...thus the appeal for me of Hart Crane, Anna Akhmatova, Mandelstam, some Stevens, some Yeats - as opposed to the jump-cut edginess of much modernism, post-modernism.

adagios of islands.

sunny sublimity.

the gesture, the understated signal, toward the vast, the calm.

Jordan sez: "I wonder (I'm always wondering, call it a character flaw) whether Ron's p-A/SoQ distinction isn't at bottom about prosody and diction."

I think it's about trying to define what is especially "American" in poetry in English (& implicitly identifying what is "American" with what is lively, contemporary, etc. in English poetry worldwide - a globalization-effect).

It's agonistic/dialectical - defining what is by comparison with what, supposedly is not (SoQ is not really American, except as some kind of effete remnant of colonial imitation, or ersatz product of a stodgy, artificial pecking-order/system).

Such pigeonholes are convenient for making snap judgements. But I think they continually bump up against uncategorizable examples.

Trying to examine some of the distinctive qualities of modern & contemporary American poetry could be a very interesting project, an aspect of some kind of larger project of cultural self-awareness & reflection (where have we come from? how does this surface in our writing today?). However, it would be better to try to ground such in a more disinterested framework of literary values. In Ron's framework, there is already a body of progressive/oppositional/approved poetry, and the effort involves matching & absorbing ever more & new examples & products to the existing model of value. It's a kind of collective self-promotion. The binary/agonistic/sports model facilitates this process of self-congratulation : there's always a negative shadow which sets off our shining lights.

By contrast, what I mean by a "disinterested framework of values" would involve comparisons and investigations of contemporary work within a much broader field : ie. world literature.

Spent some more time over the sultry weekend with Stephen Prickett's dazzling book (Words and The Word) mentioned a couple days ago.

He's getting into the relation between Romantic & Victorian poetry, & the 19th-cent. movement toward cultural centrality of prose fiction & realist novel.

He does this in terms of the paradoxes & problems of Biblical translation, & the enormous impact, on British poetics & romantic poetry in general, of Bishop Lowth's studies of Hebrew poetry in the 18th cent.

Sounds rather abstruse, I guess. But it's not. His focus is on Wordworth, Blake, GM Hopkins, & esp. Coleridge. Tied into a remarkable reading-back of the various translations of the story of Elijah's encounter with the "still small voice" in the cave. (I have a little old poem along that line, which I will post here later.)

Coleridge's emphasis on the power of the imagination-intelligence to shape perception; of human language as a "subordinate logos" of the (divine) "communicative act" which is Nature itself; & the corollary - the necessity for imaginative participation (re-making) in any reading.

How the trinitarian formula of transcendent Logos united with incarnate person contains a logical paradox (like the "set of sets which contains itself", or however it goes : the infinite God appearing inside "his" own finite creation). (Prickett illustrates with the Saul Steinberg sketch (taken from Escher?) of the two hands, holding pens, sketching each other.) And how any literary representation of reality comes up against a similar paradox.

The prose realists evaded these paradoxes by simplifying the problem of representation. The stories are cast in a form of (desacralized) "objectivity" which reifies the world. (cf. George Eliot's humanist recasting of religion via Feuerbach.)

I thought I noticed faint echoes of some of these issues in Ron Silliman's latest attack on "School of Quietude" representational poetry (remarks on Clark Coolidge, etc.). He sets up a false dichotomy and a false choice between representational and non-representational poetries. If we inhabit some form of Coleridge/Hopkins "communicative cosmos" - within which particular things in nature speak their meaning or Adamic name - then the basic motive of poetry-making - whether "abstract" or representative-narrative - will be to communicate.

When I was working on the long poem, I thought of it as anti-prose, anti-novel. The ghost-shaman Bluejay mixes in with real places & local history. Stubborn Grew narrates the crisis-collapse of its own narrator. I think I have always been aligned with Coleridge & Blake - that there is some mission for poetry which merges with religion & the sacred. Breaks through aesthetic & cultural categories.

sorry, I'm really rambling this morning. back to work...

