer’s intercourse” (with other writers and their texts) “in his head.” InRoberto Bolano he discovers a voice that he says “those my age had for some time believed…was silenced sometime after 1970,” but in this book he has not permitted us tohear it.

The one partial exception is an imaginary interview with the ghost of Bolano near the end of the book (pp 197-99), said to have taken place “on May 22, 2009, in a hospital or a cemetery, in Mexico or Spain….” After asking the usual introductory media-interviewer type questions (“How does it feel to be a ghost?” Answer: “Never hungry,” and “What are you working on?” Answer: ”I’m returning to poetry full time.”), Blevins surprises the ghostwith a raw political question: “In the current Nazi reich in Amerika, why should we go on publishing and reading books?” To this serious and pressing question Bolano’s ghost makes a gauzy, evasive reply (“The next mouth you kiss/Will be the first one”), as though to indicate that the dead cannot be asked to counsel the living on matters of strategy. Thesituation in “Amerika” was different in 2009, six years after Bolano’s death. The poet-novelist was alive for the

devious and disastrous 9/11 plot [that saw Bldg 7’s structural steel columns collapsesimultaneously in freefall from “office fires”] and for the initial steps afterward to expand the “national security state,” but not for the Orwellian developments since the financial collapse of 2008, which revealed free market fundamentalism to be the resurrection of a corpse from its crypt, rather than the capitalist gold mine at the end of history. The irony deficit disorder that now calls endless recession “recovery,” violent repression and regime change “reform” and forcing the poor to subsidize the assets of the rich ”austerity” is precisely the mad mental design and inversion of language meant to conceal reality thatOrwell warned about in 1984. The Nazi reich of Blevins question may yet lie ahead, but the current form of repression that wraps itself in the flag of freedom and security and extends its reach by means of false flag machinations, black ops, manufactured enemies andviolent coup d’etats, is a more subtle and insidious enemy that depends heavily oncorporate media’s monopolization of the Adamic function and citizen subordination to the Tyranny of Official Narratives.

Postmodernism’s exclusion of plot, conspiracy and grand narrative from avant gardethought and craft removed an essential tool for employment of the Adamic function inpresent day philosophy, poetry and the arts. A barren cultural field was then surrenderedto “non-drum beater” poets and writers and to institutional bobeches and umbrella-holders whose service to financial power cults continues uninterrupted. A pressing question for resistance in the present Orwellian time-stream is how to release the Adamicfunction in the creative arts now closeted or corralled into private “naming” with near-zero impact on the shaping of content for public discourse. Perhaps it’s enough to recognize that Bolano made

the most of poetry’s bad situation in the postmodernist “moment” by insisting on the mutual embrace of poetry and fictional forms. In the poems that follow his “SedanCorrido” Blevins does repeated riffs on the motif of a submarine “running out of air.” In the end tuhe ssubmarine has no choice but to surface from its postmodernist submersionin order to re-load and link up with the fleet. The alternative is suffocation and death. Here we may have the stark answer that Bolano’s ghost was unable to voice.