I thought about stepping into the Joan Houlihan fiasco – especially the exchange betwixt Dale Smith & Bill Knott on the Skanky Possum blog* – but then I just thought “Ick!” And that Jim Behrle had it pretty much accurate as to Houlihan & the broader social phenomena of which she is only a symptom:

 

·         They don’t get it

·         They’re “scared of us”

·         They think we’re all language poets

 

Houlihan herself underscores that last point when she uses Sheila E. Murphy as an example of, as Houlihan calls it, I=N=C=O=H=E=R=E=N=C=E. But while Murphy’s painterly linguistic abstractions might be viewed as extending from, say, Clark Coolidge’s early books, I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen or heard her describe herself as a language poet, nor have I ever seen anyone I would associate with langpo do likewise. The painterly & abstract elements in her work are entirely her own. Houlihan’s calling Murphy’s work a “language poem” simply demonstrates that, in fact, Houlihan doesn’t know how to read post-avant work in any of its varieties & can’t even see the differences when they’re up front & fairly obvious.** This is just a replay of the review ages ago in The Nation that similarly abused Jorie Graham as a language poet. Sheila Murphy & Jorie Graham are both fine writers, but neither is doing anything remotely similar either to language poetry or to each other.

 

There are other questions one might ask about Houlihan’s performance here: Does she, in fact, know what she is doing? Is this really just a cynical attempt to generate tourist traffic around her writing by generating an artificial scandal? Is Houlihan another Bill Bennett, a compulsive gambler who inveighs on the topic of values while practicing a lifestyle in direct conflict with his screeds? The test of this is whether or not Houlihan really believes what she herself is writing or only thinks that her own supporters are too stupid to know the difference. That’s not an attractive choice, but those really are the options. I often wonder this same thing about William Logan, the New Criterion critic whose fulminations are the closest thing that journal has to a comic strip. Nor are these hardly the first instances of this same phenomenon. We could just as easily ask if Norman Podhoretz understood in 1958 that penning “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” would make him a laughing stock forever. What all of these defenders of a beleaguered norm have in common is not just a rhetorical stance – one that has clear enough political implications – but also a perfect historical track record. Dating at least as far back as Henry Theodore Tuckerman & the original School of Quietude of the 1840s, these misfortunates always lose.

 

So whenever one these routines shows up in a new guise & with a new name, the questions one needs to have answered are:

·         Is this person ignorant of history? (Position A)

·         If not, which of the following are their motives?

o        Short-term gain & notoriety? (Position B)

o        A commitment to values so strong that he or she is willing to accept the historical consequences in order to make a stand? (Position C)

I have a lot of respect for that last position, although it is by the far the most rare. I’ve said this before, but I think that the poetry & work of Wendell Berry is perhaps the best example of Position C extant. Positions A & B are far more common.

 

More interesting, because it is so much more complex, is a certain kind of middle stance taken these days by the likes of bloggers Gabriel Gudding & Henry Gould along with fellow traveler Kent Johnson. None of them is ignorant of history but all three seem to share an instinctive suspicion of much of the new, even as they themselves are often practitioners of same. I don’t think any of them would mind gain or notoriety, frankly, short-term or otherwise, but I also sense that they understand the hollowness of its promise, so that rather than being defenders of an Olde Order, they have chosen instead to become the guilty conscience of the New. There is a risk in this, because it is a complex position, and that is that they can be taken for or confused with the likes of a Houlihan. I’m not sure that any of the three manages that risk as deftly as I would like, but at least I will take what any one of them says seriously, even when, on the face of it, some of their critical writing makes me think we must be inhabiting parallel (if not perpendicular) universes.

 

 

 

*67 comments to a single blog!

 

**In the same piece, Houlihan misspells Lyn Hejinian’s first name.