Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life

by Oren Izenberg

Izenberg, Oren

Genres: Poetry

248 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2011

Reviews

[Jeff · Rating 3 out of 5]

What it lacks in literary chops it makes up for in the courage of its insight into the way poems create interiority -- "the person" it takes to be the ground of poetry as a social activity. Izenberg's father was my professor in two grad-school classes, and Gerald Izenberg, pere, works on the intellectual history of individuality and identity, so the younger's warrant for his work on interiority will seem generous to me. Oren Izenberg claims early on that what he's doing is unusual, an irritating tic that returns in the book's last chapter, which tells the story of how he came up with the idea. Involved with a woman from whom he was separated by distance, he asked her if they might read together A.R. Ammons' Tape For the Turn of the Year, which apparently they did do for a couple of weeks. "For it turns out," Izenberg writes, in journal-like fashion, "that in this instance of reading a poem together, I am much less interested in understanding what A.R. Ammons means in and by his poem than in understanding what I imagine another person is making of it." (174) That strikes me as a very interesting idea for some sort of literary correspondence. Izenberg seems to take the idea of Frank O'Hara's "personism" and ask about the ground of reception which would correspond with the ground of production that is O'Hara's concern. The bother is that at times this ontological inquiry has only philosophy at its disposal; it completely misreads Harold Bloom's interest in modality, for example, and while it admits it wants to develop a literary history of poets who write with concern for the person, it has absolutely no concern for the New Humanism, that culture war of the late Twenties that gave rise to Laura Riding's critique of Eliot's "Shame of the Person," to give just one instance of a poet with congruent attention. Izenberg's chapter on Oppen is quite interesting, but elsewhere, writing about the Language poets, O'Hara, and W.B. Yeats, his conviction in his own genius persuades him to ignore whole fields of literary writing that ought to be central to his inquiry. While I found the book informing in some ways, then, ultimately it strikes me as a book by a literary critic who dislikes literary criticism.

[Kevin Lawrence · Rating 2 out of 5]

This is a very self-consciously philosophical book that is eager to demonstrate how well read Izenberg is in the areas of language philosophy, epistemology, phenomenology, and (a much vaguer notion of) ontology as it relates to those philosophical fields. Simultaneously, Izenberg is eager to show that he is not a partisan reader of poetry by focusing on three poets I don’t think most readers would necessarily relate with one another (Yeats, Oppen, and O’Hara, with L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry an important/obvious fourth concern and significant asides on Elizabeth Bishop and a weird autobiographical conclusion infused with A.R. Ammons’ poetry.) Izenberg has important arguments about the creation of a certain type of reading community, though I think he often has a tedious and frothy way of making his points. Also, throughout the book I was not entirely convinced that the individual poets under consideration shared his preoccupation with the poem as some exercise in ontology and concomitant ethical/social issues. I read the book primarily for the chapter on Oppen and I suppose it is the strongest of the chapters, but the yoking together with Elizabeth Bishop as a counter example of the various philosophical approaches to reading Oppen’s poetry struck me as often forced and somewhat of a disservice to both poets (although I appreciate that Oppen’s explicit and uncharacteristically ungenerous dismissive comment about Bishop’s poetry suggests there is something worth exploring.) Overall, Izenberg proves he’s a thinking reader although I often felt like he was over-thinking individual words/lines/poems/poets. If you enjoy reading your poetry with Wittgenstein close at hand, you’ll probably find this critic engaging; if not, you’ll likely find him somewhat pretentious and annoying.

[Gordon Hilgers · Rating 4 out of 5]

Just as it is a good thing to give yourself a break and read a little science fiction simply to crank-up the dream machine, it's sometimes good to take yourself out on a limb, read the difficult book of poetry criticism and blow your mind in the process. Oren Izenberg's "Being Numerous" studies how contemporary and modern poetry relate as poems to society in general, and this topic, unsurprisingly, is wide open and always growing.

The author ranges from W. B. Yeat's almost mystical sense of audience, arguing contrary to other critical assessments that, no, Yeats was not merely addressing a shadowy Irish nationalism (although that indeed was a factor in many of his poems) but a type of audience, a sort of of-one-mind grouping in which the essential Irish character of his books is seen as both numinous and very real.

Contrast that to Frank O'Hara's almost gossipy poetry, some of it a little smart-assed in that O'Hara catalogs even the most non-essential details of a day, a walk through New York, and as is typical for his times, O'Hara being in the crosswalks between Beat and the New York School, reports in an almost sketchy way.

From a deep look as the lesser-known and more philosophic poetry of George Oppen to examinations regarding how poetry effects and is affected by society, well, everyone has been talking about this book, so likely it is a must-read.