Cubist PoetryPart of the Climate: American Cubist Poetry by Jacqueline Vaught BroganReview by: Alan Michael ParkerArt Journal, Vol. 51, No. 4, Latin American Art (Winter, 1992), pp. 106-107Published by: College Art AssociationStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/777293 .

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106

socialized the European past by permitting it to rename itself art history, while ignoring those ob-

jects unable to be made part of that history" (pp. 5-6). As a result of this resocialization into a "his-

tory of objects," Fisher contends that new objects were created, "objects that have as their single, overt design, the desire to join history" (p. 6), the

history of the museum. From this he concludes that "the 'subject' of the museum is not the indi- vidual work of art but relations between works of

art, both what they have in common (styles, schools, periods) and what in the sharpest way clashes in their juxtaposition" (p. 8). This attitude allows for all types of objects from various cultures to enter the museum, calling into question the

criticisms of those multiculturalists who see the aesthetic display of non-Western objects as a form of cultural domination. For as Western objects lost their ritual significance, they were appreciated as

"visually interesting" things. From here, Fisher

argues, "It seemed plausible to accept these mute

objects [objects from foreign cultures] precisely because the civilization [of the West] had already set itself to silence its own objects for the purposes of the new category of art" (p. 20). While Fisher makes this process of "silencing" much too willful

(I think it occurred as a result of the replacement of religious faith by Enlightenment ideas of ratio-

nalism, a replacement that undercut the ritual and

mystical significance of religious objects), his re-

marks do suggest that museums, rather than de-

basing non-Western objects, raised non-Western

objects to the level of art, to a level equal to the

most precious of Western objects.5 In the remainder of the first half of his book,

Fisher proceeds to demonstrate why abstract art is "the natural art of a museum culture" and why "linear ordering and the cancellation of content are the two museum practices that come to be recorded within later art, where it occurs not only as one content among others, but as the essential

subject matter" of art (p. 21). He does this through an interesting interpretation of the works of Jasper Johns and Frank Stella. To Fisher, their works ex-

emplify these aspects of abstract art by the way they "efface" (expunge) literal content and by the

way they control the sequencing of works that surround their own through a "strategy of the series" or a disjunctive compositional format

(chaps. 3 and 5). The second half of the book deals mostly

with the relationship of museums and, more espe-

cially, works of art to industrialization. "Museums

became more and more central exactly in cultures

touched most deeply by the factory system" of

mass production, writes Fisher. They became

"storage areas for authenticity and uniqueness

per se, for objects from any culture or period whatever that were 'irreplaceable' or singular" (p. 165). For Fisher, it is not only the museum that is affected by industrial production. In a lengthy discussion echoing Meyer Schapiro's observations about CUzanne's still lifes, Fisher argues that the still life, being an arrangement of objects without

internal, natural relationships, is a human manipu- lation of objects along rational lines similar to the

thinking inherent in industrial production (p. 209).

According to Fisher, however, the still life and sub-

sequent use of industrial materials in art does not

deny humanity, as Marx argued when he de-

scribed "all objecthood as frozen human labor, human time, and human need" (p. 251). Instead, Fisher asserts that "through work the human is

injected into matter " (p. 251) and a recognition of this in art "involves us in a willingness to recognize the same presence in bridges, skyscrapers, and

pylons. ....

Each recovery [of the human] in an individual work states that the object world . . .

exists as a rebus, spelling and re-spelling the hu-

man name" (p. 252). 4

Notes 1. See Clement Greenberg, "Modernist Painting," reprinted in Howard Risatti, ed., Postmodern Perspectives: Issues in

Contemporary Art (Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice Hall, 1990), 12. 2. Greenberg began theorizing about this at least as early 1939. See his essay "Avant-Garde and Kitsch," in Clement

Greenberg, Art and Culture (Boston: Beacon Press, 1961), 3. 3. The assumptions and therefore the dangers I see in con-

tinuing to promote the "great plot" theory (i.e., corporations are instruments of absolute control/domination) are nu- merous: because it assumes people don't like their consumer- oriented lives, the theory leads one to presume, in view of the lack of change in these areas, that people are unable to do

anything to implement change, and thus the theory tends to absolve people of responsibility. I think it is time to entertain the idea that we, as a society, may have made so little change in areas such as education, the environment, and rampant con- sumerism mainly because these assumptions may be false. 4. The conference was held at the International Center of the Smithsonian Institution, Washington, D.C., in September 1988. 5. Clearly, Fisher's ideas reflect Greenberg's scenario for mod- ern art as an autonomous realm of activity, something that Fisher feels is fundamental to the modern museum's identity and operation. As this view of art is rejected, however, post- modern criteria, criteria that value political and social content, are being used to judge the past performance of museums

originally created around the idea of modern art.

