re previous post : of course, red flags pop up at the mention of "natural development". As well they should. In art, everything is conceptual.

Everything except the medium itself. By "song" in poetry I refer back to previous posts about the idea of poetry as perennial fluency, or a sort of omnipresent bee-hum.

This sounds sub-intellectual, sentimental, merely visceral - until you consider the possibility that the medium is a vehicle for forms of intelligible-conceptual invention, communication, aesthetic-conceptual syntheses : complexes inexpressible by any other means.

Thus what I suggest as "natural development" is not so much a WC Williamsish, Emersonian, Whitmanic or Poundian version of American origination, as a movement of American (literary) civilization toward fusion/assimilation with world history and culture as a whole : the echo of (global) perennial fluency in an American dialect.

The postmodern/"New American" emphasis on informality, slang, minor modes - this was a healthy reaction to many strange literary-historical-Modernist pomposities & perversities... yet we need to recognize its limitations, its "period style" aspects. Just as we need to understand that the prosaic materialism of the Language School closed the door on most of the normative distinctions between poetry and prose, and thus on the distinct qualities and resources of poetry.

dicey dichotomies

Robert Archambeau's recent remarks on the "Battle of Chicago" (Brit Poetry Wars) echo the various histories of stylistic division on these shores (SoQ/Post-Avant, New Americans/New Critics, Experimentals/New Formalists, Raw/Cooked, Moderns/Victorians, etc. etc.).

Have been wondering (in a vague way) this week whether these dichotomies are not symptoms of something deeper, more elusive - something involved with the nature of poets & poetry generally...

If to make a poem is to take a particular step into the social, public arena, perhaps there's a basic binary there - the step is either joining or defying (or escaping, or avoiding). Either yes or no.

The trouble is, every poet is a jumble of yes and no - mixed together in a unique, unrepeatable way. Often the efforts to align or group poets (mainstream or oppositional, for example) involve eliding the uncomfortable fact that group defiance is just the obverse of group joining.

It seems best to focus on the aims and motives of a particular work, rather than aligning poets with groups or styles. Because the most accomplished writing often involves a process of distinguishing or differentiating - which is the method by which the work says something clear, determined and new.

As for me, I'm a chaos of mixed motives & feelings. Discouragement over (non)recognition - combined with fear of entrapment in what seems like self-enclosed, ingrown aestheticism (part of me doesn't like being a poet). & on another level, the difficulty involved in balancing poetry with other kinds of thought (religion, philosophy...). Poetry & thought don't always work together. They're like two headstrong horses on a chariot...

Robert Archambeau writes a chipper report on Brit Poetry Wars in the Chicago Review. But the debate between Wilkinson & Riley over poetry/politics - Riley's critique of what seems to be a bent toward Language-purism and hands-off politics, stemming from a failure to distinguish between the two (poetry & politics) - well, this sounds like an echo of old debates on the Buffalo Poetics List of 10 years ago. Can't we get beyond these parameters somehow? Of course, British authors have a knack for saying whatever they say very authoritatively ("ne'er so well express'd")...

It seems like a continual re-statement of basics (though I pretty much agree with Riley's position). No, aesthetics is not politics, nor vice versa. No, poetry is not only a purification rite for a particular stream of left-religion (though it may be for some people). No, poetry in general, or particular "schools" of same, will not save us from capitalism, global warming, war, etc. (though particular poems might help).

Most poetry expresses shared values & trends of the moment; thus the "poetry wars" on various continents reflect ideological fractures in the cultural/intellectual spheres of the time. I think the aim of the poet (or dramatist or novelist), however, is to dig deeper : without surrendering fundamental principles, to find shared (if unacknowledged) ground, and to provide models of reconciliation.

Believe it or not, I represent continuity with that old high road. An American version. Not the pretentious post-avants, not the harlequin New York School, not the prosy Olsonites, not the slick magazine poets, not the cautious academics (charming and dazzling and fine as they all can be). Not them - just little ol' me. Henry. It's all there in them pocket-size paperbacks, the long & short of it.

To think of the verbal-poetic medium as a river. Whitman's "hum of your valved voice".

