You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence
By Donato Mancini
BookThug, 2012
Donato Mancini’s “You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence” is a book about writing about poetry. There is an ideology lurking unspoken in the practice of reviewing poetry in Canada, it claims, and it sets about to reveal it. And it does, more or less. In the end an ideology stands revealed, one organised around the unquestioning assertion of a certain set of values: tropes of craft and tradition, accessibility and the common reader and pure, uncomplicated beauty. But in spelling all this out the book inadvertently reveals itself to be as saturated in an ideology of its own, and this changes the book and its task in ways that do not sit well with me.
My reservations begin with the book’s apparent blindness to its own ideological inclinations. Given that this is a book of ideological analysis, complete with a well developed method, it primes its reader to notice the operation of ideology and it is jarring, to say the least, to see ideology so powerfully at play in it. There is a certain inevitability of ideology in any and all writing, of course. But there are decidedly more elegant ways to negotiate the co-occurrence of ideology and its critique than this. Mancini quotes Roland Barthes and Judith Butler in support of his argument, Nietzsche too; he is clearly not unaware of their work and how they managed to do it. Some measure of that sort of critical self-awareness or reflexive irony would have done this book wonders.
What ideology is it, that creeps into the book? Mancini presents himself as a postmodernist, and he explicitly aligns himself and his book with what he calls postmodern poetry. He concedes that this is a somewhat unusual move on his part. We do not speak so much of postmodernism anymore, and what he calls postmodern poetry is more often called ‘experimental’ or ‘innovative,’ ‘avant-garde’ or some permutation thereof, or, for those more politically oriented, ‘engaged’ or ‘radical.’ For Mancini, though, each of these falls short in some crucial way. Among other reasons, he opts for ‘postmodern’ because of the historicity implicit in the term. By using postmodernism he is implying that the poetic practices he writes favourably of are in some way aligned with and legitimated by a profound historical shift that renders prior poetic modes, as he puts it, “anachronistic.”
Mancini writes, by way of framing his argument: “In the view of many poets, the forms of literary subjecthood presumed in the self-assured lyric I “secure in its place” steadily erode through the 1960s. In this view, the continued production of lyric poems is anachronistic. The cultural conditions and relations of production, emergent after the so-called postmodern turn, disintegrate the social subject I posited in lyric poetry. After this turn, lyric poetry can only have continued pertinence (if any pertinence at all) within the ideological terms of a contested literary field…” (p. 14)
This claim is deeply, deeply problematic. In it there is the unspoken assumption that poetry should align itself to its historical moment‚ both in this statement, in his dismissal of the lyric as an anachronism, and in his reasons for choosing to use the term postmodernism in the first place. Let us begin with that. And let us consider that claim in the historical context of lyric poetry.
If we do as Mancini does and track lyric poetry back to the Romantic movement, to Shelley and Byron and their ilk, then we are speaking of poets who were writing from within the Industrial Revolution‚ a time of radical upheaval and often catastrophic transformation that ‘disintegrated’ (to use Mancini’s term) the social subject the lyric poem predicated itself upon. Given this, the lyric poem has always been an anachronism: a product of the nostalgia at the heart of the Romantics’ distrust of the incipient modern era. It was a willful anachronism deployed as a strategy of resistance to what the Romantics saw as the wholesale destruction of a way of life.
Which suggests that its anachronism is precisely the value of the lyric poem. Yet, in Mancini’s argument, there is no acknowledgement of this‚ there is not even so much as an admission of the possibility of this, or any other effort to constructively engage with the poetics of the lyric form. In the place of one unquestioned set of values Mancini asserts another. How to call this anything but the work of ideology?
This is not to say that the problem Mancini addresses with this book does not exist. There is no disputing the proposition that there is an ideological hegemony distorting the field of Canadian poetry. There are a whole range of poetic practices that are being unfairly marginalised; this makes Canadian poetry, however we want to conceive it, that much less vibrant, relevant and interesting. But I cannot say that I have any faith in the way that Mancini addresses the problem to do any good. He leaves me with the impression that what he is arguing for is the substitution of one ideological regime for another‚ a coup d’etat of sorts. Power would change hands and the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalisation would continue to operate as before, the only difference being a change in roles. This is to say that this is a book of partisan polemic, and that position is untenable and impractical. People are as likely to stop writing conventionally lyric poetry as they are to stop experimenting with questions of poetic form. The challenge is not to prove one method superior to the other. Efforts to that end will resolve nothing, and the impasse between the two positions will persist‚ worse, with this kind of opposition there is the risk of reducing the diversity of poetic practices in Canada to an entrenched opposition between two camps. Again, there would be a reduction in difference, in diversity. There needs to be something else, some other way to speak and think about poetry.
