Little example of partisan expression : the avant-garde "challenges", or "critiques"; but if you criticize the avant-garde, you are "bashing".

Jordan sez:

Henry writes that the talker is a time-thief. Maybe. That sounds like an absolute position, an all-or-nothing hideout. I bet a poet could be a talker, could be out spending the small change of their observations to get the shiny and soft things they need for the immense ongoing collages, the surreal boxes, a cup of coffee to chase down the spleen.

To blame someone for an "absolute position" (common these days) is to take an absolute position. My approach with these talk/poetry comments is to juggle more than one thing, to point up differences. It tends to bring out other partial non-absolute comments, like the one above. We all may be both talkers (takers?) & poets, but they're not the same thing.

Now the new binary is quietude & negativity, per Kasey & Josh.

This I suppose is an elaboration of Ron's basic position.

There is a "way things are" which is a socio-political system, and which is not "the way things should be". This is the given, the self-evident, the axiom, with which the poet aligns him or herself BEFORE making poetry. Then the poetry evolves as illustration. & there are neat clubs to join.

On this blog I've been voicing a critique, from various angles, of what I call "oppositional poetics", since January 3, 2003. I'm glad to hear it's now become a collegial dialog.

A quote from R.A. York's The Poem As Utterance, a study of 19th & 20th cent. European poetry from the vantage of "pragmatics" - a branch of contemporary linguistics (Methuen, 1986). Speaking of the usefulness of same, he writes:

"it might lead to a soundly based classification of utterances, as, for example, between those which aim primarily to alter the world and those that aim primarily to effect a communion in appreciating or comprehending the world." (pp. 8-9)

Here we have another version of what Mandelstam called the future of poetic research : delving into the impulse of the text.

Look closely at this divide : doth it not faintly resemble the avant/quiet picture box?

O my peeps, there's something deep here. Vita activa, vita contemplativa. "Mary hath chosen the better part."

The Third Way reconciles both halves of this dumb-dumb rain.

Kasey weighs in on the Silliman/Lowell/Quietude debate.

Kasey, if I'm understanding correctly, accepts the "quiet/avant" formula. Style is political; the avant/quiet split is an effect of very different cultural goals (laureate charisma vs. active dissent) and therefore, real, and therefore, indeed "there is no third way" (the "elliptics" taken to be the typical & futile attempt at combining incompatibles).

If this sounds confusing, it's not Kasey's fault, please go to Kasey's site.

It seems to me that what we have here is an example of a thought which is very prevalent in "avant" spheres. There is a Manichean split between the establishment (political, artistic, social etc) and the activist dissenting margin (political, artistic, social etc). Poetry is a subset of this split. The implications of this ideological approach to poetics are probably quite extensive, y'know. I can't get into it right now.

Happy 4th ever'body. My Grandma Florence Gould would have been 103 tomorrow.

More Ron watch. What does the two-world theory of "Quietude vs. Avant" provide? I mean, how do we interpret this interpretation of US literary history?

This divide between Quietude (used to be called "mainstream") and Avant - like an old scar that keeps itching - a nagging sprite that Ron can't quite exorcise. He writes that Lowell recognized the value of "avant" poetry and tried to change accordingly; that Lowell idolized Hart Crane because Crane also sought a "third way" between traditional Anglocentric poetics and American experiment"; that the "Ellipticals" are the latest refugees from a defunct tradition; but that "Hank Lazer demonstrates. . . there is no third way."

These claims seem to be part of a project to legitimize "Avant" poetry as a major, mainstream literary phenomenon (by distinguishing it sharply from its traditionalist "other"). But what are "major phenomena"? & how are such phenomena acknowledged and measured these days? A poetics does not become major simply by revisionist history which dismisses what's gone before. A new poetry wins a wide critical & popular audience - the only measure of "major" status I know of - by means of its creative allegiances, not merely by its dismissals.

Ron's binary seems designed to reject even the possibility of a synthesis between traditional "mainstream" Anglophone poetics (say, stemming from the odes & lyrics of 19th-cent. Romanticism, the epistles and satires of 18th-cent. poetry, and the rich language & paradoxical texture of Baroque & Elizabethan poetry) and a meaningful contemporary American idiom. This is the nagging ghost (yes, the ghost of Crane - and Eliot as well) which for some reason he finds it imperative to exorcise.

