Yesterday, Matthew Zapruder made some comments in his email here that are worth examining in greater depth, both for what they say and what they presume. The context you will recall was some poetry by Noah Eli Gordon that was rejected from a poetry reading being staged in opposition to the impending war on Iraq. This was not a general all-purpose rally of the sort one gets in Central Park, on the Mall in DC or marching up Market Street in San Francisco – it was a poetry reading. The people coming to it were, presumably, anticipating the presence of poetry. So when the organizers of the event rejected some poetry on the grounds of difficulty, I questioned their judgment. The poem, in point of fact, was not terribly difficult, but what if it had been? Would that have made a difference? For Zapruder, whose work as a translator I’ve noted with approval here before, it does make a difference. Thus he asks:

 

Are Ashbery's "Leaving Atocha Station," or Mina Loy, or Shakespeare's sonnets for that matter, as easily apprehendible on first reading as let's say Philip Larkin or Charles Simic? I'm not talking about the further and endless levels of complexity in a good poem, regardless of its surface. Just its surface. A poem does have a surface, doesn't it?

 

I guess it just comes down to whether or not one is willing to grant that the notion of "difficulty" has any place at all in poetry. That's an interesting discussion, and one worth having here and elsewhere. But in this particular case, right or wrong, the organizers of that reading in good faith seem to believe in that distinction, and genuinely thought that Noah's poem was too difficult to work effectively in that situation.

 

It’s the belief in that distinction I want to question. Not because I want to bludgeon this particular event into the ground, but rather because a decision predicated upon that distinction stands as a metonym for a wider range of behavior that occur in & around poetry in this society.

 

It’s a distinction that underlay a decision by one post-New American writer I know over a decade ago to not recommend Robert Grenier for the short list for a teaching position at his school, a state university. This writer not only fully understood Grenier’s reputation among his peers as a poet, but also Grenier’s reputation as an innovative, engaged teacher in the classroom. “I just cannot bring myself to deal with the backlash,” is, in essence if not in words, how he explained his decision to me at the time, “if I recommend somebody whose most important work is a box.”

 

I could replicate other examples of this same sort of decision-making all across the continent with respect to jobs, to publications, to grants, the entire gamut of what constitutes the literary life. At one level, this is a type of thinking & acting with which Whitman had to contend. Certainly the growth of bureaucratic institutions in the wake of the Second World War, as the American post-secondary education system rapidly expanded toward what it is today, gave full reign to precisely the sorts of decisions that might be made around variants of this particular distinction. The first volume of Hank Lazer’s excellent critical work, Opposing Poetries, documents this phenomenon intelligently & carefully. Jed Rasula’s American Poetry Wax Museum does likewise.

 

The distinction is not about difficulty versus simplicity – although that is one form that this question can take – nor is it about surface versus depth, nor even intelligibility versus whatever the opposite of intelligibility might be. Rather it is a distinction that has to do with expectation, the expectation of what is possible. It’s a distinction between what I – or anyone – already know and what I might now confront.

 

The school of quietude is almost entirely predicated on a pathological desire to avoid just this confrontation. Indeed, as Edgar Allen Poe observed when he first coined that phrase to describe the very same tradition that persists to this day, that is why this school is so very quiet.

 

Imagine the life experiences of a person relatively unfamiliar with poetry coming to a reading in the United States the year 2003. This person lives in a society in which the Talking Heads had a hit record singing the zaum poetry of Hugo Ball in 1977. The most surreal songs of Bob Dylan were released – and not on any indy label – some 36 years ago. Eminem crams in more social observation into any given quatrain than some Pulitzer poets have managed in their entire careers. Ditto songwriters like Townes Van Zandt or Dave Carter, to pick on a completely different musical genre, or groups like Public Enemy & NWA. And Van Zandt & Carter are both dead, and those rap groups already consigned to the remainder bins of history. Or consider, for that matter, Prince, another golden oldie who managed a career without the benefit of a word for a name for several years. The most popular motion picture of the past two years had substantial portions of dialog spoken (with subtitles) in Elvish. To pick another medium altogether, television, the audience coming to this reading will have had everything from the close attention to the spoken that is Buffy, to the narrative ambiguities – including the backwards speaking dwarf* – of Twin Peaks to the multiple layers of Max Headroom, all in the range of recent references as they gather to hear somebody read a poem. This is in 2003, 172 years after the first of Aloysius Bertrand’s prose poems. Over a century after Rimbaud & Lautréamont. Forty-seven years after Allen Ginsberg published Howl, a book so obscure that it made him a millionaire. All of the above, up to & including the Vampire Slayer, require at least as much sophistication in communication skills on the part of their various audiences as the poem submitted by Noah Eli Gordon. And when we consider the number & kinds of discourses that occur simultaneously on a single screen of CNN’s Headline News channel – let alone consider the signage visible at any instant as we walk or drive down any commercial street in America – we see that it is the surface of the univocal poem (yes, Matthew, there are surfaces)  that is the deviant experience. Whether or not we approve or disapprove is entirely another matter – but the one-dimensional surface profoundly is the exception to our experience of language, not the rule.

