For the past couple of days, ever since I got Chris Lott’s email, I’ve been drafting & redrafting a response. I haven’t been happy with any of them.

 

I’m not unsympathetic with Lott’s quandary. Certainly not by comparison with Ange Mlinko yesterday. It’s apparent to anybody who reads Lott’s blog that he’s serious, well intentioned & open to a wider than usual range of writing. I believe him completely when he writes that

 

it is downright disheartening to feel as if that which one loves is not just being supplemented by another kind of beauty, but being downright beset as a relic of tradition that is holding the art back.

 

Lott’s desire for a completely ecumenical approach to poetry in which one might read David Pavelich, then Philip Levine, Raymond Carver, then Annie Finch, echoes at one level what Juliana Spahr wrote here last November: 

 

Yet, now the note of sadness, what has happened is a peculiar myopia. I say this over and over, but one of the strangest, saddest?, things that is the result of this wealth is not that it is hard for readers, but that so few of these poetries talk to each other. So language poets and Nation language / Caribbean poets and pidgin / Bamboo Ridge poets and Scots poets and etc. all have these arguments against standard English. They are different arguments but they meet in various ways. And yet the poets so rarely meet in journals, in readings, at parties. What a lost opportunity.

 

Yet there are two aspects of Lott’s complaint that strike me as troubling. One is its assumption that one poetry is “more traditional” than another – Lott’s problem being that this is taken by some post-avant poets as a pejorative. Rereading the same exchange with Daisy Fried from December 3 that Lott cites, I realize that she makes this same equation. I don’t buy it.

 

In the U.S., at least, post-avant poets can trace their heritage back to Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman & often to the likes of Blake, the young Wordsworth, or Aloysius Bertrand. To go back as far, most school of quietude poets would have to turn Tennyson, the core Romantics and the later work of Wordsworth. Both broad traditions in American verse reflect significant influences from foreign poetries, albeit different poets & aspects. The most visible difference in terms of literary heritage between the two tendencies is that the schools of quietude (SoQ) are more apt to reflect an interest in certain traditions from the British Isles – and, indeed, there is a wave of conservative British & Irish poets who have done quite well for themselves in the U.S., job & publication-wise, of late, taking spots that would otherwise have gone to home-grown SoQ poets.

 

I’m more intrigued at the idea that one often gets from school of quietude poets that their work also extends back in American letters to Dickinson or Whitman, when their own poetry so often appears to have been written at least one century earlier than either of these masters. One way to fully appreciate just how radical Dickinson is as a poet, even within the post-avant framework, is to read Michael Magee’s brilliant ongoing work, My Angie Dickinson, which appropriates Emily’s forms for a contemporary content. The way I read this work is that Magee is doing the same sort of “parallelogram” with Dickinson’s poems that Meredith Quartermain does with Robin Blaser’s in Wanders. It’s an amazing & still evolving project – I know I’m not the first to have noticed – & confirms my impression that E.D. would never get into print in Prairie Schooner, Poetry, The Atlantic, The New York or even The Nation, were she alive today. Indeed, she wouldn’t be allowed to participate in anti-war readings put on at the campuses around her own hometown of Amherst.

 

So I think there are two things occurring when poets claim that one tendency is “more traditional” than another. The first is a certain amount of obfuscation. School of Quietude poetry is not traditional in the sense of fitting into that heritage, but rather extending from a different literary narrative altogether, one that was for so many decades opposed to precisely such writing: Whittier, Holmes, Bryant, Sidney Lanier & James Russell Lowell, for starters.

 

“Traditional” in the way it’s used by SoQ poets doesn’t in fact mean working within a tradition. Rather, it’s a stance toward the role of change within art that is most often being staked out by such a term. Change is not easy for anyone but in the SoQ world, it’s positively excruciating. Remember how dramatic the writing of the young Brahmins in the 1950s & ‘60s who revolted – Bly, Merwin, Plath, Rich, in particular – was perceived to have been. Adrienne Rich, for example, chose to publish the title poem of her breakthrough Diving into the Wreck in Clayton Eshleman’s journal Caterpillar, not because Eshleman has ever been considered a paragon of feminist politics, but because the alternatives available to her at the time were so very few.

 

Case in point: David Ossman, better known these days for his work as part of the Firesign Theatre, published a collection of interviews in 1963 entitled The Sullen Art, taken from a series of WBAI radio interviews he had done in 1960-61. In his introduction, Ossman quotes from Gilbert Sorrentino that “the new poets are not a bunch of illiterate, barbaric, slightly criminal types,”  & addresses the issue of the two tendencies in American writing:

 

It would be unfortunate, however, to consider these writers members of a single “avant-garde” clique. They are two individual and independent to be taken for an organized junta in opposition to what has been variously called “The Academy” and “The Establishment.” Not only have many of them been teachers, but their books, published and in preparation, total some 60 volumes. It is too bad that American poetry today appears to fall into two distinct camps.

 

Ossman’s gathering of 14 anti-establishmentarians – 13 men & Denise Levertov – include not only Rexroth, Creeley, Ginsberg, Dorn, LeRoi Jones, Paul Blackburn, Robert Kelly, Jerry Rothenberg, Gilbert Sorrentino & Paul Carroll, but also John Logan, W.S. Merwin & Robert Bly!! The back cover’s copy isn’t kidding when it suggests that it’s erroneous to characterize these new poets as “beat.”*

 

The idea of Logan, Merwin & Bly as aesthetic rebels is laughable today. Yet in the context of the world in which they first arose as poets over 40 years ago, a universe in which Aiken, MacLeish, Lowell, Jarrell & the New Critics dominated the SoQ landscape, it was at least plausible to imagine them as closer to the New Americans than really was the case. Indeed, Bly, James Wright, Robert Kelly & Jerome Rothenberg even collaborated for awhile around the concept of a “deep image” poetics, a new tendency that dissolved as quickly as it became apparent just how radically dissimilar their own poetries & programs really were.

 

In reality, Bly, Merwin & the other rebel Brahmins were little more than a reaction formation created by the excitement of the New American Poetry – their recognition was that, in order to save the school of quietude, they had to change it. This they did mostly by importing the verse of the SoQ’s spiritual & literary cousins from Europe, either through translation or imitation. Thus was airport gate surrealism born. That the new formalists would show up a scant generation later to attempt to take back the broader direction of the School of Quietude demonstrates just how much inertia there was & is in the SoQ. The recent importing of the airport gate poets themselves suggests that this has not been a successful strategy & that folks are now hoping that such transplants will move this tendency beyond its current “on life-support” status.

 

I said that there were two aspects to Lott’s plahn that bothered me. I’ll get to the other tomorrow.

 

 

 

 

* Almost as puzzling today as the presence of Bly, Merwin & Logan in Ossman’s anthology is the absence of any New York School poets in a series taped & broadcast in New York City.