Tom Hibbard reviews Telling It Slant

Tom Hibbard reviews Telling It Slant

Telling It Slant
edited by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks
University of Alabama Press
Tuscalosa AL
2002; 446 pp
ISBN 0-8173-1096-7
ISBN 0-8173-1097-5 pbk

TELLING IT SLANT: LEAVING SHANGRI-LA

Telling It Slant isn’t the sort of collection I would ordinarily read—essays by variously known writers asked to write about the state of poetry at this time in the U.S. I guess I have more feeling that true comprehensive thinking emerges gradually in an unlikely manner rather than from any sort of officially appointed source. These writers seem to be in some distant way a group. I don’t mean that as any sort of reproach. They seem to be to some degree secure in their sense of themselves as writers. This too is ok. Perhaps what makes this book so intriguing and profound is that the writers’ sense of themselves as writers is afflicted in the same way. Though I don’t mean to imply that they form a movement, they all seem to be wrestling with the same thorny problem.

   This is a fairly long book—over four hundred pages, twenty-six different authors, footnotes, small print. George Washington University lecturer, Mark Wallace, whose reviews I have found reliable and insightful, and Steven Marks have done a faithful and savvy job of editing. As I contemplate, without specific notes and references, the experience of reading Telling It Slant, I think of it as a calm, quiet afternoon perhaps after having done some satisfying work or watching in fervent solitude a perfect and memorable sunny, still untroubled day through lacy window curtains. I think of the book with admiring wonder, even amazement. This review does not do justice to the writers individually. Before I begin picking out authors’ names and feebly analyzing, I want to offer some sort of praise for them altogether, as peacemakers, as people motivated by a sincere desire for fellowship in a world that has too many that prefer bloodshed and division.

   It seems the editors, perhaps the writers also, felt that the point of embarkation for the book was that writers, in this case poets, in modern society ‘hate identity’.   This is a plausible notion.   One might expect to agree with it considering the iconoclastic reputation of artists and writers over the centuries. They don’t want to be obligated by labels. Labels are an appendage of the past.

   Yet what is more interesting and challenging about this book is viewing it not as an attempt to reject labels but to somehow legitimize them. This might be simplistic. I don’t say that the ‘lost generation’ of today’s writers is subconsciously desperate for identity. That sounds plausible also. It’s more complicated than that. Perhaps I shouldn’t have used the word ‘legitimize’. What these writers are doing it seems is attempting to fathom the depths of identity. They are testing the lengths of its insidious influence. They are attempting to find out what identity means. Perhaps they do this without pretense only to find freedom from it. But, on the other hand, and this may be merely a test also, the question seems to permeate the labyrinthine reaches of these as-unlikely-as-possible experiments and masqueradings—what would you be if you were nothing. Actually, the question is more like this—what would you be if you were an insightful and at bottom humanitarianly motivated writer in a perfectly egalitarian society, in a society that takes no notice of any particular identity.

   Steve Evans’ subtly excellent first essay of the collection makes the statement that ‘This generation’s hatred of identity has been fed by the experience of the generations that immediately preceded [it]’. ‘Has been mitigated’ might be just as accurate. Evans introduces the writers he means and the considerations that have arisen from their experience, things such as ‘difference’, ‘being numerous’, ‘fragility’, ‘making things’ and ‘possibility’.   For Evans, identity is associated with ‘the ruling order’ and is a hindrance to development.

   The second essay, by Lisa Robertson, titled ‘How Pastoral: A Manifesto’, is nothing like the first in tone and subject. It states, ‘I need to pry loose liberty from an impacted marriage with the soil. I need a genre to gloss my ancestress’s complicity with a socially expedient code, to invade my own illusions of historical innocence’. And, ‘Let’s pretend you “had” a land. Then you “lost” it. That is pastoral. Consider your homeland, like all utopias, obsolete’. Like Evans, Robertson approves the ‘obsolescence’ of identity, and yet she does not seem able to entirely shake loose from the concept of ‘homeland’, of having lost something that she once had.

   Following these is ‘Poetry and Identity’, by Harryette Mullen, discussing the problems and questions posed by the several categories that intertwine with her writing—black, minority, female, innovative. Mullen rejects a ‘human’ perspective and expresses a wish to unite both innovativeness and universality with her blackness. Interestingly, this does not seem to contrast with the underlying sentiment of the other writers. Then ‘Anarchism and Culture’ by Jefferson Hansen, in which Hansen, though he says he favors avant-garde writing, argues that no writing is ‘in front of’ society. ‘Anarchism’ to Hanson means that there is no primary style of literature, that many different styles exist in different areas of cultures at different times. These are followed by an ‘essay’ by Gary Sullivan--a one-page, four-paneled comic strip in which poetry’s lineage is compared to the lineage of Adam and Eve. Then a long essay about Asian and Asian-American literature and literary forms by Brian Kim Stefans, containing the remarkable quote from Asian American writer Sianne Ngai, ‘Postmodernity... and pluralism are nearly synonymous’. Thus ends the first section, ‘Cultures’.

   By this time, identify has been established as a bad thing, a nagging parent that won’t allow its charges out of its sight. Identity not only imposes a restrictive authority, it entangles the writer in a position of authority by making him or her ‘responsible’, blocking the way to a radical, highly-sought originality. Being in a minority becomes desirable or at least a step in the right direction. This is not hatred of identity but of a certain form of identity; identity is viable if it is in the minority, detached from authority, out of favor at least in the beginning. The sections and essays that follow go even further, expressing a loyalty to an array of dissident perspectives—communist, ethnic, technological, homosexual and Bill Luoma’s ‘Cowgirls Like the Saltlick Gender & Some Poem Analysis’ in which he considers the problem of gender by putting himself in the position of a trans-sexual or ‘intersexual’: ‘Someone else made the decision of what and who I would always be before I even knew who and what I was’. Despite the essay’s humor, it conveys the serious notion that the obstacle to quality in writing is not identity per se but accepted identity.