This nagging ghost, ironically, also stands for the "major status" (as I define it above) which has eluded Avant poetry itself. As always, we witness the avant-garde trip over its "dead" fathers and stumble along. . .

My old checkers moves from Buffalo Poetics listwars.

Not the New, but the Now.

The Now is not emerging from the School of Carpitude.

Next I'll take on the NY School gen. 300.

Have the vision & ambition to be midstream.

This is one way to approach it.

Topic for discussion :
is this the choice - either find a way to turn poetry into a game - or be eaten alive by it ?

Deep game needs - the need to isolate the space so you can live in the larger world too; the desire NOT to be Poet 24/7. How this scrapes against or interacts with poetry club culture.

The problem for free thought created by club culture, the culture of poetry as S*E*N*S*A*T*I*O*N*A*L.

I was a poet in high school. I was a writer in junior high. I didn't need or want acceptance - I wanted publication.

Yes, I was probably being negative & stentorian the other day.

The crux for me : what constellation of beliefs & attitudes underlies the School of Carpitude?

I think it's a form of belief analogous to religion in Hellenistic times, when you had Christianity & Judaism & Gnosticism & neo-Platonism and so on.

The School of Carpitude (perhaps we could call it an emanation of the "post-avant period" of Language Poetry?) seems a little like Gnosticism & neo-Platonism, except its dual cosmos is "materialist" rather than idealist.

There is a better world over yonder, where spiritual phantoms have been dissipated, nationalism and militarism and imperialism and sexism and capitalism have been demolished, class and social relations have been justified, and life is free, groovy, bohemian & "material" (see Marx).

The polarity between Mainstream & Avant, between Quietude & Carpitude, is an echo effect of this more basic chasm, between Here & Yonder.

Another basic belief of the School of Carpitude is that Modernism was & is truly revolutionary, part of the engine of social revolution, through its enlightened disaffection from bourgeois conditions, leading us to Yonder. (This is reflected, for example, in the Carpitudists special interest in Russian Formalism & the Futurists, in tandem with their disinterest in the role & fate of the Russian Acmeists & their theoretical commitments.)

These basic Carpitude attitudes color their understanding of traditional poetics, of the role of the poet in the public sphere, of the relation between poetry & politics, and of the nature of language in general.

But it seems pretty apparent that the Quietude/Carpitude polarity, this intellectual construct, renders problematic or difficult any poetics which is built on a unitary model of the relations between the poet's role in society, and poetic speech. (In contrast to the supposed gains which might result from a "critical" or revolutionary concept of the role of poetry.)

Enjoying the commentary from 6 or 7 bloghouses on Quietude Theory. I haven't been able to work out a response, due to work & projects (on a sedate parallel with JK, perhaps, I'm writing a novel beginning with a 12-yr-old named "Henry") & the fact that this topic is hard for me to grasp.

My animus & vitriol toward the Silliman Quietude Theory is due I'm sure in part to the fact that I share some attitudes with the "experimental" crowd. The rumbling spiritual uproar of Poetic Nowness - reflected in microcosm every time we are moved & granted insight by a work of literary art - has a certain anarchic center of gravity which does not coincide automatically with Career in any sense. Career is built on the prudence, hope, practical planning, brainwork and moxie of individuals : Nowness is an uncontrollable communal snowball of literary criticism, response, persuasion, recognition, as well as that thing that happens when in our solitary cenacles[?] we read something really good. And the professionalization/care & feeding/curatorship of Creative Writing in the academy creates a certain incestuous, solipsistic dynamic (or I should say stasis) - somewhat like the patronage system in municipal politics - which sends "Tradition" through a kind of parallax distortion (with the of course proviso that there is plenty of genuine and valuable scholarship & teaching & criticism carried out there by poets who are also teachers, and by scholars who are genuine critics). Reading for school is not the same as reading for fun, as I learned (perhaps in deep mistakenness) back in 3rd grade.


