Kathleen Eamon
On Leonard Schwartz’s The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises (The University of Arkansas Press 2016).
Leonard Schwartz’s The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises is a timely book, emerging at a historical moment that its own capacious political vision lets us find internally related to the crises in question. Much of it was written in the context of post-9/11 New York, in a US then newly embroiled in the invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, and under the second President Bush, but its point de capiton is Gaza. Revised and published under a decidedly different era, domestically, it was then born into the time of Trump. A few short days after the election, I attended an Elliott Bay Bookstore (Seattle) reading Schwartz coordinated with poet and scholar Jeanne Heuving, who read from her own new Transmutation of Love and Avant-Garde Poetics. Transmutation traces a lineage (including H.D., Robert Duncan, Kathleen Fraser, and Nathaniel Mackey) that Heuving sees as giving rise to new possibilities in lyric love poetry. If the traditional love lyric sees its love object overwhelmed by the lover/poetic speaker, offering metaphor where the love object once was, this new form generates horizontality, working by metonymies that sustain its speaking and spoken subjects in a libizinized field. That possibility felt nearly utopian in the face of a newly-elected president before whom all the varieties of subjectivity, save his own, seem threatened with disappearance.
The New Babel can be productively read as both tracing and contributing to a related lineage as Transmutation, one where both field and relations, still libinized (according to Freud, there is no relationality without libidinal investment) is also constituted by aggression and constantly threatened by violence. Perhaps following Hölderlin in the thought that “Where the danger grows, grows that which can save us,” Schwartz is interested in danger also as the site of possible growth. If our capacity for evil and aggression arise from, as Freud claims, the death drive turned outward, so too do our capacities for metonymy, attachment, friendship, and love: in short, the same thing which makes aggression possible also allows us to unbind from our empirical selves, to turn to others, to make a field or a world in the first place. The attempt to write, say, a war poetry that claims for itself the moral high ground requires us to pass over the energized abyss that separates any empirical version of ourselves from it, and to do so without acknowledging that gulf. Schwartz’s name for our capacity to make that turn is “transcendental mobility.” (43)
The New Babel includes essays, poems, and dialogues, suggesting that a multiplicity of players and forms are needed to build any new high ground. The essays convene the living and the dead, the interviews the living, and the poems, perhaps, the living and what survives its own death as unconscious sediment. The volume is not, indeed, presumptuously titled “Toward a New Babel,” and in her back cover commendation, Fanny Howe suggests that the text is instead “like a map of roads all leading to this day today.” If not precisely toward a new Babel, the central reference to that mythical tower, with its roots in shared language, marks an interest in some form of moral or epistemological high ground, even if what it lets us look at are roads littered with the explosive devices that either mark the most overwhelming human relation or, properly defused, converted perhaps from the order of the real into that of the symbolic, can again serve as nodes of communication. “I’m talking about something like that, that day they began the bombing. But you know, I’m also here with you.” (106)
In his opening essay, Schwartz positions the work vis-à-vis the friendship and then rupture between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, a friendship that breaks down over the question of poetry’s relation to the Vietnam War. As far, it seems, as poetry is concerned, Schwartz sides with Duncan, “that the task of the poet is to imagine evil, not to oppose it,” (ix) claiming that Duncan was “responsible for the fall of the friendship” but also “right about the larger point.” (x) We might have expected these poems thus given permission to do something else to be supplemented by interviews and scholarly essays that directly engage the history or politics of the contemporary political moment and particularly in the “mid-east,” but instead the objects of analysis alternate between more abstract questions of language and politics or the very concrete poets in and beyond politics. This is a poetics, and Schwartz asks us to take it as a “single unit in poetics.” (ix) All the same, Schwartz does not experimentally integrate these forms, is not precisely interested in creating a new and open form, but rather in moving between them. In that way, he sustains a commitment to what we have inherited alongside a fluidity and mobility that comes from the knowledge that what we inherit never was uniform in the first place. That sense marks the text as a whole. Poem-interview-essay: in spite of the book’s lineage of Jewish thinkers, this three-but-also-one structure conjures a trinity which since Hegel has represented the im/possibility of consistency or logical resolution, marking both a thinking that cannot compass but is nonetheless oriented by feeling or matter and a feeling or material that can ground thinking in contradiction. “The dead and our living gaze are locked in love—and make for a third.” (44)
If Hegel, however, found occasional comfort in the replacement of unitary thought with a triadic structure, Schwartz works to unsettle that as well, putting his faith in the energy of the negative itself: “Nix to logic/nein to recognition/nope to news that stays news.” (23) With his many poetic, conversational, and theoretical references to Celan, Freud, Scholem, Benjamin and others, Schwartz looks to a lineage that might be thought to subtend his identity as a Jewish-American poet, but they are also enticingly identitarian references that share a commitment to non-identity, to what exceeds any particular people’s logic, recognition, or (Pound’s version of Hegel’s history) their news that stays news. Schwartz describes the three modalities of The New Babel as the work of imagination, analysis, and dialogue, but each form in turn holds moments harder to place: mysticism, witness, humor, and sex. That logic of non-identity is what allows Schwartz to move between crises, demonstrating that not only love allows for the transfer of energy from one object to another, but that aggression serves as well: the crises in question include not only the Palestine-Israel conflict, not only also the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but also domestic American political, historical, and racial crises that certainly did not arrive (even if they were in a sense lit up by, as suggested by the interview with Amiri Baraka) the fall of the twin towers.
