I normally am sitting down when I read anything online, so I must have looked a little awkward jumping for joy at The Skeptic John Erhardt’s response to my inclusion of Bob Grenier’s Sentences in my list of essential titles the other day. My knees hit the underside of the keyboard tray. Well, not my knees but my quadricep muscles, such as they are. But you get the point.

 

John’s comment, which is good natured & straightforward, is short enough to quote here in its entirety:

 

Am I missing something? Did Silliman honestly praise a two word poem yesterday, and both of those words were "Joe"?

 

And did he list it as part of an "essential" text?

 

I literally almost choked on my food as he wrote a paragraph about what "Joe / Joe" makes us rethink. I'm not saying it's stupid or lazy -- honestly, if I had to choose someone to defend a poem with the text of "Joe / Joe" I'd choose Ron.

 

The "Joe/ Joe" analysis isn't comparative, by any means. But I find it interesting that Ron himself (and others) can dismiss entire groups of opposition poetries in one gesture of macro-analysis (School of Quietude, for example) and yet insist that their own brand of poetry be examined from a micro perspective.

 

Outside of correcting his misspelling of the word entire, and removing a hyperlink to this very page, that’s the comment as published. I laughed at his second sentence, as I suspect everyone else will also. As a wry jab, it’s so very close to the kinds of complaints that one once heard from some art critics towards the work of Jackson Pollock or Mark Rothko or Ad Reinhardt or even Andy Warhol’s soup cans and Brillo boxes that it gave me a thrill. I have apparently proposed as “essential” — and I won’t deny this — a poem so very simple that Erhardt nearly required the Heimlich maneuver.

 

Which allows me here to give John a good squeeze, at least metaphorically, and to say, loudly, “Yes, exactly! But, but, but….” I did indeed praise a poem that is so very simple as to call into question precisely the literary values implicit in John’s rhetorical question. Now I’ve done this sort of thing before, and with Grenier’s Sentences to boot, although usually my example tends to be a different poem,

 

thumpa

 

thumpa

 

thumpa

 

thump*

 

But functionally the same principle applies for both works — Grenier’s “miniatures” are miniature only in the sense that Pollock’s drip paintings are only paint drippings or Rothko’s works, painted in fact very rapidly, might be thought of as sketches, or Cage’s 4’33” is only silence. What in fact occurs is an inversion of perspective common to any materials-centered work of art in which the reader / viewer / listener is forced to step away from all the preconceptions brought to the situation and actually see / hear / read what is there. It may be a comment on the conservative nature of literature, or perhaps just poetry, as a social institution that it took until 1975 to arrive at a space that had been achieved for painting a quarter century earlier, but this same recognition also positions Grenier’s level of accomplishment accurately. Grenier establishes a completely different mode of reading as central to the act of literature in much the same way that Cage transforms the act of listening for music — so, for example, you hear not only the note, but also the bow pulling across the string. And while one can, in both Grenier & Cage, trace the long history throughout the course of the art through which this moment is reached — and while this moment, while transformative, is in no sense teleological (i.e. it won’t tell us what we as artists will need to do 30, 50 or 300 years from now) — it unquestionably changes the game completely. That’s why Grenier’s Sentences was on my list and not, say, Life Studies or Howl or even The Cantos, even though each represents a moment without which Sentences could never have existed.

 

Now come the but, but, buts…. First, and this is the most curious one from my perspective, John’s rhetorical question — “Did Silliman honestly praise a two word poem yesterday, and both of those words were "Joe"? — has to be answered negatively, not because I didn’t praise the poem, but because neither of the words were “Joe.”  They were, and are, “JOE,” and the distinction is not trivial. The capitalization is as much a critical part of the writing here as its absence is from this other work I’ll choose to call ”thumpa.” It is the graphic ambiguity that historically attaches to the capitalized letters, to capitalization itself, that is at the heart of this work. Do we read it as two lines, as all body text, in which the word thus is understood as graphically “shouted,” and rhyme can be said to exist, or do we read it as title & text, which yields instead a completely different reading, one in which the body text is a very dry bit of humor joking back at the title. The poem raises & challenges the status of a title as no other work I have ever read manages to do, this curious act of language that stands outside and above the body text of the work itself. What if Joyce’s Ulysses were named instead Bloomsday, or whatever? Or Eliot had preserved his original He Do the Police in Different Voices rather than calling it The Waste Land.