But it would be a mistake to reduce this issue to the "poetry in academia" debate, since, for one thing, both Nowness & the supposed Quietude take place not only in the academy, but also, as Ron points out repeatedly, in the networks of literary Publication & its epiphenomena. &, for another thing, the most interesting aspect of the issue hovers around more strictly lit-crit areas, having to do with the development of modern poetics, the relation of innovation to tradition in art & poetry, the reflection of social reality in literature, etc.

Every poet brings a unique perspective to these questions, and they can be quite diverse, obviously. Some will consider poetry to be, essentially, a difficult craft, a genre of writing, which you practice in school and evolve in the context of contemporary literary magazine writing. Others will emphasize the osmosis of literary models and avatars, will pursue the literary history of modernism (Eliot, Pound, Stein, Stevens, and all their generations, etc. etc.) for keys to their own efforts, and as windows on the contemporary (this seems to have been my own bent for the last couple decades). Others will be enthusiastically attuned to the subversive youthful essence of poetry, its criticism of sleep & stasis & philistinism emanating from the garrets & clubs of romantic vital revolt (I know this sounds funny, but there it is). Others will use poetry as a kind of political language, a means of expressing a critique or alienation from capitalism, imperialism, mass culture, the middle class, etc.

What troubles me about the Quietude Theory (along with many similar formulas and attitudes emanating from the post-avant set) is that it reifies vast and various ranges of past poetries into a clump of Quietude, Mainstream, Official Verse Culture. It is this act of reification - a reductive conceptualization - which is the founding move creating ANOTHER clump : the post-avant camp itself. Suddenly there is a set of literary progressives, avant-gardists, who consider themselves both different and more enlightened than the mainstream "others". Within their subculture, they wallow in the vaunted minutiae of "neglected" poets, they excoriate the benighted taste AND politics of the "mainstream" : and in this very process they neglect the essential duty of the poet, whether from within the academy or outside it : to direct the poetic language of the present time - at its highest pitch of clarity, originality, complexity, simplicity, variety, social relevance, intellectual acuity, and aesthetic integrity - to the attention of the general public, the ordinary reader, the extraordinary reader : and NOT to abide (full of insolence, hypocrisy, and intellectual disgrace) in the cozy, incestuous, flabby, and musty nests of their own parochial nit-picking snob societies. The tradition of poetry is a perennial high-energy Now extending back to the bards and prophets of ancient Athens & Jerusalem & before, up to the contemporary "pressure of the time"; it will not be bottled & labeled by the reified, self-serving pigeonholes of the "post-avant", or the "Neo"-formalists, or the denizens of MFA snooze groves.

One can never, in an American context, dismiss the abiding presence, the inspired mastery, and the sometimes explosive relevance, of the obscure, the long-neglected, the marginal, the eccentric, the modest, the quiet, the experimental. But the reification which, in the schools of the post-avant, grants an automatic positive aura to some figures & works, and a corresponding negative aura to others, simply on the basis of "mainstreamity" (say, from among many possible examples, Olson & Lowell), is a specious exercise, an intellectual and aesthetic short-circuit, which obscures what actually has been accomplished in our poetry.

So let's, for a moment, underline the inimitable individuality of certain poetic exemplars. Let's shake the tin walls of Carpitude a little. The binaries get biffly when you remember the influence of the King James Bible & Shakespeare & the Romantics on Whitman & Dickinson; or the politically-alert careers of Quietudists Whittier & Wm Vaugn Moody; or the technical brilliance of Longfellow's innovations; or Poe (the anti-Quietudist)'s "traditional" metrics; or say, the career of radical Modernist, Pound disciple, Poe imitator, avatar of the New Critics, and Ashbery model, TS Eliot; or the street politics of Quietudist conscientious objector Robert Lowell; or the unpigeonholeable poetics of his friend Eliz. Bishop; or the bizarre "quietude" of scholar-poet John Berryman (have you read his essays - or his poems - or is he just another running dog of the quiet establishment?), which made it to the cover of Time, or hey, the career of quietudist establishment academic anarchist FBI McCarthy-tailed WW 2 Vet Portuguese translator poet Edwin Honig, etc.and so on. In fact, if the Critic will lift his eyes for only a moment from the venal obsession with Influence, Publication and Politics, or IPPocrisy, he might discover a constellation of actual poets writing actual poetry. . . amazing, isn't it?

