Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : polemics (label : subject/polemics).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Related topics (there are many others) : carpitude, cheese poetics, community, ideology, satire, social role...

Here is a cluster of Index labels under the subject : criticism (label : subject/criticism).

I haven't linked to every term in the numerical series for some of these labels (i.e. criticism2, criticism3...), but only to the initial term (i.e. criticism). (See Index for more on this.)

Some related topics (there are many others) :

Acmeism, academy, affinities, American culture, American poetry, Aristotle, classic, classicism, Coleridge, commentary, disinterestedness, holism, investigative poetics, Modernism, postmodernism, Russian poetry, style, wholeness...

I've been thinking of snappy 2- and 3-word rejoinders to the edifice of Sillimanism:

Robert Frost

Wallace Stevens

Hart Crane

William Butler Yeats

John Berryman

Robert Frost

Robert Frost

Robert Frost (in Russia, meeting Akhmatova)

Joseph Brodsky

Anna Akhmatova

Les Murray (mustn't forget Australia)

Osip Mandelstam (vs. russkii-amerikanskii futurism)

Robert Frost

I see Ron S. has mounted another defense of his heroique historie of anti-School-of-Quietude Americana.

Last year I started this blog with a critique of the oppositional mentality.

Ron believes there is a reactionary-establishmentarian cabal which is holding back & resisting the triumph of oppositional poetries.

My idea as mumbled here last year was, that "oppositionalism" in the poetry world is a mental prison-house more fearsomely fortified with dulness & blinkered thinking than anything a supposed cabal could come up with.

The enemies of poetry : dullness, boredom, hypocrisy, fakery, lack of talent, lack of inspiration. Neither the redoubtable resources of these enemies, nor the forces that poetry arrays against them, have anything much to do with institutions or bureaucracies of supposed progress or reaction. To turn poetry into an illusory rivalry of factions is the best way to render it too petty and negligible for any serious public (or private) purposes.

Talent and dedication and sensibility will come to the fore in the arts, on their own merits and by their own efforts. No program or critique will ever keep up with them.

My affinities (based in "optimism") may also imply certain resistances to various idioms of disaffection & resistance among my contemporaries.

George W. Bush is using language to topple the Tower of Babel in your backyard. This from a recent study by Elwood Latitude of the Latitude Leeway Foundation. Because he is President he thinks he can fool us with bomber jackets he bought at Job Lot, thinks he's cool. We know better, nyah nyah Georgie-Porgie! I will vote for Delbert Deal because he is a good deal better than his brother Fred Deal, who was an all-around Bad Deal. George uses language as if it were sticks and stones, but names will never hurt me, I am going home now for my mother calls me home from the flock with the flock, here little flock come with me for I am the good little Shepherd Boy.

Where does thinking in binaries, paired opposites, originate? You could say it started with the devil, offering the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good & evil (or with God who created the tree). So our binary thinking is a consequence of the Fall. Or you could say it originates in the structure of Nature as we know it, beginning with night and day, or with our orientation in space (up/down, left/right), or with the gender difference.

We're familiar with it in the US (the 2-party system; communism vs. capitalism; various ethnic us vs. thems).

Party loyalty, partisanship : on the one hand, necessary for organizational functioning; on the other hand, the motivation for "ends justify the means" behavior in both thought & deed.

The innovative/mainstream binary offers a kind of protective membrane for struggling writers. But I don't think it's real; it's a mental construct which provides space for partisan games of literary maneuvering. It blocks access to more essential literary elements.

It might be better to imagine poetry as one thing, really; one thing with many facets. To let go the protective membrane of insiders/outsiders. To face experience and literary tradition and the reading public simply, ignorantly (in Wallace Stevens' sense), directly.

Something I read somewhere : "Faced with an insoluble problem, make it bigger (enlarge the context)."

Let's forget about the roaring of contemporaries & cozening polemics. It's a musty closet. Let's do two things : read "the classics" and study where we are in the world (& beyond).

I imagine a limpid poetry of experience, which moves by gradual slight stages from description to synthesis and music, and back again. & by the same gradual slight stages from voice to persona and back again. a reserved poetry, which seeks fitness and the right moment & the right word rather than quantity and ambition.

Of course, most post-avantistes today consider the pentameter, along with everything else, broken a long time ago, and why not.

Pragmatics is a branch of contemporary linguistics; it emphasizes language as communicative utterance. One of the things it looks at are the pre-suppositions of a speaker regarding his or her audience, which influence all the choices of vocabulary & style. If you looked at the attitudes of various modern & contemporary poets toward style through the lens of pragmatics (as R.A. York did in The Poem as Utterance, back in the 80s), you could interpret the style of their "utterances" as motivated by social attitudes.

Why would a poet like Crane not break the pentameter, to take a salient instance? Perhaps because the social attitudes motivating wide ranges of modernist experiment - such as "epater le bourgeoisie" (then) or "disrupt oppressive social systems based on standardized syntax & meaning" (not too long ago) - held little value for him. The simplistic binary polemics which offer a bourgeois-sellout "them" vs. an aesthetic-political vanguard "us" are based on attitudes which severely warp the reception/absorption of the main stream of poetry in English; this has its consequences for practice.

Poetry does not take sides. Poets may, but poetry doesn't.

The politics of style is one of the most boring traits exhibited by human herd-instinct.

There IS a third way, and a fourth way, and a fifth way. . .

