I've deleted the MOST ridiculous of yesterday's 3 posts.

There are diverse kinds of poetry & diverse audiences. We have to move beyond the team-sport mentality, whether coming from formalists or experimentalists. Though I relished Joan Houlihan's take-no-prisoners, Emperor-has-no-clothes, take-the-naked-Emperor-prisoner style. Feeds my mean streak, I guess.

& we don't want to spend all day in the workshop, memorizing the list of tools.

I'm in favor of something like Montale's notion of dilettantismo (in maybe his first essay on poetry) - (if I'm remembering it right!). Best to think of poetry as a part of general culture, and try to be modest & circumspect about theory, means, methodologies... let the general audience make what it will of what is offered. (But will Henry take his own advice??? Noooo....)

Common sense & biting satire, if not much magnanimity, from Joan Houlihan. Sorry to hear that the straightforward logic of critical judgement - ie., how can you edit a Best Of if you don't believe in "bestness", and reject any measures of quality? - makes some people feel bad.

Feeling a cold breeze blowing from blogland since my stance on the Houlihan brouhaha. The world is as small as the people in it. Though I was harsher than I should have been on Fence (every magazine has its mix of good & not-so-good) & on the poem Houlihan chose from it (still, sans the sarcasm, I think my evaluation of it was about right).

Josh Corey has some interesting musings on Atlantean communityhood. I am far more sceptical than he is. If membership in the true a-g requires some non-aesthetic political mutual understanding or allegiance (as per Steve Evans), that's fine, if you want to be political; but it's not worth selling out your poetry for it.

The poet, in my view, is working with an originary, primordial, anarchically free mode of speech, the special aptitude of which is to absorb & transmute everything (political, social, religious, aesthetic) that comes within its range. I'm not saying it transmutes all these things in reality : I'm saying that within its own sphere it remakes them into something else (poetry). The values of poetry that remain through time & historical change are centered in this originality : we don't value Whitman or Dickinson or WC Williams or Crane or Pound or Stevens or etc., for their political opinions or social commitments, but for the original force of their poetry, which synthesizes all the various social & ideological & intellectual & emotional elements into something rich & strange.

I've said it again & again & again & again (see especially the interview with Kent in Jacket #10). . the ideals & commitments of various social & political communities may be very noble & fine, but when they try to use these values & ideological formations to make claims on poetry, they exude, as Mandelstam put it, "the unclean goat-smell of the enemies of the Word."

[added later:] However, the notion of poetry cleansed isolated idealized iconized - as if it were a living entity and not a human creation - only sterilizes the notion of poetry & dehumanizes its cult-worshippers. What's the answer to that? The poet, as poet, expresses human feeling & thought & commitments & values through & within poetry; this process cannot be judged, channeled, manipulated, massaged, promoted, or controlled by anyone or anything outside it, without corrupting it & losing its essence. (Pantaloons, indirectly, reminded me of this.)

As of today I am renouncing the terms avant-garde, post-avant, progressive, or experimental with reference to poetry, and taking a page from good old Minnesotan Ignatius Donnelly (who makes such a brilliant appearance, along with Thomas "Little Nappy" Dorr and magic-man Bluejay, in Stubborn Grew), I am going to refer to everyone somehow aligned with those terms as "Atlanteans" (also in the Hart Crane-ean sense, I guess).

Anyway, those Atlanteans who have been able to absorb, with some spoonful of composure, the tectonic shocks of the Houlihan squabble, may want to move on to a critique of a different kind - based on a cogent & sweeping argument about the nature of language in poetics : "The Enchanted Loom", by Paul Lake.

I think this is a very elegant and thought-provoking essay, perhaps groundbreaking for some poets. Groundbreaking in that Lake first of all uses contemporary science (chaos theory, artificial intelligence, cognition studies, etc.) as an Archimedean lever against both modern & postmodern orthodoxies regarding the nature of language. He quotes cleverly from Jonathan Swift in the process. Then he shows how these same scientific developments, by changing our understanding of order, meaning & information in nature, have correspondences with the process of literary composition and reception. (His holistic analysis chimes very cutely with the report circulating - which I mentioned here yesterday - about the findings of a British researcher, showing that our minds easily translate sarcbmeld wrdos, as lnog as the fsirt and lsat ltetres are in pclae - we read them holistically in a natural way.)

