d i u 2 2 c 3 march 95 * * LEW DALY by Edgar Allen Poe _Swallowing the Scroll: Late in a Prophetic Tradition with the Poetry of Susan Howe and John Taggart_. Buffalo, N.Y.: apex of the M supplement #1. Of Mr. Daly we know nothing--although we believe that he is a student in SUNY-Buffalo's Poetics Program--or perhaps a graduate, or perhaps a Professor of that Institution. Of his book, lately, we have a heard a great deal--that is to say, we have heard it announced in every possible variation of phrase, as "forthcoming." For several months past, indeed, much amusement has been occasioned in the various literary coteries in New York, by the pertinacity and obviousness of an attempt made by the poet's friends to get up an anticipatory excitement in his favor. There were multitudinous dark rumors of something _in posse_-- whispered insinuations that the sun had at length arisen or would certainly arise--that a book was really in press which would revolutionize the poetical world--that the MS. had been submitted to the inspection of a junto of critics, whose fiat was well understood to be Fate, (Mr. Robert Creeley, if we remember aright, forming one of the junto)--that the work had by them been approved, and its successful reception and illimitable glorification assured.--Ms. Rosmarie Waldrop, in consequence, countermanding an order given her publishers (New Directions,) to issue forthwith a new paperback edition of her dissertation on Wittgenstein. Suggestions of this nature, busily circulated in private, were, in good time, insinuated through the press, until at length the public expectation was as much on tiptoe as public expectation, in America, can ever be expected to be about so small a matter as the issue of a volume of American poetry or poetics. The climax of this whole effort, however, at forestalling the critical opinion, and by far the most injudicious portion of the procedure, was the publisher's announcement of the forthcoming book as "a very remarkable example of poetic criticism." The fact is, the only remarkable thing about Mr. Daly's writing, is its remarkable conceit, ignorance, impudence, obscurity, pedantry and bombast:--we are sorry to say all this, but there is an old adage about the falling of the Heavens. Nor must we be misunderstood. We intend to wrong neither Mr. Daly nor our own conscience, by denying him particular merits--such as they are. His book is _not_ altogether contemptible--although the conduct of his friends has inoculated nine-tenths of the community with the opinion that it is--but what we wish to say, is that "remarkable" is by no means the epithet to be applied, in the way of commendation, either to anything that he has yet done or to anything he may hereafter accomplish. In a word, while he has undoubtedly given proof of a very ordinary species of talent, no man or woman whose opinion is entitled to the slightest respect will admit in him any indication of genius. The "particular merits" to which, in the case of Mr. Daly, we have allusion, are merely the accidental merits of particular passages. We say _accidental_--because poetical merit which is not simply accident, is very sure to be found, more or less in a state of _diffusion_ throughout even a work of criticism. No man or woman is entitled to the sacred name of poet, because from 95 pages of claptrap, may be culled a few sentences of worth. Nor would the case be in any respect altered, if these few sentences, or even if a few passages of length, were of an excellence even supreme. For a poet is necessarily a person of genius, and with the spirit of true genius even its veriest common-places are intertwined and inexplicably intertangled. When, therefore, amid a Sahara of obscurity, we discover an occasional Oasis, we must not so far forget ourselves as to fancy any latent fertility in the sands. It is our purpose, however, to do the fullest justice to Mr. Daly, and we proceed at once to cull from his book whatever, in our opinion, will put in the fairest light his poetical pretensions. And first we extract the _one_ brief passage which aroused in us what we recognized as the Poetical Sentiment. It occurs, at page 41, in a subsection called "The Gospel According to Mary," which, although excessively obscure at all points, is upon the whole, the least reprehensible portion of the volume. The heroine of this subsection--not Mary Magdalene but Susan Howe--is here exorbitantly praised, with Wallace Stevens' name strangely substituted for the more suitable example of H.D.: On what other scale than that of the path from the Easter Tomb in Palestine to the poet's desk past two millenia [sic] of silencing by the apostles; on what other scale than that of the path from Passion to the poet's tomb before which history rolled its wheelstones of both church and state, forcing night onto the page on which she "weeps to wake," as Percy