To contrast a notion of art as emerging from conceptual abstraction, a sort of Platonic ether, with the idea of the "vernacular" (whether in language or architecture). Poetry emerging from this sort of perennial sound (Edwin Honig wrote somewhere about poetry as something like bees humming, present always and everywhere.) (Honig's name, in German : "honey")

Drab, dehumanized modernist building projects. Poetic productions stemming from abstract notions of language, form & ideology. Or kraftwerk poetry based on a do-it-yourself model - a-historical, detached from the flow of culture and civilizations, re-inventing primitive wheels again and again.

As opposed to an "Acmeist" model of poetry as a distinct, perennial something - an ongoing "conversation" (Pasternak's term) - rooted in shared culture and history, memory (a Dantean vernacular, the volgare illustre). Or Mandelstam's (& Akhmatova's, & Yeats's) sense of it as a gift, stemming from states of exaltation - inspired yet built on labor (Mandelstam proceeding from Pushkin & the Russian tradition).

What I'm trying to describe is close to Eliot's much-maligned concept of tradition - an already-underway, ongoing conversation, which one can join (and even revise) if one is willing to recognize it, and put in the necessary work of absorbing it.

My understanding is that these emphases are normative for European and world poetry : and somewhat distinct from the American (& Futurist) emphasis on flash, immediacy, (post)-modernist abstraction, constructivism, industrial kraft-production.

The "hum of the valved voice" - aiming for clarity and engagement, an intellectual agility for grasping connections. Wallace Stevens, a great technician, tended, in his critical comments, to downplay 20th-century emphases on technique : in favor of this "river-sense" of fluency which I'm trying to get at.

The poetic medium : perennial fluency.


Mississippi River, near Franklin Ave. Bridge,
Minneapolis (photo by Phoebe G.)

For very detailed background on the Palio, see this book from the 70s : La Tierra in Piazza, by Alan Dundes and Alessandro Falassi (Univ. of California Press, 1975). Lots of good photos. Last chapter a sort of anthropological-psychological interpretation, fascinating.

Recently, Allen Bramhall & Gabriel Gudding both discuss (& condemn) agonism & rivalry in American poetryland. Meanwhile I'm using this horserace as a metaphor for it.

Dundes & Falassi analyze the palio as (in part) a male puberty rite, colored by the machismo of Mediterranean culture. Curious & ambiguous symbolisms in the city of the Virgin and the she-wolf (for example, the winning jockey & his clan drink wine and suck on pacifiers after the race). That's just one aspect of it.

I understand & to some extent agree with Allen & Gabriel. Poetry, obviously, is many things at once : an art form, a game, a vocation, a means, an end. Poetry can be (profoundly) a release from egoism and violence and stress and Keats's "irritable reaching after fact & reason".

Sweet music of speech; delightful play & laughter; intellectual bread & wine; wisdom, encouragement, equanimity; etc. etc.

But an artwork also brings into play the faculties of taste & critical judgement. (John Latta quotes Coleridge's description of his reading method as "sieve and winnow" - and shows how it's done.)

Eliot's essay "Tradition and the Individual Talent" is all about coming to terms with contrary forces of ego and ambition, on the one hand, and the objectivity of the art itself on the other. "The progress of an artist is a continual self-sacrifice, a continual extinction of personality."

Critical judgement acts (or should act) as the umpire - fair, disinterested, objective, above the fray. And every authentic poet is also such a judge - both of his or her own work and that of others. In fact this critical activity - as part of the whole creative process - is what makes for companionship, camaraderie & cooperation among fellow artists. It's not just that they are poets together - they are critics together.

When you have a fair referee - then you can have a horserace.

& no one can judge rightly without true love.

The language poets and affiliates thought they could jettison the myth of the lyric self & romantic subjectivity & so on by objectifying "language" as a "material" phenomenon. In doing so they had to narrow down the theory of poetry, exclude all those epiphenomena we ascribe to accurate description, definition, feeling, evocation, symbolism, plot, meaning, etc., and just leave poetry a sort of stripped-down protest against the supposed domination of the signified. Some of the langpos aimed for pure versions of this procedure; their postmodern affiliates used those methods to "torque" (their term) their "language" in eye-catching contemporary fashion.

