Praxis, theory, and the unmakeable: An interview with Robert Hullot-Kentor
Chris Mansour
Platypus Review 33 | March 2011
On February 19, 2011, Chris Mansour of Platypus interviewed Robert Hullot-Kentor, noted Adorno translator and author of Things Beyond Resemblance: Collected Essays on Theodor W. Adorno. What follows is an edited transcript of the interview.
Chris Mansour: For several decades you have been translating and interpreting the relevance of Adornoâs thought for us. In your most recent essays, however, it seems you have mostly wanted to save Adornoâs ideas from appropriation by the postmodern and contemporary canon, which you claim have done âimmense damageâ to his insights. What kind of disservices have been done to Adornoâs work from his time to ours, and what exactly do you think needs to be redeemed?
Robert Hullot-Kentor: You say, âimmense damage.â That rings a bell somewhereâAdorno, or no Adorno. But, as to helping to discern Adornoâs ârelevanceâ to this day and age, relevance has never been relevant to my mind; ârelevanceâ is a measure of irrelevance. The moment is plenty relevant to itself if we can figure out how to locate itsâourâown thinking, itsâourâown words. And whatever âimmense damageâ we now inhabit, I doubt those canons you citeâpostmodern or contemporary canonsâwould hurt a fly, or Adorno. There arenât canons to struggle with, not since more than half a century ago when they were already rags. The current situation is narrow, blinded and constrained, and awash, all at once, but it is not polarized in the fixed fashion that invoking the idea of a âcanonâ wants to imagine. Getting wound up about the danger to life and limb of the canon is for English departments so preoccupied teaching students to write credible business memos that the faculty canât be interested in literature anymore.
The problem for critical thought, now, is how to make reality break in on the mind that masters it. For what we are involved in, thatâs the one praxis. And the puzzle of this praxis is shaped in realizing that while reality must be made to break in on the mind, that canât occur in the model of tossing a stone through a window; the window must shatter under its own fissuring tinsel pressures, from within, as a violence against the violence. It differs from being mere violence as an act in which reality has been made humanly commensurable, without this commensurability of experience in any way pretending that reality itself is human. We are considering a capacity for experience.
CM: There is much to say here, but maybe we can work our way back to it from my first question to you, I was asking what you think needs to be redeemed in Adornoâs work.
RHK: Redeemed? Nothing. I meanâŠus? You donât mind if we go a bit word by word here? Well, I donât think that we are in a position to redeem anything. I doubt we can redeem Adornoâs work, and definitely not if we pose that question to ourselves in terms of his own thinking, if thatâs what weâre in part curious about in this conversation. Come to think of it, at that conference you organized for Platypus at the New School a couple of months ago on Critical Theory,[1] didnât something come up about Adorno and religion?
CM: Yes, momentarily, there was a discussion critical of Adornoâs relation to the sacred.
RHK: So maybe it is worth mentioningâsince in a way you also broach the question, perhaps from the other directionâthat Adornoâs thinking, if I can half quote him here, touches at every point on a theological element (no less than does Beckettâs), but only by way of the most extreme diffidence to what his work lives from. That tense diffidence (thatâs his word for it) is implicit to any critique of enlightenment that actually is a capacity of enlightenment. The self-critique of enlightenment, at its extreme, by way of its own sober reasoning, amounts to the insight that its disillusionment, its ability to vanquish every last ghost in the machine, is itself the production of an illusion as a credulousness of its own mastery. This thought, which, maybe you know, has a vast antiquity, doesnât confirm the supposedly plump, ultramontane comforts of belief or an urge to bend at the knees. As enlightenment, and not simply citing antiquityâs maxim of humility, it is as much a critique of theology, which, Adorno thought, has never once been extricated from the powers that be.
CM: Was Adorno a believer?
Johann Heinrich Wilhelm Tischbein, Goethe in the Campagna, oil on canvas 164 x 206 cm, 1787.
RHK: Adorno was not among the faithful, the skeptical, or the agnostic in the Que sais-je? tradition. But I do think of him in the tradition that begins in the 15th century with Cusanusâthe Cusaâwho in many ways marks the decisive point in the secularization of theological reasoning in aesthetics. I am not saying Adorno was Cusanus, but he did pursue the experience of thoughtâs dependence on its object both in his materialism and, inextricably from that materialism, in his theses on metaphysics. By this measure, the gods, the many, many gods, must be a whole lot more interesting than what Feuerbach thought he might find in them as the sum total of alienated human essence.
