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An
autobiographical Education of... in essay and interview form, Nathaniel Tarn's The Embattled Lyric, a 'substantially altered new edition
of his 1991 Views from the Weaving Mountain,' according to the preface, reads as a
retrospective, forward-thinking distillation of ideas by a man who, after a
long career as a poet, preceded by one as an anthropologist, sounds like a
contemporary Henry Adams turned cultural ecologist/poet confessing that here
today in modern America and Europe there is no poetry or preservation of
cultural values. And whether discussing his own tri-national ambivalences
(French, British And American experiences in Burma with Buddhism, his
collective 'choral' theory of lyric poetry, the lyric archetypes Orpheus and
Eurydice supply, the devolution of poetry into a 'head stuff' product he dubs
mere 'writing,' the tedium of academic discourse, counter-cultural
anti-intellectual failings, the 'closed field' of the poet as
[producer-consumer' of poetry, 'a republic of the dead' as the only
collective we can count on to last, or the dismal future of the planet, Tarn
is interesting, provocative, full of contradiction, surely aware of it, and
so actually drawn to hope. 'However depressed I am,' he confesses in a 1999
interview, 'the fundamental principle is one of hope, the only indispensable
prerequisite of poetry.' As a mark of consistency, 26 years earlier in his
book-length poem The Beautiful Contradictions Tarn similarly hoped for a rejuvenated world intellectually and environmentally
despite the material realities of 'INFOGLUT' culture and 'the petrifaction of
language.'
For the poet this petrifaction is particularly abysmal as it kills off the
alchemical power Tarn in his analysis of Blake celebrates and mourns. As a
dissatisfied anthropologist, he condemns technical jargon in all academic
fields and vilifies the situation of poetry only read by poets by comparing
it to Levi-Strauss' work on incest. Back in the poet role, he finds this
incest 'a scandal of unbelievable proportions: one in which everyone wants to
sing and no one wants to listen to the song..., 'adding, 'If this were not the
image of many of other human enterprises of possibly deeper import, I would
not have troubled you with mention of it.'
Tarn also finds our culture cannibalistic with respect to primitive cultures,
and this is comparable to how modernism has cannibalized itself into
postmodernism and an endless regeneration of 'new' avant-gardes. In such
critiques heard before in him and many others Tarn's powers of analysis and
passionate skepticism come to the aid of any befuddled poet living in an age
of theory. Take
his critique of Language Poetry. Dismissing it in
part as a rerun of Mallarme's experiments and the nouveau roman of the 1960s, Tarn deflates the
effectiveness of its political claims, pointing out in a 1999 talk, 'Octavio
Paz, Anthropology, and the future of Poetry:'
The argument,
used by some producers who,
correctly
locating the seats of available power
in the
academy, have ensconced themselves
therein every
bit as much as the establishment
'mainstream'
to the effect that the disruption of
the common
linguistic coin is part of a war against
'late-capitalist' discourse is singularly inept: I do
not see any
oppressed workers of any kind
devouring the
products of avant-gardism.
And yet, as is characteristic of Tarn's mind and work, there is this
contradiction a decade before:
Charles Bernstein's Content's Dream and Ron Silliman's The New Sentence are 'the most energetic brilliant, and
challenging critical works to come out of our craft since... Olson's
'Projective Verse'... or the essays of Ezra Pound' ('Regarding the Issue of New
Form').
If we remember that Tarn has confessed to liking the 'mental game' of
Structuralism or have noticed his stylistic penchant for relativistic
quotation marks and italics, the contradiction, like many of his others, is
not surprising and it goes to the core of Tarn's 'education'. Tempered
devotion to Objectivists and the Black Mountain School, for instance, starts
with a personal view of Olson, Duncan and Zukovsky as 'his three pillars,'
continues as a publisher for Cape-Goliard in England, and then turns doubtful
('an overemphasis on process'], his puzzlement over the 'creed' of 'form is
never more than an extension of process'). In the end, his habitual
skepticism, in keeping with his high regard for Buddhism's 'strange
relativism,' is grounded in belief, belief in poetic voice, which he links to
the possibilities for a better
world. Flipping back to Theory, he scoffs:
The
death-of-the-author thematics... are
another
inanity: when society does its
very
best to
homogenize us, what is wrong with
a strong,
knowledgeable, and responsible
ego crying in
the darkening wilderness?
Instead, voice, 'it may be argued, is to present poetry what style once was
in the past: the way in which
you diagnose whether there is, or
not, a presence worth hearing and knowing behind words heard or read.
We have come back to Tarn's frail anthropological hope in poetry and the
poet. While now '...the way poet deals with words is s/he takes
them after everyone else has finished with them, when all their use has been
gotten out of them, by theologians, philosophers, scientists...', perhaps the
poet 'has the hope that... words may have recovered a renewed innocence' in a manner
reminiscent of Wordsworth's
'optimism' of the poet being 'the most available human being, available to
what is important to us when we have done being theologians, philosophers or
scientists and are simply human creature.' However, it is Tarn's belief as
well that poetry 'anchors itself
in, and is nourished by, the existence of... traditional natural and
cultural treasures and that when these latter suffer as much as they are
doing, poetry is herded into becoming purely elegiac...' - something he points out happening
in Neruda's The Heights of Macchu Picchu.
Ultimately, the survival of poetry and the earth in the face of
over-production and consumption are linked in a new unity typified by Tarn's
call for a truly choral or universal voice in 'a common world... guaranteed
paradoxically by its very plurality.'
Who will lead us to the new promised land? Tarn hopes it will be the
'...anthropologist-poet as "the prophet of a future true
multiculturalism," the
Neruda whose Macchu Picchu is also a "hymn to future".'
©
Marcus Smith 2008
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