 

In misreading every single word of Grenier’s text, John at least is in keeping with the tradition that still calls that last poem The Wasteland, not unlike the critics who fail to notice the quotation marks about Zukofsky’s “A” or folks who put equal signs betwixt letters when they’re referring to language poetry. So the answer to John’s first question has to be, Yes, you are missing something if you manage to get every word wrong in a two-word poem. And the whole of literature is what falls into that distinction.

 

My second but lies in the fanciful leap that John then makes from my reading of Grenier’s poem to

 

But I find it interesting that Ron himself (and others) can dismiss entire groups of opposition poetries in one gesture of macro-analysis (School of Quietude, for example) and yet insist that their own brand of poetry be examined from a micro perspective

 

when in fact I don’t think that I dismiss entire groups of opposition poetry in one gesture of macro-analysis. And School of Quietude (SoQ) is a perfect example. I use, I hope, that term descriptively rather than derisively. I use it in part because a primary strategy of the SoQ historically has been to be invisible to itself, only to name itself in terms of its segments — confessionalism, new formalism, open poetry, leaping poetry, etc. — or in such vague terms, such as mainstream poetry, as to be meaningless. Better by far might have been the distinction, which was proposed briefly in the 1960s by Mr. Lowell himself, between raw (i.e. New American) and cooked (i.e. SoQ), except that so much of the theoretically raw poetry — Larry Eigner as well as Robert Duncan, Jimmy Schuyler as well as Charles Olson, Jack Spicer as well as John Ashbery — is, performatively, far more cooked than the so-called cooked poetry, a lot of which might better have been referred to as a form of fast food, recognizable forms for people who don’t want to wait to see what the real form of the poem is.

 

I’ve written in this blog & elsewhere of the SoQ poets whose work I genuinely admire & enjoy, from Wendell Berry & Jack Gilbert or Paul Muldoon & Daisy Fried, to Bob Hass & Alan Dugan, George Starbuck & John Logan, Annie Finch & Thom Gunn. And I am perfectly willing to concede that if I perform the sort of close reading I did here on these Grenier poems on post-avant poetry in general — which on principle I think we should all do — I will find 95 percent of it wanting. However, my general perception is that I will find something much closer to 99 percent (or higher — the “five nines” theory of 99.999 does indeed beckon) equally lacking if I apply these same standards to the School o’ Quietude. And if I stack the two traditions against one another, five percent of one totally overwhelms the one percent (or less) of the other, which will tell you about my aesthetic choices, including, for example, why I make them.

 

After all, like that former Lowell student Robert Grenier, this one-time student of Jack Gilbert started off in a fairly quiet place — I was able to publish in Poetry, TriQuarterly, Poetry Northwest & Southern Review within three years of starting to write seriously in the 1960s not because I was good but because their editors had no standards beyond “it ought to look familiar.” Ought to look familiar is not good enough for me.

 

It is a classic hegemon position to have no name for whatever it is one is doing, but very specific names for everything else you want to mark as different. Thus there is Poetry Magazine, not Traditional Poetry Magazine. And there absolutely have been, and no doubt will continue to be, those who act as though there continues to be poetry and language poetry or poetry and avant-garde poetry or poetry and postmodern poetry, or however they imagine to configure it. But if the question is reversed — in the same way that you have to reverse your idea of listening when confronted with 4’33” or stand facing a Pollock canvas up close for the first time — and we ask instead what is it that connects all these modes of traditional or mainstream poetries, then Edgar Allen Poe’s joke in response to Henry Theodore Tuckerman 160 years ago seems at least a place to begin.** There is poetry, I want to argue, and there is the School of Quietude. Let’s try it that way for the next few hundred years.

 

So, John, take a deep breath. If you really want to see what’s missing, all you have to do is L¤¤K.

 

 

 

 

 

* In “The Chinese Notebook,” § 192, in The Age of Huts, and in an untitled interview with Manuel Brito in Brito’s A Suite of Poetic Voices: Interviews with Contemporary American Poets.

 

** Here I think it is clear that a failing of the entire avant-garde tradition has been one of not taking the SoQ seriously enough, of simply presuming, for example, that Billy Collins is just a postmodern Ogden Nash, when in fact he’s much worse. It may require a masochistic personality to attempt the project, but the history of the mainstream as hegemon has yet to be written for poetry. One place to begin, I would argue, might be with a deliberately ambiguous figure and then — Cary Nelson-like — branch out from there in a radial fashion. The ideal ambiguous figures for me would be two editors, one of The Dial, Marianne Moore, the other of The New York Times Book Review, Harvey Shapiro.