Ben Friedlander jokingly introduced
me at the 2017 National Poetry Foundation conference on the poetries of the
1990s by saying that that decade had been “the period between language poetry
and Silliman’s Blog.” Later, in one of those hallway conversations that proves
so fruitful at events like this, Ben and I talked more seriously about how one would periodize language writing, if one
wished to do so. It’s a little like asking if Beat poetry still exists today,
given that Michael McClure, Gary Snyder and Lawrence Ferlinghetti are still
active. I said at the time that I had been serious in my characterization of it
in the introduction to In the American
Tree as more of a moment than a movement.
But I had betrayed that assertion
in how I had edited that collection, including only those who had appeared
enough times in works by publishers and magazines so thoroughly associated with
langpo to thoroughly bear its stamp. And, as I’ve stated a few times since
then, I did so thoroughly enough that there were just three poets who fit my
criteria whom I failed to include: Curtis Faville, David Gitin and Abigail
Child. The first two had withdrawn from publishing by 1981-2, the period when I
put that book together, and I had misread Child as a committed filmmaker who
wrote much as she also danced and did performance art, a misreading on my part
that I have regretted ever since. If I had really edited that volume to
articulate the moment, I should have included first-rate writers who were quite
critical of language writing, such as Beverly Dahlen and Leslie Scalapino, or
who were off doing their own thing without much if any reference to what was
taking place at the Grand Piano, the Tassajara Bakery or the fledgling Ear Inn
readings. This would have included people openly hostile to some of langpo’s
investigations into language itself, such as Darrell Gray or Andrei Codrescu,
but it also would have included the likes of Norman Fischer, CD Wright, Joan Retallack,
Doug Lang, Phyllis Rosenzweig, Joseph Ceravolo, Judy Grahn, Michael Lally, Lorenzo
Thomas, Jim Brody, Simon Ortiz, and Nathaniel Mackey. Edited by a white guy on
the West Coast, In the American Tree is
very much a(n imperfect) record of a movement and not a moment at all.
Plus a nearly five-year gap
occurred between editing and publication, the result of the original publisher,
Ross Erickson Books, struggling financially. Had the collection actually been
edited close to its publication date, younger writers who had subsequently
emerged, including Charles Alexander, Laura Moriarty, Ted Pearson and Harryette
Mullen, surely would have been added to what was already an unwieldy number. In
1986, when the National Poetry Foundation finally got the 1982 manuscript into
print, Tree already some of the same
time-bound features I had noticed earlier in Donald M Allen’s The New American Poetry, which presents
the early Jack Spicer and not the later writer whom we think of today, the
Edward Dorn who is clearly a lyric student from Black Mountain, not the pop-art
philosopher-poet with the problematic politics. Indeed, Amiri Baraka was not
yet Amiri Baraka when he appeared in the Allen anthology. One could argue the
same for Denise Levertov as well.
Standing in the hallway in Orono, I
told Ben that if I had to do so, I would agree that language poetry was not a
literature of the 1990s, and that the poetics of the New Coast Conference, held
in March of 1990 and later gathered into a double anthology by the journal O•blēk, had in fact accomplished what
it set out to do, which was to announce a generational shift to a younger cohort
of poets, a group notably more diverse in race and gender than that figured
just four years before by Tree. The O•blēk anthologies never got the
distribution they deserved, and, perhaps because of the hostility by many of
the participants of the poetry publication to assertions given prominence in
the theoretical one[i],
the collections have never been republished or brought out in book form.
I also had already given langpo a
starting date, the appearance of Robert Grenier’s essay “On Speech” in the
inaugural issue of This in 1971. Even
48 years later, that still feels right to me. There certainly were earlier
manifestations of what would come to be known as language writing in journals
such as joglars edited by Clark
Coolidge and Michael Palmer (dating back as far as 1963, when Charles Bernstein
would have been just 12 years old, Erica Hunt only eight), 0 to 9, edited by Bernadette Mayer with Vito Acconci, and even my
own Tottel’s, which beat This into print by a matter of weeks. But
Grenier’s epic overstatement, “l HATE SPEECH,” had the concentrated effect of
an announcement every bit as much as Allen Ginsberg’s first reading of Howl in the Six Gallery, October 7,
1955, had announced the New American Poetry, no matter that it came five years after Olson’s essay on Projective Verse
and even after Black Mountain College itself had closed down.