   Other essays not written from a specific outsider perspective are decidedly unconventional in form. The final essay of the collection, by Juliana Spahr, is three essays of varying lengths and typographies side by side in three columns on each page, one of the essays being a parable about pepsis wasps and trantulas. Co-editor Marks’ ‘essay’ is a four-page diagramatic artwork that I happily did not understand at all. I decided Tan Lin’s ‘ambient stylistics’ should be considered gonzo literary criticism since it discussed everything—his relatives’ small motel, staying at the Marriott Inn, his dad’s being the best liar he ever knew, his many girlfriends, good television shows—except the question of poetry. Perhaps that could also be considered minimalist. G.S. Giscombe’s ‘Fugitive’ similarly talks in parallel about the tv show The Fugitive, the book Invisible Man, Amtrak and a seminar on incorporating multicultural perspectives into the classroom. Caroline Bergwell’s essay on the use of more than one language in a piece of writing contains this: ‘Writing is for the ployglot a process of undoing the illusory stability of fixed identities, bursting open the bubble of ontological security that comes from familiarity with one linguistic site’. Sianne Ngai’s contribution to this collection argues that the origin of true expression is disgust.



   A good way of demonstrating the thematic strand in Telling It Slant might be to string out some quotes from its pages. I note in my underlinings from essay to essay the themes I have mentioned breaking the surface. I’ve already quoted some of these. Here are a number of others.

            ‘My marginality as a black artist teaches me important lessons for my survival and integrity as an aesthetic innovator....’

                                                                                    —Harryette Mullen

            ‘...form, as it interpenetrates with content, always occurs within a poetic field littered with various forms, techniques and assumptions’.

                                                                                    —Jefferson Hanson

            ‘In the end it is important to acknowledge the extent to which the emerging avant-garde is motivated by a genuine desire for a breakthrough’.

                                                                                    —Daniel Barbiero

            ‘Language poetry cannot be considered subversive....’

                                                                                    —Leonard Schwartz

            ‘Poets tend to develop a complex relationship with language in a society where language tends to be oversimplified in the popular media’.

                                                                                    —Christopher Funkhowser

            ‘Only the poet who recognizes the negative agency of exasperated utterances, their ability to not-express and not-articulate, is able to paradixically express her own inexpressiveness and give form to what is formless’.

                                                                                    —Sianne Ngai

            ‘Experimental poetries on the other hand propose that the reading of the poem can be inherently linked to the construction of the world’.

                                                                                    —Jena Osman

            ‘An earth that only the imagination can conjure, suspended between persons--between lovers striving happily to reinscribe themselves between the sheets’.

                                                                                    —Benjamin Friedlander

            ‘When we hope for a future different from the present we uncover the injustice of our imagination’.

                                                                                    —Sherry Brennan

            ‘Listening to a poem or novel or newspaper should be like that; it should be camouflaged into the large shapes and patterns of words that surround us and evoke the most diffuse and unrecognizable moods that a culture produces’.

                                                                                    —Tan Lin

            ‘I think I write because it’s the time and place that brings the most difficulty, sadness, pain and pleasure, always sensual, sometimes erotic’.

                                                                                    —Andrew Levy

            ‘...poetry is the external manifestation of these internal processes...’

                                                                                    —Rod Smith

            ‘Here subjectivity is multiple yet it looks outward. It embraces without absorbing’.

                                                                                    —Juliana Spahr



   Throughout, editor Wallace remains somber and straight-faced, shuffling and arranging all this circumspection with the utmost judiciousness. His own contribution, ‘Toward a Free Multiplicity of Form’, is shiningly forward-looking and optimistic, though here too the strictness of the essay’s organization and language is surprising. In his essay I have underlined this: ‘There is no historical necessity for poetry to take one form rather than another. But that doesn’t mean that the problem of form is over—if anything, a free multiplicity of form will help poets become more aware of their choices of form and more conscious of the implications of those choices’.

   Multiplicity seems to be key. Wallace’s words ‘aware’ and ‘conscious’ also seem key for me. I feel poetry is evolving in the same way that a field of science evolves. There is a historical necessity of form. Multiplicity is this necessity at this time, multiplicity incorporated into the nature of identity, multiplicity of the sort whose ‘numerousness’ connotes both uniformity and difference. This seems already to be happening. Jeff Derksen in his essay ‘Unrecognizable Texts: From Multicultural to Antisystemic Writing’ brings in the subject of Canada’s passing its Multiculturalism Act. This law has been criticized for fostering mostly superficial ethnic traits such as old-world costumes. It has also been accused of trying to control ethnicity by absorbing it. Yet it is an improvement that multiplicity rather than merely identity be associated with ‘the ruling order’ and that authority, rather than being restrictive, enforces openness. Clearly the intent of the law is to promote identity, a variety of identities. The problem is that identity tends to run deeply and become destructive. Derksen asks, ‘How can a text move from being oppositional—from a position of refusal—to being an agent of rearticulation?’ The answer is through multiplicity, through its strength. Identity begins or should begin with the problem of survival. It is multiplicity that makes each ‘generation’ a verb not a noun.

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