“One of the characteristic symptoms of the spiritual condition of our age,” Charles Baudelaire wrote about Eugène Delacroix, is that “the arts aspire, if not to take one another’s place, at least reciprocally to lend one another new powers.” Barry Schwabsky, a poet who evolved into an incisive art critic (like Baudelaire and Peter Schjeldahl), approaches an artwork as if looking to borrow what is lent and triggers his own “new powers” as a poet. For the past decade, he has served as art critic for The Nation. A collection of his stimulating reviews in The Perpetual Present (Verso, 2016) presents an art critic who writes with immediacy and nuance.
He notices, for instance, that the children depicted in Gauguin’s “Breton Girls Dancing, Pont-Aven” (1888) “embody an inexplicable stillness,” and then writes that the artist’s tendency for stasis, even when his subject matter seems to lend itself to the evocation of change and movement, reflects his urge to perceive something eternal within the momentary.”
In his preface to Words For Art (Sternberg Press, 2013), Schwabsky indicates “part of what it means to me to be a critic: to write as someone whose writing is not backed up by any credential but only by the force of the writing he or she produces, the cogency and perception and eloquence.” In this collection of essays, he writes about the writing styles and effects of other art critics. When he says of Michael Fried, “He has always been aware that any truly productive interpretation must go beyond verifiable fact – that it is, in fact, a wager,” Schwabsky could have been remarking on his own comment about Gauguin’s “urge to perceive something eternal,” a hunch with a shiver of its own.
Baudelaire regarded Delacroix as “decidedly the most original painter of ancient or of modern times.” But a century later, John Berger disagreed: “A lamb chop by Goya touches more pity than a massacre by Delacroix.” Whether concerning a painting or a poem, we still expect the critic to offer a judgment – even while we increasingly bristle at any whiff of starchy authority. “Critics are not power brokers anymore,” Schwabsky said in a contentious dialogue with Paco Barragán. “The age of Clement Greenberg is long past. Our role is to develop and formalize the conversation around art – to circulate ideas and perceptions. We are not gatekeepers.” Unlike Greenberg, who also was art critic for The Nation, Schwabsky is not inclined to plant flags for new movements nor to predict how the wind will blow. But what about judgment?
Again, Schwabsky is a poet, and a poet is someone who is perpetually on the brink of a poem or troubling over newborn verse in the ICU. In judging another’s work harshly, there is a danger of committing a gross injustice. But this is not the most dire danger faced by the creative critic. More debilitating is the strain to apprehend and commiserate with something one really does not like very much. This effort draws a poet out of her/his bias and character. The more gratifying alternative to this situation is to approach an artwork or poem as one approaches any significant experience – through alternating currents of exalted appreciation and cool demystification. Charles Baxter said that one of the reasons Randall Jarrell’s poetry reviews “were so devastating was that Jarrell was a very good describer of a poem’s verbal economies and thematic gestures, and he had a well-stocked mind so that he could provide a cultural content.” Schwabsky is known for acknowledging the achievements of his subjects and commenting with quotable economy about technique as if the artist’s intention is still moving toward its goal, namely the sensual mind of the viewer.
All of the above adds up to a somewhat long runway towards Heretics of Language, a new collection of his book reviews and essays about writers. I picked it up eager to discover if and how he applies his habits of art reviewing to literary genres and authors. He introduces the “heretics” as “individuals who, innocently or otherwise, have taken this alteration of an already-identified language as an experiment, a project, a vocation, a game, an ordeal, a destiny, or a destitution. They are at variance with what they identify with.” In other words, Schwabsky has a taste for works that conform to an approach to language based on highly intentional “mutations” of diction. As an art critic, Schwabsky seems to track and clarify a taste that becomes explicit – but in the pieces on books, that taste is usually implicit from the outset. How will he manage that narrowness?
The essays preserve the initial, irradicable impacts of works of literature on Schwabsky, a series of confirmations that leads to ongoing moments of appreciative assessment. Past encounters, still fresh, evolve into auspicious returns. In “The Grand Piano: Language Writing Remembered,” he recalls the moment in 1979 when he discovered Ron Silliman’s Ketjak — “Eschewing argument and narrative, the juxtaposition of these ‘torqued’ sentences focuses attention on the surface of the text – a literary equivalent to the emphasis on the flatness of the picture plane in Modernist painting.” He was – and still is — delighted that “the lyric drama of address counts for nothing in such aggressively disjunctive work.” He admired the “sublime attentiveness to the world and the word at once.” His distastes, tactfully indicated, would seem to look back approvingly at earlier indictments, such as Louis Zukofsky’s incrimination of the first-person signature as a sign of “predatory intent.”
That tact is expressed in his astute retrospective essay on the work of Barbara Guest in which he recalls Denise Levertov’s rebuff of a Guest manuscript (“on the grounds that it displayed ‘the typical chic flipness of the NY School’”) when the former was poetry editor at Norton. “Another of Levertov’s complaints,” he says, “was that ‘often a poem of yours has seemed to me like an unrelated series of poem-seeds, none of them developed.’” But this characteristic of Guest’s work, of “forever-becoming,” is exactly what excites Schwabsky. He simply allows Levertov to represent, on the slant, the object of his aversion. The Guest essay is a most effective and charming model of critical gratitude. Blending implied advocacy with responsive description of texts and techniques, Schwabsky prefers the role of usher over that of born-again minister. But over the course of reading his reviews, one’s understanding of his partialities expands.
In a discerning piece on Italy’s iconic revolutionary author Nanni Balestrini, he revisits those qualities of a presence that abjures its self-ness. He writes of Balestrini’s meta-novel Tristano, “As later would be the case with some of the products of Language poetry, flarf, and conceptual poetry, it is writing that appears to emerge not from any individual ‘I’ but rather to have been extracted from the discursive atmosphere of the world at large.” About Joe Brainard he says, “Brainard’s unflagging self-attentiveness is curiously and paradoxically egoless; he can expose himself preening or faking it in his memoires, but his prose never suffers such flaws. It has no evident design on the reader.”
Schwabsky’s roster of heretics also includes Francis Picabia, Ingeborg Bachmann, Paul Celan, Jack Spicer, Alda Merini, Amelia Rosselli, the unclassifiable Malcolm de Chazal, Czech modernist Ivan Blatný, Samuel Beckett, Jonathan Safran Foer, Tim Dlugos, John Ashbery, Natalie Czech, Denise Riley, Amy King, Wong May, Jeff Nunokawa, Richard Hell, and Borislav Pekić.
In his essay on Arthur Sze (“one of my favorite poets”), Schwabsky ventures one of his few if gentle scoldings. “It’s a little disappointing when Sze gives in to the temptation, as he very occasionally does, of ending a poem with something that suggests a gesture toward the epiphanic; no one perception should in itself claim to offer a key to all the rest …” The word should above assumes a great weight within its surround of sympathies. It is a judgment that provokes inquiry, argument, and perhaps action. A most circumspect and generous critic, Schwabsky like his subjects works as if he “has no evident design on the reader.” His designs are of the more inconspicuously determined kind.
[Published by Black Square Editions on January 15, 2018. 245 pages, $20.00 paperback]