The latest slander against langpo can be found in the “New Brutalism” quiz’ first question:

 

“You align your poetics more toward:

 

L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E. You are more concerned with theory than emotion.”

 

That’s just one option among six, with a fair amount of tongue-in-cheek. But still….

 

How does one square this attempt at humor against a book like Fanny Howe’s Gone, as deeply felt, even wrenching, a book of poems as has been written. I suppose that this may be what enables some folks to say, “Well, Howe’s not really a langpo.” But basically, that’s just another deployment of the same stereotype. Because Fanny Howe has been part & parcel of this phenomenon for thirty years & has had a profound impact on virtually all of its practitioners, she doesn’t count because she doesn’t fit some preconceived model. The problem, obviously, is not with Fanny, but the model.

 

The argument that language poetry is without emotion is not unlike the theory one sometimes hears from Eastern transplants to California to the effect that “the west has no seasons.” It takes folks who grew up with blizzards & 90 percent summer humidity & the lockstep turning of the leaves in the second & third weeks of October a few years to appreciate the subtle shadings of western seasons. But eventually they do.

 

Similarly, langpo has just as much emotion as any other poetry – whether your alternative be boozy & weepy Brahmin confessionalist, ever so chipper NY school gen whatever, or the somber poetics of witness all bound & gagged. All tendencies of poetry have exactly the same quotient of emotion – it’s present at all points in how the poet feels about his/her work as he/she works & as we read. Whether you call that 100% emotion or null emotion is almost beside the point. Where there’s ink, there are feelings.

 

The quiz makes me wonder what the questioner imagines an emotion in print to be. At a structural level, emotion is simply a predictable response to any device that diverts the reader’s attention away from linguistic & syntactic integration over to a metadiscourse, an inferred figure or context. We “believe” in the figure, we “feel” their pain. Or joy – whatever. It is of course a manipulation – all writing entails manipulation – one in which the reader does (or does not) willingly partake. What makes poetry (regardless of variant) different, for example, from the romance novel is that its historic mandate has been to be conscious of its effects, sharing that consciousness with readers. This is how you can have a writer like Jack Spicer, who both seems completely suspicious of his emotions while being so out there with them at all points. “Bang, snap, crack. They will never know what hit them.” If you can’t hear the hopelessness in that line, it’s time to notify your executor.

 

The author of the New Brutalist quiz appears to be Jim Meetze, a poet I know only from his blog, “The Brutal Kittens.” Interestingly enough, Jim Meetze also happens to be a possible “outcome” of the quiz (tho not if you select that langpo option above – go for lyric, Rimbaud, lyric, fashion sense & lovers, in that order). What we read after his name may not be “tougher than blog,” but it certainly is more coy:

 

You are James Meetze. You are very suave & are a dashingly good dresser. You strongly desire to bring emotion back into "innovative" poetry, yet you disdain pure confessionalism. You are the spokesperson for The New Brutalism and behind that charming smile and those shiny western shirt snaps, you are secretly planning world domination. You love kittens, which shows your true sensitive side. Your poems make people weep.

 

A lot of what flows from that paragraph depends on just how much irony one assigns to various elements. It could be read straight and it could entirely satirical. My own reading is that it’s both, at once. This ambivalence – it’s really a form of optimism, however disguised – may or may not be a feature of New Brutalism, but historically it’s common enough for young poets of any stripe. But life is somewhat like a chess game. Each sentence written may open up new possibilities, but it also inevitably closes many more. A writer, such as Fanny Howe, who can arrive at the high side of 50 with a volume that could be characterized as a suite of love poems filled with despair, demonstrates what is possible through a very long & rigorous process. It’s not a place one can skip to just through self-canceling tropes.

 

Thus if I read the poem I quoted here on May 20, or something even so simple as this –

 

Let it snow unless it is heaven

 

Let it snow

what it is itself that waterstuff

 

as it covers the silver

winter dinner bell

 

– I see intense emotion, generated in the above instance by how the straightforward command “Let it snow” is turned each time, first within a qualification & second leading to this long final phrase (three consecutive adjectives all with a short “i” followed by two consonants & a terminal “er”), bell positively ringing by sonic contrast with all that has led up to it. It’s more complicated, in fact, than I’m making it sound here – who after all can issue such a command? – but my point is that the plainest description, snow covering a single object, can itself be constructed to convey as much emotion as anyone could imagine because Fanny Howe knows what she is doing.

 

Let’s look briefly at a very different kind of language poet, Diane Ward:

 

He mingles with them smirks with them grins with them

disdains them tarnishes them merges them

brightens for them agrees for them dampens for them

keeps nothing in them has nothing in them pats nothing in them

taps on them quickly cues them quickly thrives on them quickly

encourages before them despises before them alienates before them

grows to them releases to them saves to them

forecasts along with them foreshadows along with them caresses along with them

bounds up to them finishes up to them doubles up to them

Here Ward varies grammatical structures line by line so that we can hear their impact, focused again & again on what we envision within that chameleon signifier, them. While this piece is playful in a way that Howe’s poems in Gone are not, the emotional component of the language is at all points perceptible, even as Ward varies the meaning of emotion moment by moment. If anything, it’s closer to the spirit of gaming & logic of perpetual contradiction that characterizes Meetze’s self-portrait. Is this the point where New Brutalism & langpo merge? Or is it merely that Ward was herself in her twenties when she wrote this work. You can find the poem in a book I would recommend to anyone, and especially to New Brutalists. The title of this 1979 volume, which Ward appropriated from John Dewey (& which I hope Jim Meetze will appreciate), is Theory of Emotion.