I think if poets can get past the attack on Language poetry (which, by reading it only as a manifestation of an outmoded philosophy of language & art, is only a partial reading), they might find Lake's ideas very useful for generating new models of writing, reading & teaching poetry (on the relation between text, fiction, and imagination - on "implicate" literary wholes & the relation between writing & reading - on how imaginative-fictional order is paralleled by different techniques in poetry).

I have a few reservations about the essay, after a first reading. First of all, how could anyone not like Tristram Shandy!! Secondly, I think the argument is faintly shaded by the potential for simply a new form of deterministic naturalism. The notion that small particular events are all implicated in larger, determining folds of meaning, could imply merely a new, more sophisticated Newtonian machine-universe. Furthermore, to argue that literature is the transmission between writer & reader of these information-wholes, and good literature refines these transfers, elides an elusive but fundamental element : the notion of incommunicability; that there are things or concepts or realities that are at the edge of or beyond speech & expression. In my view, this aspect is tied very profoundly with the adventure of poetry-making. In fact I might propose a kind of counter-complex to Lake's complex of wholism-information-communication; it would read something like uniqueness-incommensurability/infinity/freedom-silence.

Tristram Shandy's hilarious self-decomposition of the "book", the literary artifact, the embarassing "thingness" of people, novels & books all together, points, in my view, toward the inescapably imperfect and inescapably human fundament underlying all our theories & productions of "reality". But this fundament can be understood in a comic sense. I can only translate this into religious terms, which is my fumbling version of the incommunicable. As I tried to describe it in the interview with Kent Johnson in Jacket (which, by the way, shows all kinds of parallels with Lake's essay), it's for me an "incarnational" poetics, summarized perhaps best in Mandelstam's essay on how western art was set free by the historic event of Redemption (unfortunately I can't recall that essay's title; will try to find it). In Mandelstam's terms, Redemption released art into a realm of free play, without any shadow of determinism or responsibility to anything beyond itself. For me, this symbiosis, redemption/free play, says something about our "existential" experience as human beings. "Death on the cross" corresponds existentially with Everyman's consent to mortality : we suffer and die freely, in order to discover essential or ultimate freedom itself, in order to experience spiritual rebirth & "the freedom of the children of God".

Art as free play - freedom taken to its anarchic, human limit - is an essential aspect, an equal counterpart to the drive to share & communicate information. Tristram Shandy is a glorious representative of this case. & there are many 20th-century examples as well, which cannot easily be dismissed by a new scientific paradigm. But "thought is free", as well - and I think Lake shows very clearly that new perception can and should lead to new and much-needed artistic values in the 21st century.

One last little blast before I head to the airport. I'm accused of binary thinking; also it's implied I've been ungenerous (along with J. Houlihan) to a neophyte poet. (I think "revolving door / of its throat", by the way, a nice line too, only it's spoiled somewhat by the preceding "breath" of "nipple").

It seems to me that as the ruffled progressive wing circles the wagons, there has been no recognition, in a generous or non-binary way, of the positive qualities of the Houlihan critique. "We" know better, apparently. Well, I don't think so, guys. (See, again, the notes recently sent in commentary at Limetree.) There is a continuous process of bankrupting of general literary values, on behalf of parochial, self-serving corner-shaving.

The turbid moiling of the Houlihan hullabaloo subsides as the weekend approaches. Like a "sensitive plant" or touch-me-not, the scene shrinks at the approach of a stolid outsider. The confident poet will find the sedimentary layer, and the insightful critic will attach a prognosis (using proboscis) to something similar, I suppose, as the squabbling deliquesces on down to its point of origin.

Jonathan generously attempts a refutation of Houlihan's actual arguments. & I accept his position, but only to a degree. There is a difference between the original & Houlihan's parody of it : underlying the disjointed phrases ("breath/of a nipple" [???]) is some kind of rhetorical question, if not statement. My translation of the poem : "Does the process of excavating a 'logocentric grid' (the axle) of reality - which is the inverse mirror of stating axioms - muzzle the 'ventriloquist' breath of the (feminine?) body itself?"

So on a "tree" level, Jonathan has a point. But I think he misses the forest. The forest level of Houlihan's argument is that the poetic obfuscation of this kind of style actively discourages its interpretation. I will take a wild guess & speculate that this poet is a young ephebe currently enthralled with Celan. She's taken a fairly unoriginal postmodern idea (anti-logocentrism) and plumped & feathered it in portentous Celanophane, leading to such wonders of metaphor as "breath of a nipple", etc., its "revolving /throat". Faced with this mannered (wrapped) & imitative baloney, Houlihan's parody is justified, & her critique of both obfuscation and wheedling accessibility is very valuable.

