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Reviewed by:
  • Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde by Peter Quartermain
  • Andrew DuBois
Peter Quartermain. Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde. University of Alabama Press. xii, 322. $39.95

The title is apt, the subtitle less so; for while there is much here that can be called avant-garde (though this shorthand in taste is always on the verge of outliving its veracity), the term poetic facticity, placed where it is, implies that it is the central theme of the book – but it isn’t; two essays address it directly, while elsewhere it appears glancingly. There is certainly no overarching argument made in this regard; after all, in the introduction the author admits the book’s lack of one. It is no great deficiency.

It is instead the plurality and recalcitrance indicated in the primary title that obtain as a through-line loosely connecting these twenty-one essays: plurality, because a number of poets are discussed, a variety of topics in poetics treated, habits of reading revealed; recalcitrance, because the critic comes up against something that cannot be explained right away. There are many admissions of, questions about, tentative explanations for the fact that there is something happening here, but what it is is not quite clear: “But why? Why is he so opaque?” “[W]hat she writes does not ‘make sense’ in ordinary terms.” “[It] refuses to stabilize finally into a settled meaning.” “[I]t’s a little more complicated than this, and not easily susceptible of explication.” “[T]he difficulties are far more pervasive than he suggests.” “[S]ome of [her] texts are impossible definitively to fix.” “[It] undoes certainty.” “It’s a pretty weird poem, I guess.” These are not merely self-reflexive tics. They accumulate to a point of advocacy for a number of “poetries” (and even poems), as if groping toward a response to someone who says, “I’m not reading that or anything like it again. It doesn’t make any sense,” and for whom the reply, “That’s precisely how it does make ‘sense,’” just won’t quite do.

After the welcoming introductory essay and a cornerstone-setting piece on canonicity and Eliot and Pound, three poets are treated more than the others: Basil Bunting, Lorrine Niedecker, and Louis Zukofsky. “Basil Bunting: Poet of the North” features an opening historical tableau that indicates early on how Peter Quartermain can use a good story to his advantage. His interest in matters of extremely local form is at the fore of “Parataxis in Basil Bunting and Louis Zukofsky” but not at the expense of either literary history or the epistemology of reading; remarking that parataxis “seems to be a medieval and modern form” (intriguing – is this true?), the critic delightfully describes “paratactic structures” as “creat[ing] a field of apprehension.” “Reading Niedecker” shows his ability to write to the general reader as well as to the specialist. There are three other essays on these writers, and as a group they mark a solid beginning to the collection and its concerns. [End Page 267]

Essays follow on Robin Blaser, Richard Caddel, and Robert Creeley; “George Oppen and Some Women Writers” are considered; Bruce Andrews and Steve McCaffery pop up; the virtues of Mina Loy’s Love Songs are sung, and sounds are of the essence in “Syllable as Music: Lyn Hejinian’s Writing Is an Aid to Memory” – extremely local effects again. But so is the global here. The book closes with a quartet of essays – “Undoing the Book,” “Poetic Fact,” “Sound Reading,” and “Paradise of Letters” – that serve as a magnet for the general themes seen throughout. The strongest overall impression may be the book’s versatility. Stylistically, Quartermain’s voice sounds human, sometimes even talky, which reveals the origin of much of this work in lectures. He is a man who nuzzles up to the words yet finds much that is worthy in diversion; his juxtapositions in this regard are slightly bracing but cause no harm. He mixes moments of immediacy found in matters sonic with those of structure found in formal architecture, all the while asking foundational questions having to do with thinking and reading, reading and writing. This...

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