\u201cI would play Orpheus for you again,\u201d Robert Duncan once wrote to Denise Levertov, \u201crecall the arrow or song \/ to the trembling daylight \/ from which it sprang.\u201d The shade of the doomed mythic inventor of lyric verse runs through twentieth century American poetry, with echoes of tragic love, loss, and lament. In this compelling and often surprising monograph, Robert L. Zamsky takes up the shifting legacy of the myth, pursuing its \u201cOrphic bend\u201d (a phrase he borrows from Nathaniel Mackey) through the work of five major twentieth-century US poets: Charles Bernstein, Robert Creeley, John Taggart, Tracie Morris, and Mackey himself.<\/p>\n
In his opening pages, Zamsky lays out the familiar story of Orpheus and Eurydice, before narrating its early evolution from a fragment attributed to Ibycus (6th century BC) through to Ovid and Virgil. At first, the critic seems to be settling into a belated reply to Walter Strauss\u2019s influential study Descent and Return: The Orphic Theme in Modern Literature <\/i>(1971), until he pauses to note that the three poets at the core of his book\u2014Creeley, Taggart, Morris\u2014are not, in fact, making use of the Orpheus myth at all. In their writings, he admits, \u201cthe relationship to Orpheus is simply not an explicit one. None of them, to my knowledge, describes his or her work in relation to the Orphic tradition\u201d (6). It becomes clear that Orphic Bend <\/i>is less about direct responses to the myth, and more the thicket of lyrical metaphors that emerge from its details, ranging from the poet\u2019s backward glance to the later dismemberment of his corpse.<\/p>\n
As indicated by the book\u2019s subtitle, the most important of these tropes is Orpheus\u2019s song itself: an ancient reminder of the vexed relationship between music and poetry. Zamsky\u2019s study takes up the question of the musicality of post-war American verse, writing in the wake of Joseph M. Conte\u2019s Unending Design: The Form of Postmodern Poetry <\/i>(1991), and sharing lines of inquiry with the more recent work of Susan Stewart. At first, the critic\u2019s specific musical context is opera, a famously orphic spectacle: Zamsky touches on the origins of this form, and considers Ezra Pound\u2019s rarely-heard Le Testament de Villon <\/i>(1923), before turning to Charles Bernstein and Brian Ferneyhough\u2019s Shadowtime <\/i>(2004).<\/p>\n
Focusing on the dramatic suicide of Walter Benjamin at the climax of Bernstein\u2019s libretto, Zamsky reads Shadowtime <\/i>as capturing \u201cnot only a significant moment in human history but also the logical conclusion of the humanism of that history\u201d (39), a grand argument that rests on his repeated claim that \u201cfor the humanist thinkers of the Renaissance, the narrative of Orpheus represented the possibilities and the challenges of syncretic logic\u201d (18). It\u2019s an intriguing reading, positing an Orphic loop in early modern thought, although its historic basis feels a little ungrounded: it\u2019s supported only by a nod to Peter Kivy\u2019s work, and Zamsky avoids citing any of the Renaissance humanists he has in mind.<\/p>\n
In any case, opera is soon put to one side: from the second chapter onwards, American music dominates Zamsky\u2019s soundtrack. Indeed, it is often jazz, more than the Orpheus myth, that seems to be his primary concern: the gorgeous graphic score that appears on the dust jacket was composed by the trumpeter (and first-generation member of the AACM) Wadada Leo Smith. This turn to specifically Black sonics feels increasingly central to the book, hinting at a set of urgent questions underpinning its account of the relationship between poetry and music in America across the last half century.<\/p>\n
\u201cStruggling to find his voice as a young poet, Creeley found not just inspiration but a model in jazz\u201d (48), Zamsky writes towards the start of his second chapter. And yet, this is swiftly qualified by Creeley\u2019s claim that his work is not \u201cjazzy, or about jazz\u2014rather, it\u2019s trying to use a rhythmic base much as jazz of this time would\u201d (49). There is a tension here, and it creeps into the following section, too, as John Taggart discusses his decision to make \u201ca grid from the sheet music for [Ornette Coleman\u2019s] \u2018Lonely Woman\u2019\u201d to build his own verse. \u201cNot \u2018jazz poems\u2019,\u201d Taggart insists, \u201cthey would have to start from and go away from jazz\u201d (70). Across these central chapters, Zamsky shows us a pair of white poets who are torn between claiming and refusing an association with Black music, insisting on framing their borrowings as somehow abstract rather than stylistic.<\/p>\n