The volume is oriented by that opening reference to the failure of friendship between living poets, which a sort of key note that we return to in each of the three transcribed interviews from Schwartz’s radio program, Cross-Cultural Poetics (now at more than 350 episodes, housed at PennSound). Only one of the three interviews included in the book is explicitly about the Palestine-Israel conflict, that with Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai (since then, apropos this discussion, author of among others a collection titled War & Love, Love & War); the other two are with poet Amiri Baraka and philosopher Michael Hardt. What seems to have marked these particular conversations for inclusion is the way they thematize the question of cross-cultural poetics itself, or the possibility that writing, reading, thinking, and talking might access something outside of the empirical self, might somehow make it past our concrete identities.
Schwartz is clearly interested in reflecting what splinters any idea of politics as a universal concern but also, I think, in a new and multiform universalism. As his conversation with Hardt points out, this might mean a surprising commitment to the notion of a transcendental subject, but where that subject is neither something nor nothing. This is a thought also captured by the volume’s “Transcendental Tabby,” an essay that introduces the “Apple Anyone Sonnets,” poems comprised of English terms derived from Arabic “collaged” with “Shakespeare cut-ups and rewrites.” (42) Our identity as English speakers was always-already compromised and enriched, and “our” most identifiable cultural “achievements” are thus never self-identical. In all of this, Schwartz is looking toward the transcendental for its affordance of a “detachment from the social,” and he looks toward the lyric for its “ecstatic upswell.” Together, as a transcendental lyric, these might give us “a mobility in the preconditions which make what is to follow possible—some kind of society.” (43) The wording is humble, as is Schwartz’s degraded identification with the tower as fallen, “I’m down with the Tower of Babel,” (4) but the volume offers language itself as the means by which to rescue verticality: “The Tower of Babel: word up.” (5) What binds The New Babel as a text is a shared aim that requires disparate means, and it can be described perhaps as working to cobble together a language that both frees and binds, language that might allow us to build “some kind” of tower (or two) but also to remain knowing and playful about what towers are and what they represent in the process.
