Thanks for your blog! I'm an MFA student (a disgruntled grateful one) who has been reading embarrassingly voraciously to catch up with the work that I should have been studying.... Any suggestions? Any suggestions for a student who would like to be a holistic/ aesthetic/ craft-driven/ inspirational/ teacher? Is there a world in academic for a dissident of two sorts? If nothing else, I'd like a brief list of good reads.... Some I'm starting to live with already (the anthologies you mention).
I do have a theory – that word may be too overblown for it, a hunch – about how to proceed with the “catching up” process. It is, of course, something we all have to do at some point in our lives (and it requires sort of a continuing vigilance – one of the curious discoveries of my blog has been how little I had carefully read of the younger poets who are out there now – those between the ages of 30 & 40, let alone those who are still in their 20s – so one consequence of my blog has been that it’s become a mechanism for me to catch up & try & keep up myself).
At one level, I think that the best place to begin is anywhere you sense a direct connection with someone’s poetry – in my own life that was William Carlos Williams’ The Desert Music, but I don’t think it matters hardly at all what the triggering text is. Whatever turned you onto poetry in the first place. Start there. Then read around that text until you have some sense not just of that author, but that author’s context. Who was William Carlos Williams? At what point in his career did he write that poem & that book? Who were his friends? Who was out there who was not his friend? What were the literary influences that he & his friends were responding to? What were they reacting against? And which poets responded to Williams & his friends? Can you trace a path of poetry between this trigger text & your own life, your own generation?
What I’m recommending is a concentric circle approach to mapping out poetry. Start with a text & work outward in all directions. If you begin with Williams, as I did, it will take you inevitably to Whitman & Wordsworth & Blake in one direction as well as to Lee Ann Brown & Joseph Torra in the other, with ever so many in between.
If what I’m calling your trigger text falls anywhere outside of the School of Quietude, you will sooner or later come upon Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, the great poetry anthology of the 1960s. It’s a particularly important text, not only for the impact it had on several successive generations of poets, but because it uniquely gathers together most of the different post-avant traditions of that time in a manner that is articulate. This is not to say that the book is perfect – those aren’t my favorite texts by Robert Duncan or Jack Spicer, say, and the “SF Renaissance” section is largely a fiction imposed by the form of the book itself – but because it represents perhaps the last moment in time when the various post-avant poetries were sufficiently few enough & small enough in terms of absolute population that one could attempt to define the world – at least the world of U.S. poetry – in a single book.
I would try to follow out those different traditions more or less to the present. You will find, I think, that the New York School has been a phenomenon of constantly renewing resources & energy, which is why people joke about NY School generation 17 or whatever. The Black Mountain poets continue to be a very vibrant strain into the 1970s, but then it becomes far less clear what a continuing version of that tradition might look like. This isn’t an accident. I think that a certain slice of the early energy that was associated with language poetry during the ‘70s was something that ten years earlier might well have gravitated toward the Black Mountaineers. (But because it didn’t, langpo was free to borrow from everyone.) The SF Renaissance depicted in the Allen anthology dissolves almost instantly – because it never really existed. And the Beats reinvent themselves over & over, sometimes with a sense of their own heritage (there are a lot of retro Beats out who strike me as the literary equivalent of Civil War re-enactors) and more recently in the form of Slam Poetry. Then you need to ask yourself about the poetries that emerged, especially in the 1970s, that are nowhere to be found in the Allen anthology. Not just the Caterpillar/Sulfur poets like David Antin, Jerry Rothenberg & Clayton Eshleman, but feminist poetries, and poetries by ethnic & sexual minorities. You can absolutely draw a line, probably several, between the early work of Judy Grahn and the Beats, for example.
One of the things any young writer today has to have some sense about is the remarkable – almost overwhelming – amount of diversity that has become a defining feature of American poetry in the past two decades, and I can’t think of a better way to approach that question than to watch the four or five distinct strains of the 1950s turn into something like 25 tendencies four & five decades later, all of which have extremely blurry boundaries.
Behind all of this is a primary assumption that I should make explicit. Define your reading by what you need, regardless of any school’s curriculum. If you can’t shape the school’s program to meet your needs, you should come first, not the school. It really doesn’t matter if you’ve never read Spenser unless you think it does. And if the latter is true, Spenser is who you should be reading regardless of whether or not he is still being taught in your particular environs.
A second assumption, but one that varies a little by region & metro, has to do with the importance of poetry readings. They aren’t the work of literature, but they’re certainly its kitchen & café. Whenever I’ve taught, I’ve asked students to keep journals & to record their reactions to at minimum two poetry readings per week, at least one of which had to be off campus.
A corollary of this has to do with other teachers. If you never see a particular teacher of writing or contemporary literature at readings off campus, don’t bother taking him or her seriously. Because they’re not. They’re telling you it’s just a job.
There is an echo phenomenon of this that shows up in reading lists. It has to do with teaching anthologies. Almost all teaching anthologies are useless. The one real exception to that is Paul Hoover’s Norton Anthology of Postmodern American Poetry. But if ever there was an exception that proved the rule, that book is it. Teachers who use teaching anthologies – including all of the other Nortons – are basically being lazy. It’s a red flag about the teacher’s commitment to the class and to the students. Any time you can choose between a teacher you wants you to buy ten books and one who wants you to buy an anthology, always pick the former.
When I was a college student in the late 1960s, an excellent rule of thumb was that the best literature & writing teachers were crazy people who were in the process of getting themselves fired or otherwise asked not to return to the campus in the future. That phenomenon was exacerbated (or, if you prefer, buffered) during that decade with a false sense that there would always be a next job teaching somewhere else because we were still in the post-WW2 expansion and colleges were still being built at a dizzying pace. Since that came abruptly to an end during the Vietnam era, there has been a lot less of that sense of danger on the American campus & frankly it’s too bad. College should be about risk because that is what will teach you best how to handle what’s coming up.
Is there a place in the academy today for a dissident? My sense is that everybody I know there thinks of themselves as such. And it is almost uniformly a matter of self delusion. The simplest test is this: are you getting fired for your work?
Now maybe you don’t actually need to be a dissident – this is more true than a lot of people seem to realize. But it’s still important – absolutely so – to understand what your values are as a writer, and how best to act upon them. So here is a final test. If you were to find out tomorrow that you were dying of cancer and had, at most, six months remaining, are you doing what you should be doing with your life? Here’s hoping the answer is yes.
