The New Brut: I hadn’t expected my comments on the stereotypical representation of langpo in James Meetze’s Quizmo survey to be read as an attack on the New Brutalism, per se. My comment was aimed more at the implication of one sentence in Meetze’s quiz than it was his poetics. Yet of the more than 8,000 words of commentary this generated on Meetze’s site, the weblogs of others – including (but not limited to) Kasey Mohammad,  Catherine Meng, Laurable, Alli Warren, Jim Berhle, Tim Yu & Chris Sullivan – plus Squawkboxes to Kasey’s site & my own, and a discussion on the PoetryEtc list, one recurrent theme was the trope of boxing:

 

M     Kasey stepping into the ring in his black and white uniform blowing a whistle. The crowds are covering eyes & tossing their popcorn. Barbara Guest comes out holding a sign…. Round 2. The bell’s been rung…. [Meng]

M     (i)n the midst of the warring din…. we have in the one corner the Senior Poet…. In the other, we have the scruffy, sap-filled Byronic spokesman for Poetic Youth. [Mohammad]

M     Do I feel as if he called me out? Of course I do…. [Meetze]

 

So much for my ability to make what I thought was a relatively simple point: the stereotype – langpos are opposed to emotion – irks me and isn’t supported by looking at the work itself. I don’t think that bellicosity improves international relations (W: take note) & certainly don’t think it does much for poetry.

 

I picked Fanny Howe’s Gone as my sample of emotion in langpo not because she was a woman – tho in hindsight I should have seen that objection coming – but because I’d just finished reading the book. I was in fact noodling around with the idea of a second blog on Gone to supplement the one I did on May 20 when that line in Quizmo got my attention. I could have, as easily, chosen the work of Barrett Watten (read Plasma / Paralleles / “X” for example) or Clark Coolidge’s more recent Far Out West. Or the work of Bruce Andrews or Charles Bernstein. The emotions – and to some degree the strategies – are different from book to book, but if you can’t hear/see it in each, then it’s really time to contact your executor. I feel that same way about the Diane Ward piece I cited here as well. You don’t need a unifying narrative or figurative frame for each of those phrases in her work to carry an emotional payload. At least I don’t. To require that kind of frame, really to convert the poem into a dramatic monolog, cryptic or otherwise, doesn’t for me engage emotion. If anything, the process contains & constrains emotion within pre-digested categories. Meetze is right when he points to the importance of tone even though I don’t agree with his ear for the specifics.

 

As for the New Brutalism, I’m really agnostic – I’ve liked the poetry I’ve seen & the people I’ve met who’ve associated themselves with this term, but I haven’t read nearly enough to make generalizations or draw conclusions. As with anything that’s new & emerging, the New Brut’s primary challenge is to differentiate itself from the broad range of other poetries that are currently contending for mindshare. At the moment, I don’t think it’s clear, for example, that NB, so-called, even has differentiation as a goal & Kasey’s admonition against manifestos seems to be implying that he doesn’t think that this is where NB is going.

 

But contrary to what Kasey suggests, I don’t think that langpo’s historic problems with the New York School in the 1970s were necessarily inherent in the poetry. Over the years, there’s been a lot of cross-breeding, a process that continues.

 

I see more positives than negatives to a discussion like this. Kasey’s piece was a reasoned & intelligent essay on the topic of emotion in poetry, generations & positionality. Tim Yu followed with a response that I wish I’d written myself.* Alli’s shorter reply is a work of art in its own right. And James Meetze responded quite credibly by articulating some of what he’s thinking about with regards to his poetry & my own. I actually agree with Meetze on the question of language poetry’s “time” – it’s over. As I first wrote in the intro to In the American Tree in 1984, langpo always was a moment rather than a movement. That is why it is possible to include writers – Howe (either one), Armantrout, Bernadette Mayer, P. Inman, John Mason, Jean Day, Ray Di Palma, Erica Hunt, David Melnick – who are radically dissimilar from one another in terms of their own writing strategies. Indeed, that diversity is one of the key strengths of langpo as a moment. & this no doubt is why I tend to see any definition of langpo that excludes any of the above as really missing the point, or else trying to hijack the phenomenon for some other argument. It’s not historically accurate or intellectually honest to try & read any of these people out of the equation. I suspect that it is just such a narrowing down that Kasey is trying to avoid when he cautions against a New Brutalist manifesto.

 

 

 

 

* I’m not, I should note, convinced that this conundrum can be reduced to a “difference in sensibilities.” For one thing, langpo as a social phenomenon demonstrated as broad a range in sensibility as one might imagine. I certainly can tell, for example, that somebody who would name his weblog The Brutal Kittens places a value on the ironic superimposition of competing frames. My complaint wasn’t that Meetze has a sense of humor, but rather that that one particular quip was predicated on bad data. And has, as Jim Behrle & others have noted, a history all its own.