TT: One last question. If you don't mind, could you give us a sense of what your forthcoming book, Oblique Modernism, is about? Do you see it as a continuation of previous projects?
JR: Like Imagining Language, This Compost, and Syncopations (The American Poetry Wax Museum being the exception, written 1992-94), Oblique Modernism is another long-time-coming book. Its inception goes back to my application to the History of Consciousness Program at Santa Cruz in 1986. I ended up writing a 550 page thesis on “The Poetics of Embodiment” instead. Still, Oblique Modernism is not what I envisioned twenty years ago, and it's really the fruit of long archival prowling. But there is a link to its inklings in the past—particularly to materials in Imagining Language drawn from the modernist avant-garde—that it shares with my other projects in general: a conviction that prevailing attitudes (on topics like modernism, contemporary poetry, linguistic diversity) are little more than platitudes. I've always been astonished by how much in the way of general knowledge and opinion is absorbed second hand—and, concomitantly, how we're institutionally enjoined to make a little go a long way. It's just a hair's breadth away from frivolous to generalize about modernism on the basis of Pound, Eliot, Woolf, Joyce and—in the idiom of dissertation-cum-first book—another figure of your choice. In that respect, at least in English departments, “modernism” has largely been a way of talking about a slender portfolio, with little support for innovative research or even adequate background preparation. How many Eliot scholars have ever really read Laforgue? I doubt that Poundians even know about Henri-Martin Barzun, whose multi-voice epic aspirations Pound surmised, in 1913, might be the poetry of the future. Thankfully, the situation has improved in the past decade with the Modernist Studies Association and the journal Modernism/Modernity. And a salutary interdisciplinary banner has been held aloft for decades now by Marjorie Perloff, to whom Oblique Modernism will be dedicated.
The basic premise of obliquity in Oblique Modernism can be put in the form of an anecdote. Tristan Tzara tells of how he once met a man who claimed to have spent time in Paris where he knew a famous Dadaist, none other than Tristan Tzara. Bemused, Tzara asks the man what he looked like. Tall and blonde he's told (Tzara himself was short and dark). I take this as a paradigm of misrecognition upon which so many encounters with, and presumptions about, modernism are predicated. The familiarity of modernism is now its stigma. The artistic push that gave rise to the principle of defamiliarization (Shklovsky) and the alienation-effect (Brecht), needs now to be defamiliarized in turn. Rather than full frontal encounters (i.e. normative textual and iconographic exegesis), I rely on a more oblique reckoning, apprehending modernism from peripheral vision as it were, overhearing rather than listening, following scents to hidden lairs rather than barreling down the interpretive thoroughfare. This has meant that I've spent a lot of time become acquainted with figures like Carola Giedion-Welcker (who was prescient enough to recognize that what Joyce was doing with language matter in Finnegans Wake had a plausible corollary in what Hans Arp was doing with plastic matter in his sculptures), Louis Lozowick (the only American artist, as far as I know, who visited the USSR at the height of Constructivism; and who, knowing Russian, produced the most lucid accounts of that scene in the early Twenties), Thomas Wilfred (Danish folk singer who devoted his life to pioneering “lumia,” misleadingly called “visual music”—several of his works were on view at the Visual Music exhibit at the Hirshhorn last summer, one of them with a running cycle of more than a year!), and Frederick Kiesler (known, if at all, as “the greatest unbuilt architect of the twentieth century” in Philip Johnson's estimation). Other important figures in Oblique Modernism are slightly better known, like Maurice Maeterlinck and Aby Warburg (the art historian who spent a lot of time in an insane asylum, until he petitioned for release by preparing a lecture on the Hopi snake ceremonies he'd witnessed thirty years earlier). I also look at Wagnerism—the “ism” that preceded, and prefigured, the more familiar vanguard isms of the early twentieth century—and “jazzbandism,” so named by that curious Spanish writer Ramón Gómez de la Serna in his fascinating and odd book Ismos published in 1931. As you can infer from these references, the “modernism” that emerges under the gaze of this obliquity is not restricted to literature. To dig into any of the periodicals of the time, like those I listed earlier, is to encounter a consistent and ready reciprocity between all the arts. You find a poem in Czech, say, next to a concrete poem by Schwitters, followed by some architectural photos and section plans, an article on Charlie Chaplin, and a portfolio of Archipenko, and then maybe a sample page of music by Bartok. After a while, Pound's immersion in music seems almost obligatory, not a quirk of his character.
So Oblique Modernism will be a book much in the spirit of Imagining Language, I think, in that it is nourished by a lot of fugitive figures carefully intermingled with a familiar spectrum (from Mallarmé to Abstract Expressionism), in a structure designed to animate the encounters.
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