Once again, Ron Silliman is elaborating his binary scheme of US poetics history, what might be called the "team schema" of literature, which is actually pretty traditional in its own right, going back to the battles between Establishment & Radical poets of mid-century, and back before that to the Modernists & the Georgians, and back before that to the experimenters (Whitman, Dickinson, Hopkins) & the rest of the Victorians. . . where would criticism be without these teams, these Quietudes & these Carpitudes? It makes you wonder whether American culture has actually produced ANY fully-developed poets in the last few generations, since the distinction of a fully-formed artist is to absorb & transcend such cliches & group phenomena. Where would Ron's radical Carpitude poets be without a Quietude to diss? Let's face it, 99% of experimental post-avant carpitude poetry is utterly forgettable mediocre braying (same percentage goes for Quietude ranks). & if that's the case, why the obsession with these camps? What critical value do we have in endlessly underlining the magical divide between Rads & Straights, decade after decade, if 99% of the work in both camps is crap? Aren't we just using dung beetle technology to build two huge a-symmetrical mounds of crap? Upon which Ron will sit (the Carpitude pile, to the left) & dish out his extravagant encomia (O brilliant, Mike Magee! just to cite one recent example [not that I have anything against Magee's parodic riffs on Emily Dickinson. My beef is with Silliman's critical scale of values, which transmutes the clever into the pathbreaking, etc.]. . .)

That young Ron in the 60s would see publication by a trade publisher of a book by Joe Ceravolo as evidence of some kind of cultural conspiracy seems paradigmatic for his later perspectives (the Manichean divide between Quietude & Carpitude, the war between NY School & Langpo, etc). It also seems inevitable given the mental constellation of "New American Poetry" : an approach which ab ovo shapes its poets as in struggle. No one is simply an American poet : one is a "NEW American poet, battling conformism, neglect, establishment poetics, and world politico-economic Evil". Maybe the effects are analogous to the way partisan loyalties obscure democracy per se.

Jordan feeling feisty this morning.

I have the best of both worlds: make real arguments, experience eerie silence.

I see different critical talents, here & there in blogworld. Ability to characterize with precision & understanding, sometimes. Articulate. Not so partisan, clubbish; not so ready to spray cliches & beery nostrums from the political Bladder. Readers with real ears.

This split between mainstream & oppositional bugs me. Too many abstract counters, categories, pigeonholes. Seems to short-circuit synthetic energies necessary for solid critical perception; thus it stymies reception to some extent. Why not just fageddabaddit, & read the things on their own terms, & respond to them on your own terms, personally, as if you picked them up in a 2nd-hand bkstore in Tashkent.

So I create this imaginary St. Petersburg, where Gumilev & Akhmatova & Mandelstam & Tsvetaeva & Pasternak discover how to make past poetries their own (individual craft); speak about their traditions (education); engage in polemics while recognizing talent in the other's camp (culture). Russian ark.

& I can empathize with Mandelstam's notion that we write for an imaginary interlocutor from the future. (In fact I must say I sometimes I feel like a figment of his imagination in that sense.) Have I reduced a great Russian poet to the status of a reverse image of my own "professional" nonentity, by removing him from his proper context (his contemporary Russian audience)? So that he serves as sort of an icon/imaginary friend on the mantle for Everyman-Nobodypoet? That's part of it, I suppose. My context is this small city in Rhode Island, where I live & screw up & leave behind a sort of hodge-podge of inscriptions stored in the John Hay Library archives. When I'm underground over there in the 132 acres of North Main Cemetery, my poems will assume a different tincture, as the paper dries & the ink fades.

I want to write more topical report poems, up-to-the-minute Audenesque, & have them published in the New Yorker & in the paper of record in St. Petersburg, Florida.

& of course I could always read more poetry myself. . .

Just a thought in response to Gabriel ("Conchology") Gudding's long essay "From Petit to Langpo", which appears on his blog (& in an earlier version? in Flashpoint magazine).

The essay shows how democratic pedagogical principles like "everybody can write" could lead to "everybody has an inner poet waiting to get out" and "poetry is the lyrical record of personal experiences". With such truisms you can see how opposition might grow, from modernists ("poetry is the extinction of personality", "make it new", "a poem is a machine made of words") to New Critics ("a poem is an autotelic self-enclosed object"). One can see how the wave could swing back from New Critical rules to the ragged edges of biography & personality (the Confessionals, the Beats). Or how the NY School might opt out stylishly (while borrowing) from both.