Schwartz sets up many elements of the complex constellation that marks the text as a whole with the first and eponymous poem. It is divided into eight parts, beginning with 0 so that its eight is also seven, time enough for world-making that must begin not with nothing but with the negative, not a firmament but rather a tear in the firmament. The 0 designation, more than those that follow, acts as both number and theme, “As Babel is both a ground and a zero, Middle English grund and Arabic zefir, cipher, Gallicized zero—let’s call it Ground Zero.” (3) In moves that both confirm and dismiss the associations we are all likely to have with Schwartz’s title, he references “the fall of a Tower” (obvious but effective double duty as both the tower of Babel and one or the other of the twinned towers), and the “babble” that is at “language’s beginning” (both babies and song). The reference to the Twin Towers inscribes the “confusion of language” onto the more modern and specifically American trauma, and all of the writing in the book takes place after that event, some of it in New York just after, but Schwartz either undoes or doubles down on the possible self-seriousness of this fact by quickly referring to them as “the North and South Phallus” now replaced by the “smoldering Cleft” of an absence that, in Schwartz’s text, at least on my reading, never quite gets feminized. It does, however, achieve metonymic displacements the absence of which is perhaps the hallmark of a trauma that remains traumatic: first with Celan and then with Afghanistan and then both at once in “The smoke contains bodies; we breathe one another. Thus Babel is Kabul. We breathe one another.” (3)
In his “Flicker at the Edge of Things: Some Thoughts on Lyric Poetry” (first published in this journal in 1993, and referenced in The New Babel at the start of its essay, “Transcendental Tabby”), Schwartz develops the notion of a transcendental lyric by way of a reading of Duncan’s poem “After a Long Illness,” a poem Schwartz takes to have made that form of the lyric actual. If traditional love poetry realizes the poetic subject at the cost of derealizing its love object, Schwartz’s notion of a transcendental lyric seems to be one that substantializes or registers as energetically active the absence at the heart of the speaking subject. He describes it in psychoanalytically-inflected Kantian terms, as a “ripple of a Nothingness at our very core, a Nothingness that cannot be conceived of without immediately being falsified as it is turned into something determinate by that conception…” (TIS 94). Already in “A Flicker,” the nothing is more than absence, figured as a flicker and a waver, action aimed at not-being, an anxiety that might be read as the death drive:
[W]e are more essentially this oblivion than we are any clarity, that, therefore, we are most truly ourselves when we are emptied of everything, when we have been reduced to a husk, to a zero, to a mental condition distinguishable from stone only to the extent that an indefinable anxiety continues to make itself felt, an anxiety provoked by our failure to become stone, no matter how deep our stupor. (96)
This way of thinking our anxious essence also helps explain our yearning for reified identity, for the submission to something that might quell it, might superficially replace restlessness with anything else, no matter how contingent. The argument of Schwartz’s essay is, to put it too simply, that exactly at the site of a fleeting poetic encounter with the empirical self, the self given solidity by its moment in time and space, its embodied orientation, and its historically-determined set of identities, we find ourselves oriented beyond, captured by reference to “a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.” In that poem, “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” Stevens positions the poetic speaker as recipient of a musical demand, incapable of bringing around new worlds but patching this one as he can. By the end of the final poem in The Tower of Babel, in addition to “guitar players singing sadly in Spanish,” a father and a daughter become twinned guitars, the one already strung (and so, we might think, unable alone to call up that beyond) and the other set to string herself. (111)
This is related to a theme that emerges in Schwartz’s interview with Michael Hardt, which focuses on the political possibilities of, in his words, “a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love.” (68) Schwartz connects that thought up with Hardt’s long-standing collaboration with Antonio Negri, writing together as a mode of accessing another’s voice. For Schwartz, if not as explicitly also for Hardt, this access seems internally connected with the pair’s project of investigating globalization critically but also in the hope of discovering its revolutionary underside. On Hardt and Negri’s telling, it is power that has dissolved, become “ether,” come to seem a transcendental condition on the basis of which individuals and groups have become concrete, reified and stuck in and as their social determinants. Schwartz pushes toward what might help us dissolve and share power’s ethereal advantages.
All three of the interviews in the text contribute in specific ways to the thought that political possibility depends on a different articulation of subjectivity, on the primacy of mixture at our core. In a way, the third and final interview, with Amir Baraka, serves as a pivot to the question of the specificities that comprise the particularly American mixture. Baraka says “Americans have never spoken standard English, that’s a bizarre pretense… You can say that American culture is composed of Africa, Europe, and Native America. It’s that mixture…” (100) It is perhaps in the energetic tacking back and forth between languages, as much as between empirical identities, that Schwartz asks us to find the transcendental subjectivity, in either case a nervous unbinding movement that might let us find a solidarity rooted in us where we are least solid; hence the importance of not just one but twinned towers.
Like Schwartz, Amiri Baraka responded soon after 9/11 in poetic form, writing “Somebody Blew Up America,” a poem that moves from the terrorism of the present to a history of lynching and slavery. Schwartz asks Baraka about a poem, “Whys 1,” and in the recorded version, Baraka reads from (and, in part, sings) a long sequence that powerfully evokes a people whose song is proscribed, what it means when “they ban your/own boom ba boom,” a line that returns us to the lyric as song, now not as a question of love but of a politics that seeks to make love impossible, themes that in turn set the stage for The New Babel’s final poem, “John Brown’s Body.”