It would be superstitious to think that human making is limited in what it makes only to what it has made, as Vico perhaps thought. An obvious, palpable clue here, in terms of technique, is that we can only do with things what can be done with them. One can only do with glass what can be done with glass, with plastic what can be done with plastic; one can only do with each and every word and with each and every note, as well, what can be done with each of them, and so on. It takes imagination to recognize that reality is not raw material, as something we can concoct however we see fit. But, with regard to imagination, it is even more important to say that there is only imagination in the experience of that recognition. Wallace Stevensâwho, as you know, is always as much on my mind as are Adorno and Nabokovâhad many ways of saying this: His ânecessary angel,â which bears interesting comparison with Benjamin on Kleeâs Angelus Novusâis the necessary angel of reality without which there is no imagination. Or, as Stevens otherwise put it, âReality is the only genius.â[2] To comprehend the same thing, Adorno had the idea of âexact fantasyâ from Goethe. In these terms, the Prometheus of labor shrinks but he also gets a whole lot more interesting, as do those deities lounging right this moment out in that Hindu temple in Queens.
CM: You are talking about the critique of constitutive subjectivity?
RHK: Yes. The philosophemâthe recognition of disillusionment as an uttermost illusionâis another formulation of the critique of constitutive subjectivity as a capacity of subjectivity to spring its own trap. It is not categorically different from Marxâs critique of the Gotha Program that labor is by no means the source of value.
CM: In this idea of the recognition of disillusion as illusion, are you saying that religion and irreligion converge?
RHK: In Adornoâs thinking, they do. It is one thing, as he put it in the âFinaleâ to Minima Moralia, to âcontemplate all things as they would present themselves from the perspective of redemptionââa perspective from which, as he developed the idea, âthe question of the reality or unreality of redemption hardly matters.â[3] And it is very much something else to suppose that we are in a position to redeem anything whatsoever.
CM: I am curious whether the idea of the recognition of disillusionment as illusion, which you say is so important to Adorno, has a correlative in his aesthetics? Earlier on, when you were talking about technique, I noticed you mentioned notes and words along with plastic and glass.
RHK: Just as Adorno thinks that enlightenment is capable of criticizing its own limits, in his aesthetics he thinks that art, to be art, must be the making of what is more than can be made. Art, as he understood it, tests the thesis that subjectivity potentially transcends itself by way of subjectivity, and not by its abrogation. That is, the artist isnât a pythian vessel. But insofar as Adorno wrote that radical artâart that in any way means to be artâneeds to be âthings of which we cannot say what they are,â he simultaneously asserts a making that is capable of escaping its own intention. Youâre in art school, right, Chris?
CM: Right.
RHK: Well, if you become an artist you have the experience of someone stopping by the studio, poking a head through the door and wanting to know, âDid you really make that?â If you havenât had that experience by the time youâre in your twenties, you can stop paying rent on the studio. Artists are, and have always been, keyed to making the unmakeable; the muse is obsolete, but all the same sine qua non. A friend from many years ago, Jim Tate, a poet, said that he wrote poetry to ensure âthat it could still happen.â Thatâs what itâs about. Who would bother with art, unless it exceeded what was made? In his letters, van Gogh writes to his brother, Theo, that he had no idea how he made his paintings; he was sure that he didnât know how to make them. It is worth thinking, all the same, that the artist writing those letters was a nominalist technician if there ever was one, building every painting up out of three or four gestures, wet on wet. It is, literally, an inconceivable mastery, and in these terms oneâs sense that no one could have made those paintings is not utterly delusive; and it wasnât for van Gogh, either. Do you know Francis Baconâs phrase, wanting his work to be a âSahara of the appearancesâ?
Bacon meant that he wanted to produce a likeness by way of an absolute unlikeness. That would be an act of recognition in the movement across the absolute distances of shifting sands in which vision returns to the beholder as an intention by way of what has entirely relinquished intention. That is the unmakeable thing he needed to make.
Francis Bacon, Figure with Meat, oil on canvas 129.2 x 121.9 cm, 1954.
CM: Adorno says that, doesnât he, in his aesthetics, when he writes that art doesnât imitate nature, it imitates cloud dramas?