Shelley said, the light and writes _I am_; on what other scale than that of Prophets and Gospels reconceptualized in this way are we to witness this--one of the most truly radical returns of the spirit of prophecy in American poetry, if not since the 19th century, then since the final poems of Wallace Stevens . . . At page 65, in a subsection of much general _eloquence_, there occur a few lines of which we should not hesitate to speak enthusiastically were we not perfectly well aware of the purpose of Mr. Daly's argument: In the promissory economy of the departure of faith, the son, as a sign not of God, but of woman and man, is an emphasis placed on the Fall. That the child must, both in theory and practice, improve upon the paternity of God--the principle of creation--to become a father, marks in the course of what is therefore only an appropriative repetition of that primal day, the pursuit of an insuperable homogeneity: the patriarchal line. At page 10, in the preface, we meet, also, a passage of high merit, though sadly disfigured: I will provisionally describe by the word "prophecy" here a poetry that might be said to permit--on a stage of public hierarchy, and under the full weight of our disgrace as citizens on such a stage--enunciation in an encounter with the supra-hierarchical, the power of God. The disfiguration to which we allude, lies in making poetry's "stage" less solid than the emotions of those who would ascend to speak. Concrete froth on a pitcher of beer could not effect a more ridiculous image. Moreover, by giving less weight to history's "stage" than the actor's "disgrace," our author betrays an overweening aestheticism. In Mr. Daly's scenario, the Poet does not so much bear witness to the Age, as the Age to the Poet. "Enunciation" occurs less as an encounter with God, than as the aftertaste of God's "power." (This "power," alas, has little to do with revelation, but is merely the bombast of any competent preacher.) The poetry in question isn't _really_ prophecy, but only allows itself to be _described_ as such. At page 11, still in the same preface, we find some lines which are very quotable, and will serve to make our readers understand what we mean by the eloquence of the book: Reinscribed as avant-garde, to be a heart cut-out and made the variable, and not the iconoclasm, of a body of seditions from which the poem--thus severed by discourse--is therefore relativized out of range and bathed in light, the work of Howe and, even more marginally, that of Taggart, lives on inimitably in our minds, and as it is intended to live: as material testimony to an encounter with the heteronomous, or to encounter as such, in terms of what is in the first instance a criteriology of the divine. We extract this _not_ because we like it ourselves, but because we take it for granted that there are many who will, and that Mr. Daly himself would desire us to extract it, to hold in our minds as a beating specimen of his _power_. The "heart" is poetry, cut from society's "body" and "Reinscribed" in the mind of the reader. We disapprove, however, the butchering method by which this operation is performed. The "material testimony" should be understood, we fancy, as an expression of approval on the part of Mr. Daly, for the fine idea which immediately precedes--the metaphorical organ transplant. It is, in fact, by no means destitute of force--but if the heart is _intended_ to live in the reader's mind, why disparage discourse, which removes the organ preparatory for transplant? At page 83, there are two sentences put under the heading "die Entzauberung der Welt." We cite these sentences as the best thing of equal length to be found in the book. The compaction of Olson and Nietzsche is especially noble. Lost with the language of God is the illegibility of descent in those who live, that they might gather irresistibly in what the language gives. Lost though it may be to internecine legibility--and to a war between the Cosmos and the Occident--the exteriority of a human, all too human universe may still exist: but as a language of the loss as such, considered as a call for which the language is, as prophecy, the unresolved sensorium that comes across. We give the lines as they are: abstraction weakens the sense; and the blanket use of "language" to describe all of Mr. Daly's terms--his descent, gift, war, loss, prophecy, and sensorium--blunts the impact of the argument. Of that species of composition which comes most appropriately under the head, _Drivel_, we should have no trouble in selecting as many specimens as our readers could desire. We will afflict them with one or two: Shards of the law now ground-down to and convergent in a single point, or, the tip of a shard in the heart heteronomously dislodged, and impolitic all too idolatrously to the point (of bringing annihilation upon itself), must now be offered-up