My real name is Chinover Minny III. At least that's what it says on the smudged birth certificate from Boston, dated 1934, which I have before me. I didn't learn this until I was 35 years old, and living as Henry Gould, in Galveston, TX (I worked there as a post-avant oil-rigger for many years, before an iambic injury to my left foot left me penta-traumatized). I spent my early childhood in an orphanage near Glencoe, IL. In my seventh year, I was adopted by a dysfunctional School of Quietude family, a large chaotic household of carefully-numbered "stanzas" (play-rooms & cribs) watched over by the Gould couple, my "parents", who, I learned, many dismal years later, had taken me in for only two reasons : 1) the money, and 2) the captive audience. Love had nothing to do with it : they wanted me to listen to them recite reams of repressed brainless Quietuditties. You know what I'm talking about : all those "lyric poems", all those "personal confessions", all those "free-verse implosions", all those bathetic I-centered "sonnets"... ghghgaaaahhh... ! Those people never attended a political rally in their lives. They never questioned the underlying post-structural hierarchies of hegemony or the rhetorical sleight-of-hand and slabs-of-meat which maintain the corrupt system in all its flourishing false consciousness. They never went to St. Mark's in the Bowery or St. Pete's by the Bay; they never listened to the live-chicken New Americans (forerunners of the contemporary spasm of genius and intellectual probity which today we name "post-avant in its generations"); they never knew what hit them in the magazine rack until it fell, literally, over their repressed little Quietude hats. Plus, they never studied linguistics, so, unlike those of us who have "been around the block", they tried to listen to poetry and language "directly", whatever that means!

This is the sordid and pinched environment in which I struggled to grow as a person and a social function of identity-otherness. Lucky for me, I was pulled up from my dessicated literary roots literally by my hair, one day : one fateful afternoon in San Francisco. I was walking down Telegraph, with my meek balding little Prufrock head stuck in a book of poems by Waldo Princk (an early Joyride Migraine imitator, I gather), when I was struck by an airborne vehicle (a blue sedan of unknown provenance). I must have been unconscious for a mere 15.4 seconds, but when I awoke, I found myself on a "joy ride" across southern California and the Baja with a group of amazing poets called The New American Post-Avants. They were led electronically from a workstation in Philadelphia by one Ron Silliman, their "guru" (though he prefers to be known as Top Gun in post-av circles, at least).

The p-a Magic Bus Tour, needless to say, changed my entire life and literary orientation. I became intelligent and intellectual, for one thing : I learned, eventually (after many years of study with Top Gun), that there is a linguistic basis to poetics, and that words don't necessarily refer to what the letters stand for (especially in the Boston Globe, for some reason).

How this adventure instigated my literary investigations and divagations down the long winding trail to discovering my true name and genealogical tree (the Minny Family were Old School of Quietude aristocracy since before the Sunflower landed in Paterson NJ)... well, that's a tale for another blog-dog day.

torque x risk - quietude + hebetude/hesychasm divided by sq.rt. divagation = nift (don't ask me what this means. I am going on the hypothesis that there is no connection with "nifty")

At the Byzantine exhibit I learned about "hesychasm" - a movement in the Orthodox Church of that era (12-1400s), which taught communion with God through contemplation. Hesychasm translates as: "quietude".

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.

In my mental geography (responding to Ron today), the town of Providence lies nestled between the Crevasse of Quietude (somewhere beyond Dante St., on Federal Hill) and Mount Atlantis (to the left of the Doyle Observatory). I have always felt that the official poets situated in the Crevasse have overslept due to lack of sunlight (the Mount inhibits morning rays, even during Daylight Savings months), though perhaps it's a question of allegiance to King George (who Slept Here too, a few years before Washington Slept Here & composed his "Ode on The Second-Best Bed in the Republic" while snoring through his wooden teeth) and his stylistic anglossia tics & other bedbugs. But I digress, citizens. The Crevasse Assembly Poets have always been startling dreamers (HP Lovecraft actually dreamt his nightmares in perfect iamboid pentchompeter), yet this has not won them the universal acclaim & plaudits & laurels & ecstatic receptivity which is their unnatural due, and Sylvia (Bath-Towel) knows this, along with Helen (Book) Vendor, and I don't think that the energetic freewheeling American love-happy poets of Mount Atlantis will ever grant them the hospitality which their shadowy pathos, in other words, is their Otherness. They are dominant and hegemonic but not demonic, as some influential maggots & zines would have it. I love their work and read it constantly until my eyes begin to bleed. There is hope for the Crevasse now, since several scenesters from Boston have abandoned beloved Beantown for dear olde Providence, but I don't want to give away their names yet (for free, anyway - backchannel me about this). I live not far from there but try to walk uphill every day, into the sunlight, which I deserve more than Jasper Fledgling the current Poet Laureate will ever in a million years admit or even countenance, with such a countenance as his (it is some countenance!). Oh my freedom-lovin' people & freewheelin' bards of America! Thank You!

"angle of repose" :

a mining term. means the slope at which a pile of something (sand, coal, rocks) will stop sliding & remain at rest.