Mr. James Behrle writes (outlining his view of Joan Houlihan's approach):

A poem *must* mean something, something that can be consumed. Like a Big Mac. A poem must be something that can be discussed in a circle, taken apart and put back together. A poem is something that can be taught and understood. There is no rigor to push language, to test sounds, to create dissonance, to make it new.

Knowledge has been identified with food since at least the Genesis story of the Tree of Knowledge.

But food means more than gobbling down protein & vitamins for "survival". The nourishment is often indistinguishable from the pleasure. What I understand Houlihan to be referring to, in her critique, is the pleasure of Pound's logopeia, the "dance of the intellect among words".

Now Mr. Behrle may be correct in saying that the poetry of his "we" often involves no simple transfer of meaning, in fact it may involve a rejection of "meaning" in this sense altogether, and still remain poetry. But it would be too bad if the rigor of his "we" style of consumption denies the pleasures of meaning altogether. Houlihan's quotes from various auto-pilot playfully ambi-meaningless experimental taste-defying word-gumbos simply underlines her argument that certain pleasures of ordered meaning are missing there.

Jonathan Mayhew writes:

But we are all vehement! Henry Gould and Jean Hooligan as much as Jonathan Mayhem. It's called passion! If elegance could be measured it wouldn't be elegant any longer. If poetry were written in "normal" language it wouldn't be poetry at all. All this reminds me of some books my Grandpa had by Robert Hillyer, a guy who used to write a column for the Saturday Review or Saturday Evening Post. He would quote a poem by Cummings or Williams or Auden and sneer at it. Modern poetry was crap. Half the time he was right, but that just shows bad poetry will always be more plentiful than good. The poetry he advocated was worse than crap. That's why the badness of Houlihan's own poetry matters in this debate.

But JM, I'm not against vehemence per se; only struck by it in this context. Houlihan's biting comments seem to stir not engagement but defensive vituperation. & no, the fact that Hillyer advocated crap poems does not justify quoting Houlihan's poems to deny her critical acumen. Houlihan does not present her poems as alternative models within her essays. The one poem (that I found, anyway) which she offered as exemplary, by Franz Wright, was pretty good, though I thought the final line spoiled it (snow like "millions of bees" : seems facile, a kind of well-worn flourish).

I agree that her criticism is satirical & negative, and does not really offer a "way forward" in terms of a new or exemplary poetics. But I find her closet-cleaning a breath of fresh air.

Dale Smith weighs in against Houlihan at Skanky Possum. At least Smith addresses her actual arguments; but he does so in a hectoring, bullying manner. Interesting to me that he opposes Houlihan's strictures with an emphasis on the holistic post- or trans- verbal experience of modernity : parallels the issues I raised in previous post today (ie., can criticism happen at all, in a culture of holistic-autonomous gushtalts?).

Jonathan weighs in on Joan Houlihan. I'm somewhat bemused by the vehemence of this & other negative takes. Again I see an unwillingness to address her main arguments (obscurity & bad writing among the "progressive", lazy resting-on-laurels among the established, et al.), along with a willingness to belittle her own poetry (which really is not a point against her essays), & to question, very tweedily, her "credentials".

All this vehemence makes me ask: is criticism actually possible with regard to contemporary poetry? Contemporary culture is most adept at creating complete autonomous worlds (poetry movements, football seasons, ghettos, SUV ads, music videos, computer games. . .). These pastimes are so pervasive and all-consuming that, in comparison, perhaps, a general notion of "good writing" seems inconceivably boring. "Progressive" poetry creates its own terms for production & consumption, which have a lot to do with an aura of performance & "liminality" & immediate experience, and little to do with "normal" or even traditionally or measurably elegant syntax or vocabulary.

The Joan Houlihan articles getting attention in blogland. Responding to Josh: I'm not sure what the comparison to Wm. Logan, or the quality of her own poems, has to do with the substance of her critiques. Too much defensive carping from the fishpond. That she chose some really bad poems from Fence was supported by the fact that she showed how the mediocre writing of those examples was echoed by the editors' own pronouncements defining their aesthetics.

Witty & acerbic evaluations of contemporary poetry by Joan Houlihan. The whole series is worth reading.