What is especially maddening is how close this book comes to being that something else. In the closing pages of the book Mancini describes how poetry brings into language a quality that does not reduce easily to ideology, and that there is therefore within poetry something with the potential to rework and reshape our relation to ideology‚ as Mancini puts it, something that “can mutate to work towards utopian ends, rather than value-conservative ends” (p. 242). The equation of poetry with the utopian seems right to me. Poetry is, after all, where we come to do impossible things with words‚ of course there should be the possibility of a re-imagined relation with ideology emerging from it. If only this had been where he started.
As it is, the way that Mancini uses postmodernism gives the book an ideological rigidity when what is called for is a certain suppleness of thinking, and it regrettably makes this book inadequate to resolving the problem to which it addresses itself. And this is a shame, because this is a book that certainly had the potential to do better than what it turned out to be.
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Alan Reed is an experimental writer turned novelist. He is the author of a collection of poems, For Love of the City (BuschekBooks, 2006), and a novel, Isobel & Emile (Coach House Books, 2010). He lives in Montreal and is rather tall.
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29 comments
Colin says:
Nov 23, 2012
Hi Alan,
I’m glad to see that Donato’s book has begun to get a bit of press, so thanks for that Alan, but, having read it a couple times over the last week in quite a bit of excitement at what it was able to do, I’d like to point out a few things I feel you might have misread.
First, though you begin by noting correctly the book’s argument (that “there is an ideology lurking unspoken in the practice of reviewing poetry in Canada”), this is literally the last time in your post that you mention reviewing or craft discourse. This is kind of strange considering that You Must Work harder is 80% composed of 1] a survey of how mainstream reviewing reacted to and has adapted to, or not, postmodernism in poetry from the 60′s on, and 2] an attack on the discourse of craft as the hegemonic language by which poetry in Canada is unquestioningly evaluated by. Neither do you mention the key new idea put forward by the book: aesthetic conscience, which, renovating the sociological theory of conscience formation as a foundational process in the socialisation of humans, is meticulously laid out as
“the annexation by morality” of the aesthetic realm of sensation.
Second, it seems that you’ve taken You Must Work Harder as a manifesto against lyric poetics or something of the sort, but it really is not interested in that kind of argument. For example, at the end of this post you use a quote that suggests that Mancini thinks POETRY “can mutate to work towards utopian ends, rather than value-conservative ends”; in fact, the original text concludes by saying that the AESTHETIC CONSCIENCE can “can mutate to work towards utopian ends, rather than value-conservative ends”. The difference here is very important to point out. To give another example of why I think you’re deeply misread “the impression that what he is arguing for is the substitution of one ideological regime for another‚ a coup d’etat of sorts”; at one point early in the book Mancini actually praises a thirty-year-old review of what was for its time ‘postmodern’ poetry by Al Purdy, about as conventional a lyric poet as you can picture in Canada, while arguing that in comparison a contemporary review by Shane Neilson is much more ideologically closed and unable to see outside of the rigidity of its preconcieved systems of evaluation. In addition to this Mancini also critiques the reviewing practice of some postmodern poets, Rob McLennan for one, pointing out that sometimes such poets will undermine the very work they seek to praise by treating it with the same ideolect (praising its “craft” as if the most we can aspire to is finely made furniture, or situating its relevance purely through the oppressive lens of nationalism, and so on). You say that you fear a reduction in diversity of poetic practice – the very point of this book, and Mancini repeats this often, is that REVIEWING practices have not diversified at the same rate that poetry has, and without a critical diversity to match this poetic diversity, the field will be stifled, managed, surveilled, controlled.
You Must Work Harder is, I think, a much-needed challenge to reviewing in Canada, not to one camp or another. It’s very important to engage with a book like this for the very reason that it interrogates the means by WHICH Canada’s varied camps articulate themselves within and in relation to one another. And at the same time its Zizek-like investigation of ideology (I found the book very very funny), and conscience as the site of ideological production and maintenance, can be read beyond the context of poetry reviewing, into the context of Canadian neoliberalism in general. Maybe a re-read would bring some of these things out for you but I think You Must Work Harder is more unique and rigorous a publication than you give it credit.
Hope this made some sense,
c
Sina says:
Nov 23, 2012
Colin, thanks for the comment. I haven’t read the book, though I did read it a few years back when it was in thesis form… I think you’re both longing for a solution…I think we all are. But already in this exchange we can begin to articulate some of the frustration with contemporary reviews…as you point out Colin:
“REVIEWING practices have not diversified at the same rate that poetry has, and without a critical diversity to match this poetic diversity, the field will be stifled, managed, surveilled, controlled..”