 

In this context, which is an ordinary context for any poetry reading in the United States, would “Leaving Atocha Station” be a complex experience? Would Mina Loy? I think the answer is patently obvious: only for readers for whom the definition of poetry has somehow become so constrained that it can only mean certain things. In fact, this does not appear to be the case for ordinary readers, those who come to the experience with no prior expectation, with no need to automatically toggle between “right” & “wrong,” easy & hard. Those readers – especially those with no poetry experience whatsoever – will associate what they hear with what they already know from other experiences of language & art in their lives. And they have plenty of adequate options. To reiterate something I’ve written on this blog more than once already, this is what underlies Kit Robinson’s claim that language poetry is difficult only for certain types of graduate students. That’s not a witty rejoinder – it’s the literal truth.

 

A few years ago, my sons, who were five at the time, got into the great puzzle books of Graeme Base, and asked me if adults had puzzle books or books that were games as well. So we read together all of Tom Philips’ A Humument and then we read the first 80 or so pages of Finnegans Wake. This morning, six years later, one of my boys asked me “What was the other name of Finnegan besides Everybody?” “Humphrey Clinker Earwicker?” I asked in reply. “Yeah, that’s it,” he said. Which is not such a bad retention level that many years later. While my kids didn’t catch all (or maybe even any) of the bawdy references in either work, neither book when read aloud can honestly be said to be too difficult for kindergartners. That doesn’t mean that the Wake necessarily works as a book – I think that Joyce’s philological approach to language led him astray – but its reputed difficulty is not a difficulty of the text itself but rather of the social context into which works such as this have been integrated – or, more accurately, marginalized – in our society.

 

Another example of how people who aren’t readers read poetry. Seven years ago, I discovered a pair of siblings I had not known that I had. Both live in the Charleston area where my half-sister works as a lay counselor in a Baptist church & my half-brother tends lawns for a living. My half-brother had one semester at Clemson when he got out of high school, but gave it up to work on shrimp boats until he started to have kids – that is the bulk of their post-secondary education. In the process of getting to know these two very sweet people, I sent them some of my books. Later, when I traveled down to Charleston to actually meet them in person, I listened as my half-brother explained my poetry to his sister as reminding him of some gardening courses he had taken & that my work seemed very much to be structured like a walk on a path: “You see one thing, then you see another.” He brought what he knew of the world to this experience that was new to him, my poetry, & was perfectly able to find frameworks that suited him just fine. This is how human beings work.

 

It’s only when you know what poetry is supposed to be and you confront something that falls outside of that framework that it starts to become genuinely hard. And that knowing what poetry “is supposed to be” is taught – it’s neither natural nor integral to the poem, but rather is superimposed over it.

 

So, yes, I will admit that there is a difference between ”Leaving Atocha Station” and the work of Philip Larkin**, but it is not a question of a difficult vs. an easy surface. Larkin wrote an impoverished poetry & Ashbery respects his readers. Larkin’s work may be apprehended on some level at a single sitting – but this is invariably a sign of deprivation. Bad TV sitcoms can be apprehended at a single sitting because there is never more than a single idea to any scene. Bad poetry is not so terribly different. But even Friends & Seinfeld have strived for more than that. I have never understood why any human being would subject others to such an information-drained experience? Why would one deliberately write a poetry of sensory deprivation?

