In a webnote that he calls “Dark Clouds over Mordor,” Greg Rappleye has been wondering “how long Silliman will go without responding” to Reginald Shepherd’s repeated attempts to, as Greg characterizes it, call me out. But here in the Shire, the skies are blue. I think Shepherd’s doing exactly what he ought to be doing – he’s defining his poetics and defending them. That makes total sense to me. Do I agree with him? Probably not. But I don’t think he needs to write my poems any more than I think I need to write his. Each of us, I trust, will write the poetry we need.

Shepherd’s roster of the “experimental” poets he likes – Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Kathleen Fraser, Ann Lauterbach, Michael Palmer, Bin Ramke, Donald Revell, Cole Swensen, and Rosmarie Waldrop – is a pretty good starter list of what I think of as “third way” or (to use Stephen Burt’s old phrase) “ellipticist” poets, writers trying to identify a path open as much to such mainstream poets as Jorie Graham or Jean Valentine as to the likes, say, of such post-avants as Erica Hunt or Harryette Mullen. I’d add Forrest Gander & C.D. Wright to Shepherd’s list as well.

But then I’ve never said that I disliked all School of Quietude (SoQ) poets either. I’ve gone out of my way at times to point to Wendell Berry, Daisy Fried, Bob Hass, John Logan & Jack Gilbert as writers who I think are worth reading under any circumstances. I’ve been known to say positive things about everyone from Elizabeth Bishop to George Starbuck to the soft surrealism of Charles Simic & James Tate. And I agree with anyone who thinks Hart Crane was one of the most interesting (and tragic) poets of the last century – a lot more interesting than the faux experimentalism of e.e. cummings. If they have a significant relationship to the forms they use, it doesn’t really matter where they get them. I think Wendell Berry would be exactly the same poet even if the SoQ never existed. Which is exactly how it should be.

It’s the SoQ’s historic presumption that American literature is a subset of British (or, since the vaults are pretty much empty over amongst the conservatives on the Island, Irish) literature that irks. Or its occasional annexations of the tradition it dare not name (from Blake to Whitman & Dickinson to the early Pound), which seems to be just the clumsiest sort of turf elbowing imaginable. Or its 160-year history of pretending that other traditions don’t exist in the United States, a pretense that one still finds in certain programs, anthologies and institutions.¹ Shepherd would appear to be one of the poets who has gotten over that, which is great.

 

¹ How many poets of the several post-New American tendencies have ever had a photograph on the cover of Poets & Writers in its 20-year history? Unless you’re counting C.D. Wright, Andrei Codrescu or an occasional identarian poet who receives dispensation to write freely, the answer is still zero. Which is how a publication with a circulation of 60,000 trivializes itself.

Bill Knott

Three times in the past week, I’ve seen missives from poets that echoed one another. One was an email from a friend of mine, not a langpo, but somebody with a significant birthday this year and a big beautiful selected poems due out in a few months who is in despair that anyone reads him or, if they do, understands what he is trying to do. The second is the degree of alienation positively radiating from Jonathan Mayhew’s second blognote about things little known about him – he says that he hates poetry readings (he told me as much when I ran into him at the MLA, and he stayed away from the big group reading, tho many there would have loved to have met him) and is too angry all the time really to be the nice guy I know him to be. The third, and most extreme, was this New Year’s Day message on Bill Knott’s blog:

Once they get to a certain age, poets should be put to sleep; I don’t mean all poets, not real poets, successful poets: but poets like me, second-raters, third-raters, run of the mill whether SOQ hack like me or superannuated avant, we should get it in the neck. 

I know there is a significant correlation between depression and poetry, and that the holidays in particular can be especially hard, but it disturbs me that the social environment of poetry is such that it seems to reinforce these feelings. Bill Knott may not be my kind of poet, but one thing he is not is a failure. It’s doubly ironic, perhaps, that he is doing to himself precisely what he insists elsewhere on his blog the likes of Geoffrey Hill & Gjertrud Schnackenberg (whose aesthetic program Knott characterizes, not incorrectly, as fascist) do to other poets. But with Knott’s sense of satire – he was Andy Kaufman avant le comic – you never quite know.

Knott teaches – or has taught, I don’t find him on the current faculty roster – at Emerson College in Boston, Mayhew at the University of Kansas (his family lives in St. Louis) tho not in the English Department, my friend teaches somewhere in the New York area, tho like Mayhew not in a writing program as such. What each is expressing is an enormous sense of isolation related precisely to their writing. Both Mayhew & Knott talk about it in competitive terms – at least Jonathan hasn’t concluded that the game is over yet.