It's ironic that Creative Writing schools would focus on the "craft" of empowering, squeezing out & purveying personal experience, rather than on the art of poetry itself. But I suspect Gabriel's history is a little one-sided : you could probably find offhand quotes from his same set of late 20th-cent. poets on the pedagogy of poetry, which emphasize (instead) the impersonal "craft" aspects. (I'm just guessing, though, not making a case here.)

The issue of solipsism or individualism in art cuts deeper than pedagogy & the professionalization of poetry. As I've been saying in various places on this blog, the nature, the ontological status, of the human person is a deepening mystery; how that mystery gets radiated through the modes of story & poetics creates what we call genres. (hey, who do I think I am, Northrop Frye?)

Just another quick response to Jonathan. He writes:

"There is no set of cultural references presumed to be shared by all educated readers.
Eliot's notes to the Waste Land already posit the end of a common Victorian culture of
reading. Pound takes this a step further. So I don't think that Henry Gould can say that
there is a common, mainstream Eliotic tradition that we ignore at our peril."

But if I think of "tradition" specific to poetry, I don't think of the set of cultural references. I think of poetry as a characteristic, unique activity. & I think there are traits of poetry-making which are pretty timeless & global. "Poetry is avant-garde because it doesn't change much." (quoting himself) & I try as many have before me to get at that peculiar activity in some places on this blog ("metaform", "event", etc).

The healthy thing about Eliot's awareness of tradition - whether we agree or not with the specific qualities he chooses to emphasize - is that it counters the parochial, polemical mirror-world of oppositional poetics, where claims & counter-claims for value or importance are always made in the context of opposing some OTHER poet or poem or style. . .

So I will try to address again these two points & answer Socky at the same time; I have the feeling that if I can carefully define the idea of "metaform" it might deal with both issues.

Originally I proposed this notion of metaform as a critique of New Formalism - against the assumption that "forms" are all there is. But my point refers really to any emphasis on technique in isolation, whether by the formalism of traditionalists or the anti-formal formalism of innovators.

Form is the building design. Metaform is the actual building, in the open air, in its environment. Moshe Safdie on a hilltop seeing his 10 or 15 structures scattered around Jerusalem.

But poetry persists in a different kind of environment, differently social, conceptual, performative. Its atmosphere includes the intellectual & cultural context, the surrounding climate of its time. Thus for example part of the "metaform" of Wordsworth includes the climate he helped instigate - a new focus on "ordinary speech", folk music & balladry, "romance" in the medieval sense, and, most importantly, a spiritual doubt & questing around the foundations of received religion & 18th-century Enlightenment received ideas.

However, if we left it there, we would not be talking about poetry, but about the "form" of social & intellectual history in general. As I tried to point out earlier in this blog with reference to Mandelstam: metaform, in the context of poetry, has to do with a process of internalizing & creative re-making - the transmutation of cultural metaform into the inimitable aesthetic form of a new poetry.

We could think of metaform in terms of a process of a poet's development. It could be seen as a kind of oscillation or circle: first, the beginning poet practices & becomes practiced at received forms (in the technical sense of form - free verse, sonnet, etc.). After gaining a certain confidence, she or he applies this talent & newfound technique - seeks to engage with the culture at large through creating interesting, relevant works & offering them to the public. This is indeed a period of trial, as any poet knows who looks back at rejected poems of a long time ago or just yesterday: all those poems that fall short, either from lack of energy or shape, or from trying too hard to "sound like" poetry - and ending up sounding inauthentic: it's not really THEM speaking, it's an unconfident imitator of something already done before. If the poet persists, however - and through luck or effort or destiny discovers originality - the process of interiorizing the cultural metaform(s) of her time & place begins: the inimitable poems are made which exhibit an aesthetic, intellectual & human integrity. Often the late poems, at the end of this struggle, are the most beautiful. Occasionally the Rimbaud will arise whose originality short-circuits the whole process. But this originality is the cultural metaform, reflected in & transmuted into poetry.