In my view the "language poetry" concept should be clearly rejected, as a cramping limitation on what poetry actually is and can be. I've tried to do just this, over the years... The essays over here around the Chicago Critics try to present a broader concept, which is formalist in a quasi-Aristotelian sense : the poem is an achieved intellectual-affective form, which is not restricted to its verbal texture - because texture is not the sum or limit of what poetic language does. Instead, language is a transitive element - a form of transportation - which may lead to both referential meanings and to aesthetic (intransitive) equilibrium.

Moreover, poetry is ineluctably personal. (I would go so far as to say that reality itself is ineluctably personal, but that's a somewhat different debate.) We will never return to those archaic times when art was the anonymous social expression of collective myth. But art is not only personal : rather it represents a synthesis of subjective and objective, personal and social. The modes, forms & genres of poetry are past signs (& not always relevant to the present) of the complex struggle to discover or create such syntheses.

The locus of interest in poetry is that very tightrope between these poles : it is precisely this wavering dialectic which opens the line of connection between poet and reader.

I suppose I'm behind the times, being anachronistic, by harping on the langpos and the postmods at this late date. Younger poets have "moved beyond" that bygone era of language poetry's flourishing. But how have they moved beyond? In the direction of new dialects or mannerisms, new sub-schools and urban collectives, new identity-affiliations? I'm suggesting they could move in the direction of a more capacious theoretical understanding of the art's possibilities.

Of course, theory generally (as John Latta's recent quotes from Larkin & O'Hara testify) can be considered inimical to poets and what they do. It is usually irrelevant to the working-out of a poet's life and gift. All I would suggest is that a theory which emphasizes personality, feeling, concreteness, accurate description, formal integrity, and at least the possibility of substantial, verifiable meaning - such a theory would be congruent with the actual practice of those two poets, and perhaps future poets too.

Yet more debate today about Ron Silliman's critical terminology.

Branding/pigeonholing is truly an inversion of literary criticism. A poem is something new constructed out of shared materials. Criticism relies on catholic taste, common sense, careful discernment. These are requirements for any fair judgement of poems, bodies of work, stylistic trends. On such basis, the critic evaluates the new thing that the poet has made out of shared materials.

The aim of the polemicist and pigeonholer, on the other hand, is to fit individual works into a pattern, an abstraction. The poem is not a new thing, but merely an "example" of a "trend" in a predetermined (and determinist) literary cosmology. The work is thus belittled in the very act of being "named" (though "to brand" - that marketing practice derived from cattle-herding - should not be confused with the dignified verb "to name").

We all generalize - we all draw general conclusions based on particulars; but if our evidence has no grounding in honest criticism, or if it merely serves as fodder for some kind of polemical agenda, of what real value is it for appreciating the qualities of individual works? It's nothing more than a pretentious form of name-calling.

Here, then, for Christmas, is the philosophical groundwork for the School of Cool Quietude - the school which basically surpasses and replaces the Language School, the Post-Avant School, the New York School, the Black Mountain School, Nathan Bishop Middle School, Harley Hopkins Elementary School, and all the other contemporary schools. Aristotle laid out the understanding by which we recognize that state that Charles Olson so avidly pursued in his mumbo-jumbo way (& ironically dismissed the Greeks for missing) : that reality is inherently intelligible : there is no Cartesian-modern duality of mind and matter : Intellect is the identity, the coincidence of the knower and the known. C. Moev again :

"...the heritage that is Plato reworked by Aristotle reworked by Plotinus, all reworked again by Aristotle redivivus in the thirteenth century, and all sharpened in the light of Christian meditation. From our discussion of Aristotle, we may distill that understanding into three fundamental principles, which were to become the foundation of the medieval understanding of reality.