These seem to me terms predicated on an image of writing as part of a false economy, one dominated by schools &, to a lesser degree, publishers, where the absolute ratio of jobs (and books from the likes of FSG, Knott’s publisher) to actual writers is so severe that even the most successful feel cut off from the community of their peers. This is really directly related to the same issues as I discussed on Wednesday. Poetry may be, as that silly piece in the Philadelphia Inquirer insisted, “hot,” but these three poets can’t get beyond the incredible chill they feel.

The idea of the poet competing for the FSG volume or the tenured job in Lawrence may have made some sense in a world like, say, the 1950s, when the number of poets wrestling for such goodies was around 200. But in a world in which there are at least 10,000 U.S. poets, it can only lead to the conclusion that, even if you’re a winner, you’re still a loser. That’s sad at best & potentially tragic.

The distinction I always make between avant and post-avant poets has always been around this very recognition. The mythology behind the idea of a tenured elite or the card-carrying Surrealist are just flip sides of the same coin of exclusionary gate keeping. But the Beats and the New York School (and to a lesser degree even the Black Mountain poets & the Spicer Circle) seemed clearly to get it that they were a community first, individuals second, and that that was just fine. This seems to me the inescapable implication of reading the work of Frank O’Hara – it’s literally what “Personism” means – and Ted Berrigan. Jack Spicer, one example I cited on Wednesday, is famous for being a misanthrope, but his Lorca letters, his imitation of Creeley, the intimacy of Language and the literary games of Book of Magazine Verse are all, every single one, acts predicated on the importance of community. That’s why I wrote, on Wednesday, poetry is a community. It really, legitimately is. And if you hate readings, that says a lot about your relationship to that community. Why wouldn’t you want to see what your friends are doing, and check out their work? It doesn’t matter, finally, if the event is more social than focused on the literary – there is plenty of time for that elsewhere. And isn’t it an incentive to push yourself even harder when a friend is doing something interesting?

But if you think that beyond a certain point, the “failed poets” should be taken out & shot, Knott’s modest proposal, there is something seriously wrong. I feel about failed poets the way Larry Fagin & C.A. Conrad feel about “neglectorinos” or, to use one term I’ve employed in the past, “the disappeared.” That disappearance – usually from print first – is invariably tragic. It robs me of my heritage as a poet that I can’t find the work, say, of Gail Dusenbery on the web. I’ve already been robbed no doubt of many good poems by Weldon Kees, Lew Welch or Dan Davidson because they acted on an impulse not so different from Knott’s. I don’t want to lose one poem or poet more. One of the real long-term potentials of the Internet, and of archival programs like PennSound, Ubuweb, Eclipse & Project Gutenberg, is that “the disappeared” could be, can be kept accessible literally forever. That’s the goal we should be seeking.

While I was in California back on July 10, the Wall Street Journal ran a piece on Afghan poetry in the U.S. on its front page. The article by Masood Farivar, which has been reprinted by a few other newspapers in places such as Pittsburgh and Birmingham, Alabama, is worth reading in its entirety – when was the last time you saw a cogent piece on the sociology of poetry on the front page of a newspaper? Me neither. The headline in the Journal was “For Afghan Cabbies, A Poetry Tradition Spurs War of Words.” Most of the other papers, however, realized that this wasn’t about taxi drivers, giving it the plainer, but more accurate heading of something like the Post-Gazette’s “D.C. Afghan poetry groups fight war of words.”

The gist of the article concerns two reading series that take place in the same Masonic Lodge in Springfield, VA, on different Friday nights each month. One, “An Evening with the Dervishes,” in the words of Farivar, “

prefers what it calls the serious, scholarly pursuit of poetry. The group views itself as a literary clique focusing on masters such as Abdul Qadir Bedil, a 17^th century poet and Islamic mystic, or Sufi. Its gatherings feature top scholars and poets.

The other, older series, “An Evening of Sufism,”

brings all forms of Afghan poetry to large audiences. It also treats attendees to free refreshments and pop-music performances.

The article makes a point of noting that a reader in the latter series recently “informed the audience that she’d just finished her poem in the parking lot.”

The differences between the two groups echo the division within American poetries between the School of Quietude, that ensemble of aesthetic tendencies that tends to stress the conventionality of poetry and its continuity with English literary traditions (and tensions) & the broad range of post-avant alternatives that emerged with the New American Poets of the 1950s, but which can be traced back to Whitman & Poe a century earlier. