When I published a negative review of Another South, I expected to hear back from its editor, Bill Lavender. I didn’t get anything until this past weekend, but it’s evident that Bill used the time well to marshal his arguments.

 

An open letter to Ron Silliman regarding Another South:

I expected Another South to provoke some criticism when it came out. Much of it I have enjoyed. I am rather proud, for example, to have edited what is to my knowledge the only book ever to receive a negative review in the Books section of The Times Picayune. The reviewer there, Sonny Williams, was the first to voice one of the criticisms I had anticipated from the southern, and indeed the northern, establishment:

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Despite the claims of being avant-garde, however, this type of writing has been going on for some time and is connected with the rise of the academic critical theory of the '60s. L-A-N-G-U-A-G-E poetry, the aesthetic predecessor of "Another South," has been around for 30 years....

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For those of us who actually know what Language poetry is, of course, this analysis is quite off the mark, especially since this paragraph is specifically an elucidation of one of Joel Dailey’s poems. Joel’s work comes out of the Objectivist and New York School traditions, with scarcely a nod to Language. Likewise, the relations of the rest of the work in this anthology to the Language movement are at the very least complicated, sometimes complimentary, sometimes contradictory, and sometimes there is no relation at all. One might wonder, for example, how anyone could call Language the “aesthetic predecessor” of Andy Young or Lorenzo Thomas. Still, I anticipated this very criticism because for some in the broad community of poetry Language is simply the symbol for everything that “doesn’t make sense.” It’s remarkable how many critics use the term without having any knowledge whatsoever of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E magazine or anthology.

Another criticism I expected Another South to receive at the pens of “establishment” or “conservative” critics is of this variety:

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...Jake Berry’s excerpt from the third volume of his ongoing longpoem Brambu Drezi, the first lines of which read:

 

      In the clutch of blind embryo

       madness is a tongue robbing death

       in the matted black hair of darkness

 

That’s about as dense a cluster of overwriting & cliché as I’ve come across in a long time.

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Now “overwriting & cliché” are tried and true terms of the MFA workshop and the editorial back rooms of magazines like The New Yorker. This is the sort of statement I would expect to see in Georgia Review, or New England Review, or one of the many journals of that ilk. What’s a little surprising to me is that this was written by you and posted on your blog (http://ronsilliman.blogspot.com/-- September 25 and 26, 03).

You go on to argue:

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How contrast this against the likes of a poem like “Flash Point”:

 

This useless clairvoyance

Is embarrassing

What good is it to know

The motives behind manners

 

And worse, the so what stares

Of those upon whom you manage

To inflict this wisdom

 

There is more space

Awaiting exploration

More clouds of gas

That need their picture took

 

Lorenzo Thomas has more going on in eleven lines than Berry does in seven pages. Think for a moment of the frame set up by the terms useless & embarrassing in the first two lines & how each reacts off a term such as clairvoyance. Then think back to madness is a tongue robbing death. The most generous possible reading of that latter line is one-dimensional to the point of being flatline.

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Obviously there is much to be admired in Lorenzo’s work, but why give this thorough and complimentary reading to an eleven-line poem and mention only three lines of Jake’s seven pages, if these two works are to be the crux of your comparison? You give “Flash Point” the reading it deserves, but Brambu Drezi is dismissed as we might expect it to be in Southern Review. Jake Berry obviously needs to be read against a surrealist tradition, against Cendrars or Breton or Frank Stanford’s long poems, not the English tradition of concision and subtle wordplay, like Dickinson. Comparing these two poems is a bit like calling Joel Dailey a Language poet, because the comparison simply doesn’t tell us anything. Why not read Jake against Cendrars? No doubt he could still be framed to come up lacking, but at least he would have been compared to a poet whose work bears at least a passing formal resemblance to his own. Or read him against Andy Young, later in the anthology, who like Jake draws upon the southern folk oracular tradition. Or indeed read him against Hank Lazer’s extensive reading of Brambu Drezi in his essay. Any of these options are ways into the text that could offer critiques of real value, whatever the polemic, but the comparison to Lorenzo’s poem simply makes no sense.

