My comments yesterday on how to organize one’s thinking about the surfeit of good writing by younger poets when faced with absolute constraints on one’s time & attention generated a few interesting responses as well as, I’m afraid, some predictable ones as well.
To the implication that if I think there are hundreds, possibly even thousands, of competent, interesting post-avant poets now writing in English, I should adjust my critical horizon upward until it fixates upon some attainable quantity of “great” writing, I think that view manages to miss – precisely! – what is different about the current poetic age.
The social role of poetry in the English speaking countries is changing & attempts to retain a sense that one might be able to encapsulate just the best-of-the-best in anthology-sized collections, for example, is only a method of pretending that this transformation isn’t happening. What it means is that the relationship of the individual poet is changing with regards to his/her audience, to the role of the book, the role of the literary journal & the function of specific poetic communities. One consequence that I can see – although it is far from complete or uniform as a social effect – is that the hardcopy literary magazine has declined dramatically in importance & value. Only part of this is due to the rise of web-enabled journals. An equally important side-effect is the rise of the chapbook – the chapbook may in fact the be the primary literary “unit” vis-à-vis poetry right now. It’s a publication that has zero chance of making it into the book chains and save for a few poetry-centric bookstores (most notably Woodland Pattern in Milwaukee), you can’t get it retail. Even City Lights & Open Books in Seattle tend to have very few chapbooks. My new 84” bookcase is filled with them.
Rebecca Loudon responded in the Squawkbox commentary tool* to my line that
" I’d love to figure out how younger poets are handling it "
What, exactly, do you mean by younger poets? Chronological age? Emotional age? Years of writing? Number of publications? Do you have no interest in how the older poets are handling it? Curious.
Which is an excellent point. By “younger” I mean anyone who hasn’t been writing & publishing books for a quarter of a century, whatever their chronological age. My experience has been that younger poets are actively attempting to make sense of the world, and especially the world of poetry, “in real time,” with all the chaos, change & indeterminacy that implies. “Older” poets have largely already figured out what their poetry is doing and have a tendency to stay focused on the world of writing as they understood it when they were younger poets. What is so remarkable about an older writer who actively manages to stay current with all that is changing in poetry – Robert Creeley is a great example of this – is that it is so very rare indeed.
I don’t think that this is an indictment necessarily of anybody who can’t keep up with Robert’s restless imagination & his ability to absorb so much of what’s new. I just think this is a natural part of the “gravity” that occurs as part of the aging process & that one has to work actively against that winnowing process that results in older writers seeming “out of touch” or “interested only in their friends & those younger poets who imitate them.” Or worse.
As aggressive as I try to be about that myself, the greatest surprise to me in starting my weblog two years ago was exactly how much even my own reading tended to focus largely on the work of my immediate peers, poets born between 1940 & 1955. One person who is getting (re)educated as a result of this blog is therefore me. And it’s been a useful process indeed.
Dan Bouchard sent me an email pointing out Steve Evans’ article in the fourth issue of The Poker, which addresses this same issue. Sort of. As is so often the case with Evans’ work, the piece considers many aspects of the phenomenon without ever taking a clear stand in behalf of one particular strategy. He achieves this by framing the discussion as a look at “four dissimilar strategies.”
He sort-of-warns against “outsourcing” our “taste” to the various prizes, which attempt to sort out “the best” – or at least to lend that rubric to various School o’ Quietude friendship networks. He presents various “constellations” of his own gradually evolving reading list (he’s as slow a reader as I am). He thinks about the relation of writing to the world & especially to our current debased mode of political discourse. Here at least he ventures a conclusion – that Bush should be beaten. Evans then lists 232 reviews that appeared over ten months in four journals – The Boston Review. Publishers Weekly, Rain Taxi & Poetry Project Newsletter – and notes which presses got the most reviews:
10 reviews: Norton
9 reviews: FSG, Graywolf, Verse
8 reviews: New Directions
7 reviews: Coffee House, Wesleyan
5 reviews: Knopf, Krupskaya
4 reviews: Flood, HarperCollins, Kelsey Street, Penguin, University of Georgia
Evans doesn’t discuss what it means, in relative terms, to have a review in Publishers Weekly vs. one in the Poetry Project Newsletter, let alone The New York Times or Poetry. Nor does he indicate which titles may have received more than one review. Thus the piece feels like an incomplete update on the sort of research that Jed Rasula did in The American Poetry Wax Museum or Hank Lazer did in Opposing Poetries.
Yet what feels most “contemporary” about Evans’ take on all this is exactly its failure to take a stand, adopt a topic sentence, draw conclusions on the wall. Thus ultimately it’s his lists of “constellations,” titles of eleven books each that he was in the midst of reading at different moments over the last 18 months, that one reads as the clearest presentation of a point of view. And here it would be interesting to see which presses his constellation represents – and possibly even to see some discussion of what it means for a book to continue to stay on the list for several consecutive months. Is that a good thing or just the opposite?
It is worth noting, I suppose, that of the 14 presses listed above, five are New York trade presses & at least three of the independents (Graywolf, Coffee House, New Directions) publish enough books annually to function as if they were trade presses. Just two are related to universities. Three of the presses – Kelsey Street, Krupskaya and Flood – might truthfully be said to be small presses. But none to my knowledge publishes chapbooks.
* Which was down for awhile yesterday & even appears to have eaten at least one comment.