before enormous crowds. (Pg. 19) And of a poet: The appellative sedimentation from the depths of which those who populate her work--all perhaps Lazaruses--are resurrected, is in the first instance informed by, and therefore confirmation of a sometimes fierce, and sometimes pure experiment in the communicative and the absurd. (Pg. 36) In "The Passion" we are entertained after this fashion: Whereas Marx's revolutionary teleology contains within itself the seeds of factory- built totalitarianism, Kierkegaard's encompassing religiosity in _Fear and Trembling_ sustains a pitch of paradox that, if followed openly, would lead to potlatch in a social sphere abandoned by Enlightenment to reflection and bureaucracy. (Pg. 71) In "For Robert Duncan" we have it thus: In the wings from which such a stage, the stage of symbolic order, might be spied and rightly sacrificed in the face to face relation that the very fact of language gives a name--a fact that only poetry corroborates --language is itself understood to have a meaning . . . Just above this there is a passage where Mr. Daly grotesquely confuses the two meanings of "wing": This is a gospel resistance that keeps us together in the off-stage of the outside--the threat to all theater in the understudy's cry--or under wings not ever spent by winds, but spread before us as though through a force of verisimilitude to Benjamin's Angel's vision--depicting as it does the process of history as wind that, under the shelter of progress, blows between paradise and annihilation. (Pg. 87) But in mercy to our readers we forbear. Mr. Daly is never elevated beyond the dead level of his habitual opacity, by even the simplest theme in the world. That any man could, at one and the same time, fancy himself a poet and string together as many pitiable inanities as we see here, on so truly suggestive a theme as Mark Rothko's paintings, is to our apprehension a miracle of miracles. The topic would seem to be, of itself, sufficient to elicit fire from ice--to breathe animation into the most stolid of stone. Mr. Daly winds up a dissertation on "blood and ash"-- Thus having faced the expectation of "The Rothko Chapel Poem," perhaps as the Israelites in the wilderness did the flames of revelation in the face of Moses--through a veil of mercy, I have been unable to fully countenance the sorrows I perceive within the poem without a measure, however extreme, of contextualization in terms of the late medieval and Renaissance traditions of Passion mysticism (pg. 67) the whole of which would read better if it were Thus having tried to read "The Rothko Chapel Poem," perhaps as a tourist in Paris would labor to understand a menu--through tears of hunger, I have been unable to accept the unappetizing quality of the poem, though an afternoon with the cook would probably explain everything. Even with the great theme, Mary, our poet fails in his obvious effort to work himself into a fit of inspiration. One of his goals is to write a hymn to religious verse--but from beginning to end it is nothing more than a silly hymn to a great line of literary "D's": Expanding on DUNCAN's "line is in itself metaphor," each _page_ is aligned as but a pentecost of itself, renouncing parity between the lines. Each page being like a site-specific but self-disengraving graph of articulations hitherto merely consubstantial with, and therefore, ultimately, indivisible from, inscrutability--that archimedean point to all prophetic cataloging and litany; each page as such affords us a view of, approach to, or consequence of, the Magdalenian gospel from behind eyes of prophets from DEBORAH to DICKINSON, in light hiding the poet from our own eyes but shining on God. (Pg. 43) The suggestion is obvious. We might earlier have wondered what Mr. Daly meant by "immodesty," when on the opening page of his treatise he declared I take . . . as a model for the immodesty of my claims for them, the immodesty of the poems themselves (pg. 7) --but no longer. At one point the poet directs himself, as Youth's representative, to issue a proclamation as follows: Toward an aftermath of Romantic desire . . . we, being the young, have been forced at this time to mislead ourselves even further-- brought as never before to the point of being led headlong, and in hordes, into a divide on every side of which a silence has begun to reign. In this divide resides the ethical relation. Unearthed asymmetries shadowing immanence, and in fact capacitating the very disgrace that we must make of it, take shape in magnanimity and abasement at this time. (Pgs. 47-48) The "_hordes_" has reference to Mr. Daly's contemporaries, who are not fellow actors but part of the scenery. They appear in this production as a grand backdrop for Mr. Daly's "disgrace," "magnanimity," "debasement." The silence, however, must be an awful burden for our poet, who thinks it necessary to issue a