"visionary repose". . . Hart Crane, sometimes. "Repose of Rivers"; "Royal Palm". . .

also his poetics in general, balancing old & new.

motionless speed : a spinning top.

On the Nature of Quietude


Pondering on my walk to work this "quietude" & what it is. In context of currently reading Edgar Wind's great book (Pagan Mysteries of the Renaissance) about the Neoplatonic fellows of the Florentine Academy (15th cent.) - Ficino, Pico della Mirandola, et al. (Interested to see that Nicolas Cusanus emerges at the end.)

Anyway, Ron Silliman has laid out his various expositions based on a taunt by Edgar Poe at the reigning fireside magazine verse of his time. Ron's is a heroic narrative, in which the stodgy furniture & debased aesthetics of traditionalist establishment popular/elitist "verse" are gradually dismantled & swept away by the enlarged & vivifying renewals of the ever-resistant oppositiional avant-garde.

Was remarking yesterday, in comments on BK Stefans' review of Robert Lowell's oeuvre, on the lack of repose characteristic of the so-called mainstream eminences of the last mid-century (Lowell, Berryman etc). One way of looking at this would I guess be historicist : these poets were teetering on the brink of the revolutionary changes of the 60s, and their unease reflected that moment before the storm.

But you can't reduce poetry to history, nor these particular poets' work to a simple expression of angst or unease.

In fact you can't reduce poetry to sociology or ideology either.

As I mentioned, I'm pondering in the context of Wind's exposition of the neoplatonic humanists' philosophizing on the nature of humankind and God. So I'm thinking in terms of their ubiquitous triads, from Apollo's tripod up to the Holy Trinity. One of them had to do with the equilibrium of the good life stemming from a balance of three aspects of the soul: contemplation, activity, pleasure (intellectual, irascible, sensual; Saturn, Jove/Mars, Venus; etc. etc.).

It intrigues me to think of the wings of blogpoetics as tending to emphasize one or another of these aspects. Thus the NY School tends toward an epicurean pleasure principle & a light mockery of seriousness in any of its obvious forms.

The langpo-avant-gardists tend toward the vita activa, the irascible principle : art is a "movement" loosely aligned with social liberation & political correctness, struggling against the oppressive decadence of a debased commercialized mainstream. The irascible principle naturally seeks & finds its antagonist(s), the current ectomorph of which is the "School of Quietude".

The problem with this dialectic is that the irascible ones conflate the contemplative faculty with the complacent attitude. Intent, in their irascible fashion, upon reading literature politically & ideologically, they are deaf and blind to what is probably the most basic function of poetic harmonics : to lead the reader/listener to a recognition of inherent & beautiful equilibrium, to a visionary repose where contemplation, activity & pleasure reflect some kind of perennial life-principle, Dante's ben del intelletto.

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.

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. . .

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.]. . .)

. . . the battle, in art, essentially, being between the imperial and the empyreal:

the contemplative (Mary's better portion) and the active (Martha's):

a spiritual battle in the soul between the whole Creation & partial goods (greed, lust, pride, anger);

("since the coming of John until now the Kingdom of Heaven has come by violence, and violent men take it by force; but it shall not be so among you. Verily I say unto you, the least of those in the Kingdom of Heaven is greater than John" - Gospel)

the 9 daughters of Mnemosyne (memory) being grandchildren of Zeus;

this is the subtext of July (Julius Caesar to Jubilee).

What's the positive term for "quietude" (Ron's diss) ?

Harmony ? Reading Bloom : he says (after Plato) that poetry emerges when reason enters music. He writes much about the relations between reason, passion, faith.

Or maybe : equanimity ?

No, Ron Silliman, you cannot purvey Great New Poetry to me every three days. I don't buy your economy of millions of Great Poets kept down by a conspiracy of mainstream schools of quietude. I don't care if it's impossible to read everything being published. A critic can have standards even if the view is restricted.

There is something to be said for running the gauntlet of mainstream publication : it enforces necessary solitude & purpose.

The standard may be something finicky & whimsical on the surface. But it will allow the poet time to win the critic over despite the strictest judgement.

Even if poetry is blooming everywhere, I still want the critic to find it rare, profound, substantial, absolutely convincing. I want the critic to be tough to win over, knowledgeable, sensible, responsive.

I want poetry to go & hide somewhere, in some old abandoned shack in Hungary maybe, to get away from all these glib, pretentious poets.

This gets back to Jordan's comment about the "yucky" feeling of doing reviews.