I’ll have to take a closer look to respond to Reed’s point about postmodern etc., but it strikes me as hitting on the question of bringing a certain amount of language out of the academy and onto the street, or the Internet as is the case…
Looking forward to more reasoned responses such as yours. And thanks Alan, for the review.
Alan Reed says:
Nov 24, 2012
hello Colin,
it’s good to hear from you again; thank you for this response. I spoke so briefly of the ideology of craft discourse because I presumed the readers of lemonhound to largely already be familiar with it. an ideologically fraught choice, I know—one of the pleasures of writing this review was in my consciousness of how the book is already a response to anything I could possibly write about it. and I decided to not speak to the specifics of Mancini’s ideological analysis because of how compromised I felt it was by the book’s overall ideological agenda. this is where we disagree substantially.
but before I get into the thick of that, I do agree that this omission was, if not unfair, then lacking in generosity. this opens onto interesting questions of the ethics of reviewing. I did not read the book on its own terms, and there is certainly a case to be made that in doing so I’ve deviated from acceptable practice. what I did instead was to read the book as an effort to change the way we think about poetry, and to try to anticipate and evaluate how effective it would be in doing so. again, a potentially ideologically fraught choice. but ask this: would this book change Carmine Starnino’s mind, or would he dismiss it as easily as Mancini dismisses “Vowel Movements”?
to briefly redress the omission, I would stress that the somewhat backhanded compliments paid to the book’s ideological analysis in my review are entirely sincere, but that I question the need for his recourse to developmental psychology research when so much of the Marxist literature his ideological analysis derives from is closely engaged with Lacanian psychoanalysis (cf. Althusser, Žižek). it feels suspiciously like a reinvention of the wheel. his theorisation of aesthetic conscience, for example, especially in the context of the note the book ends on, doesn’t do anything that Julia Kristeva hadn’t already done brilliantly in Revolution in Poetic Language.
your argument that writing and reviewing poetry are distinct practices is interesting, and I’d like to dwell on that for a moment as well. I did indeed substitute ‘poetry’ for ‘aesthetic conscience.’ it was an alteration to the letter but I think not to the broader sense of Mancini’s line of thinking. I would say the key passage is on page 240:
“Current theorisation of embedded metaphor and ideology confirm the basic Gramscian argument that assumptions are more determining when invisible, unconscious. … If so, the very process of aesthetic deliberation provoked by art dilemmas can potentially bring the assumptions, the embedded guiding metaphors, up to the light of conscious scrutiny. At that point, assumptions often become explosive in the discovery that significance in art always exceeds what is predictable by historical awareness, artistic intent and conscientious imperative.”
he is arguing that aesthetic conscience can be modified through “aesthetic deliberation”—in our case, the act of reading poetry. yes, it is aesthetic conscience that changes, and through it ideology, but it is poetry itself that is the catalyst for that change. which is not so far off from what I wrote: “In the closing pages of the book Mancini describes how poetry brings into language a quality that does not reduce easily to ideology, and that there is therefore within poetry something with the potential to rework and reshape our relation to ideology—as Mancini puts it, something that “can mutate to work towards utopian ends, rather than value-conservative ends” (p. 242).”
this suggests that for Mancini writing and reviewing poetry are not entirely distinct from one another; that they exist within and constitute a shared understanding of what poetry is. in my reading of the book, it is that shared understanding that is what is at stake. for example, I do not doubt Rob McLennan’s sincerity when he speaks in the terms of a craft ideolect. that is, after all, the language and the understanding available to him. this is why I largely did not distinguish between writing and reviewing poetry. they are simply too mutually implicated to be easily teased apart.
and, at last, moving on to our disagreement. I would not say that You Must Work Harder is a manifesto against lyric poetics. I would say, and did say, that the ideology informing it is openly hostile to lyric poetics. I will quote from page 14 again:
“In the view of many poets, the forms of literary subjecthood presumed in the self-assured lyric I “secure in its place” steadily erode through the 1960s. In this view, the continued production of lyric poems is anachronistic. The cultural conditions and relations of production, emergent after the so-called postmodern turn, disintegrate the social subject I posited in lyric poetry. After this turn, lyric poetry can only have continued pertinence (if any pertinence at all) within the ideological terms of a contested literary field.”
and add to that passage the sentence that follows it: “Radically non-lyrical alternative poetries have to develop, to give lyric poetry a productively defining antagonist, or there remains no reason for it to exist.”
