It was
Kasey Mohammad’s brilliant note, appended as a comment to my September 9 blog, that got me thinking more about the Houlihan question
yesterday. Kasey’s argument is that
you've sketched an axis whose poles are the external
("audience") and the internal ("community"); I wonder
whether there couldn’t be other axes that figure in here as well.
In that
sentence “you” is me and “I” is him (which sounds like it ought to be out of a
John Lennon song somewhere). And I of course agree that things never are that simple. But simply
recasting my terms thus reminded me instead of how much our Official Poets of
late have in fact cast their lot around a series of activities that posits appreciation as the major relationship
towards the poem. Robert Pinsky’s Favorite
Poem Project, Billy Collins’ Poetry
180 and Dana Gioia’s “Art for the Masses” NEA Shakespeare Campaign
all are premised on a few common presumptions, principally that poetry is
written by the very few & consumed largely by a passive audience of
non-writers. That seems to me to be a very specific – and very political –
theory of literature.
One feature
of post-avant poetics, regardless of the tendency, is that readings often occur
in which the audience is at least half composed by other poets. It’s not
unusual for the poet to know a good number of the poets in his or her audience,
even when reading in a new city for the very first time. That’s an
implicit presumption in Frank O’Hara’s “Personism” manifesto & it is what
literally authorizes the use of a form of shorthand in the critical writing,
for example, of Charles Olson. It’s also the feature of post-avant poetics that
is being identified whenever a School of Quietude poet accuses some part of the
post-avant scene of having coterie
poetics.
That’s
always struck me as being a peculiarly Orwellian charge, in that the
presumption of the literacy of an audience – that its members could just as
easily be the writers speaking – is taken as a sign of elitism, whereas the
contrasting model is one of a functionally non-literate (because non-writing)
audience appreciating the work of an anointed few. That Gioia’s anglophilia
takes him out of American literature altogether is almost too deliciously ironic for words.
Those of us
in what Bill Knott recently called the School of Noisiness – I’d use terms more
like vibrancy & life, Bill, just to contrast it with the
embalming elixirs of the Other – really don’t think in terms of audience,
precisely because it posits an unbridgeable gap between those who write &
those who don’t. So, in fact, I would disagree with Kasey about the model of an
axis being posed that has audience at one extreme. Rather I see the universe of
writing, which includes all readers, as a series of constantly shifting
ensembles of tendencies, directions, & what I’d characterize as interest
clusters. And while I do often think about poetry in terms of political
organization, the dynamics of it are most amenable to a Gramscian view of a
poetics of movement & position, more than one of winners & losers. The
short-term gains I posited as one aspect of a position not unlike Houlihan’s
yesterday are real, even if the longer term dynamics – School of Quietude poetry always dissolves in the long
run, overwhelmed by the crazies, the Blakes, Dickinsons & Whitmans – are
likewise inescapable. Periplum, that
Greek term for navigating a constantly reconfiguring universe, is indeed the point.
Ш Ш Ш
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