1. God, as pure being or actuality or form, is the reflexivity of pure awareness (intellect itself), which is nothing (not a thing), but the active power to be everything and nothing. [viz. Nicolas Cusanus's name for God : the Possest, the "Is-Power"]

2. Each thing that exists, exists only as a qualification of or participation in Intellect-Being. As determinations or limitations of being, things are radically other than the principle of Being itself (Aquinas would say they participate only in 'common' or 'created' being), yet if they were not in, of, through or from God, they would not be. In an absolute sense, only God is; all else shares. [note the prefigurement here of the Romantic poets' synthetic awareness - contemplation of the All in all things, in quietude]

3. Human awareness (the rational soul) is a special case, a special sharing in or affinity with the ultimate ontological principle. Hence its (at least potential) immortality, freedom in and from space and time, immunity to the power of any created thing (freedom of the will), and potential for what was variously called contemplative rapture (alienatio mentis, ek-stasis), deification (deificatio), or divine union (unio mystica). [ie., quietude]

"Our particular concern is the third principle, because it in fact subsumes the first two, and because it is the principle that underlies the pilgrim Dante's journey, his claims to have visited the Empyrean..." [Moev, p. 58]

Let's face it : 99% of all writers are hacks, and the other 1 percent are also hacky 99% of the time. You have your commercial (generic) hacks, your arty-farty (academic) hacks, your vaunted-garde high-nosed (revoleptic) hacks... all three of 'em close kithin-kin brethren, a-slurpin' o' the turbid inkwell.

Behold them three conjoined heads, a-yammerin' down the track o' the Hackbeast Trifecta ! Now there's some writin' for yaz !

Though I don't agree with him entirely, Kasey's recent post on "quietude/disquietude" set a higher standard for critical comments on these poetry blogs. Impelled me to delete several gabby posts from Friday.

Will have to think for a while about that post, before echoing & bandying that term ("School of Q") any longer.

Follow-up to yesterday's post : Silliman's historicism is always framed to promote the idea of an oppositional community - the New Americans, the post-avants, etc. Ironically similar to Ignatow's presentation, in that interview, of himself as coming out of an embattled real American/WC Williams school, which only recently (the '70s) had come into its own, as the authentic American mainstream.

My view of all this remains the same as ever. It's poetry itself, not the poetry community, which is the diverse/unified vibrant entity.

As long as poets and critics continue to deflect criticism along the path of social branding/collectivity exercises, the real issues - of style, form, rhetorical address, aesthetic values, themes, influence - will be obscured.

People would rather politicize the art - turn it into a tribal checkers game of who's where and who's who - than think and evaluate poems and poets independently - empirically - as part of the unified field called "poetry".

Another irony in this situation is this : as long as poets and critics characterize themselves first and foremost as members of some literary subculture or other, they will continue to fall short of the social and political directness and emotional/logical force which poetry always has the potential for showing. And does show, in individual poets and poems - phenomena which always seem to jar somewhat paradoxically with the theories of social branding which are supposed to contain them.

Jonathan on the Brodsky thread.

The comparison O'Hara/Auden/Mayakovsky is fun, but I think their differences outweigh their similarities.

As regards the rest of Jonathan's comments : I am really tired of this kind of criticism by insinuation, based on very slim knowledge, and even less fellow-feeling, with the poet in question. What Ron might have thought about what Brodsky might have thought about Mayakovsky - what is the point of this? A little research in the Brodsky archives might turn up a totally different, and far more interesting and informed, perspective on Mayakovsky/Brodsky. But we'd rather settle for myth, rumor, insinuation, and the other ingredients for the potential cooking up of literary slander.

It's not enough that Brodsky was, in his own country, an almost dissident-by-default (Jewish, somewhat independent) under a dictatorship, and sent into exile; we have to make efforts to "place" him aesthetically and politically with these little filaments of meaningless genealogy (N.C. to SoQ etc.) and these animadversions of political incorrectness (Brodsky, let it be noted, arrived in the U.S., with his suitcase from China & his rudimentary English, in the fall of 1972 - a little late and a little disconnected from the moral responsibilities of the Vietnam War).

Here's a link to some basic biographical information.

I want to deal with 2 main arguments made by RS (quoted in previous post).

The first argument (to paraphrase) is that American poetry bifurcates into two paths, lines, traditions, models - the Romantic/Amer. Renaissance/Modernist/avant-garde/post-avant, on the one hand, and the "School of Quietude" traditionalists on the other.

The 2nd argument is that the traditionalist camp exerts an inordinate power & influence over the cultural scene, through control of major awards, publishers, etc.