Mancini is here explicitly arguing that lyric poetry continues to exist only as a result of desperate and underhanded ideological manipulation, is he not? can you offer an interpretation of the book that incorporates this sentiment and how pervasive this sentiment is in the contemptuous tone of the book?
(and Sina: thank you for the venue.)
Sina says:
Nov 24, 2012
My pleasure, Alan, and I hope we’ll have more reviews from you…please. I can’t really enter into the discussion because I’ve not read this iteration of Mancini’s project, but I can say that the discussion seems to be the kind of discussion one can only hope one’s work provokes… And yes, how to read tone, how to embed one’s reactions from the thrum of raging discourses around a particular text. Though I find it hard to imagine Donato as contemptuous…I am curious.
Alan Reed says:
Nov 24, 2012
and I had meant to add a note about my reading of anachronism: it is a reading that owes a substantial debt to an essay by Olchar Lindsann, “Anachronism as Dissent.” the essay is cantankerous and inflammatory, and quite deliberately so, but if you are curious about other ways of theorising anachronism it is well worth reading and can be found here:
http://www.wordforword.info/vol16/Lindsann.htm
Colin says:
Nov 24, 2012
It’s hard for me to know how far to go in trying to reply to your reply…or whether to try to do so at all. What I don’t want to do is diminish the text that is the occasion for this confrontation, so I would just say, to anyone interested in the disagreement here, go find Donato’s book and read it yourself. I feel that You Must Work Harder defends itself, argues its points, charts its ideas, far better than I’m able to in a comment stream. And I think that it’s hard not to see – in the wake of the feminist critiques of reviewing in Canada earlier this year (via Sina and the CWILA and others) – that there is need for books like this. I would argue that Donato’s book IS a part of the ongoing feminist critique. (Much of his attack on the ideolect of ‘craft’ has to do with its inevitably masculinist and patriarchal outcomes in thought.) But it is also a part of an anticapitalist critique, and a critique of Canadian essentialism (such as the Harper era’s “conservative values are Canadian values = craft discourse values are Canadian Poetry values), which your review and your reply simply failed to notice/mention. The caveat that you make in your reply, where you say that you assumed Lemon Hound readers would already know things about YMWH that you didn’t mention at all in the review, kind of defeats the most common purpose for a review doesn’t it? I would be pretty disappointed if the review you posted a while back of Lisa Robertson’s Nilling failed to mention what each of her essays were actually about, because of some assumption that readers of LH are probably already aware of her interests.
I also find it incredibly unsatisfactory to suggest, as you do regarding the Rob McLennan review, that it’s alright if postmodern poets have to fall back on the same old metaphors and fantasies of craftsmanship, closure, teleology, the Common Reader (yet another idea from YMWH that you do not mention) – as long as they’re sincere about it. I also find the following statement from your reply incredibly derisive and unfair: “I question the need for [Donato's] recourse to developmental psychology research when so much of the Marxist literature his ideological analysis derives from is closely engaged with Lacanian psychoanalysis (cf. Althusser, Žižek). It feels suspiciously like a reinvention of the wheel. His theorisation of aesthetic conscience, for example, especially in the context of the note the book ends on, doesn’t do anything that Julia Kristeva hadn’t already done brilliantly in Revolution in Poetic Language.” Really? Are you actually trying to say that because the dominant intellectual currency for ideology critique has been Lacanian psychoanalysis, Donato shouldn’t have sought out a new currency for it in his use of developmental psychology? What’s worse is that you immediately go on to suggest that YMWH is completely obsoleted by Kristeva’s Revolution in Poetic Language, a work from thirty years ago that does not in any way discuss the review a text or Canada as an ideological site, which, need I remind you, are the central objects of study in YMWH. This is tantamount to saying “I really didn’t feel like the author needed to use so novel an approach; oh and by the way I don’t like how wasn’t novel at all.” Successful scholarship both builds on and innovates its predecessors, at times coming to similar conclusiongs using contradictory means. YMWH is successful scholarship.
I feel in sum that you’re unable to read You Must Work Harder on its own terms. The discussion you seem to want to have about lyric poetry is completely beside the point if your goal is to review a book about reviewing, but I get that that’s what you’re interested in, so I feel that this interest may have caused you to read for what you wanted to see, rather than for what is there. I would direct your attention to pages 44/45 of YMWH, where Donato clearly articulates the situation that he is “hostile” to: the reactionary boundary-setting, by certain individuals who cling to the traditional critical authority of the reviewer-as-canon gatekeeper/consumer advocate, of what poetry IS and CAN BE, and the way that this “neo-pragmatism” actually seeps into the self-justification of those who are actually writing beyond those boundaries.