That poem’s title called to my mind immediately (is spite of its possible anachronism – the poem is undated) Kenneth Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown,” which most readers will know was Goldsmith’s found text appropriation of the coroner’s report on Michael Brown, read aloud at a weekend-long arts event at Brown University. To make a connection with Schwartz’s poem might well be a misinterpretation, and it follows on the heels of a definite misreading on my part: in scanning the contents of a recent issue of Talisman, I recently misread the article titled “Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘The Body of Michael Brown’ as The Eighth American Disaster” as suggesting (hyperbolically, sure, but cleverly, I thought) that that performance itself should be considered the eighth in the line of the seven real disasters at heart of Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters. The essay actually of course follows Goldsmith in his after-the-fact justifying claim that this work should be positioned as a continuation of that earlier text. There is something interesting, however, in my inability to properly distinguish a string of real events from their poetic representations, since that failure itself is of course the hallmark of a trauma; Goldsmith’s own reportedly flat reading of the text is trauma’s other possibility. Either language is the same as the act/event, in which case we have a doubling of disaster, or it has divorced itself entirely from it, in which case language cannot reach, mediate, transform, or integrate the disaster. I take the final poem of The New Babel to suggest that song has played and might still play a role in transforming that identity or rupture.
If “John Brown’s Body” is a response, then it is a response in a minor key, just 19 lines long, beginning and ending with the refrain “There is so little that is individual and just.” Between these lines, the poem calls to mind a lost collectivity of bees and beekeepers, but also a pair of individuals, father and daughter (“The first guitar and the one not yet strung/tune themselves together, preparing a next song”), and the pair work together to deform Shakespeare: “the daughter laughs/and, outfitted in maiden speech, playfully reads the line: ‘read ‘to be or not to be’/not the right way.’” This pair forms an open dyad, perhaps a new political form, certainly the smallest possible comedy troupe. With them, we are returned to the lyric as the song, the babble of babies and bards, with which the first poem opened, who might “Fight for the familiar things/the patriots only pretend to stand for.” (111)
There is no mention of John Brown in the poem itself. John Brown the abolitionist is of course a white figure in the struggle against racial injustice, a figure currently called on by self-described white anti-racists as, to their thinking, one available to them in a way that black figures and voices are not, representing for them a white person who joined the historical struggle rather than merely articulating a position. The reference to the lost collectivity of bees and beekeeping, however, suggests a perhaps mythic alternative history where the struggle was always “ours,” a shared project with, whether we are all bees or all keepers, honey its aim. More radically (or less?), perhaps the two are more closely joined than all that; in his John Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois writes: "John Brown worked not simply for Black Men – he worked with them; and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues, and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot." (Du Bois 7) If it is true that the history is ours but in a way that cannot be shared, and that it more deeply cannot be shared at the current moment, where does that leave us?
“John Brown’s Body” is most famously an alternate name for “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” a song that commemorates John Brown, and perhaps this mode of memorial aesthetics is one of the “familiar things” Schwartz is looking for us to fight for, writing small-scale lyric about a time when song (as opposed, say, to coroner’s report) was the discursive mode in which we bound those traumas that prevented us from being a “we” in the first place. Goldsmith’s repetition of disaster, whether or not you take it to be itself a disaster, is the kind of compulsion we stand under if we give up altogether on inherited forms. This is equally true if we contingently commit ourselves to those forms. Schwartz’s father-daughter pair in this final poem offers something more hopeful, if not precisely utopian: it offers us up playful generational repetition with a difference.
In The New Babel, Schwartz not only plays radio host but also, in an important sense, the radio itself, taking his work to be to pick up on a variety of transmissions, whether from the past or the present, from poets or theorists, attending to his empirical others even as he stays fixed on the news from afar. In this mode, Schwartz attempts less to lead us out of the isolation and distance, the blankness which nonetheless generates despair as global events unfold in and via individually-tuned news feeds, less to move us out of our isolation than to allow us to grasp it but in newly granular form, and to begin to orchestrate its impulses and perceptions into moments of possible connection. Adorno, in his “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” claims that "it is precisely what is not social in the lyric poem that is now to become its social aspect." (42)
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature 1. 1. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Patmos,” Exzentrische Bahnen. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993.
