Rod Smith
Biography
Rod Smith is the author of Music or Honesty, The Good House, Poèmes de l'araignée (France), In Memory of My Theories, The Boy Poems, Protective Immediacy, and New Mannerist Tricycle with Lisa Jarnot and Bill Luoma. His latest collection, Deed, will be published by the University of Iowa Press in the fall of 2007. A CD, Fear the Sky, came out from Narrow House Recordings in 2005. Smith's work has appeared in numerous magazines and anthologies, including Anthology of New (American) Poets, The Baffler, The Gertrude Stein Awards, Java, New American Writing, Open City, Poésie, Poetics Journal, Shenandoah, and The Washington Review. He edits Aerial magazine, publishes Edge Books, and manages Bridge Street Books in Washington, DC. The next issue of Aerial will focus on poet Lyn Hejinian. Smith is also editing, with Peter Baker and Kaplan Harris, The Selected Letters of Robert Creeley, for the University of California Press.
Poet's Note
These comments will be welcomed by fifty or sixty people, a large number given the times we live in and the gravity of the matters under discussion. It must be borne in mind that a good half of this interested elite will be dedicated to maintaining the current system of beluga whale fistfucking, and the other half by people who insist on doing quite the opposite. Having, then, to take into account my core audience as well as readers who are both attentive and diversely influential, it is clear that I cannot speak with complete freedom.
Yet, suppose you tried to separate the feeling which music gives you from hearing music. Aspects of the composition of a book must partake of this attempt. Suppose you tried to separate the feeling shopping for music gives you from the experience of shopping for music. We may wish to call the elements of the aspects of the composition of a book its various “schizotypes.” The combining of the schizotypes imply an impractical material telepathy which is ever-present & decaying. The moment at which this decay communicates its unique advent—its schizotypicality—is the moment at which a reader escapes the artifact's nascent particularity. Advents which plus then pulse.
The idea of cognitive limits as discussed by Chomsky and others asserts that, as with any other species, there may be things that we're very literally incapable of understanding. This relates to the very real question: can humans interact in a nonhierarchic manner? Has politics failed? Is there a cognitive limit to our ability to recognize that what Andrew Ross calls “The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life” will destroy the species if we do not quickly choose otherwise? The Chicago Gangster Theory of Life is the operative paradigm of American society: “I have to get mine any way I can because there's not enough to go around.” & of course, it is entirely unclear that there’s not enough to go around. So, have we reached our collective political cognitive limits? Are we capable of sustained modes of association which genuinely respect the rights of individuals to exist?
The question of cognitive limits is central to the submodernist paradigm which does not exist. Within this nonexistent paradigm it is also a valid question whether further artistic ‘innovation’ in a generalizable manner is possible, or indeed desireable. It seems that as far as categories go the kinds of things that can be done have been done. What remains, however, is the fact, following Stein, that one does not have to try to be new because one is in a new time. This is what I am calling New Mannerism.
I am characterizing modernism as a continuum, submodernism being a recent manifestation. One can read postmodernism as largely a result of the allied victory in world war 2 leading to an increased capital flow to north america. American contradictions and sensibilities gave modernism a new flavor. Submodernism is a result of what the integrated spectacle calls globalization.
Another aspect of submodernism will be a rebellion against certain kinds of theory as careerist doubletalk. This relates to an increasingly desperate need for intellectual self-defense against the spectacle which speculative theory does not provide. There are exceptions.
Modernism is grounded in an exploration of non-normative modes of thought. Uncodified ways of being or of arranging materials. Yet as this non-normative history piles up—modernism, postmodernism—how explain its apparent lack of impact on discursive frameworks of power? Outside the texts of Guy Debord, who has really tried? Or has it had an impact? Chomsky makes the point that, for example, the women's rights or civil rights movement were not a direct attack on the existent power structures, they merely sought to be let in, they have not changed the manner in which those institutions operate, their operation being largely analogous to how the mafia operates. Nevertheless, and of course, these were real victories which were taken, not given.
This is a general characteristic of hermeneutical strategies that depend upon content rather than context. “As long as we think of solutions as happening only once we perpetuate the trauma of our native insecurities,” sayeth Rasula. What he might mean by “trauma” is all too clear to the “native insecurities” which are IN FACT in the dictionary. However in Edgar Alain Poe’s recent chapbook we find an argument for “the Principle itself. . . the Human desire for Supernal Difference.” It seems the fundamentally systemic indignity is HISTORY, or else haddock, but let us suppose it is history—a ‘politics of time’—“all politics as centrally involving struggles over the experience of time”—with respect to this: “Think, in particular, about the problems posed for a politics of emancipation by a horizon of expectation within which the replacement of capitalism within any current lifetime is no longer a feasible prospect; and the social forces traditionally assigned to the job can no longer be looked upon with any confidence to ‘grow into’ their allotted political role.” Without the “jargon” but with the “in particular” this seems to be accurately involved in an elucidation of the historicized deprivation of the disingenuous. But is there some hope for a commodification of revolution? Modernity has codified change—post-modernity being only meaningful if allowed to be meaningless, i.e. as schism in modernity's endless meaning concretions—& if meaningless then the famous haddock (named Kannon) blurred with tears of major tremble, is the meaning to be decided.
The problem of language is at the heart of all struggles between the forces striving to abolish alienation and those striving to maintain it; it is inseperable from the entire terrain of those struggles. We live within language as within swan vomit. Yet, in spite of what humorists think, swans do not vomit. Nor do they make love, as Dan Hoy thought, except online. Words work—on behalf of the dominant organization of life. And yet they are not automatized, unfortunately for the theoreticians of information, words are not in themselves “abortionists”; they embody forces that can upset the most careful calculations. Words coexist with swan and messiah vomit in a relationship analogous to that which proletarians (in the modern as well as the googled sense of the term) have with power. Employed almost constantly, exploited full time for every sense and nonsense that can be squeezed out of them, they still remain in some sense fundamentally vomited. Bummer, huh?
Power lives off stolen goods. It creates nothing, it recuperates. If it created the meaning of words, there would be no poetry but only useless “information.”