So for now, even though there’s more I might be able to point out about your post and your reply, I feel like I’ve said enough. At the same time I’ll note that I do aim to write something of some kind about Donato’s book and when I do I’ll make sure to link it to you Alan and to this page. Thanks for taking the time to respond and for the essay too.
c
Sina says:
Nov 24, 2012
Yes. I think this is the kind of discussion Donato was probably hoping would evolve…chuffed that it’s here.
Gillian Jerome says:
Nov 24, 2012
I think I want to read Donato’s book.
Sina says:
Nov 24, 2012
Yes, that’s the appropriate response here. I have to read it in this form as well…Donato says it’s nothing like the thesis.
Alan Reed says:
Nov 24, 2012
Colin, I want to clarify a few points because I feel like you’ve misunderstood—which is likely my fault for posting without editing enough.
1. I see Rob McLennan’s sincerity as a symptom of the extent of the problem: that the ideology of craft discourse is not just exerting its influence over review writing but also over the writing of poets who would be better served thinking in other terms.
2. this one is absolutely my fault for not explaining myself at all. I’m sorry. had he opted to use psychoanalytic theory in the place of developmental psychology he would have had access to a mode of theorising already integrated into the methods of ideological analysis he was working with. it would have saved him a lot of work, because of how much of it has effectively already been done for him, and given him a far more sophisticated position to ground his own thinking in. I think it would have made for a much stronger and more effective argument. what I said was intended as a concise and practical critique, and I’m sorry it didn’t come across as such.
and I’m sorry to see you end this exchange at this. you haven’t yet substantially addressed my critique of the book or answered the questions I asked you. I would still like to know how you would interpret Mancini’s use of postmodernism in the book and how it operates within or alongside his project of ideological critique.
nevertheless, this has been fruitful and enjoyable and I am looking forward to reading what else you have to write about this book.
Chris says:
Nov 25, 2012
Thanks to Colin for these terrific responses, which reflect the issues the book raised for me.
I would also point out that, in the passage quoted at length, Donato isn’t arguing anything about lyric poetry. He’s reporting and summarizing positions that “many poets” have argued (perhaps it would have been better if he’d named names?), and argued at significant length, both in their poetry and their theorizing. It’s likely that Donato is more or less on board with their positions, but that’s somewhat besides the point of his argument in this passage, which is that the lyric poem that presents a (coherent?) subjective “I” that expresses itself (and Canada!) is still the dominant understanding of “what poetry is” in Canadian poetry reviews. The passage’s context, after all, is within the discussion of a 2007 overview of Canadian poetry that describes it in just such terms — effectively disappearing the substantial amount of poetry and poetics that has questioned the centrality, the necessity, and the desirability of that notion of the lyric.
In other words, if your project with this review is to document Donato’s ideology in the same way that he documented the ideology of Canadian poetry reviews, then this passage seems like insufficient evidence. There are certainly other passages in the book where his take on “what poetry is” is more directly stated that this passage. But I’m not even sure why you’d take that project on.
Alan Reed says:
Nov 25, 2012
agreed that in the passage from page 14 he is providing a summary of the positions of others. but in doing so he is preparing a postmodern position that he will later in the book adopt as his own, so I think it fair to assume, at minimum, his agreement with the statement. and I chose this particular passage because it occurs early in the book and therefore I felt it crucial for setting the tone of what will follow.
Alan Reed says:
Nov 25, 2012
as for the question of why, I did explain myself in the review. if you would like to comment substantially on that I would be glad to respond.
Chris says:
Nov 25, 2012
No, the review doesn’t explain this. It claims that Donato’s ideology prevents him from makes the book inadequate to resolving the problem it sets for itself. But the review, as Colin notes, barely addresses the book’s core “problem”, which makes it hard to see the connection between Donato’s ideology and the book’s ability to address what it’s trying to address.
Which is something like: Can we determine the dominant ideology of Canadian poetry reviews? Can we identify the assumptions that inform reviews, especially the ones that the reviewers themselves are most likely not questioning? What are some of the implications of those assumptions? (It is *not*: What would be a better ideology to replace the dominant ideology with?) I think, if anything, Donato’s ideology, as you’ve defined it, would make it *easier* for him to identify certain aspects of the dominant ideology — indeed, it’s probably what encouraged him to write the book.