Schwartz, Leonard. The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises. US: University of Arkansas Press, 2016.
Wallace, Mark, and Steven Marks, eds. Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.
The New Babel can be productively read as both tracing and contributing to a related lineage as Transmutation, one where both field and relations, still libinized (according to Freud, there is no relationality without libidinal investment) is also constituted by aggression and constantly threatened by violence. Perhaps following Hölderlin in the thought that “Where the danger grows, grows that which can save us,” Schwartz is interested in danger also as the site of possible growth. If our capacity for evil and aggression arise from, as Freud claims, the death drive turned outward, so too do our capacities for metonymy, attachment, friendship, and love: in short, the same thing which makes aggression possible also allows us to unbind from our empirical selves, to turn to others, to make a field or a world in the first place. The attempt to write, say, a war poetry that claims for itself the moral high ground requires us to pass over the energized abyss that separates any empirical version of ourselves from it, and to do so without acknowledging that gulf. Schwartz’s name for our capacity to make that turn is “transcendental mobility.” (43)
The New Babel includes essays, poems, and dialogues, suggesting that a multiplicity of players and forms are needed to build any new high ground. The essays convene the living and the dead, the interviews the living, and the poems, perhaps, the living and what survives its own death as unconscious sediment. The volume is not, indeed, presumptuously titled “Toward a New Babel,” and in her back cover commendation, Fanny Howe suggests that the text is instead “like a map of roads all leading to this day today.” If not precisely toward a new Babel, the central reference to that mythical tower, with its roots in shared language, marks an interest in some form of moral or epistemological high ground, even if what it lets us look at are roads littered with the explosive devices that either mark the most overwhelming human relation or, properly defused, converted perhaps from the order of the real into that of the symbolic, can again serve as nodes of communication. “I’m talking about something like that, that day they began the bombing. But you know, I’m also here with you.” (106)
In his opening essay, Schwartz positions the work vis-à-vis the friendship and then rupture between Denise Levertov and Robert Duncan, a friendship that breaks down over the question of poetry’s relation to the Vietnam War. As far, it seems, as poetry is concerned, Schwartz sides with Duncan, “that the task of the poet is to imagine evil, not to oppose it,” (ix) claiming that Duncan was “responsible for the fall of the friendship” but also “right about the larger point.” (x) We might have expected these poems thus given permission to do something else to be supplemented by interviews and scholarly essays that directly engage the history or politics of the contemporary political moment and particularly in the “mid-east,” but instead the objects of analysis alternate between more abstract questions of language and politics or the very concrete poets in and beyond politics. This is a poetics, and Schwartz asks us to take it as a “single unit in poetics.” (ix) All the same, Schwartz does not experimentally integrate these forms, is not precisely interested in creating a new and open form, but rather in moving between them. In that way, he sustains a commitment to what we have inherited alongside a fluidity and mobility that comes from the knowledge that what we inherit never was uniform in the first place. That sense marks the text as a whole. Poem-interview-essay: in spite of the book’s lineage of Jewish thinkers, this three-but-also-one structure conjures a trinity which since Hegel has represented the im/possibility of consistency or logical resolution, marking both a thinking that cannot compass but is nonetheless oriented by feeling or matter and a feeling or material that can ground thinking in contradiction. “The dead and our living gaze are locked in love—and make for a third.” (44)
If Hegel, however, found occasional comfort in the replacement of unitary thought with a triadic structure, Schwartz works to unsettle that as well, putting his faith in the energy of the negative itself: “Nix to logic/nein to recognition/nope to news that stays news.” (23) With his many poetic, conversational, and theoretical references to Celan, Freud, Scholem, Benjamin and others, Schwartz looks to a lineage that might be thought to subtend his identity as a Jewish-American poet, but they are also enticingly identitarian references that share a commitment to non-identity, to what exceeds any particular people’s logic, recognition, or (Pound’s version of Hegel’s history) their news that stays news. Schwartz describes the three modalities of The New Babel as the work of imagination, analysis, and dialogue, but each form in turn holds moments harder to place: mysticism, witness, humor, and sex. That logic of non-identity is what allows Schwartz to move between crises, demonstrating that not only love allows for the transfer of energy from one object to another, but that aggression serves as well: the crises in question include not only the Palestine-Israel conflict, not only also the American invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan, but also domestic American political, historical, and racial crises that certainly did not arrive (even if they were in a sense lit up by, as suggested by the interview with Amiri Baraka) the fall of the twin towers.