In order to accept the 1st argument, one must, at all costs, put aside any detailed sense of the flow, and the particularities, of American literary history. But it's not that hard to retain a sense of such flow, such particularities : all you have to do is open up what is probably the best-selling, mid-20th-century poetry anthology, re-issued decade after decade, used in countless classrooms, bought & read by thousands : the Mentor Book of Major American Poets, ed. by Oscar Williams & Edwin Honig. Here you will find "avant-garde" moderns (Cummings, Pound, etc.) side by side with Frost, EA Robinson; Whitman & Longfellow and Dickinson & Bryant; Stevens & Marianne Moore & Auden. Of course it's not inclusive - the poets are white, & mostly male. It's from 1950 or so. But you can learn a lot more about the variety & vitality of "central" American poetry - even from this dated collection - than from Ron's historical dichotomy.

Ron wants to pretend that the vital midstream of American poetry history never existed. Why? So he can use his reductive labels to exaggerate the importance of his chosen canon. If you can somehow deny the impact of mid-stream, "populist" poets of the 20th century - the powerful careers of (just for example) Auden, Berryman, Lowell, Merwin, Dickey, Bly, Wakoski, Piercy, Rich, Gary Snyder - I'm thinking of the standing-room-only crowds at their readings, the big sales of their books, 1950s-1970s - if you can somehow pretend those things never happened - then you can present a simplified version of that history, which is really an insult : both to the intelligence of readers, and to those dynamic & resourceful careerist-poets themselves. They didn't depend on some cabal of old white guys at Lofty Publishing Houses to make themselves well-read, famous & influential. But... but... if they never happened, then look how Important the "New American Poets" (Olson, Beats, NY School, post-avant) suddenly seem to be!

And I haven't even begun to dismantle the simplifications involved here. The idea that American poetry somehow subtends like a spider from either the early American experimentalists (Poe, Whitman, Dickinson, Melville) or from stuffy old Anglos (Tennyson, Housman, Kipling) is just utterly ridiculous. Where do you place Eliot in this scheme, and where do you place the New Critical dominance of mid-century poetics, which one could quite seriously argue developed out of Eliot & Pound by way of Frost & Stevens (or vice versa!)? The fact is, American poetics developed a dynamic of its own, filled with crosscurrents & dichotomies & contradictions, drawing both on Eliot's notion of "tradition" and on Emerson's notion of "invention" (see Langdon Hammer's wonderful book Janus-Faced Modernism, on the interplay between Crane & Tate, and the consequences for the academic poetry establishment, for just one example of the "particularities").

What irks me no end about Ron Silliman's conspiracy theory of American poetry is the odd image of a displaced "canon" or "prestige" which haunts the background of his polemic. It's as if his theory is built on a single primitive, unrecognized ideal image : that of a mythical Avant-Garde Classic Period, when people like Pound & Eliot could be both heroic, iconoclastic innovators, and supremely prestigious cultural authorities, at one and the same time! Thus the strategic thrust of his complaint : if only we could break down the walls of that whitened sepulchre, the SoQ Establishment, why, then we - the New Americans! - we will be the arbiters! It's a dream of power (oddly parallel to some of Poe's late-career fantasies, when he wandered drunk down Benefit St., here in Providence, trying to woo a bride/benefactor for his projected Great American Literary Magazine...).

As I have tried to imply, the best antidote to a-historical conspiracy theories and fantasies like this, is simply to read 20th-century American poetry, in all its ample complexity and capacious contradictions. And why do we need such an antidote? So that "future American poets" can work in an atmosphere of openness and possibility, rather than within such melancholy, theoretical corridors, dank with the perspiration of resentful struggle - rank with the odor of imaginary, puzzle-palace stratagems.