Alan Reed says:
Nov 25, 2012
sorry, allow me to clarify: you asked why I would take on the task of documenting Mancini’s ideological position and this is the relevant part of the review:
“He leaves me with the impression that what he is arguing for is the substitution of one ideological regime for another‚ a coup d’etat of sorts. Power would change hands and the mechanisms of exclusion and marginalisation would continue to operate as before, the only difference being a change in roles. This is to say that this is a book of partisan polemic, and that position is untenable and impractical. People are as likely to stop writing conventionally lyric poetry as they are to stop experimenting with questions of poetic form. The challenge is not to prove one method superior to the other. Efforts to that end will resolve nothing, and the impasse between the two positions will persist‚ worse, with this kind of opposition there is the risk of reducing the diversity of poetic practices in Canada to an entrenched opposition between two camps. Again, there would be a reduction in difference, in diversity. There needs to be something else, some other way to speak and think about poetry.”
and this is because of the way he uses postmodernism within the book—which is something both you and Colin seem reluctant to discuss. it is the theoretical principle the book’s argument is grounded in, is it not worth some mention?
you say: “I think, if anything, Donato’s ideology, as you’ve defined it, would make it *easier* for him to identify certain aspects of the dominant ideology.” yes, certainly. but this puts the book in the position of substituting one dominant ideological position for another. you say that this is not his intent but you have yet to make an actual argument to that effect. and if it is the case that this is what he has done, intentionally or not, then I find the book deeply problematic for the reasons mentioned above.
Chris' says:
Nov 26, 2012
I’m happy to discuss how he uses postmodernism in the book. Postmodernism serves as a thing that happened (basically) that Canadian poetry reviews pretend didn’t happen. This helps to reveal their ideological assumptions.
Your argument seems to be that Donato wants a postmodern ideology (but which one?) to supplant this dominant ideology. That would be a different book, however; this book, which lacks a section that lays out the specifics of such an ideology and a rationale for why it would be better, seems to be what it claims to be: a critique and analysis of the dominant ideology informing Canadian poetry reviews. This sort of work does not require a plan for substituting it with another ideology (even if it is informed by another ideology).
Alan Reed says:
Nov 26, 2012
Chris, it seems we’ve run up against the limit of how many times one can reply inline to a comment.
you write: “Your argument seems to be that Donato wants a postmodern ideology (but which one?) to supplant this dominant ideology. That would be a different book, however; this book, which lacks a section that lays out the specifics of such an ideology and a rationale for why it would be better…”
I refer you to the chapter that begins on page 59, entitled “Why Postmodern?”, that “lays out the specifics of such an ideology and a rationale for why it would be better”.
and there is a sentiment that pervades the book—only occasionally explicitly, like on page 14—that postmodern poetry is somehow more legitimate than the lyric poetry supported by the ideology of craft discourse. there is no ambivalence about the value of craft discourse, no acknowledgement that it is simultaneously an ideological distortion and a perfectly valid poetics in its own right. craft discourse is unilaterally condemned as ideological. this is the book’s ideological gesture. it is this that I take issue with.
also, you don’t seem to entirely understand how ideology operates. it is never explicitly stated as such. it is the value judgements that are taken for granted or go unspoken. you write: “This sort of work does not require a plan for substituting it with another ideology (even if it is informed by another ideology).” ideology is not something you plan to use, it is what you use without realising. it is precisely because You Must Work Harder is “*informed* by another ideology” that I take issue with it. it is not that I am arguing that Mancini *wants* to institute a postmodern ideology—I do extrapolate the consequences of that in my review, but that is secondary. my issue is that this book *is already* operating under such an ideology. and I wonder why this doesn’t seem to concern you.
Chris says:
Nov 27, 2012
The chapter beginning on page 59 doesn’t lay out a specific ideology; it lays out a critique of a dominant ideology that occurred from several angles, from a “formally, aesthetically, and politically diverse set of poetic practices” (59).
I still don’t see why it should concern me that a book has an ideology, since as you point out, all books do. This review and your follow-up comments have been stressing how concerning all this is, without putting your finger on what is so distressing. (Even if Donato thinks that a certain type of lyric poetry is anachronistic or whatever, even if for some reason I disagreed with that — how does that ruin his analysis of the sorts of discourse and the sorts of critical blind spots that inform the past fifty years of Canadian poetry reviews?)
Which is mostly just to say that if you’re trying to convince me of something, it has failed — and I’m sure I’ve failed at convincing you of anything as well — perhaps much as you suggest Donato would not convince Carmine Starnino of anything. I would like a clearer sense of what I’m supposed to be alarmed about, but this discussion hasn’t caused it to emerge; perhaps next time it will succeed. I wish this had been a discussion of, say, the value and function of craft discourse, rather than an attempt at dissecting Donato’s thoughts on the lyric (he’s not the first person I’d go to for thoughts on the lyric, after all). But, ah well!
