James Rother is a man after my own heart. It’s his head about which I’m less certain. Rother, a comp lit professor at San Diego State, has for some time written passionate, engaged criticism of modern & contemporary poetry, mostly from a post-neo-formalist perspective. The following 112-word sentence will give you a taste of his manic, even gleeful overwriting – Rother is describing the reactions of Donald Hall & Robert Pack to the sudden – “unbelievable popularity” is Rother’s phrase for it – ascendancy of the poets contained in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry in the early 1960s, as evidenced by the introductions to their response, a revised edition of their own anthology, New Poets of England and America:

 

While Hall attacks British quarterlies and their parochialism with the impatient civility of one loath to be reminded of the ease with which apologists for poetry downshift into “second-best is still best” rhetoric resorted to by used car salesmen, Pack, blistering with a rage that is nearly uncontainable, makes it clear that, had he been allowed to, he would in a New York minute have swapped all six pages of his introduction for a single wordless pop-up conveying, as would an unequivocal semaphore of a catastrophe already visited and intent presently on spreading pain as far and as wide as it can, how palpably horrendous the state of American poetry had become.

 

This sort of bells-and-whistles harrumphing is a pleasure regardless of whether or not the critic gets it right. Rother’s project, interestingly enough, is a reading of the differences that occur between this 1962 edition of the Hall-Pack anthology & its immediate predecessor, The New Poets of England and America, edited by Hall & Pack with Louis Simpson and published just five years earlier. All of this can be found in the current issue of The Contemporary Poetry Review, an online journal devoted to criticism that shares with Rother a desire for the School of Quietude to be louder & just possibly even better & more rigorous. That’s a noble aspiration, I suppose, even if it strikes me as predicated upon more than a few false & blatantly silly assumptions.

 

But Rother’s question in itself is certainly worth exploring. Why would these editors & their publisher release two versions of this same anthology if, in fact, the Allen anthology had not seriously undermined their presumptions about the world? Rother explores the newfound humility with which the second selection deliberately drops the definite article from its title. As I don’t have a copy of either edition – there is a limit to my masochism – I can’t comment directly on his analysis per se. When I was younger & still trying to sort different schools of poetry out in my own mind, I owned a paperback copy of one of them, probably the second. But I recall thinking at the time that the Robert Kelly-Paris Leary Controversy of Poets anthology, with Kelly’s New Americans situated directly alongside Leary’s Old Formalists, decisively closed the door on that debate – half of that anthology is brilliant while the other half reeks of mothballs. I still keep Controversy of Poets close at hand, but that is pretty close to all I really need of the likes of Anthony Hecht, X.J. Kennedy, Galway Kinnell or Richard Wilbur. Not unlike Jonathan Mayhew’s side-by-side comparison of the last two volumes of Best American Poetry in his weblog earlier this year, the conservative tradition wilts the instant it is placed into direct contrast with even the most excessive or indulgent progressive writing.

 

What Rother is tracing here, though, is not simply his version of Us vs. Them, but rather why, in his view, ye Olde Formalism failed to simply brush aside the likes of Gregory Corso on the one hand & why what Rother himself calls the “abortive extremity of the ‘strong measures’ movement some twenty years later” would amount to so very little & similarly prove incapable of putting the world of poetry back together again. Along the way, Rother is rather loose with his characterizations. Here, for example, is a depiction of the New York School:

 

Centered about a nucleus of defrocked abstract expressionists including the just returned from Paris, John Ashbery; Reikian clown Kenneth Koch; fast forward lens adrift in New York, Frank O’Hara; cut-up sonneteer Ted Berrigan; and the Mark Wahlberg of this entourage, Bill Berkson, this unabashedly queer conclave struggled to be reborn from the phoenix ashes of French surrealism and the Lower Manhattan art scene.

 

The “unabashedly queer” Ted Berrigan is an idol to conjure with, for sure; ditto for Kenneth Koch. Yet, after dissing virtually every tendency of poetry active in the 1960s, what Rother arrives at, in tones as irked & fuming with protestation as anything he reserves for the failures of Pack or Hall, is an inescapable – and here I agree with him – conclusion: the New Americans got it right. Pointing in particular to such “chips off the Poundian block” as Zukofsky, Olson & Creeley, Rother concedes that the blasts at the Beats in the fifties that focused on their lifestyle completely missed the mark:

 

Somehow it never occurred to critics and reviewers until very much later—the 1970s, really—that the tablets codifying the new laws of poetic procedure that had descended from Black Mountain in the mid-‘50s not only anticipated a wholly new type of poem that was for the first time in history as uniquely American a creation as the Coke bottle, but provided, within limits, an accurate shadowplay of its lineaments and roulade of externalizing forces.

 

One can only wonder what a new formalist would make of Rother’s argument here, made as it is more or less from, if not exactly within the temple, at least one of the most simpatico publications they are likely to see.* I think it is evident, if only from the tones of hurt & outrage that characterize his writing style, that Rother would prefer a world in which a lively & vibrant new formalism continued the traditions with which he is most comfortable. Yet, in his own view, formalism, so-called, has failed to do so.

 

Where is this going? I can only think that Rother is trying to clear the ground for a new School of Quietude, one that confronts – rather than sits sullenly or silently by – the problematics posed by the presence of all modes of post-avant writing. What that writing might be, I can only wonder. But that someone has decided to address the task head on is, I think, healthy for poetry of all manner & stripe.

 

 

 

                                                                                              

 

* At an earlier stage in its existence, CPR claimed “to encourage criticism that is clear, spacious, and free of academic jargon and politics.” Rother’s piece is guilty of violating every one of these conditions & his work is the better for it.