Here's a long quote from Ron Silliman, posted on his blog on 12.23.05. I post it here because it's a pretty good summary of his approach, which I've been criticizin' for years now:

"I come along at the end of August 2002 and start posting to my weblog, reviewing maybe four books a week at the most, but often enough approaching the issues active in poetry from other perspectives – such as looking at Seth’s self-described “rant” on his weblog. Over the course of a year, it’s conceivable that I might actually discuss – at best – ten percent of a given year’s books of poetry. I’m not at all systematic, but I am informed, at least to this degree: as a poet, as a writer, as a reader, I come out of an identifiable tradition that stretches back pretty much unbroken at least to Blake & Wordsworth & Coleridge, and in the U.S. to Whitman, Dickinson, Melville & Poe. It’s not a random list, tho there are gaps that often strike me as yawning chasms of my own ignorance. My interest in Houseman, my interest in E.A. Robinson, my interest in Ted Kooser, my interest in Glynn Maxwell is pretty darn minimal. I read the Pound-Williams tradition, for example, as leading directly back to that quartet of 19th century Americans, whereas the School of Quietude (SoQ) leads instead to Robinson, Houseman, Kipling, Tennyson. But neither heritage is simple or unbroken – Gertrude Stein is a disruptive presence in the Pound-Williams tradition, for example, as is Joyce. The disappearance of the Objectivists in the 1940s – the first major modernist generation to virtually vanish, if only for a time – represents a crisis in modernism that I think we have yet to fully understand. I sometimes suspect that the shift from an avant-garde model, ushered in by the Preface to Lyrical Ballads in English & by Baudelaire’s prose poems in French (hijacking Bertrand more than following him), which ultimately is a military model, toward what I’ve termed the post-avant, which is more community focused and not inherently allergic to fessing up to its own sense of heritage, was triggered precisely by the absence of the Objectivists at the moment when the New Americans came along. Language poetry, my own generation of the 1970s, came along as a break within the New American vein in the name of that generation’s own higher values – it basically ditched the fetishized “I” and looked at the materials of writing with some of the same cold analytical eye that the abstract expressionists had used with a canvas & Jimi Hendrix used on a guitar. Somewhat inadvertently, it also exposed an inherent conservativism even within the New American tradition. Since then, we have seen a tremendous expansion of American poetry, fueled by an influx of women and people of color and different backgrounds. There are more poets now, and more good ones, than ever before. And the scene doesn’t look even remotely like what it did just 20 years ago when In the American Tree was about to be published.

I have been, I hope, reasonably out front about my own predilections, my likes & dislikes. I’ve insisted on a concept like School of Quietude because there is, and has been for over 150 years, a disequilibrium of power in American letters predicated on control of the publishing lists of the trade presses – the Gang of Eight I referred to in my note on the New York Times last week – and, at least once upon a time, around jobs within the academy. The most destructive and oppressive thing an elite group can do in our society is to pretend that it is the unmarked case, as if Robert Pinsky and John Hollander wrote poetry, but Kasey Mohammad wrote post-modern or New Brutalist poetry, Geof Huth wrote vispo, Erica Hunt & Harryette Mullen wrote langpo. That allows the unmarked set the opportunity of acting as if its monopoly of such traditional institutions as the trade presses and the awards conferred by the publishing industry – there’s that Gang of Eight again – were “normal” & anything outside of that were “exceptional.” In fact, the SoQ is one interest group among many, privileged more by history than by the bad acts of its current practitioners, but real nonetheless. It’s a little like white males coming to own their own whiteness & their gender. It really will be good for the SoQ to own their own heritage – they have more disappeared poets to recover than almost anyone."

I'm going to think about this a little today, in between work-work, and write a little response, I hope.

There is a dimension in poetry which Ron, for all his genealogical & antiquarian research, knowledge, & passion, just does not get. & I know my own b-b-b-b-log is tedious with Ron-demurrals. Nevertheless I want to say it, just like I want to say, as an aside, that Louis Menand (in his essay in this week's New Yorker on the sociology of literature & prize-giving) does not get it, on a certain level.

What's wrong with Menand's very familiar thesis? The age-old mistake of the fore-brained philosophical proseur : to confuse the woman's dress & make-up with her physical beauty. Menand pretends to reduce art to power, commerce & good old ordinary human venality (how enlightened, how sophisticated, how worldly-wise, how regular-guy!). He forgets that the retail of literary commerce is rooted in the wholesale of aesthetic beauty; that the insane ego-trips, kultur-trips, money-trips & power-trips, which distort every human social interaction, don't actually touch or influence the formal elements of beauty (which are untouchable because formal - because rooted in nature) - elements that both the craft-work and the inspired genius of art are bound to emulate & reiterate.

