Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism (review)

In his Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism, a deft and skillful close listening to the works and experiences of canonical modernist poets Ezra Pound, Langston Hughes, Gertrude Stein, and Wallace Stevens, Rob Wallace (a professor of literature and a drummer as well) intercedes in a vexed field of collaboration. He attempts to realign the terms of the conversation between poetry and jazz, and to understand improvisation as a discipline—not just, as it has been pejoratively understood (under the shadow of racism), as loose or arbitrary play.

In structure and principled intent, Wallace's intervention recalls no book to my mind more than Frank Lentricchia's classic study Modernist Quartet. As a method, Wallace's work more expertly answers Henri Lefebvre's inimitable call for a textual/contextual rhythmanalysis. Drawing tactfully on recent critical readings and theories of Marjorie Perloff, Ann Douglas, Philip Pastras, Michael North, Paul Gilroy, Aldon Nielsen, Derek Bailey, and others, Wallace attempts to position the act and ethics of "improvisation" as a kind of instrument attuned to a loose theory and method "that can be seen both in a given artist's work and in the life of that artist" (18). The book seems to jettison (to the good, I think) a formalized system of modernist improvisational theory and practice derived from the work and lives of Pound, Hughes, Stein, and Stevens, and their critics. Wallace instead achieves a brilliant and tactful method of listening to the work of these writers as each reaches for their unique sense of sense. I n this way, I think Wallace has exemplified improvisation at its very best, as a crucial (rather than narrowly critical) method of literary listening that aims to ambulate its way far nearer and down closer to the sonic and sensual contours of poetry than academic, theoretical readings often do. Wallace's improvised method of readings keeps one brush on the snare while accenting and shading the works he attends in ways that make us see them (even in their blurriest precision) clearer and hear them better.

Within the site of Wallace's hearing, William James's rhythmic pragmatism sounds the ur-rhythms of American literary modernism. Echoing Ross Posnock's The Trial of Curiosity: Henry James, William James, and the Challenge of Modernity, Wallace associates the work of each of his quartet of poets with James's lead in "defining how modern consciousness relates to the pulse of life" (75). In his reading of Stevens' long poems, Wallace credits James for the sense of "ambulatory thought" in his approach to Stevens as well as in Stevens' own approach to poetic method. He goes on: "But this ambulatory thinking takes on special significance for Stevens's poetry when we consider the amount of actual walking he did, and that he often composed his poems while walking" (144).

In his reading of Stevens' "Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction," a poem so thoroughly composed in its march of tercets, Wallace comes up with a reconception of improvisation that covers his method as well as the subjects of his readings:

My reading of the poem as improvisational is based in the more nuanced notion that improvisation itself does not necessarily lead to the exclusion of a desire for certainty. Improvisation itself can never be "pure," and nor can "pure poetry" or a "supreme fiction." Part of the misunderstanding about improvisation across the arts is that non-improvisers often regard it as a magical [or, I would add, a strictly musical] process at best, or a purely free, intuitive, and messy process at worst. But as Sun Ra consistently reminds us, there is a discipline in freedom, and freedom in discipline.

(146)

By this subtlety, Wallace's readings walk us back to an open-ended encounter with the sound-sense in the works of Pound, Hughes, Stein, and Stevens.

If there is a shortcoming to Improvisation and the Making of American Literary Modernism, it is the somewhat too direct (and so reductive) link between...