RHK: Yes. That movement at a standstill could be a movement in clouds or sands.
CM: Do you like Baconâs work?
RHK: The early works, much more than the later ones. But even when the painting isnât where my imagination can go, what he could make is astonishing. Bacon was finally so overwhelmed by his desperation to make what exceeded him that he could only bring that amorphousness back by way of an inflicted and thematically narrow intentional articulation. I wasnât surprised when one of his paintings ended up in a Batman movie.
CM: Was that a psychological matter for Bacon?
RHK: That must be an aspect of it. But it is much more a problem of where art went, and where it is now. Up until modern art, artists could get away with imitating the unmakeable: rhyme schemes, for instance, imitate the unmakeableâthatâs a transparently painful conceit now. Art became radically modern when it had no choice but to demand of itself the veridically unmakeable, no longer its illusion, and found itself facing an impossible task. Dance became break neck gymnastics in response. âFound artâ capitulated in front of the problem of the unmade and hoped to surrogate the untouched for the untouchable. Thatâs the level of the problem that compelled Bacon.
CM: Photography certainly taps the unintentional.
RHK: Yes, it does. But what makes photography so difficult is that it so easily wins the unintentional while paying so heavily for it in its inability to engage the constructive powers of the eye on which the capacity for exceeding appearances depends.
CM: Wouldnât Marx say that art that claims to produce the unmakeable is the manufacture of a fetish?
RHK: Iâd say that Marxâs admiration for the âwork hardened bodiesâ of the proletariat is a fetish.
CM: That is an opaque answer. What do you mean?
RHK: I mean a number of things, including that Marxâs critique of labor did not go deep enough. It is there in his writings, but you can understand why Adorno concluded that Marx wanted to make the world into a labor camp: the Soviet Union wasnât only a misunderstanding of Marx. So, I mean that, but I mean at the same time that of course art is a fetish, but the worst of life is not what leaves labor behind, even if itâs just pretending. No doubt, setting up the made as the unmade is a fetish. But, all the same, if disillusionment is an illusion, then humans are considerably more interesting than the self-certain sobriety that interprets artworks by tracing them back to their makerâs intentions or, with greater socio-economic sophistication, to the historical interests of the moment in which they originated, as if thatâs so smart and informative. The doctrine of interest itself needs to be demystified, in political representation as in art. Those cloud dramas are no less the voice of nature. The entire history of artâand this is very clear nowâis nothing but the development of techniques for potentiating intention as the intentionless; the piano keyboard serves for nothing else. If the history of art could be written, that history of techniques of the unmakeable would be its history. What is at stake is distinct from mystical effusion in that the accomplishment is not by way of abolishing subjectivity, but by way of subjectivity; you can think of van Goghâs nominalism, which weâve discussed a little, or you can think of what Hegel called the âextinguishing of the subject in the object.â This is an activity that leaves the artist behind like a heap of ash, an experience that can be hard to survive without all the braggadocio that goes on over in places like the art gulch in Chelsea. Making the unmakeable is what raises every important question about the nature of aesthetic form. Adornoâs apothegm is to the point here, that it is in art, if nowhere else, that âorigin is the goal.â
CM: There is enough to talk about here that we might as well go back to the very beginning of our conversation. Why was it, when I asked you what youâve wanted to do with Adornoâs work over several decades that you answered with what you called the idea of praxis, of making reality break in on the mind that masters it? That does not, to be honest, seem like much of an answer. Did you lose track of the question?
RHK: I hope not. I try to hold the whole conversation in mind at once, which is pretty hopeless, Iâm sure. I mean to keep track; I know I was keeping track then. But the truth of it is, Iâm more interested in what keeps coming back to us more than I think in terms, as you suggest, of our going back to anything, now or later, whether to the beginning of our conversation or elsewhere, as if thereâs an origin at one end of the dusty road of time and, in the other direction, tomorrow is already busy taking shape. That image implies a spatialized, kinetic idea of time. What we have gone back to in this conversation is what has come to get us. Thinking in these terms makes sense in light of Freudâs concept of regression, as the need to deal with what is still to be solved, whatâs nagging at us, whatâs right here in our bones as elements of those splintering forces that are by no means located somewhere back at a spatialized beginning that we sometimes visit, or donât, as, for instance, when we were talking about what makes a window shatter under its own tinsel forces in terms of immanent criticism. By the way, thatâs just as much the concept of time inside Adornoâs notion of those cloud dramas: A concept of time that developed in opposition to the idea of a primordial, primitive origin at the beginning of all things. Without the development of that idea of time, we wouldnât have had Freud or Adorno, let alone Virginia Woolf or Joyce.