OK, how does this relate to the 2nd issue - the assertion that "oppositional" poetics exists in a sort of dialectical or symbiotic relation to a larger tradition?

American ingenuity, starting with Whitman, Dickinson & Poe, valorized originally by Emerson & Thoreau, set in motion a certain cultural landscape or metaform. American poetry would be absolutely original, experimental & new in relation to the poetries of old. This idea was not developed in isolation, but in the context of more traditional poetics of Longfellow, Tennyson & others - it instigated a creative tension. It exploded into view with the Modernists of the first 2 decades of the 20th century. However, it was (fortunately) never "resolved". Both Eliot & Pound, for example, but primarily Eliot, revealed a Janus-faced approach to innovation, and as time went on, the traditionalist Eliot came to the fore - pressing the notion of a single European Christian culture and a poetics aligned with the Renaissance & Dante. Eliot had tremendous influence on the critical & pedagogical developments represented by New Criticism & the southern poets, Ransom, Tate & others. Their influence, in turn, was so strong that when Lowell broke with them in the 50s and began writing confessional free verse, it seemed to mark a sea-change in American poetry. But that was only the beginning. The 50s & 60s brought on a multifaceted expansion/revolt in US poetry activity. The revolt was aimed against both cultural and aesthetic norms. "Aesthetic norms" - when crystallized in prescriptive or traditionalist poetics & pedagogy - seemed like an oxymoron, when the essence of lyric poetry seemed to involve spontaneity, openness, a rejection of social controls, and dream-work or surrealism.

So, by the 1970s and 80s, the US had produced a smorgasbord of different approaches to poetry-making, along with an academic "creative writing" industry. At this late date, in this conflicted environment, how can one possibly suggest that there is a "tradition-at-large"?

During the same period, of course, there was an effort through translation & anthology-making to expand the vistas of tradition & possible models. But their is a difference between translating or anthologizing on the one hand, and creating a new poem or work of poetry on the other. The cultural metaform - whatever shapes & boundaries it may exhibit - must be interiorized and recapitulated in new aesthetic forms & works. In the Middle Ages, poetic mastery was represented in the model of the "wheel of Virgil": the poet's movement from lyric contingency, to didactic purpose (the Georgics), to epic vision - in the process producing a world-image or culture-image - a reflection of the culture as an entirety.

Lyric contingency (or receptivity, openness), didactic conscience or purpose, epic or religious vision - these impulses perhaps underlie the application of the whole variety of technical approaches, specific forms & genres, etc. The US context or heritage is marked by a conjunction of extremes: the extremity of Emerson, Whitman & Dickinson's revolt against British norms; the extremity of Eliot's reassertion of traditionalism. Extremity lends itself to "scene-making": young poets are influenced by the notion that a particular technical approach, idiom, or cultural attitude is a momentous commitment. In a sense, it is: but the decision to follow a particular model is only the beginning of the process of making original poetry - the process leading from form to metaform & on to new form which I outlined above. This is a fact which is often lost to view.

If we take into consideration something like the underlying impulses behind the Virgilian wheel - and add to it a consideration of the developmental process (form/metaform/originality) - we may begin to recognize the outlines of a "tradition-at-large": the character of poetic making as experienced at all times & places. This perennial character might serve to set the US experience of extremes in a new context. Within this context, perhaps we can approach what's been done and is being done - as readers and critics - with an eye not only toward the influence of idioms & scene-makers, but toward how individual poets have interiorized & re-presented both the materials of poetry per se, and the "metaforms" of the surrounding culture. Keeping the underlying impulses in mind, we might be more ready to recognize new lyric poetry, new didactic poetry - and eventually the challenges of poetic & social vision implied by epic.

The recent NY Times feature on Anthony Hecht produced an interesting confluence of responses (see these blogs: Lime Tree, Ineluctable Maps, Mike Snider's, and the discussion on form & avant-garde on the Poetryetc. list).

Hecht's question, "what makes it a poem?" - as he sits hieratically in his white-columned library in Washington DC with the mausoleum-like inscription from one of his own funereal poems written in gold around the walls - comes like the sphinx or the voice from the crypt, asking the style question that no one has been able to answer for the last 50 years or so. "I thought of a butterfly. . ."