Sina says:
Nov 27, 2012
I’ve wasted way too much time trying to convince hard-nosed critics and poets to be more open–no more time for that. Onward into the land of the open-minded. Or actually, more on point, to the land where people are aware of their biases and confident enough to wade into other people’s realities without compromising their values.
Ross McKie says:
Nov 27, 2012
Thoroughly engaging discussion. Might I, humbly (playfully?), add to this last comment in the stream that perhaps “…this book *is [always] already* operating under such an ideology.” There is an element of the corrective here that necessitates nods to that bugbear, the Cartesian paradigm. There mightn’t be a need for such linear deduction in this very discussion; indeed, if that implicit imperative were muted some then thought here, to now nod to the *thinking* of Jan Zwicky, could be understood, pursued even, as complementary– more than one “thing” might be at play here always already.
Not to devour ourselves here with voracious self-referentiality, but the hermeneutics here might be read as participating in the very problem being explored about the test at hand. Perhaps this is to diplomatically offer the prospect of something like an intellectual polyphonous voice or some such thing/think. I believe Zwicky points to this type of awareness in “Lyric Philosophy.”
These comments need not be so much tested for possible cracks (i.e. use of the word “concern” and (re)ply (wink), as to be complemented with other modes of knowing and re-informed by the quotient of “what’s left over” always already…if you will.
Again, an entirely stimulating stream…
Ross McKie says:
Nov 27, 2012
“text” there not “test”– although if I were to allow any heteroglossia or polyphony, perhaps more accurately, then both are complements. Tee-hee and pardon the “error.”
Thugged-Out | Argo Bookshop says:
Dec 4, 2012
[...] You Must Work Harder to Write Poetry of Excellence (which generated a few interesting exchanges yonder), Elizabeth Bachinsky’s I Don’t Feel So Good, and a beautiful oversize reissue of bill [...]
Will Owen says:
Dec 5, 2012
Mr. Reed,
I have a speculative question for you (which, I’ll admit, hides a sort of critique): what exactly would this coup d’etat in reviewing practices look like?
Are you complaining that if the trade of book reviewing was replaced with the pracitce of writing poetics or deep description, as is Mancini’s central proposal, lyric poets would be at a disadvantage? Why? I have to admit that I’m not at all sure what this change would look like, but I imagine lyricists would be able to take a swing at it without too much trouble, depending on what they’re working on.
I think you’re not giving a very full reading of the contested literary field that Mancini brings up as the habitat for lyric poetry in our day and age. He means that the literary field should not be a place where the lyric should be sure of its officialdom (as it truly is at the moment), not that it should be excluded from the context of literature in the same way what he calls ‘postmodern’ literature has been. And somewhere in the comments thread you bring up the ‘why postmodern?’ chapter a bit out of context – that’s the chapter where he’s arguing that postmodern is a better term than ‘experimental’ or ‘radical’.
It is clear that Mancini is batting for a particular team: he clearly loves Tish, KSW, Langpo, and Marxism, and people that don’t love those things probably aren’t going to get much out of the book, but I’m not sure your critique – which seems to go “he’s just arguing for a world where Kevin Davies would’ve won the GG instead of Jacob Scheier when he really should be arguing for the abolition of the GG” – is valid. It relies on putting words in his mouth – extending his argument were he to become a partisan (he’s not).
Just because he contrasts Winnipeg to Windsor doesn’t mean that he’s constructed a closed system with no space for Montreal.
Alan Reed says:
Dec 5, 2012
Mr. Owen,
you clearly know Mr. (Dr.?) Mancini better than I, so I have no reason to not take you at your word regarding his intentions. I would not disagree with how you have characterised his positions on book reviewing and the privileged status of lyric poetics, but I would say that his work here is fundamentally undermined by how he frames it in a discourse of postmodernism.
as for my reading of the chapter ‘Why Postmodern?’ being “a bit out of context”—this is the chapter where he most explicitly makes the case for the legitimacy of postmodernism on the basis of its historical relevance. coupled with his earlier dismissal of lyric poetics on the grounds of its obsolescence (p. 14 and my discussion of anachronism in the review), this reads to me as an intrusion of an ideologically determined value into his analysis. this is by way of Derrida: to paraphrase his critique of logocentrism and apply it to this context, ideological values come in mutually determining binary oppositions. I had no intention of misrepresenting the book, and I hope this clarifies my prior statement.
you say: “It is clear that Mancini is batting for a particular team: he clearly loves Tish, KSW, Langpo, and Marxism, and people that don’t love those things probably aren’t going to get much out of the book…” and I agree entirely. this is exactly the scenario I had imagined when I spoke about partisan polemics and ideological polarisation. I would like to think that in saying that I have not put words in his mouth. I have already said something to this effect in discussion with Colin, earlier, but it is apparently worth repeating: in reviewing this book I read it and evaluated it from the perspective of how effective it would be at actually changing the politics of the literary field. to state my position briefly, I would say that I do not believe preaching to the converted will do that. I could very well be wrong, but to repeat the question I asked earlier: would this book change Carmine Starnino’s mind, or would he dismiss it as easily as Mancini dismisses “Vowel Movements”?