CM: Does this involve what I remember you writing, I think, in the introduction to Adornoâs Aesthetic Theory, about thinking by means of an enjambment of thought? Enjambment as opposed to argumentation?
RHK: Yes, argumentation as modus operandiâthe proudly hard-headed passion for âgetting itâ vs. ânot getting it,â âright judgmentsâ vs. âyour wrong judgmentsââis spuriously philosophical. It is an appeal to the authority of origin, not as the goal, but at the beginning of all things. Itâs not that logic is a matter of indifference, on the contrary, but its putative necessity is a strong-arm fraud, inextricable from the fraud of historical necessity. The problem of critical historical thought, by contrast, isâand I donât think there is any other content to the whole of Adornoâs oeuvreâhow to dissolve the illusion of this necessity we have woven for ourselves. Iâm not saying that truth is a flip of the coin or that making mash out of the idea of truth would do us any good. Thinking is a search for binding, if however transient, insight; indirection is essential to it, enjambment is its crisis. Adorno called that enjambment, parataxis. As a technique, this can be just as full of nonsense as the syllogism. But thinking must feel its way along, so to speak. And when the issue is the consideration of Adornoâs workâand this isnât exactly a special caseâthis consideration not least of all involves recognizing where his work gives indications that it is no longer binding or meaningful; where what is fleeting in insight turns out to be more than an axiom about its fleetingness.
CM: What does that actually mean, then, in considering Adornoâs writings?
RHK: It means reading with an eye to perceiving where the text surrenders its importance, as if the words themselves are insisting that âit can no longer be said like this.â That isnât a measure of relevance or irrelevance; it is the emergence of one aspect of its own non-identity with itself. History is taking its own measure. Recognizing these moments, I want to repeatâif its not too much trouble for us to keep track of all of our conversation while weâre talkingâis obviously not an act of redemption. But it is a salvaging labor in which critical subjectivity possibly becomes the ability of the old to long for the new. This approach is not altogether different from listening with a compositional ear to music and noticing that the music itself indicates that it can no longer be composed.
CM: That is part of Adornoâs theory of composition, is it not? And you are saying that considering Adornoâs work in this way aims at making it break in on the mind that masters it?
RHK: I suppose. But with the caveat that conceptual labor is not art, in which case it acquires something akin to the sound of Heidegger enthused with his inamorataâthe sheep of the fields. Arty criticism, criticism that claims to be art, criticism plus sheep, criticism plus adjectives, fails art and fails criticism.
CM: Does this not conflate criticism and philosophy? But, in any case, there is certainly a lot of art in Adornoâs writing.
RHK: There is. And, in German at least, his writing certainly has its own sound, and that sound, a distinct voice, is often discussed. But that sound is not the achievement of being arty. What is involved, again, is a matter of that diffidence that we were discussing earlier, though here that diffidence is somewhat differently focused. A way of condensing the issue of the relation of philosophy and art in Adornoâs work is to think of Wallace Stevens writing that the âpoem is the cry of its occasion/part of the res itself and not about it.â[4] Modern poetry and a radically modern philosophy that wants to settle for nothing less than the thing itself, converge in an opposition in which, as Adorno put it in Aesthetic Theory, art only has itâthat is, the âcry of its occasionââbecause it canât say it; and philosophy can say it, only because it does not have it. That is, incidentally, one way of stating why aesthetics is the middle point of Adornoâs work.
CM: If Adornoâs thesis describes the relation of philosophy to art, then there must be another side to this, right? The obverse. Because in the phrase you quote from Stevens, he seems to be claiming to âsay itâ in a way that Adornoâs maxim would seem to prohibit.
RHK: Good point, It is true that art can pretend to be philosophy, as much as the reverse. But, you know, in the poem where Stevens writes that line, I think itâs in âAn Ordinary Evening in New Haven,â he is using concepts in opposition to the illusory surface of the poemâhe might as well use sand paper on the poemâs illusory surfaceâas an act of abstraction. Itâs similar to how Zola could introduce in a novel a long inventory list of the contents of a department store; thatâs roughing up the illusory surface of art as well. It is part of art resisting art in an effort to remain art. Conceptual art wants to do that too, of course. And of course this can backfire and usually does.