 

The presumption underneath Zapruder’s question is that univocal, one-dimensional poetry is in some way “normal,” when in fact it is radically unlike the everyday experiences of language of any human being in this society. I won’t argue the point that there isn’t a considerable amount of such poetry around, but almost invariably univocal poetics can be traced back to structural failures in the educational system, literally funneling a segment of the population into a narrow conception of poetry that is pathologically bizarre. That the school of quietude has grown into a self-reinforcing ensemble of social institutions dedicated to the preservation of this world view is something that social psychologists of the future will no doubt have lots to say about. 

 

Historically the Left has always demonstrated considerably anxiety around all issues of culture, from the faux hillbillies of the Popular Front to John Sayle’s cinematic sermonettes. In some sense, a poetry reading against the war in Iraq, noble idea that that is, almost invites these sorts of questions. Back in 1965, I helped a little in setting up the first Vietnam Day Teach-In at the University of California in Berkeley. The chief coordinator for the entire affair was a very buttoned-down newspaper reporter from, as I recall, Cincinnati by the name of Jerry Rubin – he didn’t stay all that buttoned down for long. One of the big debates among the organizing committee for that event was whether or not to invite Michael McClure to read his poetry. Rubin opposed the idea, precisely because he feared that McClure would read from his Ghost Tantras:

 

GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOO!

GOOOOOOOOOR!

GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!

Grah goooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeeer! Grayowhr!

Greeeeee

GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAHHHRR! RAHR!

RAHR! RAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!

BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE

looking for sugar!

GAHHHHHHHH!

ROWRR!

GROOOOOOOOOOH!

 

Some time around 1970, there was a giant reading also against the Vietnam War at Glide Church in San Francisco. All the major local figures of the New American generation were there. The m.c. for the evening, or at least for the latter part of it, was Denise Levertov. Unfortunately for her, one of the people in the overwhelmingly packed auditorium dressed in a giant pink terrycloth penis costume, as he had done at numerous demonstrations around the Bay Area, earning the rubric The People’s Prick. As I recall, the room got so crowded – it was way over the fire code allotment – that Levertov sought to alleviate the problem by having members of the audience come and sit on the stage. The problem was, The People’s Prick was among those who got up on stage & the nature of the costume was such that he couldn’t sit down. He tried to stand quietly at the back of the stage, but Levertov was having none of it. If cooler heads had not prevailed, the event would have broken down into chaos.

 

These conceptions of what events like this should be have bedeviled them forever. In some sense, the organizers of this reading were only acting as links in a larger chain of fear that they share across time with Jerry Rubin & Denise Levertov. For his part, Noah Eli Gordon, like McClure & the People’s Prick before him, with his poem that read aloud slowly lasts less than two minutes, got to play the role of the barbarian at the gate, the promise or threat of a little polysemy into a world that is sworn to avoid it.

 

But Jerry Rubin, you will note, changed his mind. Within three years of putting the kibosh on McClure’s participation in the teach-in, he would show up at the New York Stock Exchange wearing only an American flag &, in Chicago, nominate a pig for the presidency, an act that helped ignite the largest police riot in decades. Perhaps Rubin noted that what got noticed – nation-wide as it turned out – from the initial Teach-In was when Norman Mailer uttered the phrase “Hot Damn! Vietnam!” and got the radio broadcast of the event over Pacifica radio instantly pulled off the air.

 

I’m not necessarily an advocate of Rubin’s politics, fun though they might have been. But it seems apparent to me that the issue of complexity is a spectre that is going to haunt poetry forever. The reason the anti-war poems of the school of quietude, well intended as they were, had so little impact in the 1960s was because, regardless of what they said about the war, the form of their work argued (sometimes, if it was well written, forcefully) precisely for all the institutions of order as they apply to language & meaning. Sam Hamill’s sad little chapbook is merely the repetition of that history, this time as farce.

 

 

 

* Not literally backwards speaking. His role was recorded with him reading his words backwards – sdrawkcab sdrow -- & the tape was then reversed so that it sounded “frontwards,” but as if spoken from Mars.

 

** There is considerably more going on in any poem by Charles Simic, so I don’t want to extend this argument to him. I have some fondness for the soft surrealists of the 1960s: Simic, James Tate, Bill Knott. There’s more to their poetry than some of their fans seem to get.

Reading a magazine that I have not yet seen, Tom Fink notes the containment strategy often imposed by conservative poets with regards first to langpo & then more broadly to the entire post-avant tradition.