proclamation to those leading Youth toward the divide--lest any should chance to be unaware of the fact that he (Mr. Daly) has discovered the divide to be a fine place after all (for there "resides the ethical relation")--but whether "Romantic desire," for having inspired an "aftermath," or "Unearthed asymmetries," for their "shadowing" of "immanence," are objects of devotion or despisal--that, for the life of us, we cannot tell. Of the "divide" in question--the present moment in poetry--Mr. Daly says: On the basis of a profound distrust of instrumental models of language, and in coincidence with the entrenchment of such models in the university-centered mainstream poetry renaissance of the seventies, remarkable strides--of theoretical resistance to, and aesthetic liberty from, the mainstream sensibility--have been taken by avant-garde poets during the last twenty years. Yet, as is the case with all bourgeois transformations, the moment of discovery--of the discovery of resistance-- has passed. When the tenets of resistance become presumptions, they necessarily overdetermine that resistance, with the consequence of one-dimensionality at the level of practice. And In a moment of despair I would characterize what is at this point required of the avant- garde, then, as a vast expiation--involving years of completely re-oriented study and practice--for its betrayal of the radical historical traditions of the sacred and the creative word. (Pg. 84) That so clever a personage as Mr. Daly should not be elated by the avant-garde's "remarkable strides," but feel "despair" instead--and active anger too--is certainly nothing more than reasonable and proper--but then he should have left the task of demanding expiation to some other uninterested individual--even Cicero has been held to blame for a want of modesty--and although, to be sure, Cicero was not Mr. Daly, still Mr. Daly may be in danger of blame. He may have enemies (_very_ little men!) who will pretend to deny that "the radical and historical traditions of the sacred and the creative word" (if _this_ is their study) bears at all points more than a partial resemblance to "bourgeois transformations" and "one- dimensionality at the level of practice." We have said that the "remarkable" feature, or at least one of the "remarkable" features of this volume is its obscurity--its opacity. Whenever the reader meets anything not decidedly obscure, he or she may take it for granted, at once, that it is stolen. When the poet speaks, for example, at page 27, of a "radical, rather than general, skepticism," he is borrowing without acknowledgment--or proper explanation--an idea that derives from the work of Emmanuel Levinas. The grossest allusions and appropriations abound. We would have no trouble in pointing out a score from this obscure source alone. At page 40 Mr Daly says: that which is otherwise than Being, or beyond essence, does not exist apart from self- destruction and just after only in this less limited sense . . . can the Good beyond being . . . eventuate in a rectitude of which we cannot dream. In another passage, also beholden to Levinas, a curious pun suggests that our author should like nothing better than to forget the obligation: We will write with the ardor of a lower life- form, reserving for exteriority the higher. We are DAILY brought to bear against the profane by a face in the square, by a hand in the gears. At page 15, our author applies a Levinasian code-word to a redaction of our own "Tell-Tale Heart," describing certain poems as being diachronic like the recondite stroke of a clock soaked in blood Discussing Susan Howe's "complex, almost formidable" reading of 19th century literature, he credits to _Typee_'s author an idea, whose articulation strongly recalls our most unimportant self: Melville tells us that there will be a conflict between consciousness, the availability of self, and conscience, the overcoming of our self-sufficiency, forever registering its pendulum swings like battle- cries in the deepest recesses of our mortality. (Pg. 49) And on page 55: In a pendulum swing of pure hierarchy between dirge-like prosodic grapplings and breakthroughs of inarticulable affection, Howe goes about the task of registering counterhistory in typeface and singing. But it is folly to pursue these thefts. As to any property of our own, Mr. Daly is very cordially welcome to whatever use he can make of it. But others may not be so pacifically disposed, and the book before us might be very materially thinned and reduced in cost, by discarding from it all that belongs to Levinas, Derrida, Blanchot, Bataille, Benjamin, Foucault--the very class of thinkers, by the way, whom Mr. Lew Daly, in his "Contextual Imperative" (_apex of the M_, no. 2) most especially effects to contemn. It has been rumored, we say, or rather it has been _announced_ that Mr. Daly is a graduate or