The volume is oriented by that opening reference to the failure of friendship between living poets, which a sort of key note that we return to in each of the three transcribed interviews from Schwartz’s radio program, Cross-Cultural Poetics (now at more than 350 episodes, housed at PennSound). Only one of the three interviews included in the book is explicitly about the Palestine-Israel conflict, that with Israeli poet Aharon Shabtai (since then, apropos this discussion, author of among others a collection titled War & Love, Love & War); the other two are with poet Amiri Baraka and philosopher Michael Hardt. What seems to have marked these particular conversations for inclusion is the way they thematize the question of cross-cultural poetics itself, or the possibility that writing, reading, thinking, and talking might access something outside of the empirical self, might somehow make it past our concrete identities.
Schwartz is clearly interested in reflecting what splinters any idea of politics as a universal concern but also, I think, in a new and multiform universalism. As his conversation with Hardt points out, this might mean a surprising commitment to the notion of a transcendental subject, but where that subject is neither something nor nothing. This is a thought also captured by the volume’s “Transcendental Tabby,” an essay that introduces the “Apple Anyone Sonnets,” poems comprised of English terms derived from Arabic “collaged” with “Shakespeare cut-ups and rewrites.” (42) Our identity as English speakers was always-already compromised and enriched, and “our” most identifiable cultural “achievements” are thus never self-identical. In all of this, Schwartz is looking toward the transcendental for its affordance of a “detachment from the social,” and he looks toward the lyric for its “ecstatic upswell.” Together, as a transcendental lyric, these might give us “a mobility in the preconditions which make what is to follow possible—some kind of society.” (43) The wording is humble, as is Schwartz’s degraded identification with the tower as fallen, “I’m down with the Tower of Babel,” (4) but the volume offers language itself as the means by which to rescue verticality: “The Tower of Babel: word up.” (5) What binds The New Babel as a text is a shared aim that requires disparate means, and it can be described perhaps as working to cobble together a language that both frees and binds, language that might allow us to build “some kind” of tower (or two) but also to remain knowing and playful about what towers are and what they represent in the process.
Schwartz sets up many elements of the complex constellation that marks the text as a whole with the first and eponymous poem. It is divided into eight parts, beginning with 0 so that its eight is also seven, time enough for world-making that must begin not with nothing but with the negative, not a firmament but rather a tear in the firmament. The 0 designation, more than those that follow, acts as both number and theme, “As Babel is both a ground and a zero, Middle English grund and Arabic zefir, cipher, Gallicized zero—let’s call it Ground Zero.” (3) In moves that both confirm and dismiss the associations we are all likely to have with Schwartz’s title, he references “the fall of a Tower” (obvious but effective double duty as both the tower of Babel and one or the other of the twinned towers), and the “babble” that is at “language’s beginning” (both babies and song). The reference to the Twin Towers inscribes the “confusion of language” onto the more modern and specifically American trauma, and all of the writing in the book takes place after that event, some of it in New York just after, but Schwartz either undoes or doubles down on the possible self-seriousness of this fact by quickly referring to them as “the North and South Phallus” now replaced by the “smoldering Cleft” of an absence that, in Schwartz’s text, at least on my reading, never quite gets feminized. It does, however, achieve metonymic displacements the absence of which is perhaps the hallmark of a trauma that remains traumatic: first with Celan and then with Afghanistan and then both at once in “The smoke contains bodies; we breathe one another. Thus Babel is Kabul. We breathe one another.” (3)
