So what do poets from the school of quietude mean when they say that they’re “more traditional,” if in fact their tradition is no longer, & may even be shorter, than that of post-avant poetries? I think that traditional in this sense means this: always already familiar.

 

What these poetries have in common, with a very few exceptions (virtually all from the vicinity of ellipticism), is consistency of viewpoint, narrative or expository lines that are treated as unproblematic, language that integrates upwards to meta-levels such as character, plot or theme. Most of these poetries are set up to avoid at all costs that which the Russian Formalists called ostranenie & Brecht later characterized as the alienation- or A-effect, the admonition to make it new, make it strange. As Shklovsky put it in Art as Technique back in 1917,

 

The technique of art is to make objects “unfamiliar,” to make forms difficult, to increase the difficulty and length of perception because the process of perception is an aesthetic end in itself and must be prolonged.

 

Post-avant poetries, whether happy-go-lucky Actualism, furrowed brow langpo, or the post-Oulipo linguistic pyrotechnics of a Christian Bök, all have this in common. It was true of Emily Dickinson & William Blake & it’s true today of Jim Behrle & Mary Burger. To the school of quietude, however, this approach is virtually the Sign of the Beast.

 

Thus Daisy Fried characterized post-avant poetics as “anti-coherency” when in fact this tendency has a consistently more rigorous approach to the question of coherence than does its opposite, which simply presumes it. Chris Lott characterizes the Other as

 

indicative of a sense that only what is new and experimental (excuse my lack of precision here, but I think the idea is clear enough) can be any good.

 

Lott’s ability to insert clarity & precision as though they were the opposites of new and experimental is an especially adept touch.

 

Of Noah Eli Gordon’s exclusion from an anti-war reading in Amherst,  Matthew Zapruder wrote,

 

I guess it just comes down to whether or not one is willing to grant that the notion of “difficulty” has any place at all in poetry. That’s an interesting discussion, and one worth having here and elsewhere. But in this particular case, right or wrong, the organizers of that reading in good faith seem to believe in that distinction, and genuinely thought that Noah’s poem was too difficult to work effectively in that situation.

 

Zapruder’s characterization of the situation is most compelling, precisely because what he finds troubling is exactly that which Shklovsky – whose influence on linguistics through Roman Jacobson &, through Jacobson, the Prague School of Linguistics & later the New School for Social Research, on everything from New Criticism through Structuralism, was profound – identifies as the fundamental dynamic of art. In short, the problem that the organizers’ of that particular reading had with Gordon’s poetry was that it was poetry. They wanted to ensure an experience of something else altogether.

 

Lott’s conception of poetry as a pure spectrum, with “experimentation” at one end & maybe the old new formalism at the other, is a world without history. His music analogy presumes that one could switch seamlessly between poets the way one might between the jazz of John Zorn, the country music of Dolly Parton, Eminmem’s white boy rap & some arias from Tosca by Placido Domingo. In point of fact, if you really appreciate David Pavelich’s poetry, the verse of Philip Levine is going to appear bloated & full of posturing, brimming with bad faith & false consciousness. Ray Carver won’t fare a whole lot better, though Bob Hass & Marie Ponsot will. I’ve argued before & will happily do so again that the general aesthetics of the school of quietude are so ass backwards that whenever somebody from that context does write well, they virtually have to be a genius. They really are making a silk purse out of a sow’s ear & all the more power to them for that.

 

But it has been the school of quietude’s near stranglehold on certain economic institutions, particularly of the small press scene that poses as trade publishing in America, secondarily of a number of the awards programs, finally of all too many university curricula, that transforms these antimodernists from merely being the verse equivalent of the Harlequin novel into something more heavy handed & sinister. The requirement of kitsch that is at the heart of the poetry programs of The Atlantic, the New Yorker, The Nation & like-minded organizations is one thing. But the school of quietude’s insistence that this “part of the spectrum” then be taken seriously reminds me of something far more like the garden party scene in The Manchurian Candidate than anything else. Sgt. Raymond Shaw (Laurence Harvey) is not a good model for a critical reader, but he has the school of quietude routine down pat. The behavior that Ange Mlinko complained of on Thursday, which has been documented so many times that it goes beyond the ridiculous – begin with Jed Rasula’s The American Poetry Wax Museum & proceed to Hank Lazer’s Opposing Poetries, especially vol. one – has all the characteristics of cultural genocide. What is curious is that Lott seems surprised that people have emotions about this sort of behavior.

 

Finally, the school of quietude claiming any heritage from the likes of Emily Dickinson & Walt Whitman is not merely disingenuous & silly, it raises to the level of consciousness just what these antimodernists would most like to forget – that only period specialists in the academy still read the likes of Whittier, Holmes, Bryant, Sidney Lanier & James Russell Lowell, their real tradition. How exactly do these poets imagine that their fate will be any different?