Real life is messy like that. A
significant amount of the hostility to language poetry in the 1970s and ‘80s
came from poets like Codrescu and Tom Clark, who had been too young for The New American Poetry and yet felt
excluded by a younger map of the territory that no longer followed the familiar
terrain set forth by the Allen anthology.[ii] The O•blēk
anthologies suggested that the debate was already irrelevant. I think it’s
open to question whether I’ll Drown This Book: Conceptual Writing
by Women, edited by Caroline
Bergvalle, Laynie Browne, Teresa Carmody & Vanessa Place, or Flarf: An Anthology of Flarf,
edited by Drew Gardner, Nada Gordon,
Sharon Mesmer, K. Silem Mohammad & Gary Sullivan – the current
pretenders to the short-lived Iron Throne of contemporary poetics – represents an
extension of the New Coast poetics put forward by O•blēk,
which is how I read them, or something altogether new. The documentary
conceptualism put forward by Chain was
clearly a part of the New Coast phenomenon and, nearing 20, flarf likewise is
long in the tooth, and if the cover of that anthology is any evidence, also in
need of a haircut.
What’s
next? as President Bartlett used to say back when the nation was governed
by the sane. The question of articulating any
movement of poetry in a world in which there exist some 50,000 publishing ones is one hell of a lot
harder than it was when the number was 2,000 or so just 30-plus years ago. Even
the neo-Edwardian strain still exists, although if Terrance Hayes and AE
Stallings are any evidence, they’ve had a serious rebirth of wonder since the
days of Lowell and Wilbur.[iii]
My concern is that without some
shape, younger poets have nothing to push against, no old guard conveniently
tottering and about to be tipped into the dustbin of history. The turn to
politics on the part of recent poets may be occasioned by how much more visible
the depredations of capital have become, but the difference between langpo and the poets of Chain was never a question of
political/non-political, but closer to which
political and how. You can’t say
that Terrance Hayes isn’t writing politically, even if his sense of caesura can
be breathtaking. I was a member of the Democratic Socialists of America on the
day when the New American Movement first merged with the Democratic Socialists’
Organizing Committee to form that organization and my membership is still current, thank you. As I’ve
tried to make clear here and on Facebook and Twitter, I think we’re all in this together.
But poetry is governed by seasons – what gave birth to
the New American Poetry was a hiatus occasioned by World War 2 when the number
of books being published in the US was curtailed by the cost of paper and ink,
and the absence of males from the continent. As it was, the number of books of
poetry published in the US shrank from around 100 per year to just half that until well
after the war. The old world had been an argument between the neo-Edwardians
led by the Benet brothers and Robert Frost[iv]
and the moderns led by Pound, Williams and the Objectivists. The publishing
world was aligned with the neo-Edwardians and thus, as a result of the war’s
impact on publishing, many Objectivists stayed out of print until the 1960s after the arrival of Ginsberg et al. Since
the New Americans, we really have had just two other generations of poetry,
albeit with much haziness at the margins.
It seems that we are now ripe for a third. From my
perspective (in the dustbin of history where we are making room for the
conceptualists and flarfists), I’m searching out for new shoots, wondering just
where they might take us all. I for one am ready for the ride.
[i] Basically that a lack of spirituality was a defining
feature of language poetry and that a return to religion would thus be a
hallmark of poetry going forward, two decidedly inaccurate claims.
[ii] Which was a notoriously untrustworthy map. The absence
of the Spicer circle was no doubt Duncan’s influence – Robert claimed that he
had told Allen whom to include – just as the fiction of a San Francisco
renaissance was his mechanism for getting older poets like James Broughton and Brother
Antoninus into the book. Allen’s pointed comment in the introduction about
Zukofsky’s exclusion suggests that a line was being drawn – Robert was allowed
to dictate the San Francisco scene, but not the whole shebang. The 1967 A Controversy of Poets anthology, where
Robert Kelly selected the New Americans and Paris Leary chose the
neo-Edwardians, includes Zukofsky.
[iii] The brief interregnum of the Gnu Formalism can best be
understood as an admission that the poetry wars, if not set off by the Allen
anthology at least marked by it, was thoroughly won by the New Americans. The
argument against this would basically be that the social upheavals of the 1960s
disrupted everyone, and that the
rejection of the New American paradigm by the likes of Dorn, Baraka and
Levertov were no greater than the turn away from rhyming pentameter by the likes of Bly, Merwin, Plath, Wright, Hall
et al. The curious thing, reading anthologies of the New Formalists, is the
near total absence of poets born in the 1930s. Hayes was born in 1971,
Stallings in 1968.
[iv] Between them, Frost and the Benet brothers had 7
Pulitzer prizes by the time Stephen died of an early heart attack in 1944,
including those for that year and the two preceding ones. Stephen also
controlled the Yale Younger Poets award, the only other prize in US poetry to
get significant critical and news coverage.