& what do I want to say, again, about Ronville Sillimanville? What is it he doesn't get?

Ron reduces poetic history to a squabble between competing "schools". Essentially, this is a rationalization : a reduction of something which is more accurately, if more vaguely, termed "tradition".

Poetic tradition is ecumenical and welcoming : that is, membership is open to individuals from nowhere, everywhere. Yet once in the door, tradition is extremely demanding.

How so? Well, you cannot become part of the tradition by joining a school or a trend. In order to become part of the one great global tradition of poetry, you have to make poems. And poems are made with inspired poetic genius, gift, talent : because without these powers, the attainment of the particular order & beauty which inheres in poems is impossible.

Poetic beauty is so dense with articulate sensible conceptual order - like the synthesis of a coherent dream, raised to the nth degree - that its accomplishment is not available to the human will.

The literary theorizing which subjects poets & poems to the discourse of schoolish rivalries is similar to the Marxist narrow-mindedness which channels human industry & commerce into its particular video fantasy-battle between Good & Evil. That is, the model is inadequate to the complexity of the truth.

The poet is dedicated to the service of beauty; his or her productions bear witness to that dedication. This is not a board game to be judged by tyro-hobbyists.

Ron Silliman continues to get a lot of discursive mileage out of the term "School of Quietude" and the general concepts which impel same. Sometimes the topic has to do with style, and sometimes with the marketing/access/reception of poets & poetry.

It occurred to me as I strolled to the coffee shop this morning, trying to perk myself out of the poetry/blog doldrums, that the conceptual architecture which grounds this notion is not really about either aesthetics or literary influence. It's about politics.

The idea of a New American poetry as distinct from a mainstream American poetry - of an embattled, experimental, avant-garde poetry rising in opposition to a staid, conservative, middle-brow poetry - what I think this really represents is the assertion of an idiom which speaks for & about particular levels of society, or communities within larger society. It's the proposition that there exists a tribe (or tribes) of poets who are peculiarly authorized - through their manner of speech, or their bohemian lifestyle, or their ethnic background, etc. - to speak authentically about certain realities of American life, realities which (supposedly) are ignored or smoothed-over or denied by mainstream poets.

I think this ideological predisposition or framework tends, along with a lot of other & related attitudes (displayed by many poets), to inhibit the desire for, the creation of, or the recognition of, forms of poetic making (thought, language, address) which are not pre-programmed or channeled toward particular audiences.

Extra busy at the Rock these days.

Reading the poem examples over at John Latta's Hotel (evidence for non-binary unpigeonholeability), thinking

there should be a poetics - a theory of poetry in the Wallace Stevens sense - capable of interpeting recent & contemporary literary history - under the aegis of a concept of poetry per se -

which transcends the politico-polemics of the subcultures -

both the modest/minor security of academic conservatism (finicky re-workings of traditional forms for mandarins in the wilderness)

and the bowdlerizing, vulgar blare of all these callow oppositionalists -

said poetics would go beyond particular notions, such as my remarks here recently about "dialogic" resurrection of past poetries - this is only part of the story - & would "explain" the relations between a beautiful, well-wrought, careful style, the sense of an addressee or audience, and the conceptual/aesthetic transformations made possible in the process of reception - based perhaps on an underlying notion of the synthesis of speech, language and beauty -

a more rigorous general poetics might create a context for closer attention to what a particular poet is trying to do - a frame for criticism rather than promotionals -

Kasey writes about the dumbing-down of poetic syntax & thinning-out of tradition among contemporary poets.

In terms of getting a perspective on the contemporary scene, these phenomena (along with, I would add, the loss of "depiction" or mimesis among the post-avants, which I've been harping on here) seem more important than the supposed divide between mainstream/experimental or Quietude/quirkitude.

But I'm not proposing another critique based on badmouthing. Let's look for the poets who do rediscover & synthesize great "finds" from previous poetic eras.

It's not a matter of stylistics alone. It's recreating & reliving something perennial, having to do with the immediacy/presence/role of poetry in human experience (both individual & collective).

Am reading John Latta's & Dale Smith's engaging table-talk in conjunction with these pronunciamentos.