 

Dear Ron,

 

          When I got a contributor's copy of the Winter 2002 issue of Barrow Street, an eclectic New York City journal, a very interesting juxtaposition hit me. The magazine's first poem is an excerpt from Lyn Hejinian's The Fatalist, a potent example of the self-reflexive and, as she puts it, "analytic lyric" drive of her work. (Like you, I'm especially drawn to My Life.) One of the last pieces in the magazine is an interview of Robert Pinsky by Daniela Gioseffi, author of 11 books of poetry, the latest from Rattapallax Press, and an anthology, Women on War, and someone who has favorably reviewed close friends of mine. The interview is subtitled "On Poetry and Social Conscience." Gioseffi asks Pinsky what he feels "about the current abstract school and the so called 'language school of poetry'; for example, John Ashbery or Jorie Graham or Charles Bernstein – which has seemed to dominate much of the poetry of our time and to which the average reader not schooled in poetry seems to have such difficulty responding to. Do you find it solipsistic in nature?" (76).

 

          If we slightly correct Gioseffi and see Ashbery as a synecdoche for the New York School, Bernstein for the Language Poets – and such synecdoches repress much difference within those non-schools – and Graham for the recent Iowa Writer's Workshop trend to fuse mainstream and experimental poetic practices, then perhaps these 3 "tendencies," combined, may account for half of what's published in the poetry presses and magazines and e-zines. But the word "dominate" implies a lot more than half; it demonstrates the angst that you noticed in Edward Hirsch's claim that there were "too many" poetic experimentalists: 10,000 practitioners.

 

          Gioseffi doesn't know or ignores that Language Poets are overtly political. Perhaps "difficulty" makes her use the label "solipsistic" (without conscience? apolitical?). Has she encountered the "Language" argument that the illusion of unmediated communication in "easy" poetry is itself an ideological construct in need of politicized demystification? Poetry educators like Juliana Spahr can and do talk with the "average reader" about politically progressive poetry that disrupts complacent expectations of transparent mimesis, but have her mainstream sources told her this? (Also, to read Ashbery as solipsistic is to miss a kind of Bakhtinian dialogism, a carnival where one can read social conflict into his poems' heteroglossia.)

 

To Pinsky's credit, he doesn't quite take Gioseffi's cues. First sounding like a serene, tolerant pluralist who will admit star experimentalists into his pantheon, he then exposes his biases:

 

As you have said, in every kind [of poetry], some is good and some is bad. In relation to your concern with social and political materials, it is true that the more cerebral, self-referential or linguistically complicated the writing is, the safer or more armored it is. For lesser writers than those you name, an avant-garde surface is protection from the difficulties and embarrassments of subject matter. Language poetry of that kind is safe; it cannot sprawl because it holds its pose behind a protective wall of texture. Abstraction and opacity can be places to hide from the difficulty or passion of the world or oneself. But what about examples like Paul Celan – a great writer who is very difficult, often opaque, and a great writer of the social and political tragedy of modern Europe? (76)

 

Pinsky's concluding question is very good, but Gioseffi parries it by going on to an unrelated question. When Pinsky signifies on the usual safe/dangerous binary by making safe literary forms/modes seem dangerous, some will find it clever. But the implication that linguistic complexity is an evasion of psychologically difficult confession ("embarrassments") about the self's imperfections and its most difficult emotions or an evasion of the difficulty of making a determinate political judgment implies that the tasks being "evaded" are the "true" tasks of poetry. What if confessional poetry a la Lowell or Sexton is seen as just plain self-indulgent? What if a poet doesn't want to ignore the complexities of political theory and praxis and thus refrains from making "sound-byte" political judgments. The trope of "sprawling" suggests that LangPo is "uptight," ignoring how funny it often is, whereas poetry with clearly packaged "personality" is more relaxed. What if the poetry of "subject matter" that he implicitly valorizes is a protection against a more difficult subject matter: relations between areas of linguistic "experience" that are not immediately recognizable, that do not easily fit together but have metonymic contact in the multiplicity of the social spaces that people experience as their daily lives? Pinsky may see in a Bernstein or an Ashbery that even when language itself is the subject matter, a large part of the interest in such writing is investigation of the social functioning of words, but he will not allow that framing assumption to be in place when he reads "lesser writers" that he considers part of the Language group. Near the end of the interview, Gioseffi weighs in once more on the poetry she finds apolitical, this time differentiating between the LangPos and the New York School:

 

The language school of poetry seems to be about art for art's sake; and the abstract or action poetry schools, or the New York School, a sort of laid-back observation on the poet's experience. (77)

 

Does action poetry=action painting? Does she link the visual New York School with the poetic one? The caricature of the "laid back" New York School could have been obtained from some journalistic account, not from reading many NY School writers. But where did she get the idea that LangPo is "art for art's sake"? From a preconception that poetry, to be political, must tell a story or present a single ideological perspective, and that, poetry that cannot be pinned down to a single subject must only exist to glorify its status as art? That linguistic inventiveness is just hedonism and teaches us nothing about the world? What if the accusation of "art for art's sake" were contextualized, instead, as an indication that the accuser believes that a realm of "pure formalism" can exist outside of the socius, and that this belief, rather than a partial (not total or totalizing) attention to formal qualities, is a mystification of the interpreter, not the poet? Hejinian's poem at the beginning of the issue of Barrow Street could help answer some of the questions, if the interviewer and interviewee chose to read it carefully.

 

All Best,

Tom

Daisy Fried writes to challenge my use of the term conservative to characterize members of the broad literary heritage that I’ve generally been calling the “school of quietude” here on the blog:

Ron—

It's VERY nice of you to mention me on your BLOG as a person you like to read--you're somebody whose good opinion means a lot. And you're one of a number anti-coherent poets I read with pleasure. [Just trying out "anti-coherent" as a general semi-neologism for language poetry, Ashbery poetry and various offspring. Hmmm....]

Now, I assume by conservative you don't mean politically conservative--though I also realize you perhaps you don't separate politics and poetics much, but still--Dugan (my hero!) is a clearly a red, and Hass is or at least used to be left-liberal, as is Annie F., and Muldoon seems to be pretty left...etc...

So do you think it's automatically conservative to value closure, to be generally accessible in traditional (which is different from conservative) ways, or to not be particularly interested in the opaque signifier? Is it automatically liberal on the other hand, to do the kinds of processes/ practices/writings that are lately called experimental? From other remarks you made on the BLOG I think you would say no, so I'm just curious about your use of the word 'conservative'.

Lucien Freud and Alice Neel were painting bodies all during period when abstract expressionism was the last big innovation, and painting even the slightest bit representationally was a big no-no. But now the general consensus is that they were pretty damn good and innovative. And I don't think it's possible to call them conservative...[well, I don't know anything about Freud's politics; Neel was a member of the Communist part--but I mean their aesthetic is no longer thought to be conservative either, right?] Is there an analogy here?

Also, all this experimental poetry, or lang-po/post-lang-po (and you'll forgive me for throwing around terms in this inexact way) seems deeply academic to me. Which is no indication of its quality one way or the other, but most of the so-called experimentalists are middle-class kids who go to grad school and are taught by people of your generation, if not by you, how to be avant whatever, no? Just like the other middle-class kids who go to the other schools where other kinds of poetry are taught by various generations. Nothing against middle class kids who go to grad school (if I'd gone, and I almost did once, that would have described me too) but it sort of seems against the whole idea of being experimental or radical or anti-mainstream in ones work, to learn how to be those things from a university teacher, doesn't it?

All best,

your fan,

Daisy

I want to respond to two points. One is my use of the term conservative, the other is the concept of anti-coherency, which Daisy concedes is a neologism she’s just trying on, but which is also an idea that I’ve heard enough times before to understand is a conception that might exist in the world.

I wouldn’t characterize what I call the post-avant traditions, even in their most extreme forms such as vizpo & sound poetry, as anti-coherency. If anything, I think that the very opposite is true, that they form a poetics of a greater coherency, precisely because it must be a coherency earned by & within the writing, not something easily assumed. Too often, bad writing within the school of quietude presumes that simply by positing a narrating persona, coherency will follow. That is precisely the same kind of presumption that lies behind the use of family or workplace as the contextual site for almost all television sitcoms, and to parallel result. If anything, poets of the easy coherency tendencies have it harder, because the idea that the work of the poem has already been done for them is so terribly seductive. Those who can write past this do indeed achieve something worth note. But my experience of most poetry of the easy coherency variety is very much like my experience of most television sitcoms – they’re unwatchable. I’d rather have a root canal than read 30 lines by 98 percent of the poets who simply think they’re coherent when they really aren’t. For me as a reader, the far greater problem is how to find that mysterious two percent who consistently do reward my effort.

