I’ve been thinking about poetry & types. By which I think I mean something more or other than just genres. I was, for example, thinking the other day, as I referred to the evolution of humor in Charles Bernstein’s poetry of his other writing from early in his career, poems such as “The Klupzy Girl,” “Part Quake,” or “For Love Has Such a Spirit That if It is Portrayed It Dies,” all of which you can find in In the American Tree. These are works, it occurred to me, of a sort that Bernstein seems unlikely to write again. As he has evolved, Charles has moved away from being that kind of poet, whatever “that kind” implies.

 

Not exactly in a parallel vein, when I characterize Fanny Howe as not being the sort one would associate with the form of “poem as essay,” I realize I’m making not one, but at least two separate assumptions, the first about Howe’s writing & work, the second about a genre, or more accurately an intergeneric form. In my mind, for example, the “poem as essay” is something I closely associate with Francis Ponge, especially the great volume, Soap. More recently, Lyn Hejinian has explored this territory – one could even read My Life as representing a special subcategory – both solo, as in Happily, and in collaboration, with her volume Sight, co-written with Leslie Scalapino. Tho I don’t think I’ve mentioned it on the blog just because I read it long before I started this, Sight is easily one of my five most favorite books over the past half dozen years & probably the one I would name first if someone were to ask me to cite one recent volume of poetry that had expanded my conception of what was/is possible in the poem. One could take the “poem as essay” in a lot of different directions, including David Antin’s talking pieces or even some of the work of Alexander Pope. But when I think of it, something midway between Soap & Sight is closer to what I’m expecting.

 

Much, perhaps all, of this has to do with expectation, with what I happen to bring with me to the poem. I have written about the impact of readers’ expectations on the blog previously, as part of the Noah Eli Gordon-Matthew Zapruder difficulty discussion, but it also plays a role that I hadn’t particularly focused on before, one which Rob Halpern Wednesday brought to mind. Halpern makes the case that Aloysius Bertrand both knew & did not know the implications of his amalgam of prose & verse, and that Baudelaire himself was scarcely in a better position. That is, to generalize from these instances: no poet can fully comprehend what the future might find in his/her work.

 

This creates what I think of a Revolution of the Word problem – a poet might intend to change the world with his/her poetic innovations, but seldom if ever is in any position to ensure that subsequent readers happen along, also poets, who extend or deepen these revolutionary impulses. When you think of which poets lived to see the scope of their influence on writing, you quickly begin to realize how very happenstance this turns out to be. A case in point might be Gertrude Stein, who was certainly influential, especially within the context of the Paris scene between wars, but who did not live to see even a fraction of the impact that her work was to have on poetry in the fifty years following her death. For every Melville, Dickinson, Ceravolo or Niedecker, who really don’t get to see their own impact, you have a Pound, Pynchon or Joyce, who clearly do. Even today the social process that surrounds this still seems so capricious that poets in the post-avant traditions rejoice whenever a Christian Bök, Harryette Mullen or Alice Notley has a genuine crossover success.

 

Which takes me back again to the question of expectation. What does the poet expect when he or she sits down to something a little, or more than a little, different from anything that’s been written before? It’s a radically different position from the one faced by poets in the various schools of quietude – those writers are working in order to belong to a heritage conceived as largely continuous & without disruption, they’re writing to belong – doing something different is exactly what they don’t want to be doing.

 

I’ve written before that I think that older poets, such as Ashbery or Creeley, largely are getting a bad rap when younger writers complain that their work has stopped evolving, because I don’t think that their work – or anyone’s, including yours – is about the creation of novelty for its own sake. Rather, I think that they have helped to change poetry in some rather profound ways in order simply to clear the space they needed in order to do their own work. Having cleared that space, it seems churlish & ultimately foolish to think that they need to go out & clear another, then another, like Toll Bros. realtors, perpetually seeking new outer suburbs to colonize for “executive” semi-custom homes.

 

Bertrand & Baudelaire, not unlike Wordsworth & Coleridge in Lyrical Ballads, reflect an historical consciousness that they are in fact clearing just such spaces. Yet what distinguishes the French from the English in this example is that they are also consciously creating something they believe logically shouldn’t exist – Wordsworth’s Preface largely argues the opposite perspective, that their work is more natural, not less. Baudelaire’s dedication of his poems in prose to Arsène Houssaye strikes me as clearly triumphal in tone. He might not have known precisely where this was going to take either him or the poem, but he knew that he had breached some sort of barrier condition & that, once surpassed, there was no real turning back.

 

History shows that it’s easy enough to replicate that triumphal tone without, in fact, doing much of anything in the way of work. Thus, just as every metroplex has its local beat poet penning bardic sentimentalisms, the post avant world suffers through its Stanley Berne & Arlene Zekowski types as well, whose utopian sloganeering is hardly matched by imaginative verse. In a curious way, this sort of revolutionary verse replicates the problem of the poetics of quietude – it wants merely to belong, just with a different crowd.

 

Yet if you read Baudelaire’s dedication, & especially if you contrast it with the “Preface to Lyrical Ballads,” historically almost a parallel phenomenon, I think you can’t escape the question of Baudelaire’s expectations. He knows something is going to come of this, he just doesn’t know quite what.