In his “Flicker at the Edge of Things: Some Thoughts on Lyric Poetry” (first published in this journal in 1993, and referenced in The New Babel at the start of its essay, “Transcendental Tabby”), Schwartz develops the notion of a transcendental lyric by way of a reading of Duncan’s poem “After a Long Illness,” a poem Schwartz takes to have made that form of the lyric actual. If traditional love poetry realizes the poetic subject at the cost of derealizing its love object, Schwartz’s notion of a transcendental lyric seems to be one that substantializes or registers as energetically active the absence at the heart of the speaking subject. He describes it in psychoanalytically-inflected Kantian terms, as a “ripple of a Nothingness at our very core, a Nothingness that cannot be conceived of without immediately being falsified as it is turned into something determinate by that conception…” (TIS 94). Already in “A Flicker,” the nothing is more than absence, figured as a flicker and a waver, action aimed at not-being, an anxiety that might be read as the death drive:
[W]e are more essentially this oblivion than we are any clarity, that, therefore, we are most truly ourselves when we are emptied of everything, when we have been reduced to a husk, to a zero, to a mental condition distinguishable from stone only to the extent that an indefinable anxiety continues to make itself felt, an anxiety provoked by our failure to become stone, no matter how deep our stupor. (96)
This way of thinking our anxious essence also helps explain our yearning for reified identity, for the submission to something that might quell it, might superficially replace restlessness with anything else, no matter how contingent. The argument of Schwartz’s essay is, to put it too simply, that exactly at the site of a fleeting poetic encounter with the empirical self, the self given solidity by its moment in time and space, its embodied orientation, and its historically-determined set of identities, we find ourselves oriented beyond, captured by reference to “a tune beyond us, yet ourselves.” In that poem, “The Man With the Blue Guitar,” Stevens positions the poetic speaker as recipient of a musical demand, incapable of bringing around new worlds but patching this one as he can. By the end of the final poem in The Tower of Babel, in addition to “guitar players singing sadly in Spanish,” a father and a daughter become twinned guitars, the one already strung (and so, we might think, unable alone to call up that beyond) and the other set to string herself. (111)
This is related to a theme that emerges in Schwartz’s interview with Michael Hardt, which focuses on the political possibilities of, in his words, “a more generous and more unrestrained conception of love.” (68) Schwartz connects that thought up with Hardt’s long-standing collaboration with Antonio Negri, writing together as a mode of accessing another’s voice. For Schwartz, if not as explicitly also for Hardt, this access seems internally connected with the pair’s project of investigating globalization critically but also in the hope of discovering its revolutionary underside. On Hardt and Negri’s telling, it is power that has dissolved, become “ether,” come to seem a transcendental condition on the basis of which individuals and groups have become concrete, reified and stuck in and as their social determinants. Schwartz pushes toward what might help us dissolve and share power’s ethereal advantages.
All three of the interviews in the text contribute in specific ways to the thought that political possibility depends on a different articulation of subjectivity, on the primacy of mixture at our core. In a way, the third and final interview, with Amir Baraka, serves as a pivot to the question of the specificities that comprise the particularly American mixture. Baraka says “Americans have never spoken standard English, that’s a bizarre pretense… You can say that American culture is composed of Africa, Europe, and Native America. It’s that mixture…” (100) It is perhaps in the energetic tacking back and forth between languages, as much as between empirical identities, that Schwartz asks us to find the transcendental subjectivity, in either case a nervous unbinding movement that might let us find a solidarity rooted in us where we are least solid; hence the importance of not just one but twinned towers.
Like Schwartz, Amiri Baraka responded soon after 9/11 in poetic form, writing “Somebody Blew Up America,” a poem that moves from the terrorism of the present to a history of lynching and slavery. Schwartz asks Baraka about a poem, “Whys 1,” and in the recorded version, Baraka reads from (and, in part, sings) a long sequence that powerfully evokes a people whose song is proscribed, what it means when “they ban your/own boom ba boom,” a line that returns us to the lyric as song, now not as a question of love but of a politics that seeks to make love impossible, themes that in turn set the stage for The New Babel’s final poem, “John Brown’s Body.”
