Nick LoLordo,
who teaches at UNLV, had several thoughtful comments about my
take on Emily Eakins’ New York
Times article concerning Critical Inquiry’s conference on Critical
Inquiry in the 21st Century. Other than correcting the spelling
of Eakins’ name, I’ve made no edits to the body of
the letter – the ellipses are all Nick’s.
Dear Ron:
“Long time listener, first time
caller,” as they say on the radio. Some thoughts
on today’s blog. (If you're swamped by angry messages from profs disagreeing with you, does that affect your argument?
– I'm not one of those hypothetical angry profs, but I
do think you're setting up a straw man.)
Why trust the Times?
[I know you apologize for your source, but you then go on to assume its
accuracy in the polemic that follows...] Would you trust their account of
contemporary non-quietudinous poetry? When Emily Eakins tells you that they didn’t talk about literature at
that meeting, this, I think, is code: she’s scolding them for “not teaching
Shakespeare,” for not sticking to their job description, a rhetorical strategy
that is part of a tradition of conservative criticism in the media going back
to the culture wars, Roger Kimball, etc...
On your account the only way for theorists to encounter
the contemporary world is through contemporary writing, because that’s the
field that defines their professional existence.
I agree entirely with you that the academic “neglect” of contemporary
poetry is real, is a problem, has consequences within the institution in that
certain types of intellectual work get ignored or misunderstood – I noticed it
as soon as I got to grad school, and I got to grad school not knowing much at
all about contemporary poetry and yet knowing a lot more than most of my peers.
[An aside here: your move with the Frost book seems
unfair; the alternative, say, Mary Margaret Sloan’s recent piece in Talisman that under various categories
lists groups of poets in huge slabs of names (borrowing your strategy from In the American Tree), seems also
inadequate: there are always more names .... why would Frost choose to cite
every writer you named? If she cited half of them would that be enough? Respect
for those writers one admires and the desire to be inclusive,
if reified in the form of huge lists, are not entirely unproblematic...]
But I don’t completely understand your remarks about
academics moving away from literature to talk about what they’re not qualified
to talk about. English departments have been focal points of interdisciplinary
work for quite a while now; the causes and effects of that are complicated. In
what sense is Jameson not qualified to talk about politics? Because
he read Perelman badly?
As for your larger argument against “theorists”, surely
any such argument applies to all academics. Academics by definition can’t exist
widely through the society – they exist in the academy. The diversity you
ascribe to poets is that they are employed by a wide range of institutions
while all identifying as poets. [Of course, some poets who work in the academy
aren’t comfortable identifying as academics....]
Any social efficacy of poets re. the war surely had/has to do not
with their variety of job descriptions but with the shared identity of “poet”
and an ad hoc organizational strategy; poetry becomes a site of symbolic
resistance to the war because of a history of spontaneous organizing linked to
the fact that poets aren’t
professionals – both the praise and the dismissals of Hamill’s project assumed
the “amateurism” or “purity” of poetry. Poetry is mediated, just like every
other kind of writing.
Finally, I don’t understand your conclusion. Whether or
not it admits great living poets, the discipline doesn’t achieve social impact
without being mediated through the university. If you mean only to suggest that
the discourse of academic literary criticism doesn't “matter” in the sense that
some other activities do matter
(achieving visible effects within whatever timeframe we call “the political”)
I’d probably agree with you; so, with varying degrees of sorrow and glee, would
many academics.
But that doesn't mean that nothing a professor of lit, or
anything else, can do “matters.” I’d even argue that there are many things I
can do within the university that ultimately have an effect in what (some)
academics call the “real world.” If I go to the humanities librarian and
convince her to order 100 contemporary poetry titles from the SPD catalog for
the university library – many of which will be the only copy of that book in
Which leads me to a final
question.
What would happen if academic critics of poetry generally demonstrated, to your
satisfaction, an adequate grasp of the contemporary moment?
I appreciate your blog, and learn from it constantly; In The American
Tree was just about the first avant-garde work I ever saw. Thanks for
writing...
– Nick
