What We Do to a Poem

LoLordo continuedfrom previous page to stand in its place, different enough to fail to look at home. The belletristic style ofFriedlander's Allen Poe, to some extent typical of the copious production fostered by the nineteenth-century magazine marketplace, indicates, quite precisely, a gap in the contemporary literary field. We do not have an evaluative review discourse concerned with serious contemporary poetry (despite what Christian Wiman would have you believe). Allen Poe's constant interplay of praise and criticism, expressing an underlying concern for the ranking of writers, survives at the level of the book review; his concern for the appearance of various writers survives at the level of gossip (who knew all the poets of the Bay Area had such exemplary physiognomies?); his frequent quotation ofpassages survives at the level of literary criticism. But even here, in quotation, the difference is apparent, forAllen Poe cites passages to display the stylistic excellences ofa given author: just where we might expect to find it, standard close reading does not (quite) occur. What does happen is altogether more strange. Benjamin's Marxist automaton, we might recall, was unbeatable at the game of history when assisted by theology; if Friedlander assumes the position of the wizened figure inside the machine of Allen Poe's critical discourse, the literary-historical results are not so predictable. We are confronted with the mechanical , replicable quality of critical rhetoric; but at the same time (lest this description begin to sound too de Manían), we are confronted with the particular agency of a writer who positions himself within literary history and experiments with its machinery ofjudgment. Middleton's "distant reading," Friedlander's "simulcast": at first glance an opposition might seem plausible— i.e., spatial distance versus the temporal simultaneity of transmission. But Friedlander provides a stream of duplicitous simulation: his reader must account for two different source contexts, each of which is productive of a particular aspect of the critical text—and in so doing the reader is doubly "distanced," presented with the rhetoric ofattentiveness that contributes to the persuasive force of argument while at the same time acknowledges the arbitrariness ofcriticism as procedure. We have, then, not distance and simultaneity, but distance and interference . To cite Elkins once more: "close reading is the name of a method that posits a number of distances from a work but does so in order to be able to remain blind to the one distance that is finally adopted." The monocular—or single-sensed— perspective ofclose reading is challenged by Middleton and Friedlander; their provisional, genuinely experimental efforts to estrange the critical act invigorate the reader. V. Nicholas ^Uyrdo is an assistant professor at the University ofNevada-Las Vegas. He is completing a manuscript on the "notorious difficulty" ofAmerican poetry since modernism. What We Do to a Poem Michael Maqee The Material of Poetry: Sketches for a Philosophical Poetics Gerald L. Bruns University of Georgia Press http://www.ugapress.org 168 pages; cloth, $24.95 "Anthropologists don't study villages," Clifford Geertz observed in Interpretation ofCultures (1973), "they study in villages." One of the most delightful things about Gerald L. Bruns's new book, The Material of Poetry, is that he takes a similarly anti-essentialist view ofthe contemporary poetry landscape. Bruns reminds us—and not perfunctorily—that he is, to borrow another phrase from Geertz, "an animal suspended in webs of significance he himself has spun" and that his is "not an experimental science in search of law but an interpretive one in search of meaning." Bruns's account is convincing not because he has developed a totalizing theory of reading but because his style, his approach, is convincing. Bruns's example suggests that if one approaches poetry, even very difficult poetry, by living with it, one can begin to make sense of it; and that the sense one makes will have value. Bruns's book developed from the Averitt Lectures he delivered at Georgia Southern University in 2003, and he has maintained a conversational tone to great effect. Early on he sketches out the book's "three theses." "[F]irst," he writes, "poetry is made of language but is not a use of it...." This point, which Bruns...