I hope that this clarifies my position for you.
Will Owen says:
Dec 5, 2012
Mr. Reed,
Just a quick note before I’m out of here: you make three points, one of which I think is very good, the other two I do believe are mischaracterizations.
1) Mancini isn’t going to be convincing someone like Starnino. That’s absolutely true – he’s not going to convert anyone with this book, and I don’t think that bothers him. He’s clarifying and articulating a problem (for the converted, yes, but I don’t think he feels like he needs to add that bit to the end of the sentence).
2) On pg 14 he calls the lyric obsolete – I’m not so sure about this, because I think a contested field could very well support lyric poetry, so long as the poetics of that lyric poetry don’t automatically assume that non-lyric poetry is invalid. I think Mancini sees a time in which lyric poetry could radically invalidate other poetry without contestation, but he sees this particular moment as one where the lyric should be on a level field of posibility with other poetics – which is slightly different from saying that it’s obsolete.
3) He makes the case for postmodernism on historical grounds – this is true, but the opposition is not between lyric poetry and postmodern poetry, the opposition is between postmodern poetry and other terms which try to define the same phenomenon: experimental, radical, engaged, etc.
I see the Derridian ground you’re working with, but I’m not sure it works as a reading of this text, mainly because he’s using Althusser’s definition of ideology, which doesn’t necessarily come in “mutually determining binary oppositions”, though it does imply struggle (in an open field with an multitude of conflicting points, rather than a binary).
(BTW, Mancini loves Derrida – I cut my teeth on Deleuze, and he’s the first guy to convince me to drop the knee-jerk anti-Derrida habits)
Erin Moure says:
Dec 6, 2012
I just want to say that I have enjoyed this exchange, and that I did enjoy Reed’s review as well. There was for me, in my reading of the book (a book I entirely welcome), something missing, a chance for argument that could have been deeper and more nuanced. I read as well there a characterization of “the lyric” or “lyric” that made lyric into a straw man, when to me, there is no “the lyric” and the history of lyric– which is not just in English–also contains a history of contestation, displacement of subject positions, radical questioning of address and subjectivity. Some contemporary manifestations of the “lyric” poem fall into Mancini’s way of looking at lyric, many do not. Also, the book makes statements and defines grounds and borders that don’t necessarily fit when looking outside the English language. I am glad for all the discussion, and want to read Mancini’s book again now, and I did see his point and applaud it… but I still feel the book is open to the criticisms Reed makes of it.
Will Owen says:
Dec 7, 2012
@Moure,
What other languages do you look into? I’ve done some translation from Russian myself, and have helped out with two translations from Mongolian, and in both of those contexts, Soviet cannonization produced a context where there was a very palpable lyric-industrial complex that spreads out from review-and-prize culture into society as a whole, complete with the discourse of craft labour that Mancini points to. In fact, a book quite similar to Mancini’s in terms of both its polemic against lyric officialdom and its theoretical framework (Aleksandr Skidan’s “Resistance of/to Poetry”) was quite widely discussed when I was last over there – to the point that a TV channel invited Skidan so that they could make a spectacle of having him flayed by a pannel of three very hostile figures from the poetry world.
I have a friend down in Seattle that translates Arabic poetry from Egypt and Palestine who’s told me that this is much the case there as well (though I have friends down there who translate from Chinese and Korean who love to critique official verse culture, but have indicated that their respecitve ‘officialdoms’ are divorced from lyricism and self expression).
So I think the problem of where the borders are in other languages is fairly open, even though Mancini does claim that his critique is specific to Anglo-Canadian poetry and reviewing cultures.
[I guess I should name names, because it might help sell books: Mongo translators are Simon Wickham-Smith and Ming Holden, the Arabic translator is Maged Zaher - a friend of the KSW's, the Chinese Translator is Zhang Er, and the Korean translator is Don Mee Choi.]
Sina says:
Dec 7, 2012
You’re asking Erin Moure what languages she looks into?
Will Owen says:
Dec 7, 2012
@Sina – Sorry! (and that goes to Erin Moure too) ignorant U.S.American moment. The public record speaks for itself (& I’m more than a little guilty of not giving the word ‘necessarily’ full weight).