For the New American Poets & their inheritors, the question to some degree has already been answered. Poetry has been ineluctably democratized. See Ron Silliman's blog entry for today: the exciting question is not "what makes it a poem?", but, "How will the irrevocable advance made by the New Americans grow and diversify?" This is a rather sanguine, untroubled outlook - avoiding the issue I raised earlier on this blog, that the various "oppositional" styles in US poetry tend toward fracture and balkanization, because they are predicated on denying the existence of a central, major tradition in poetry in English. Stevens: "How to confront the mickey mockers. . . What wine does one drink, what bread does one eat?" (I don't have the book handy - hope I have those lines correct.)

I don't have the answer to any of these questions. But this morning my thoughts are ambling toward a recognition that each poet's work, each poet's poetics, represents a way of apprehending and responding to the world. Often the surface tensions & trumpetings of group developments seem to provide the fascination, the critical handle on "progress in the arts"; but maybe we could look at these matters through a slightly different lens. Say, for example, we took what we consider the elements of style & form & various poetry traditions, and instead of looking at them in some sort of comparative, historical context, looked more closely at how individual poets were able to apply particular formal elements to achieve their own individual ends.

Thus, instead of looking at Hecht, just for one example, as a role-model or exemplar of a particular style-force in poetics - what if we examined very specific formal approaches & techniques used by poets like Hecht, and then looked at how they were used by other, very different poets, poets who do not represent the para-political aspects of New Formalism. I think we would find that there are poets out there who would fall into the "progressive, experimental" pigeonholes, who are nevertheless able to apply traditional techniques (rhyme, meter, stanzas, modal forms, allusion/imitation, and so on). The nonce forms developed by "experimentalists" might not be to the taste of the nostalgic conservatives like Hecht, yet the actual techniques used by both may not be that far apart.

Kasey Mohammad emphasizes how Hecht's biases seem to stem from an inability to imagine or respond, in poetry, outside the traditional & sanctioned forms of old. It's an "archival" approach. Yet I think we have to recognize our own limits in turn. The old geezers have a background in metrics & oral presentation, coming in large part from poets like Yeats & Hardy, through Auden, Merrill et al., which if they could respond to the world-view, might teach the younger generation a number of things about the unity of relations between style, rhetoric, subject-matter, and presentation. Somewhere in that unity of effect, it seems to me, lies the direction of the central, major tradition - not the much-maligned "mainstream" - which the representatives of oppositional poetics too often complacently dismiss.

Ultimately, the arena of the new lies paradoxically with the individual - the individual poet's ability to synthesize many impulses, techniques and verbal capacities, to correlate them all in the service of a worldview and an inimitable expressive force.

Socrates: Hen, can we get back to yr polemicks now? When you were talking a few days ago about how the US oppositional poetry of idiomatic communities reflect the denial of a general Tradition somewhut in TS Eliot's sense. . . well, weren't you sort of practicing "transumption", which is what Milton did to the other Epicks & is a nice word for one-upmanship by absorption? No wonder they snubs you sometimes.

Henry: I got a rejection letter about a year ago from the editor of Jacket, John Tranter. He said that my poems were too "literary" - I guess he meant too stylized with clunky old-fashioned devices - & that people didn't talk that way & that Frank O'Hara taught us we didn't have to write like that anymore. Well, now that I think about it, his letter seems emblematic of the (contemporary, int'l) NY School.

Socrates: But, Hen, didn't you say once that you cut your teeth on the NY School poets back in the 60s & early 70s? & couldn't people accuse you (in fact as I recall they did) of always arguing from the negative, that is, complaining about what's "missing" from poetry these days, sorta like the way Bush talks about hidden things in Iraq, or like the proverbial shell game?

Henry: Now, Socky, that was a low blow.

Socrates: But look at it Hen - it could be argued that yer complaints about the balkanized poetry idioms is just a way of deflecting your own problem - that you FELL AWAY from your own early path (NY poets) & now are blaming 'em for not following you downhill? & now yer so far downhill that you can't see the fine grain of what other poets are trying to do - you just go into your transumpt mode.