37 <\/span>For now, Zamsky steers clear of the lurking question of race and appropriation; instead, he dives into Creeley and Taggart\u2019s texts. His close readings are often excellent, as when he pauses to weigh the phrasing in Creeley\u2019s \u2018A Song\u2019 (1957): \u201cthe slipperiness of \u2018which\u2019 troubles the line, which reads as much like a question as it does a statement. […] \u2018you\u2019 could be equated with an unknown addressee, the murmur, the grace, or even the eponymous \u2018song\u2019 of the poem as a whole\u201d (52). This mode of sustained attention is often striking, and Zamsky can send you rushing back to a poem with renewed interest and understanding.<\/p>\n The same precision and care can be seen in the discussion of Tracie Morris\u2019s recorded performances in the fourth chapter, as whole pages are dedicated to describing intricate sonic effects. Where the question of race was largely dodged in prior chapters, the relationship between Blackness and linguistic performativity becomes explicit here, with Zamsky making use of Fred Moten\u2019s work, alongside Morris\u2019s own research into the language philosophy of J.L. Austin. The argument is nuanced and often persuasive, but there are moments where the \u201cOrphic\u201d framework risks getting in the way. The chapter title \u201cEurydice Takes the Mic\u201d (Zamsky\u2019s phrase, not Morris\u2019s) seems an unhelpful projection of the trope onto the female writer. And, given the fact that there is no mention of Orpheus\u2019s doomed wife in Morris\u2019s work, the description of her undertaking a \u201cEurydicean drive for performative justice\u201d (118) seems misjudged, as does the puzzling suggestion that her writing is \u201cno less derivative of [Gertrude] Stein than Eurydice is of Orpheus\u201d (114).<\/p>\n As Orphic Bend <\/i>draws to a close, we turn at last to Nathaniel Mackey, the source of the book\u2019s title. Zamsky\u2019s excellent 2006 article on music in the poet\u2019s early verse is revised and expanded, here, with the addition of carefully argued material on the braided songs in Splay Anthem<\/i>. It\u2019s a pity that the publication schedule precludes any analysis of the monolithic jazz meditations in the Double Trio <\/i>box set, but Zamsky writes well on the way that Mackey\u2019s lines respond to the innovations of Black musicians, from Don Cherry to Cecil Taylor. The granular readings that are one of the book\u2019s consistent strengths are given a surprisingly metrical emphasis in these pages, as the critic hunts for amphimacers and spondaic substitutions in this syncopated free verse.<\/p>\n In his brief conclusion, Zamsky turns to some of the more explicit treatments of Orpheus in 20th-century US poetry, touching on the work of Robert Duncan, Jack Spicer, and John Ashbery. Pointing out that \u201cpart of Orpheus\u2019s myth is that after the loss of Eurydice, he foregoes the love of women and substitutes for it homosexual love\u201d (164), these closing pages hint in passing at a queer counter-tradition, an intriguing reworking of an otherwise heteronormative marriage story. This is just one of the many areas for compelling future research suggested by Zamsky\u2019s thoughtful book. Returning to the founding myth of lyric, Orphic Bend <\/i>offers a number of ways of rethinking the interplay between music and meaning in contemporary poetry.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Zamsky, Robert L., Orphic Bend: Music and Innovative Poetics. Tuscaloosa: Uni of Alabama Press, 2021. viii + 216pp. ISBN (paperback) 978-0-8173-6014-6 By Rob Turner, University of Exeter \u201cI would play Orpheus for you again,\u201d Robert Duncan once wrote to Denise Levertov, \u201crecall the arrow or song \/ to the trembling daylight \/ from which it […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":16662,"featured_media":0,"parent":2417,"menu_order":4,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","template":"","meta":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2408"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/page"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/16662"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2408"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2408\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":2453,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2408\/revisions\/2453"}],"up":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/pages\/2417"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/sites.bu.edu\/impact\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2408"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}