The sound recording I have circulating now called Live In Brooklyn features Amy King, in her introduction, mentioning the imminent release of my chapbook Posit. Its official release date, when I mailed out the first copies, was June 9, 2007. Just the mention of Posit, for me, makes Live in Brooklyn more important than the video taped at Goodbye Blue Monday in Bushwick (Brooklyn) in August 2009, of me reading some When You Bit… sonnets. The reason is simple: for Neo-Romanticism, for the Philly Free School, Posit has prescience in it which can effectively make it our Lyrical Ballads. Lyrical Ballads, as is known, was an early (first ed. 1798) Wordsworth/Coleridge collaboration which supplied an intellectual spine and framework to and for English Romanticism. Similarly, Posit provides an intellectual spine and framework which supports the entire Neo-Romantic endeavor or enterprise. It journeys from defining Neo-Romantic subjectivity, establishing an engagement with Deconstructionism and other forms of philosophy, re-affirming, past the English Romantics, the power of the personal, the first-person singular in art, and also incising into our gestalt sensibility a warm, humanistic approach to human sexuality, in defiance of English Romanticism’s wonted frigidity and more in line with Neo-Classicist painters Ingres and David, Posit stands as a document which leaps past 2007 (as The Posit Trilogy leaps past '17, Volo '23) and establishes what the twenty-first century might hold for high art, from Philadelphia (implying the entire East Coast as environs) on out. For me, Posit is the most seminal text with my name on it until Apparition Poems and the Cheltenham Elegies. The likability factor, huge in work like the Dancing With Myself sonnets and Chimes, may not be as omnipresent, but Posit was not channeled specifically to be likable: it is there, as Lyrical Ballads was, to lay the groundwork for a revolution in consciousness, away from the vacuity of previous American art (most emphatically, post-modernity) and towards creating representative American work which could stand comparison with anything produced in Europe in the last thousand years. The dialogues with Wordsworth (whose Preface for LB remains both incisive and definitive), specifically, have continued into the present day.
Whether Deconstructionism happened to be a cohesive, authentic intellectual juggernaut movement or not is up for debate. What is not up for debate is that the central tenets of Deconstructionism— the evanescence and arbitrary nature of language, and the dichotomous push-pull both away from and towards the text and textuality— inform Posit, The Posit Trilogy, and Volo, to a very significant extent. That Deconstructionism can also apply to painting— that there is also, proverbially, nothing outside the image— makes Deconstructionist thought relevant also to the Philly Free School and Neo-Romanticism in totem. What Posit seems to signal, as a literary talisman initiating the Neo-Romantic endeavor (encompassing also, what Abby Heller-Burnham had already painted), was the reemergence of non-arbitrary language, of a kind of lyricism-within-Deconstruction, as self-contradictory as that sounds. An ethos, then, which attempted (and attempts) to make aesthetic its own contradictions.
To what extent can form and formality (lyricism) redeem the arbitrary nature of the signifier? Is the lyrical signifier arbitrary? An empirical answer would have to put the truth in the middle of things— that, for instance, with “known” and “shown” in the title poem’s concluding line, the sonority of the two words together (that they rhyme) makes for an effect meant to engender pleasure, and not to be arbitrary; yet, why k-n-o-w-n and s-h-o-w-n mean what they mean, rather then meaning something else, is as arbitrary as any other word, or words, meaning what they mean. Bring in, or draft, so to speak, the issue of subjectivity-in-text, the first person singular, and you see how lyricism drafts Deconstructionism, also. The pull is away from corrosive nihilism and towards some discrete affirmations: of form and formality in art as redemptive, of formal effects as meaningful against the arbitrary, and of the first person singular as a potential textual meeting place or median point around which all these imperatives assemble.
Posit, released as a Dusie chap in June 2007, was my first major print publication. Most of the Posit poems had been written in the winter months which joined 2006 and 2007. It was my first year as a University Fellow at Temple University in Philadelphia, and a Fellowship year— I didn’t have to teach. In the fall of 2006, I had done a graduate workshop with Rachel Blau DuPlessis. She called her own work “post-Objectivist”— a continuation of the investigative interrogation of textual subjectivity by poets like George Oppen and Carl Rakosi (who called themselves Objectivists), with a slant towards feminism and a bias towards Deconstructionist literary theory. Rachel was heavily critical of any first person sensibility, expressed in poetic language, which didn’t take the time to investigate and interrogate its own efficacy. The belief that language could only be justified “qua language,” rather than language opening a transparent window on whatever a naïve subject desires you (as reader) to see (this thought-circuit is a lift from Derrida) was one Rachel carried through all her writing and reading tasks. I was thirty, and just beginning to publish seriously— I couldn’t help but be influenced.
The mood I caught, while composing the Posit poems that winter, was a congeries of this influence with other contingent factors— my first trip to Chicago in December ’06 (memorialized in Illinois Sky), the spookiness of West Philadelphia and the Eris Temple (Le Chat Noir), and even the perceived contemporary relevance of Greek myth (Eyeballs). I separated myself from Rachel’s formulations by maintaining a narrative voice— without a narrative voice, what animates poetry to begin with? Rachel’s own work suffered heavily from lack of a strong narrative voice— even more from the notion that narrative itself was (and even could be) outdated and outmoded. Rachel, for some reason, associated narrative with the nineteenth century— but the truer association is more thoroughgoing, i.e. poetic language is impossible (utterly so) without narrative, for it is, inexorably, words following words to create narrative which creates the effect of symbol and art, always. Nothing negotiable there. Poetry sans narrative struck me as a gimmick, and still does. Rachel and her compeers did betray a weakness for gimmick, and obfuscation, in mistrust, of substance (what in literature which produces long-term strength), which compromised their self-praised idealism.
In any case, Posit did not disavow narrative cohesion, nor did it fall prey to substance-bashing. The cohesion of the chapbook as a gestalt is loosely themed around not only an interrogation but a celebration of the poetic “I,” not relying on the disjunctures and ellipses which were trendy in 2007, but on sensual objective correlatives (Illinois Sky, Le Chat Noir, Eyeballs, Dracula’s Bride) and formal experiments which combined disjunctures with straightforward narrative (Posit, Come to the Point, Day Song). The theoretical gist of Posit is this— mixing the tenets of Deconstructionism with poetic language is richest and most rewarding if, amidst the ellipses and disjunctures, poetic language is allowed to be itself— to carry, not only narrative and voice, but sensuality, imagery, simile/metaphor, and intimations of profound emotion. If all the constituent elements which form the backbone of poetic language are lost, what’s left is a mere husk— and American avant-garde poetry, for the second half of century XX and into century XXI, is largely a congeries of husks, hollow spaces and impoverished waste lands. The waste land mentality: resist Eliot, follow Pound. Hilarious, then, for Rachel to have told me that Posit "channels Pound." As usual, only in theory. And, as ever, the mirroring Pound text does not exist. Pound: he's the paper dragon to shred. I was channeling Eliot. Posit is meant to represent the initiation of a new, rich strain of American poetry— and its influence has been felt.
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