This blog is not the official sponsor of the Canadian poetry wars. Nor, for that matter, any other. There has been speculation on at least the Poetics listserv as to why there isn’t a comments section here. Part of it simply has to do with Blogger’s lack of such a function in its software & my own meager HTML skills, attempting sans success to import a comments capacity from a third-party provider.* But I haven’t tried harder to solve that technical challenge because of the quality & tone of such discussions as one sees them, for example, in emails & on listservs. The vituperation that has characterized some of the recent Canadian exchanges, for example, has been depressing & counterproductive. Even more depressing has been the fact that I’ve never written anything of substance about a female poet here, at least until my piece on Ange Mlinko, without receiving at least one email attack – the ratio when I write about male poets is about one such blast per ten items. What an amazing coincidence that isn’t. If you want to send me a comment, the email address is on the left.

 

Underneath the name calling of the Canadians lies a more serious issue: the question of literary formation in a time of extraordinary post-avant productivity. There are, as I’ve listed by name in the postscripts to more than one anthology, literally hundreds of poets now writing compellingly in ways that can be traced back to the New American Poetry, the Stein-Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tradition or parallel European innovative traditions. This doesn’t even touch poets impacted by subaltern innovative traditions like the modernist prose poem from pre-WW2 Japan or indigenous poetics from every continent save Antarctica. Tho if we stretch a little to include Donald Finkel, we can count the South Pole as well.

 

What about all this writing? No individual, regardless of how voracious & encyclopedic a reader, can ever hope to take in all of it. Therefore, by definition, one is forced to make choices. Will I read Eunoia or The Mood Embosser? Hoa Nguyen or Jena Osman? Barbara Guest or David Bromige? Ange Mlinko or Mary Burger? Simon Ortiz or Simon Armitage? This volume by Ed Foster or C.D. Wright or Bruce Andrews means how many other texts will never be gotten to, regardless of how good they are, or of how much I might get out of them? I have a stack of unread books in my bedroom – next to an entire bookcase of same – that is as tall as I am. Eleven other bookcases in my house are overflowing. & yet there is always some book that I want or need right now (this week it’s Adelaide Morris’ Sound States) that I don’t have & can’t get easily.

 

Such conundrums may bedevil the individual reader, but they have corollaries throughout the field of poetry that have consequences – many of them less than happy – for individual poets, especially those without a lot of power, such as younger writers. First, editors run into the exact same problems as do readers. This is as true for a web journal hosted on an advertising-based “free” server as it is the most expensively produced hard copy publication. There are just more good poets than you will ever be able to publish. The problem ramps up much more steeply when we come to the question of books – few publishers of poetry print more than a handful of volumes per year. Without a sense of a larger project at hand, decisions get made based for  local & personal reasons, which at one level is okay. At another, however, there is no way in this system to assure that good writers don’t literally fall by the wayside. A poet who is reclusive or finds it difficult to actively promote his or her work, such as a Dick Gallup, is apt to disappear from view literally for decades. Has anybody read a book by Harold Dull in 30 years? By Ebbe Borregaard? Mary Norbert Korte? Gail Dusenbery? Victoria Rathbun? Kirby Doyle, like Borregaard a contributor to the Allen anthology, seems literally to have disappeared. A poet like d Alexander dies & is never heard of again. Darrell Gray’s landlord simply dumped his papers into the trash after he died.

 

In the current highly atomized state of the literary scene, books do get published, but what occurs to them after that remains far too much a matter of happenstance. When a volume happens to sell well, become, at least in poetry terms, popular, and gets sucked up into the highly tokenized process of the print industry’s publishing awards, the phenomenon appears all but random. Thus Harryette Mullen’s Sleeping with the Dictionary, Alice Notley’s Mysteries of Small Houses and Christian Bök’s Eunoia end up both carrying the hopes – and resentments – of large numbers of other poets. It’s as though out of the forest of poets, those seedlings have been anointed by sunlight & thus the opportunity to thrive.

 

We need to look at this process more critically. I would argue that it is in large measure because of the almost total absence of discernable shape & shading within the literary terrain, its sheer unmappability, that such exceptionalism becomes, by default, the only means available for the culture – by which in this instance I mean the totality of readers of poetry – to organize itself around points of discernability. But what it really points to is an abdication by the poets themselves -- & I don’t mean Harryette or Alice or Christian. By leaving a vacuum, poets permit other institutional forces – especially trade & large institutional publishers and the awards-givers who are really just an adjunct to the trade publishers – to occupy the very space that makes it possible for newcomers to get a sense of what’s where in the world of poetry.

 

I’ve ridden this hobby horse before. & I probably will again. The failure of poets, particularly when they are acting as editors & critics, to articulate a shape for the writing they want most to see & with which to be associated, is the necessary precondition for the disappearance of many, perhaps most, poets. To return to an old lesson from Jean-Paul Sartre: your choice is between the series – absolute atomization – and the group. Though that latter term has multiple meanings.