H OWAR D R I S AT T I teaches art history at Virginia Commonwealth University in Richmond.

Cubist Poetry ALAN MICHAEL PARKER

Jacqueline Vaught Brogan, ed. Part of the Climate: American Cubist Poetry Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991. 362 pp. $45.00

J acqueline Vaught Brogan's Part of the Cli- mate: American Cubist Poetry never quite decides what kind of book it wants to be.

Ostensibly an anthology of American experimen- tal poetry from 1915 to 1942, as published in the "little magazines" of the time, this collection pro- vides a platform for the author's opinions-on Cubism, on Wallace Stevens's exclusion from the

literary canon, on William Faulkner, on Jacques Derrida-which rarely transcend specious asser- tion. What might have been a fine critical study of

Georges Braque and Pablo Picasso, of the Armory show of 1913, of Alfred Stieglitz and his work on behalf of Cubism, and of how American poets were influenced by the radical aesthetics being bandied about so blithely in the visual arts, instead falls flat. Intent upon her claim that literary mod- ernism as we know it lacks historical credence as a

movement, and that the whole of avant-garde poetry should be considered "Cubist," Brogan presents no analysis of either paintings or poems. There is no rigor to this study, nor is there any close reading of texts, without which the connec- tions between the two arts remain curious, at best. Moreover, as her commentary dwindles into "who published where" and "how this poem looks different from that poem," Brogan rarely

justifies her selections. She has compiled an inter-

esting anthology, and one that might provide fu- ture scholars with significant source material, but her critical histrionics fail to jibe with the poems presented, leaving us with two disconnected halves of one book.

In her prefatory remarks, Brogan offers a def- inition of Cubism in the visual arts:

Somewhat oversimplified, cubism in the visual arts rapidly changed from an aesthetic designed to reintroduce form, largely as a reaction against the ephemeral quality of Impressionism, to an aesthetic which quite ironically but consistently fractured form. This "fracturing" not only in-

cludes the actual forms of objects and the intro-

duction of multiple perspectives, but extends to

the fracturing of the boundary between visual

and verbal representation, primarily through the

use of collage (pp. 5-6).

These two sentences provide the extent of

Brogan's art historical analysis, and there are no

illustrations. Moreover, in this rather general and

literary approach to fine art-in her assumption that ultimate "fracturing" blurs the visual and the

verbal-Brogan reveals an awkward meth-

odological slant. Her bias is clear:

While it may be purely an accident that Picasso

would develop cubist techniques in painting

WINTER 1992

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(techniques which were rather quickly recognized as corresponding to the fragmented, postwar mentality) before the Great War began, it is his-

torically and even politically no accident that cubism in literature largely falls between the Great War (appropriately renamed, in a kind of cubist twisting of perspective, with a number) and World War II (p. x).

Brogan's concept of Picasso's "accident" appears crude to me, as though she believes literary history to be the only important history. Equally trouble- some is this "kind of cubist twisting of perspec- tive," an astonishing notion. Brogan seems to consider all paradox to be Cubist; indeed, she states that Ezra Pound is "an especially difficult

figure to categorize (a fact which is, itself, amen- able to the spirit of cubist multiplicity)" (p. 114), and that Derrida "may now be our most prolific cubist writer" (p. 283), two statements that are left completely unexplored. Such offhand opin- ions serve to deflate her more reasonable ideas.

What then is Cubism as a literary phenome- non? According to Brogan, it includes both poetry and prose: among the works cited as Cubist are

T. S. Eliot's "The Wasteland," William Faulkner's

Absalom, Absalom!, James Joyce's Ulysses, and Ezra Pound's Cantos. For her purposes in this

study, Brogan offers an extensive definition of the Cubist poem:

Yet while it is impossible to delineate specific characteristics that identify every cubist poem, it is possible to say that as it ranges between ana-

lytic and synthetic interpretation, cubist poetry is

likely to be marked by concern with visual form ... by a distortion of normal stanza, line, and word boundaries; by a thematic concern with its own modernism and an intense preoccupation with perception; by narrative and temporal dis-

junctions that, in a collage-like fashion, employ multiple voices, sections, and textual fragments; and finally by a heightened sense of textuality itself (p. 6).

Aside from its interest in visual play, a characteris- tic that Wallace Stevens would later call "typo- graphical queerness," (p. 250), this definition also seems so broad as to be meaningless. Does

Oedipus Rex make the grade, considering how its

choral passages act as "narrative and temporal

disjunctions"? And what about Elizabethan

drama and its development of the dramatic aside, as a "heightened sense of textuality itself"? How

about the fragmentation of some of William

Blake's lyrics? Or the collage that is Tristram

Shandy? It would appear that almost any innova-

tive literary work might meet Brogan's criteria.