It is not that bad poetry cannot be written in the post-avant mode – sign on to the Poetics List for awhile – but that almost all practitioners of post-avant writing have had to confront such questions of form, content, coherency, implication, context, responsibility and any other number of qualities of the poem from scratch. On average, they have had to work much harder and far more thoughtfully than their counterparts on the far side of the genre in almost anything they have written. & when they don’t do their homework, it shows immediately. There may be self-delusion, but there is no hiding allowed for post-avant poets.

I would cite the example of my own poetry as a demonstration of this – I was able to publish in such magazines as Poetry, Tri-Quarterly, Southern Review & Poetry Northwest within three years of starting to write poetry seriously. It was not because I was good, but because it was easy. It was much more difficult to appear in publications of the post-avant tendencies of that time, because such writing demanded so much more of me as a poet.

If I were to define poetry, it is that art of language that demands the most of me, both as a reader and as a writer.

And that seems the appropriate segue to Daisy’s core question:

So do you think it's automatically conservative to value closure, to be generally accessible in traditional (which is different from conservative) ways, or to not be particularly interested in the opaque signifier?

The question of accessibility is a potential problem here. What makes poetry of the schools of quietude “accessible” is only that they have been institutionally ingrained for a century (or, in some ways, far longer), mostly in high school & undergraduate curricula. Having given readings in such venues as streetcorners or the Maximum Security Library at Folsom State Prison, I don’t think there’s anything “inaccessible” about my poetry, even when the audience has had little in the way of formal education or the context of a rich literary heritage. If anything, it is educational malpractice that may make post-avant poetics sometimes seem difficult, not the poetry itself. There is a qualitative difference between asking the reader to use all of their senses to read and being deliberately obscure.

As to the question of tradition, my one response would be whose tradition? It is post-avant writing, I would argue, that more accurately represents the tradition not just of Pound & Williams, Stein & Zukofsky, Stevens & Crane, but also Whitman & Dickinson, Blake, Wordsworth & Coleridge. The schools of quietude represent exactly those counter tendencies within Anglo heritage with whom those poets invariably had to contend. And while there are some important writers who arose out of that other poetics, such as my distant in-law, Mr. Tennyson, I would happily put up my tradition against any other over time.

Ultimately, I use the term conservative as a literal description – not, for example, the way I would describe George W., who would have to move well to the left to become a conservative. I always pick Wendell Berry as my demonstration for what I mean, because in his work conservative & conservation are wedded seamlessly as values – and it is in this sense that he strikes me as a very great poet. Berry is quite conscious – and unapologetic – about his premodernist position and its anti-modern implications. What separates him from approximately 99 percent of his peers along the side of quietude is not only his talent, but also his self-understanding.

Different genres of art respond to changes in time & history in different ways. When Pound, Joyce & Stein were first demonstrating how a poetics might respond to the modern world prior to World War I, Bing Crosby had yet to discover the ways in which the microphone could be used to transform the public art of song. Poetry since that time has changed less than has popular music, in part because the latter, not unlike painting, is artificially accelerated through the influx of capital and the need to continually generate new markets. Lisa Jarnot, Jena Osman & Christian Bök are closer to Pound & Stein, for example, than Marshall Mathers is to Bing Crosby. But the idea of a poetry that characterizes as traditional the idea of writing as if Pound, Stein et al were still 100 years yet into the future cries out for examination. Such a poetics is understandable as a political position – the way Berry treats it – but not really on any other terms. If I try to analyze why poets would thus want to write conservatively, terms like denial and avoidance immediately come to mind.

If I continue my comparison with popular music a little further, I can of course find people who still sing, & even compose, opera. Michael Feinstein & Harry Connick, Jr. continue to perform as though Frank Sinatra & Sammy Davis, Jr. will be sitting at the front table. Every major mode of rock that has come into existence still has some manifestation in the current culture. So forms continue, but as they do their meaning alters profoundly. One could argue, for example, that Eminem is a natural descendent of 1950’s doo-wop culture, given a heavy political twist. But a completely traditional doo-wop group would have a hard time getting a record deal from a major label. Doo-wop, it is worth noting, is historically parallel with Allen Ginsberg & Frank O’Hara – it comes after Robert Lowell.