That poem’s title called to my mind immediately (is spite of its possible anachronism – the poem is undated) Kenneth Goldsmith’s “The Body of Michael Brown,” which most readers will know was Goldsmith’s found text appropriation of the coroner’s report on Michael Brown, read aloud at a weekend-long arts event at Brown University. To make a connection with Schwartz’s poem might well be a misinterpretation, and it follows on the heels of a definite misreading on my part: in scanning the contents of a recent issue of Talisman, I recently misread the article titled “Kenneth Goldsmith’s ‘The Body of Michael Brown’ as The Eighth American Disaster” as suggesting (hyperbolically, sure, but cleverly, I thought) that that performance itself should be considered the eighth in the line of the seven real disasters at heart of Goldsmith’s Seven American Deaths and Disasters. The essay actually of course follows Goldsmith in his after-the-fact justifying claim that this work should be positioned as a continuation of that earlier text. There is something interesting, however, in my inability to properly distinguish a string of real events from their poetic representations, since that failure itself is of course the hallmark of a trauma; Goldsmith’s own reportedly flat reading of the text is trauma’s other possibility. Either language is the same as the act/event, in which case we have a doubling of disaster, or it has divorced itself entirely from it, in which case language cannot reach, mediate, transform, or integrate the disaster. I take the final poem of The New Babel to suggest that song has played and might still play a role in transforming that identity or rupture.
If “John Brown’s Body” is a response, then it is a response in a minor key, just 19 lines long, beginning and ending with the refrain “There is so little that is individual and just.” Between these lines, the poem calls to mind a lost collectivity of bees and beekeepers, but also a pair of individuals, father and daughter (“The first guitar and the one not yet strung/tune themselves together, preparing a next song”), and the pair work together to deform Shakespeare: “the daughter laughs/and, outfitted in maiden speech, playfully reads the line: ‘read ‘to be or not to be’/not the right way.’” This pair forms an open dyad, perhaps a new political form, certainly the smallest possible comedy troupe. With them, we are returned to the lyric as the song, the babble of babies and bards, with which the first poem opened, who might “Fight for the familiar things/the patriots only pretend to stand for.” (111)
There is no mention of John Brown in the poem itself. John Brown the abolitionist is of course a white figure in the struggle against racial injustice, a figure currently called on by self-described white anti-racists as, to their thinking, one available to them in a way that black figures and voices are not, representing for them a white person who joined the historical struggle rather than merely articulating a position. The reference to the lost collectivity of bees and beekeeping, however, suggests a perhaps mythic alternative history where the struggle was always “ours,” a shared project with, whether we are all bees or all keepers, honey its aim. More radically (or less?), perhaps the two are more closely joined than all that; in his John Brown, W.E.B. Du Bois writes: "John Brown worked not simply for Black Men – he worked with them; and he was a companion of their daily life, knew their faults and virtues, and felt, as few white Americans have felt, the bitter tragedy of their lot." (Du Bois 7) If it is true that the history is ours but in a way that cannot be shared, and that it more deeply cannot be shared at the current moment, where does that leave us?
“John Brown’s Body” is most famously an alternate name for “Mine Eyes Have Seen the Glory,” a song that commemorates John Brown, and perhaps this mode of memorial aesthetics is one of the “familiar things” Schwartz is looking for us to fight for, writing small-scale lyric about a time when song (as opposed, say, to coroner’s report) was the discursive mode in which we bound those traumas that prevented us from being a “we” in the first place. Goldsmith’s repetition of disaster, whether or not you take it to be itself a disaster, is the kind of compulsion we stand under if we give up altogether on inherited forms. This is equally true if we contingently commit ourselves to those forms. Schwartz’s father-daughter pair in this final poem offers something more hopeful, if not precisely utopian: it offers us up playful generational repetition with a difference.
In The New Babel, Schwartz not only plays radio host but also, in an important sense, the radio itself, taking his work to be to pick up on a variety of transmissions, whether from the past or the present, from poets or theorists, attending to his empirical others even as he stays fixed on the news from afar. In this mode, Schwartz attempts less to lead us out of the isolation and distance, the blankness which nonetheless generates despair as global events unfold in and via individually-tuned news feeds, less to move us out of our isolation than to allow us to grasp it but in newly granular form, and to begin to orchestrate its impulses and perceptions into moments of possible connection. Adorno, in his “On Lyric Poetry and Society,” claims that "it is precisely what is not social in the lyric poem that is now to become its social aspect." (42)
Works Cited
Adorno, Theodor W. Notes to Literature 1. 1. New York: Columbia Univ. Press, 1991.
Hölderlin, Friedrich. “Patmos,” Exzentrische Bahnen. Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 1993.
Schwartz, Leonard. The New Babel: Toward a Poetics of the Mid-East Crises. US: University of Arkansas Press, 2016.
Wallace, Mark, and Steven Marks, eds. Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2002.