One of the things I was trying to do in this anthology was present a collection that was not selected according to the criteria that we normally see these days in anthologies of southern lit, like the recent Norton. As I said in my introduction:

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...I chose to invite only writers currently living in the South.... According to the standard “academic” definitions of Southern Lit., the South isn’t a place, but a genre. Instead of physical location the emphasis has been on heritage, and this emphasis, seen as an editorial rule and as an element of the writing itself, has been the most profound way the mythic southern identity has been preserved. (xii)

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My goal in the work was to present a snapshot, as it were, of work outside the southern academic canon that was being produced in the geographic region at a particular time, specifically 2000-2001. I thought I made this clear in the introduction, and for that reason I was surprised that you introduced the topic by saying:

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It was John High, poet & one-time editor of Five Fingers Review, who explained to me that it was his own Southern heritage that had first attracted him to Russian writing & translation. “We both understand failed civilizations,” were John’s more or less exact words, equating the collapse of Czarist Russia – this was before the later collapse of the Soviet one – with the South’s defeat in the Civil War.

 

That’s only one of several frames that one might apply to this collection of 34 post-avant poets.

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This image of the South as a society formed from the collapse of a mercantile slave economy and nostalgia for bourgeois gentility is exactly the sort of clichéd “frame” I was trying to avoid. I’m heartened that you seem to think I failed in assembling the sort of regional unity that could be properly haunted by imagery from Gone With the Wind or Dr. Zhivago, but disheartened (and frankly mystified) by your framing this accomplishment as a failure. Was I supposed to follow the stereotype and seek out poems of faded glory? Perhaps the Civil War does still lurk among us southerners in subtle, almost magical ways, causing, every so often, some wandering soul to pause and gaze wistfully at the peeling facade of an old mansion in New Orleans or Atlanta, but the issue, at least for me, is not the ruminations of the nostalgic soul— it is rather the condescension with which the image of the hypothetical southern individual has been framed. The “South’s defeat in the Civil War” may be “only one of several frames” possible, but it is the only one mentioned here. What are some of the others? Contemporary urban landscape, wrongly stereotyped as “agrarian”? Elsewhere you note:

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Further, over half [the contributors] live in exactly two metropolitan areas – New Orleans & Atlanta – suggesting that the South is just as scene-centric as the rest of the nation. & suggesting that the “agrarian” framework has little to do with what this volume rather unabashedly calls “Experimental” writing.

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Where did this terminology come from? I don’t even understand why “agrarian” is in quotes, unless you mean to indicate its value as cliché. As I say in my introduction, “No doubt the notion of the South as a predominantly rural region was always formed more of prejudice than fact, but it is at best a century or more out-of-date.” What gave you the idea we’re posing an agrarian framework? Again, I appreciate that you acknowledge our failure to re-present the stereotype, but I am genuinely baffled that as enlightened a reader as you are criticizing us for it. I’m not trying to convince you to “like” Jake Berry or anyone else in the book, but if you’re going to critique it, critique what we’ve done and not the cliché of what is usually done.

As to the use of the term “experimental,” I agree that the term has been overused and overdebated until it has become all but trite. Still, it has not been completely drained of meaning. Would, for example, terms like “avant garde” or “outsider” or “post-avant” be more precise, or aren’t they subject to the same fuzzy polemical shifts as “experimental” or any other term we use to reference a field of writing? In the public and academic milieu of American poetry, “experimental” has a social/political connotation that has nothing to do with lab coats or indeed the OED, and I think that connotation does indeed apply to much of the work in this book. Again as I said in my intro:

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It may be that “experimental” means something different in the South than in the rest of the USA (not to mention the world), because the South has its unique sets of boundaries, stereotypes, and editorial proscriptions, and one of these boundaries might be the notion of regionalism itself. (xi)

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I don’t take issue with your questioning my use of this terminology. I question it myself. That’s why I devote a quarter of my introduction to defining or defending it-- hardly the stance of someone who is “unabashed.” You make no reference, however, to my comments on this subject, nor to Hank’s in his essay. Really, isn’t it you who uses the term unabashedly when you say, elsewhere in the blog, that “there is nothing experimental” in the book? Does no one else have the right to use the term with its over-generalized, vernacular meaning? Is it now the sole property of Language poets?

 

Another South isn’t a perfect anthology, by any means. Productive criticism or engagement might be directed along any of several avenues-- the question of what actually constitutes a region, for example, and how regional anthological groupings have been used, especially in the South but in other areas also, to promote various political and literary agendas. It continues to amaze me how deeply the southern caricature has been ingrained by this process.

 

In a way I feel I have been forced to staunchly defend something that raises more questions, for me as much anyone, than answers. The text-milieu of contemporary southern writing, in terms of both poetics and editorial practice, is quite complex, and quick dismissal is not going to help us investigate either the writing or the place. What would probably be more fruitful, and what I and I’m sure others would welcome, would be to engage a discourse based on reading and inquiry rather than summary judgment.

 

 

Bill Lavender

bill@lavenderink.org