Emancipating Pragmatism (emerson, jazz and experimental writing) by Michael
McGee  (U of Alabama Press)

A Poetics of Impasse in Modern and Contemporary American Poetry by Susan M.
Schultz (U of Alabama Press).

For price & ordering info, go to the Press's website at: www.uapress.ua.edu

While I am in a praise mode - a much more pleasurable place to be in than a
"down Bush" etc. mode - I want to say I like these books very much.  In
fact, for those who are impulsively leery of 'crit lit' books coming out of
University Presses, I find the work in this series genuinely readable - the
writers work from a point of view of having a real and personal stake and
challenge in coming to terms with the poets and their works (A slow reader,
in terms of recent books, I still have Aldon Nielson's Integral Music:
Languages of African-American Innovation to come to;  Marc Scroggins' Louis
Zukofsky and the Poetry of Knowledge is a terrific introduction to the
breadth of Z's diverse project - tho I suspect he would also say that the
"Zuk investigation" is still on its way to many further
critical/interpretive rounds. By the way, accessible on the web, Jeffrey
Twitchell's progressing Concordance for "A" already a big help).

The UAP series, however, as edited by Charles Bernstein and Hank Lazer,
share an integrity in their search to find the value, use and potential
direction of what we - at least, within the USA -  as poets and readers
currently inherit in the way of 19th and 20th century poets and poetries: a
turning of the envelope inside out to see what and how certain strategies
have accomplished, what they omit, and what they may or may not satisfy. The
attention, in terms of the poets variously covered, is clearly not on those
who write "closed narratives"  The focus is more on what has been opened -
poetries in which the language is taking risks: personal, social, political
- and questioning where is one, both poet and reader, left either standing
or moving in the face of reading the goods.

In the case of Susan Schultz and Michael McGee the working assumption is
that public language (whether it be poetry or other forms of discourse) as
given or handed down by the culture(s) is at odds with reality of the poet's
personal and/or public experience and perception. In McGee's book,
pragmatism becomes the operative instrument in shaping a language of both
opposition, as well as a way of testing words, and finding ones accurate to
experience. McGee is very good in tracing how this issue is dramatically
present in Emerson - for example his need, and those of fellow abolitionists
to create a language that will render the reality of slavery in a manner
that will work to defeat the laws, the myths, etc. that proclaim the social
benefits of such ownership. (Today, one is too easily reminded of
Bush/Cheney, etc. speaking about the national benefits of 'torture."  of ,
slave holders, etc.). He pursues this pragmatic thread through Ellison's
Invisible Man, right up to the New York School amongst the civil rights
eruptions of the early sixties. Among many parts, one of my favorite
sections is the investigation of the friendship between Frank O'Hara and
Amiri Baraka (s then, Leroi Jones), which finds part of its center at the
Five Spot, the jazz nightclub in the Village. Contrary to the cliché version
of the effete NY School poets versus the 'on the ground' Beats - that image
of the reading in which Gregory Corso is pictured as shouting down the
Mandarins.  To contrary O'Hara and Baraka were correspondents and close,
with O'Hara coming off as deeply engaged in issues of race and its impact
on poetic form and language. I won't spoil or minimize McGee's take other
than to say it makes one more compelling reason to get the the book.

Susan Schultz follows another thread. Where McGee is following a masculine
one - albeit from Emerson on the authors are deeply besieged or challenged
by languages that variously betray them both personally, as well as the
culture's they represent - Schultz is much more engaged in establishing and
exploring a "feminine tradition" as carried on by both men and women poets
in the 20th Century. (Crane, Riding, Stein, Ashberry, R Johnson, Susan Howe,
Hawaiian Pidgin writers and performers, and Charles Bernstein are among her
subjects.) In one way her project is similar to McGee's in that she is
working to demarcate spaces in the literature that are ignored, violently or
otherwise. Her analysis, for example, of John Ashberry's refusal, and
writing struggle to not be taken under the wing of Harold Bloom's critical
appropriation is fascinating (tho a little exhausting). Similarly she looks
at the way in which Ronald Johnson uses the 'outside' materials and
tradition of cooking as a means to inform the shape and content of his work.
Whether it be Howe, Crane, or Laura Riding, she is focused on where this
'feminine' voice/space/material emerges and, willingly by the poet or not,
stays alive in the work or gets erased. Indeed there is a personal urgency
here to establish, fight for and draw from this particular well.

Susan's wrestling - both loving and resisting - with the example and work of
Charles Berstein to find where she stands - is both fun and intriguing.
Particularly the way in which her exploration of Charles' father (maker of
'ready-mades' in the garment business) becomes a foil for his making poems
that, in a way, refuse to cooperate and "fit"; and that phenomena coupled
with how the poetry's aesthetic/political critique can seem to go at odds
with Charles as the businessman poet, clearly knowing how to work and
satisfy the demands of, at least, the academic system and market. It is also
a question that weighs on the path and choices of her own writing and
career. 

She compares these mainland traditions to the Hawaiian writers in Pidgin who
defy the colonial imposition of 'proper English' and steer a course that
insists on sustaining an indigenous integrity. (I find myself with issues
here - in that I think something more interesting occurs when the writing is
multi-lingual and able to collide 'corporate English', for example, against
the languages and play of the indigenous.) Schultz teaches in Hawaii and is
publisher (co?) of Tinfish Books and magazine. I am not surprised she finds
home in a places of division and pluralities (given the radius of Pacific
Rim) - as say different than a tenure track job in the Ivy League, or other
bastion(s) traditionally devoted to protecting and furthering "The
Tradition." 
In each of these various investigations of writers, she is clearly working
to find a ground whose resources and literary tradition (tho still much at
the margins) will feed her writing (one hesitates to say 'as a woman', since
the feminine space she is defining is not 'gendered' by its potential
users).  

In terms of this series of critical books (particularly given Charles B's
editorial association with Hank Lazar) I do find it ironic in terms of the
de-authorization, de-personal codes of 70's and 80's Language Poetries -
whatever that may now mean (and were these terms true to the the actual
poetry?) - that these works of Michael McGee and Susan Schultz have such a
personal (and winsome) sense of struggle, love and way of working through
the materials. Though the books are obviously deeply thought out, I rarely
feel like I am "off the ground" in some airborne, abstracted way, but with
people who are right/write in it and for which the stakes have very real
bearing on the way one builds a way of reading as well  as a way of writing
and being in this world.

Stephen Vincent
Blog: http://stephenvincent.net/blog/