perhaps a Professor in the Poetics Program--but we have had much difficulty in believing anything of the kind. The pages before us are not only utterly devoid of that classicism of tone and manner--that better species of classicism which a liberal education never fails to impart-- but they abound in the most outrageously vulgar violations of usage--of style in its most extended sense. Of felicitous phrasing, and all that appertains to it, Mr. Daly is ignorant in the extreme. We doubt if he can tell the difference between qualification and peroration. In long sentences he continuously begins with an involuted construction: Felled as we one day must be by a call to which language as we know it has deafened us . . . (pg. 27) ---------- Serpentine and self-begotten as the temptation of structure may be in an age enamored more with the absence of God than the victims of paradise . . . (pgs. 42-43) ---------- While some of us, like Susan Howe, may certainly harbor in our work an implicit, and even an ongoing, consideration of the Bible . . . (pg. 46) ---------- However different hymnody and discant [sic] may be from litany, permutation from glossolalia . . . (pg. 55) ---------- Following Psalm 22, to which Jesus remains most fully connected in the icons and altarpieces of Northerners, both Catholic and Quietist, before the Enlightenment . . . (pg. 59) ---------- Though repressed during the time between the return from the Babylonian exile and the birth of John the Baptist--repressed, that is, by priestly reforms under Ezra to make way for the Canon and the Law of the Scribes-- . . . (pgs. 61-62) We encounter the passive voice at every step, searching in vain for many a sentence's subject. Whenever possible, moreover, Mr. Daly places his cart before the horse--begins his sentence with an aside. Sentences? They are merely wind-up toys with feet that tromp up and down until the tension in the crank is completely depleted. In a word, judging from his powers of articulation, we might suppose that the poet could neither speak, hear, nor make use of his fingers. We do not know, in America, a stylist so utterly wretched and contemptible. His most extraordinary sins, however, are in point of meaning. Here is his first sentence:-- "Having taken into account certain of the most explicit demands of context in their work, I could not continue to write within the limits of what began here as a more formal review of recent publications by the poets Susan Howe and John Taggart; the type of articulation to which I was initially reconciled did not accommodate what had inspired me to speak." What is any body to make of all this? What is meant by the context _in_ their work?--and is the "type of articulation" to which Mr. Daly was "initially reconciled" irreconcilable with "the most explicit demands of context," or only with inspiration? At page 20, in 58 words, we have one of the grossest blunders: Once the flesh around the bullet the penetration of which is without end, swallows by analogy the phallus of the assassin and centers our rage, sentences hitherto handed down by us now destine us to fulfill a judgment that we cannot make--as though in preparation for our coming to face, and be disgraced by, what we've made. At page 24, we read: A gesture that is in the last instance still a premise of the language, and even the poem, in which it is represented necessarily shatters opacity, but is itself outshone by light on the absurd. At page 29, is something even grosser than this: For Simone Weil the abyss of revelation was the space of her experience with the point of a nail the head of which is the entire universe between the individual and God . . . At page 89, is a combination of several species of error: Far from being that which distinguishes us from animals, language is that which degrades us in their eyes, for by "their eyes" I mean the eyes are watching God. And just after-- Notwithstanding the political correctness of the rejection of the Pauline spirit/letter dualism, the time has come for us to flush from the thickets of post-Modern formalist anti-transcendentalism the lame-duck theology still underlying it . . . Invariably Mr. Daly mixes his metaphor--if he has not already _mashed_ it. The fact is, he is absurdly ignorant of the commonest principles of composition--and the only excuse we can make to our readers for annoying them with specifications in this respect is that, without the specifications, we should never have been believed. But enough of this folly. We are heartily tired of the book, and thoroughly disgusted with the impudence of the parties who have been aiding and abetting in thrusting it before the public. To the poet himself we have only to say--from any farther specimens of your stupidity, God give us Daly deliverance! * descriptions of an imaginary univercity / the logic of snowflakes * cf2785@albnyvms.bitnet *