 

So almost as distressing as the name calling in the Canadian dispute is Darren Wershler-Henry’s reflexive denial of group status: “there's no Oulipo branch office here.” It’s as puzzling and ultimately self-defeating a position as that posed by Juliana Spahr on this blog back in September when she characterized the creation of Chain as an act against articulation:

 

we started chain b/c there were too many arguments being made. we started it in the climate of apex and o-blek. there were arguments already and we needed other sorts of conversations to happen. this felt crucial to us. we needed to make a place for us to think about things in our way--a more sideways way or a less declaratory way. now, perhaps, we/poetry community need arguments again. it is sad that apex and o-blek are gone and really haven't been replaced. and somehow for some reason that i'm not sure i know yet, we keep doing chain. (my emphasis)

 

Chain’s co-editor Jena Osman poses it as being a choice against canon-building. Which might be the case if one poses it solely in a my community vs. your community context. But, one thing the poetry of the 1970s certainly attempted (with mixed results) to demonstrate in practice, articulation – argument – need not be destructive at all. Dialogues between communities ideally begin with an interest in what the other community is doing. So what is edited out when editors opt for a telephone book or dictionary model of the alphabet as organizing principle is precisely “Combinations, interruptions, complex conversations and crossings over.”  What is left is everybody talking simultaneously with a minimum of listening to one another.

 

The poets behind Apex of the M and O•blēk argued for a new spirituality in American poetry. That may seem like a quirky, even perverse place to begin, but it was at least an attempt to make a start. In retrospect, those new gnostics look like the last gasp of poetry organizing itself before utter atomization left every woman & man to themselves and the poetry scene surrendered over to the infinite consumerism of picking this book here, that book there, with no hope of ever creating a larger sense of event.

 

Let me pose what seems to me an obvious possible grouping, something that, to borrow a phrase from Peter Balestrieri, I will call The Collectors. The Collectors acquire that name because of a predisposition to utilize & recycle found language, although this can also mean the use of a poetic text to process an event. When Mark Peters searched the internet for every sentence that included the word “men” & then composed a booklength poem by that name, it was just an act of collection. The détournements of Brian Kim Stefans & event documentation works of Edwin Torres and Kenny Goldsmith, the text creations of Alan Sondheim as well as the work of Craig Dworkin all loosely fit this definition. Around this core one might pose questions of rule-determined work, which might fall on one side of this equation, and which just might include the Oulipo non-branch in Toronto. On the other side would be those writers interested in documents for precisely what they do and say socially, incorporating them into their works – both Spahr and Osman could be posited there. Further, one could go back and ask about such antecedent poets as Paul Metcalf on the one hand and David Benedetti’s computer-written texts of the 1970s on the others. Viewed from the perspective of The Collectors, there is a context in which both Christian Bök’s Eunoia & Louis Cabri’s The Mood Embosser not only complement one another, they virtually require one another.

 

This literary formation exists in everything but the real world. While some of these writers know one another and might even work together from time to time, there is no attempt that I’m aware of on anybody’s part from within this potential formation to point it out as a major tendency in contemporary poetry. Which means as a direct consequence that there is nobody trying to create the kind of internal – and external – dialogues that would enable it to accelerate its own development. And that its potential as a point in common for other groups to bounce off of is muted, if not nil. Only when such formations exist in real time can the “combinations, interruptions, complex conversations and crossings over” that Jena Osman envisions begin to occur. You can’t cross over until you have identified a place from which to cross.

 

The benefits of literary formation seem to me obvious: we would not have the ready availability of the work of Carl Rakosi without his relationship to the Objectivists, nor this big fat new volume of Lorine Niedecker’s so lovingly produced by the University of California Press. Long term, the work of Joe Ceravolo, Dick Gallup and the other poets of the New York School’s second generation stands to gain enormously because of this same phenomenon. If anyone ever is to rescue the work of Darrell Gray, it will be because of his role within Actualism. In each instance, the presence of a literary formation provides not just strength in numbers, but a situating context large & complex enough to motivate a graduate student like Andrew Crozier to locate & approach a man like Carl Rakosi. Rakosi had not written in a quarter century before Crozier approached him in the 1960s; by his own account on his webcast this past week, Rakosi had not even read poetry in a quarter century. 

 

But at that level, the idea of the Collectors is as much a fiction as M.L. Rosenthal’s Confessional Poetry once was. So, if we believe Wershler-Henry, is the experience of a Toronto-centered process-driven poetics. What it all points to is a profound silence precisely where there needs to be discussion. And organization. And arguments. On this point, Juliana Spahr is absolutely right: “we/poetry community need arguments again.” Lots of them, conducted in the poems, in readings, in the fundamentally political act that is editing, in forums like talks & seminars & conferences.

 

To which I would add this one word of warning: name calling seems a better way to shut discussion off, that it does to open it up.

 

 

 

 

* Ditto for a search engine.