If there is a counter argument to be made along the lines of my music analogy, it would be constructed around that tradition that used to be called folk music but that now more often goes under the heading of the “singer-songwriter” tradition, a creation not so much of Appalachia as of the Popular Front of the 1930s. Here also, as with Wendell Berry, the music is constructed around a complex of political ideas that are not accidental. I happen to like a number of these ideas*, frankly, which may explain why I do listen to folk music, along with avant-garde jazz, rock, world music & even occasionally opera. But I would note that the folk tradition has changed considerably over the decades and that the Kingston Trio-Limelighter 1950s is a far cry from the O Brother Wherefore Art Thou 2000s. Anybody who proposes to play acoustic Delta blues today is understood exactly as an historic re-enactor of a tradition, not an actual participant. That is exactly the position into which most “traditional” poetry falls, with the notable exception that blues literally began after World War I with the work of people like Charlie Patton. What we are really talking about in the case of poetry is more like Stephen Foster imitations presented as images of contemporary life. Just the sort of thing that Jeff Koons loves to make fun of.

So yes, I would call what you term “traditional” poetry conservative – that’s the positive term, when such poetry & its practitioners understand what they’re about. More of it I fear is simply pathological, which I find the much more disturbing aspect of the troubled school of quietude.

* The commitment to community & human scale in particular. Interestingly, I find these same values in contemporary post-avant jazz, such as in the Rova Saxophone Quartet or the work of Steve Lacy, Anthony Braxton et al, but not in commercialized smooth jazz.

I’ve made caustic comments here about a few poets whom I’ve associated with the tradition I’ve characterized (to borrow from Edgar Allan Poe) as the school of quietude, that tendency within American letters that envisions poetry in the United States as continuous with (& mostly derivative from) verse in the British Isles, and especially from the most conservative elements there. So the question naturally arises: are there conservative poets whose work I genuinely like?

The answer is yes. I think Hart Crane’s The Bridge a master work of American poetry. There are aspects of Wallace Stevens work that I like, even though he suffers from being so overrated by his advocates. Ditto the early Eliot, though the canonization process is not nearly what it was when I was in college, mercifully. I’ve been reading Jack Gilbert and Robert Hass with interest & even passion for over 30 years*, have always thought Berryman’s Dream Songs, Plath’s Ariel, John Logan’s Zigzag Walk and even Merwin’s The Lice admirable. There are elements in Robert Lowell’s best writing that suggest that he had the potential to have been another Frank O’Hara had he not been so horrifically dysfunctional, aesthetically as well as emotionally. Alan Dugan is a guilty pleasure. And Wendell Berry is a poet for whom the term conservative should be understood literally, in the very best sense. The values he espouses in his poetry & life seem to me to fit together seamlessly. So when I come down harshly on a poet such as Richard Wakefield, it’s because he writes so ineffectively: his sense of metrics could only be characterized as plodding and bungled.

On my desk is a manuscript for a book entitled Calendars by Annie Finch that Tupelo Press will be printing sometime soon. It’s a marvelous manuscript by a poet who could easily be taken for one of the New Formalists, in the Timothy Steele vein, but who is also, I would argue, a formalist in the tradition, say, of Bernadette Mayer & Lee Ann Brown. Which is to say: she gets it. Her commitment is to the language, even as the strategies she deploys are most often taken from oldest playbook there is. At times, as in the poem “Moon,” her work reminds me of H.D.’s sense of timing, so very deliberate & ordered:

Then are you the dense everywhere that moves,
the dark matter they haven’t yet walked through?

(No, I’m not, I’m just the shining sun,
sometimes covered up by the darkness.)