Sonnet 124

If my dear love were but the child of state,
It might for Fortune's bastard be unfathered,
As subject to time's love or to time's hate,
Weeds among weeds, or flowers with flowers gathered.
No it was builded far from accident,
It suffers not in smiling pomp, nor falls
Under the blow of thralled discontent,
Whereto th'inviting time our fashion calls:
It fears not policy that heretic,
Which works on leases of short-numbered hours,
But all alone stands hugely politic,
That it nor grows with heat, nor drowns with showers.
To this I witness call the fools of time,
Which die for goodness, who have lived for crime.

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. . .

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.)

Classic oppositional poetics statement by Ange Mlinko over at Ron's blog today.

O Buffalo, O Brown, O little clubhouses everywhere!

Oppositionalism is simply politics. It's motivated by a political desire to feel important, relevant to something larger than oneself, empowered; you could translate these attitudes into ANY professional field of endeavor and apply them seamlessly. Ironically, the us/them divide merely allows "us" to wallow in complacency, to create whole idioms & theoretical systems to support "marginality" at all cost & with all hypocrisy, to disregard many techniques of social poetry simply because they turn the mode & target of address away from the clique itself.

Ange Mlinko plays these themes on a simple oaten flute; Ron Silliman with full orchestra & pipe organ.

But this junk is not even worth talking about. I'm sure it will be turned into blog-hash for days now.

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.

Ron's the Pope of the School of Carpitude. Always griping, always canonizing.

Draw a large circle of 132" diameter. Call it "X", or "Fame & Influence". Place all poets published by standard presses, receptors of standard awards, etc. in this circle. On the perimeter of this circle draw a small circle, "Y", called "Sub-Fame & Opposition". Place all poets not published by standard presses, not recipients of standard awards, etc. in this circle.

Place yourself in the center of circle "Y". As loud as possible, begin grousing about circle "X". Create a Heroic Historical Narrative of circle "Y", which endows its poets with Moral & Political Authority & General Romantic Sexiness & Youthful Radical Originality & Cool Tattoos & the Elixir of Eternal Youth & Alternative Canonicity & Total Post-Avant-Garde Credentials. Turn Circle "X" into the Foil or Shadow of Circle "Y", allowing the latter to Shine with all the more Brilliance in the eyes of your Alternative Post-Avant Oppositional Morally Superior Aesthetically Savvy Subculture. Hubba hubba.

O grinding binaries of Carpitude!

David, OK, I'm laughing. . . but I'm probably much bigger than you so be careful around the Rock.

I recognize that, as you say, Josh is pretty much responsible for setting the words/imagination dichotomy in motion. But you wuz so busy beLITTLing me that you wuz unwilling to take an interest in the particular description of the imagination/words relation I was providing. Maybe there is a big foolishness in saying what "poetry is. . .", but how do my attempts differ from Stevens's, except in being too prolix (which I admit is a gigantic difference)? Stevens said "Poetry is a pheasant." That's good enough for me.

You wrote:
" Okay, since you seem to want to argue this point further, let's take a look at the
history of this edgy debate. Josh Corey was responding to a post in which I wrote:

"I've always admired this phrase from Stevens -- 'the morality of the right
sensation' -- with which he ended a talk on poetry. I don't think there's anything
by Stevens I've read that I didn't like, even when it bored me.

Any writer who honors the imagination, the sensuality of the mind and perception,
as much as him -- Wilde, Lorca, Williams, Benjamin, some Stein, Nietzsche, Jimi
Hendrix, to shout out some names -- has my undying devotion.

Why I find the continual emphasis on language, the politics of language,
narrow-minded."

I do not see any definitions in that post, except the one implied by Stevens'
words*. From this Josh extrapolates that I believe that all poetry -- and notice
that I mention not only a few writers who mostly wrote prose but also a musician
-- comes from the imagination. I don't know where it comes from and maybe, like
Jennifer Moxley, don't care or would rather not know. I am merely stating my love
for poets and artists of a certain type -- not a definition of what poetry is or isn't.
Hence my anger over Josh's practice of "talking past," in this case, me, as he likes
to put it.

Notice also, please, the 'for us'. Last year of living for us, whoever that may be. It
will be many people. As usual.

Laugh, Henry, or I will hunt you down in the caverns of the Rockefeller and the
Hay and calmly kill you.

* These words I heard on a cassette I have of Stevens reading (can't find it right
now), in either '54 or '55 right before his death -- reading his poems and speaking
on his belief in poetry. I don't recall him staking any universalizing claims for what
poetry is or is made of in order to counter other claims. 'A morality of the right
sensation' accurately evokes his own style. Stevens produced pages of aphoristic
and essayistic definitions of poetry. It's clear that poetics, as an activity, was for
him also a work of imagination and not reducible to any discourse."
posted by David at 3:53 PM

I knew I was taking a chance getting into a conversation with put-down prince David Hess. But what else is there to do, now that Jordan's out of town.

Go ahead and act dismissive, shmaht boy. You & Josh were verbalizing on an old & probably illusory dichotomy; what I posted is the resolution, simple as it may be.

I don't know what's wrong with your media player, Dave - sorry you can't hear. It's not wicked or dangerous; just Clint Eastwood trying to read something characteristic, & some old music.

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. . .

. . . he says, sitting in judgement, parochial type that he is.

I don't believe in a man-made utopia; I don't lobby for The Way Things Are either. I just want to see more perception, more complexity, more specificity, more carefulness, more disinterested consideration. Less ideological jabbering & knee-jerk "critique" & sophomoric cardboard pettiness.