Reading a magazine that I have not yet seen, Tom Fink notes the containment strategy often imposed by conservative poets with regards first to langpo & then more broadly to the entire post-avant tradition.

 

Dear Ron,

 

          When I got a contributor's copy of the Winter 2002 issue of Barrow Street, an eclectic New York City journal, a very interesting juxtaposition hit me. The magazine's first poem is an excerpt from Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist, a potent example of the self-reflexive and, as she puts it, "analytic lyric" drive of her work. (Like you, I'm especially drawn to My Life.) One of the last pieces in the magazine is an interview of Robert Pinsky by Daniela Gioseffi, author of 11 books of poetry, the latest from Rattapallax Press, and an anthology, Women on War, and someone who has favorably reviewed close friends of mine. The interview is subtitled "On Poetry and Social Conscience." Gioseffi asks Pinsky what he feels "about the current abstract school and the so called 'language school of poetry'; for example, John Ashbery or Jorie Graham or Charles Bernstein – which has seemed to dominate much of the poetry of our time and to which the average reader not schooled in poetry seems to have such difficulty responding to. Do you find it solipsistic in nature?" (76).

 

          If we slightly correct Gioseffi and see Ashbery as a synecdoche for the New York School, Bernstein for the Language Poets – and such synecdoches repress much difference within those non-schools – and Graham for the recent Iowa Writer's Workshop trend to fuse mainstream and experimental poetic practices, then perhaps these 3 "tendencies," combined, may account for half of what's published in the poetry presses and magazines and e-zines. But the word "dominate" implies a lot more than half; it demonstrates the angst that you noticed in Edward Hirsch's claim that there were "too many" poetic experimentalists: 10,000 practitioners.

 

          Gioseffi doesn't know or ignores that Language Poets are overtly political. Perhaps "difficulty" makes her use the label "solipsistic" (without conscience? apolitical?). Has she encountered the "Language" argument that the illusion of unmediated communication in "easy" poetry is itself an ideological construct in need of politicized demystification? Poetry educators like Juliana Spahr can and do talk with the "average reader" about politically progressive poetry that disrupts complacent expectations of transparent mimesis, but have her mainstream sources told her this? (Also, to read Ashbery as solipsistic is to miss a kind of Bakhtinian dialogism, a carnival where one can read social conflict into his poems' heteroglossia.)

 

To Pinsky's credit, he doesn't quite take Gioseffi's cues. First sounding like a serene, tolerant pluralist who will admit star experimentalists into his pantheon, he then exposes his biases:

 

As you have said, in every kind [of poetry], some is good and some is bad. In relation to your concern with social and political materials, it is true that the more cerebral, self-referential or linguistically complicated the writing is, the safer or more armored it is. For lesser writers than those you name, an avant-garde surface is protection from the difficulties and embarrassments of subject matter. Language poetry of that kind is safe; it cannot sprawl because it holds its pose behind a protective wall of texture. Abstraction and opacity can be places to hide from the difficulty or passion of the world or oneself. But what about examples like Paul Celan – a great writer who is very difficult, often opaque, and a great writer of the social and political tragedy of modern Europe? (76)

 

Pinsky's concluding question is very good, but Gioseffi parries it by going on to an unrelated question. When Pinsky signifies on the usual safe/dangerous binary by making safe literary forms/modes seem dangerous, some will find it clever. But the implication that linguistic complexity is an evasion of psychologically difficult confession ("embarrassments") about the self's imperfections and its most difficult emotions or an evasion of the difficulty of making a determinate political judgment implies that the tasks being "evaded" are the "true" tasks of poetry. What if confessional poetry a la Lowell or Sexton is seen as just plain self-indulgent? What if a poet doesn't want to ignore the complexities of political theory and praxis and thus refrains from making "sound-byte" political judgments. The trope of "sprawling" suggests that LangPo is "uptight," ignoring how funny it often is, whereas poetry with clearly packaged "personality" is more relaxed. What if the poetry of "subject matter" that he implicitly valorizes is a protection against a more difficult subject matter: relations between areas of linguistic "experience" that are not immediately recognizable, that do not easily fit together but have metonymic contact in the multiplicity of the social spaces that people experience as their daily lives? Pinsky may see in a Bernstein or an Ashbery that even when language itself is the subject matter, a large part of the interest in such writing is investigation of the social functioning of words, but he will not allow that framing assumption to be in place when he reads "lesser writers" that he considers part of the Language group. Near the end of the interview, Gioseffi weighs in once more on the poetry she finds apolitical, this time differentiating between the LangPos and the New York School:

 

The language school of poetry seems to be about art for art's sake; and the abstract or action poetry schools, or the New York School, a sort of laid-back observation on the poet's experience. (77)

 

Does action poetry=action painting? Does she link the visual New York School with the poetic one? The caricature of the "laid back" New York School could have been obtained from some journalistic account, not from reading many NY School writers. But where did she get the idea that LangPo is "art for art's sake"? From a preconception that poetry, to be political, must tell a story or present a single ideological perspective, and that, poetry that cannot be pinned down to a single subject must only exist to glorify its status as art? That linguistic inventiveness is just hedonism and teaches us nothing about the world? What if the accusation of "art for art's sake" were contextualized, instead, as an indication that the accuser believes that a realm of "pure formalism" can exist outside of the socius, and that this belief, rather than a partial (not total or totalizing) attention to formal qualities, is a mystification of the interpreter, not the poet? Hejinian's poem at the beginning of the issue of Barrow Street could help answer some of the questions, if the interviewer and interviewee chose to read it carefully.

 

All Best,

Tom