But in your beauty – yes, I know you see –
There is no covering, no constant light.
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That supplemental yes in the last couplet, the fact that the final syllable in each line articulates a phonemic openness, except for the last, even the use of the capital letter at the start of the final line (but not in the final line of the other stanzas), all demonstrate a control over the materials at hand that is extraordinary. That yes functions as though it were a sigh, modulating & redirecting  the timing of the work away from dialog & toward conclusion. It’s a device that I’ve often been suspicious of – Josephine Miles, another traditionalist whose work I take seriously, too often incorporated such asides just to even out meter or complete an end-rhyme. Finch uses it here to halt the flow of the text, to gather the language up into an expression of breath. It is no accident that every word in that aside uses exactly one syllable** or that there are no hard consonants there – the only moment in this six-line text where either of these conditions applies. I love it when someone can demonstrate such mastery in such a compact terrain.

I want to quote one other short poem here, my favorite, because of the way in which it blends an over-the-top sense of language’s lushness with a tone so soft it all but whispers. It’s called “Butterfly Lullaby.”

My wild indigo dusky wing
my mottled, broad-wing skipper,
a sleepy, dreamy dusty wing,
flying through my night.

My northern, southern, cloudy wing,
my spring azure, my crescent pearl,
a silver-spotted, sweet question mark,
sleeping in my sky.

A tiger swallowtail, harvester,
moving through my hours,
an eyed brown in the redwing dark,
wrapped softly in my words.

We haven’t had a poet so capable of combining control & excess since the young Robert Duncan.

* I have a theory that Jack’s animated & public distaste for langpo has to do with the fact that he himself, were he younger, would have been one. This is, after all, the man who once wrote (quoting from memory here): “Helot for what time there is in the baptist hegemony of death.”

** Shades again of H.D. and even of Lew Welch.

The abstract lyric certainly existed before Barbara Guest – Stein, for example, and some of Williams’ work, especially prior to World War II; the French can go back to Mallarmé – but it was/is Guest who in English seems to have perfected the form in the 1950s, a period in which she was largely (and unfairly) unnoticed with the significant exception of the Allen anthology – it is Guest who lead off the New York School section in that epochal collection, even as she had the fewest pages of work represented. Reading her poetry of that period sends me back along a different coordinate – to the texts of David Schubert and through him to the short poems of Hart Crane. I don’t know if Guest read Schubert, who seems to have largely slipped through the cracks of literary history (albeit acknowledged as an influence by John Ashbery and visibly evident in the poetry of Frank O’Hara). 

 

There is a tendency in American poetry that one might characterize as academic in the old-fashioned pejorative sense & certainly the letters and essays in the 1983 QRL issue on Schubert reflects that tradition: Alan Tate, Ben Belitt, Horace Gregory, Louise Bogan, Ted Weiss. In a sense, the New American poetry and its descendents (which include virtually every progressive mode of U.S. poetry some 50 years hence) has exorcised itself of even the memory of that tendency. Pound and Stein were geographically inoculated from it, the Objectivists simply avoided all interaction (the feeling appears to have been mutual). Yet Williams dealt with it and Marianne Moore positively thrived in that environment, and it is evident that at least through Auden (curious interloper that he is after the Second World War) the New York School was willing to let some elements in.

 

In some sense, trying to sort out the role of such influences is not unlike those followers of Creeley who do not understand his enthusiasm for Crane or Stevens. Reading is itself always a narrative, the unfolding of meaning in time – I read this book before that one. In my own life, it was Philip Whalen’s poetry that gave me the inroads I needed in order to appreciate Clark Coolidge’s work in the 1960s, yet I know of poets who came upon those two writers in the opposite sequence and I simply cannot imagine what one would make of it: I cannot fold my mental map into that configuration.

 

An analogy from music might be the relationship between Bing Crosby and Jimi Hendrix. Before Crosby, singers belted out tunes as if they were still performing from the stage of an auditorium, even as they were finally being recorded. It was Crosby who understood that the implication of the microphone was that you could sing softly and bring out a whole new range of possible music. Similarly, Hendrix was the first performer to understand the full implications of the electrification of the guitar. Crosby and Hendrix equally revolutionized music.

 

In a decade in which so many academic poets continue to sound as if they were the contemporaries of Bing Crosby, I find it intriguing that Barbara Guest should become the most influential of the New American poets. In part, it no doubt is because her work has not yet been fully incorporated, much as the Objectivists of the 1930s needed to wait until the 1970s to be brought completely into view. So perhaps it is because the current generation of academic poets seems as relevant to poetry as astrology does to astronomy, the abstract lyric carries forward within itself aspects of a tradition all but unheard elsewhere.