CM: Well, if we are just looking around for the moment, I am curious to ask you, since you brought up the sound of philosophy and also mentioned Heidegger: Does Heidegger have a sound, a voice?
RHK: In German, Heidegger has the voice of what you might expect in a letter you would get at sleep-away-camp from grandma. Juxtapose âbeing at sleep-away-campâ with âbeing-in-the worldâ and an English monoglot starts to hone in on the sound of Heidegger in German without needing to study the grammar. If English translation didnât provide Heideggerâs phrases with a densely arcane professionalism, as if it were a technical language, while he is being so down-home, it would be much less difficult to understand his work for what it is. I donât see how people put up with it. Its content is death and imagination as nothingness. Habermasâs notion of communicative action is no less obtuse to libido than Dasein, but at least it can read a newspaper without disgracing itself with inauthenticity. There is not a lot to go on there. Adornoâs Jargon of Authenticity at points froths at the lips, but the general credulousness for Heidegger is much more disturbing.
CM: Weâve ended up in a discussion of style.
RHK: I suspect weâve been talking about style in various ways all along, whether about parataxis and argumentation, or in what I was saying a bit ago about examining Adornoâs work for where it falters. That involves an eye for style. Another way to put it is to say that one has to be prepared to tap on wordsâin this case Adornoâs wordsâwith the hammer that Nietzsche bequeathed to the philosophical temperament for tapping. And if one isnât prepared, one might as well spin out concepts in those vast, argumentative sheets one reads everywhere, whether about the critique of the constitutive subject or the disintegration of âemphatic experience,â or âimmanent critique,â but as a parody. Then theory is just âtheoryâ dressed up in the critique of the constitutive subject. But really it is nothing else than its assertion. I say âdressed upâ because in the 1844 Manuscripts Marx wrote that fashion is a synonym for relations of production.
CM: âTheoryâ becomes an assertion of the given relations of production?
RHK: I think so. As I said, thereâs a lot of that to read.
CM: Youâre critical of theory?
RHK: Theory is critical of theory, wouldnât you suppose?
CM: Could you give an instance of the kind of tapping you think is worthwhile? Are you referring to what you have written about the idea of the primitive? Is that an instance of what you mean by âtappingâ?
RHK: Yes. Open any few pages of Adornoâs writings and youâll notice that of all the comments that concern the âprimitive,â in one way or another, whether the âprimitiveâ itself, or the âsavageâ, the âbarbaricâ, the âarchaicâ, âprima philosophia,â or of âregressionâ to the barbaric, none communicate what they did twenty years ago, let alone at the moment they were written, when barbarism had just blown through the front door. Open, for instance, Minima Moralia, which is here in front of us: Iâm here on p. 226, read about âthe affinity of culture to savagery,â and see how that comes up on the nervous system, as Francis Bacon would say. See if it means anything at all. Then start turning pages in any direction in the book and throughout the whole of Adornoâs writings, and you will notice that we donât exactly know what Adorno is talking about or what the âprimitiveâ amounts to. We may even feel a kind of antagonism toward Adorno, as if he were making the distinction at our expense. We want to raise our hand in class and demand, âWhat do you mean by primitive?â
CM: Is that something about the idea of the primitive exclusively in Adorno?
RHK: No. Read anywhere in the literature of the 1940s, for instance (Iâm busy with that because Iâm putting together a selection of essays from the Journal of Social Research, the journal, that Adorno and Horkheimer published in the 1930s and 1940s), and you will find throughout phrases concerning barbarism and the primitive by many writers, âIt is the thesis of this book that the two [society and the military] are inseparably connected both with each other and with a third thing, barbarism.â That insight, or, in any case, the possibility of that insight was once protean. I am referring to a review written by Karl Korsch, which was highly critical of the book and of the writer I quote, but not of the possibility of differentiating barbarism.
CM: If we can go back (the word âbackâ has started to sound a bit different) to the issue of relevance, why not say that the words âbarbarism,â or âthe primitiveâ arenât relevant anymore?