Furthermore, her application of visual art princi- ples to literature-that the introduction of multi-

ple perspectives and the fracturing of the pictorial plane in painting may be seen as analogous to the use of multiple voices and the fragmentation of

syntax in writing-strikes me as absurd, for multi-

ple voices and fragmented syntax have been used

by writers since poems were first sung around the

campfire. Finally, Brogan lets herself get caught up in the visual hijinks of various bad poets, which results in the classification as Cubist of anyone who explores "white space" or uppercase letter-

ing within a stanza. In terms of aesthetics, Brogan seems im-

paired by a reluctance to read a poem closely or to

judge its relative worth, which reveals yet another of her extraordinary implicit axioms-mainly, that as of 1913 the traditional stanzaic poem can be seen as "old-fashioned" (p. 16) and that deviation in a poem's appearance on the page may be con- sidered avant-garde, an "interaction between verbal and visual texts" (p. 24) that is essentially Cubist. Consequently, as visual form comes to dominate the discussion, a poet such as Robert Frost remains unmentioned despite his formal

accomplishments-omitted on the grounds, we

assume, that his poems look too traditional. (This

perspective seems awfully limited, for poetry is not painting, regardless of the need to be read, and thus perceived visually) Moreover, lacking careful biographical study-for example, the dis-

covery of new evidence regarding Eliot's corre-

spondence, or of Yvor Winters's trip to a gallery on the day he wrote "Snow-Ghost"-Brogan's argu- ment is reduced to circumstance.

Nonetheless, quite a few of the poems in- cluded are excellent reading. Where Brogan does a good turn, happily, is in her selection of Mina

Loy, an innovative if not great writer whose "Three Moments in Paris" and "Virgins Plus Curtains Mi- nus Dots" prove to be worth rediscovery. There are also interesting moments of historical drama

here, in which aesthetics collide quite dramatically as Wyndham Lewis and Gertrude Stein and e.e.

cummings and Wallace Stevens share a very crowded stage. To be sure, the anthology could have done without Daphne Carr's "While sooty Jews sell second-hand furniture . . ." (p. 56), an

offensive line from a bad poem, and Alfred

Kreymborg's banal "Her hair/is a tent/held down

by two pegs-/ears, very likely-" (p. 86), but

both of these writers are part of Brogan's "chang-

ing poetics of the time" (p. 7) and thus timely inclusions.

One wonders if Brogan's selection process

might have been guided by the light of multi-

culturalism. And yet on inspection, of the approx-

imately eighty samples presented, only sixteen are

by women, and writers of the Harlem Renaissance remain conspicuously ignored, despite the fact that Brogan's rubric might easily pertain to a poet such as Countee Cullen. It would seem, then, that her agenda is limited to upholding the reputation of Wallace Stevens, the subject of her previous book, Stevens and Simile: A Theory of Language (Princeton University Press, 1986). As Brogan states in her preface, Part of the Climate is in- tended to offer by praxis "new insights into the nature of 'modernism' itself by challenging the

presumption of a Pound/Williams tradition from which Stevens, among others, is notably ex- cluded" (p. xii). (Is it self-serving to redefine his-

tory according to one's own critical interests?) Granted, as the most collagist of the major poets cited, Stevens was clearly influenced by the visual art of his time, writing quite a few poems on

painting in which he explored stanzaic tension via traditional prosody and "white space," in addition to the resonant interaction of numbered sections. And yes, his interest in the materiality of the text

may be seen, in fact, as "Cubist." Nonetheless, by elevating Stevens to the status of most important writer of the century, in turn impugning modern- ism as she does, Brogan ignores aesthetic realities of the era: the radical innovations of Braque and Picasso are only remotely analogous to the works of Eliot, Pound, or William Carlos Williams, not to mention those of Faulkner To be sure, every artist is of a time, but Brogan's labeling of these writers as Cubist is akin to calling Milton Avery, Helen

Frankenthaler, and Andy Warhol all Beat painters. As a bibliographic survey, Part of the Climate

should have meaning for future scholarship, for

Brogan has successfully compiled a useful com-

pendium of "little magazine" poetry between the wars. As a work of criticism, this book is another

story: provocative yet unsubstantiated, well writ- ten yet coyly self-conscious, refreshingly free from fashionable theorizing yet implicitly didactic.

Finally, as an interdisciplinary work-a wonderful

idea, to be sure-this book lacks the careful rigor required to prove its claim. Was Cubism the domi- nant aesthetic in American poetry between the wars? Probably not. But even if it was, that is not evident from this book. And thus Brogan's study proves to be a sheep in wolf's clothing. 4

ALAN MICHAEL PARKERs poems have appeared in the New Republic, the New Yorker, and the Paris Review. He

teaches at Rutgers University and at the Parsons School of

Design.

ART JOURNAL

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