Henry: Gee whiz, Socky, you are tough on me today. Well, I would say IMOD ("In My Own Defense" in legal jargon) that hey, it's all a work in progress. By that I mean that I don't claim to stand outside the working-out of my own poetickal problems in taking these positions. & I would say that my hesitation or skepticism about the 3 or 4 "schools" ongoing in US poetry is a genuine poet's problem of modelling a style I can believe in. Does it work for me? Does my strenuous & somewhat comical search for templates (Mandelstam, Crane, Pound) represent merely a personal safety symptom, or a more natural (if wayward & partial) search for a "fusion" idiom (I mean a poetic diction that fuses with past poetry history in a real way)?

Socrates: Duh, or both? Can I have some of that cookie?

Henry: The schools of counter-poetics in the US run counter to the "workshop" or "mainstream" product by emphasizing style dialects. But maybe neither style nor dialect can be channeled too narrowly - otherwise they end up as a "manner". & I go on in my midwestern way, annoying both coasts & everyone coasting. But I'm annoyed with THEM.

Socrates: O, Hen.

Henry: O, Socky.

"Gee willikers, Hen," sez Socrates, "you're waxin summit polemickal there, ain't it? Uh mean it is a stretch nowzadays to be exclamatoriatin about an Eliotic Trudgdition, thinksme! Havn't such as Wallie Stevens, for landsakes, proven oncet & for all that America has its own autochthonic ways & means - like when he said quite clearly if offhandedly that he disliked the critical habit of allus hearin the voices of other poets in a poet, as if a poet couldn't simply just be him or herself - etc & so forthus. . ."

Well, thanks, Socky - at this point (on a dark & snow Monday morning at the office) all I want to say is that one of the striking aspects of whut I been calling the oppositional poetics of the USA is that the "tradition" in roughly Eliot's sense is always an unheard interlocutor or double of the style at hand - whether it be the obsessive formalism of the langpos or the chipper lightweight quality of the NY School or the primitivist-pioneerism of the Projectivistickal set - there is always the broad wide universal tradition of poetry in English serving as the invisible agonist or antagonist to the oppositional style

From an email to K. Silem Mohammad, whose blog carries some interesting discussion on the concept of poetic "ear":

I've been following the "ear" discussion, & have a few comments.

Often I find myself agreeing with Jeffrey Jullich, though the value of empirical studies (of versification, sound, etc) depends on how you integrate them into some more holistic response. Statistical analyses are pretty similar (a Bell curve) no matter what the topic; unless you combine your data on cloud grayness over Detroit with other factors, you won't know much about the weather. In the case of poetry this does tend to circularity, since a given work's "virtues" inhere in such a symbiotic way as to challenge or defy analysis.

Where I agree with him completely is on this notion of a more inclusive critical vocabulary (the "Quintillian tropes"). It seems to me that the focus on "ear" might be motivated by a search for a means of critical measure within a set of poetic idioms which is already too narrow (post-Language writing) - (ie. referring to J's comment that you could insert lines from various post-lang poems somewhat at random). Here it seems like a literary-historical perspective of some kind is absolutely necessary - but I guess it depends on what you are trying to do. I don't feel the same loyalty to the contemporary alternative poetic idioms that many share in this neighborhood of interest.

If I were to sketch out a literary-historical paradigm, I would see the development in the US of oppositional idioms as both style-forming and community-building. There are 2 layers of opposition : one, sort of superficial, opposes contemporary "mainstream verse culture". The other, more profound opposition, is to the notion of a central or universal (or western) Tradition, a paradigm constructed mainly by Eliot and instituted rather programmatically by the New Critical generation (Tate, Ransom, et al.). This 2nd divide is quite fixed in the US, like the 2 main political parties. The counter-idea to Eliot is that the real American tradition is Emersonian, original, individualistic, even eccentric. The achievements of Whitman, Dickinson, and some of the Moderns are given in evidence of this counter-tradition.

In my view it is precisely this double-layered oppositional stance which undergirds the idiomatic communities (NY School, Language Poetry, Projectivist, Beat, etc.). The strength & vitality of idiomatically-differentiated styles comes at a price : the denial of even a modified version of Eliot's notion of a broad tradition. And it is that denial which contributes most to the lack of a more complex set of critical tools such as Jeffrey noted.