RHK: Because it may be that the fashion of barbarismâfashion in the sense we were discussing earlier, the way Marx develops it in the 1844 Manuscriptsâhas absorbed the differentiation of the primitive. And to think in terms of relevance, which would mean dropping the now obscure appellation, irrelevant, would only amount to becoming a fellow traveler.
CM: This is indeed importantâPlatypus has often argued that society is in the midst of âregression.â What is the implication of the kind of tapping youâre doing here for this thesis?
RHK: There is a group of implications, including that itâs approximately hopeless going around asserting that society is in the midst of âregression,â let alone in the primitive or the barbaric. It does not mean anything at all. The words are not even leaden; they are a matter of indifference, especially if stating them doesnât include the insights that they most importantly contain and one is only participating in a kind of amnesia. The faltering differentiation has to be expressed in the self-consciousness of the statement of what is faltering.
CM: Is that indifference to the differentiation of the primitive a matter of the âbanality of evilâ?
RHK: The âbanality of evilâ is itself a tad banal, donât you think? We didnât get used to evil. Moral impulses didnât wear out, they were overwhelmed by superior imperativesâthatâs Hobsbawmâs pointâimperatives that the newspapers most regularly present as the primacy of the financial, but that are much more deeply evidence of the coming extinction of the liberal state. Itâs what we see in Obama encouraging the members of congress at the recent State of the Union speech this January to break party lines and sit together. The obliging congress members did not give evidence of good will toward men but of the national disintegration of party allegiance, of lucidly oppositional politics and of representational government under the weight of the social whole. That âsit-alongâ has much less to do with affirming the spirit of compromiseâa good thing, which Obama has changed into the spirit of capitulationâthan with the supplanting of the sovereignty of the people by something considerably closer to consumer sovereignty: the selection of the best product qua representative while disregarding party affiliation. The âbanality of evilâ doesnât cover much of this.
CM: There would be a lot to say about this. But I donât want to lose track of the general point of our discussion of the problem of contemporary praxis so far as whatâs at stake in making sense of Adornoâs work. Have you been saying that what is needed is to develop the self-consciousness of a faltering differentiation?
RHK: Thatâs it. The issue is the faltering differentiation of the primitive and of the context of concepts in which it is located. Adornoâs thinking altogether revolves around the development of insight into the primitive. Or, we could put this the other way around, by focusing on the disappearance of the differentiation of the radically new, here in the land of the perpetual ârethink.â The radically new, which artists, especially composers, sought in their work in the early 20th century as the âair of another planet,â developed reciprocally with the insight into the primitive, when the primitive became the impulse of the new. But listen to the phrase,âthe air of another planet,â and what there is to hear is that it speaks more appositely to the imminently unlivable air of this âplanet.â
CM: It is as fruitless to invoke the increasingly âprimitiveâ situation of the United States as it would be to urge people to seek the ânewâ?
RHK: The demand for the ânewâ probably sounds even more feeble and absurd than invoking insight into the âprimitive,â donât you think?
CM: We are suddenly out of time, and there is so much more to consider here. But, I must ask you something that has kept coming back to me throughout our discussion today, from almost the first moment. You said (Iâm taking you by your own words now) that the problem of âmaking reality break in on the mind that masters itâ is the one praxis. Whether it really is the one praxis, I donât know. But, what you call praxis, I would call theory. Havenât you confused theory and praxis?
RHK: This is some sense of humor, bringing us to the close on a question that would need another day to sort out at all. But what youâve brought up is something I repeatedly try to state to myself: theory is praxis insofar as thinking has entered the world of objects. Meaning that, as a capacity of subjectivity, it has escaped the claustrum of means/ends reasoning, what Hegel would have called subjective spirit, and has engaged the unmakeable. |P
[1]. See J.M. Bernstein, Lydia Goehr, Gregg Horowitz, and Chris Cutrone, âThe relevance of critical theory to art today,â Platypus Review 31 (January 2011), available online at <http://platypus1917.org/2011/01/01/the-relevance-of-critical-theory-to-art-today/>.
[2]. Wallace Stevens, Opus Posthumous (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1957), 177.
[3]. Theodor W. Adorno, Minima Moralia: Reflections on a Damaged Life (New York: Verso, 2005), 247.
[4]. Stevens, âAn Ordinary Evening in New Haven,â Collected Poems (New York: Vintage Books, 1982), 473.
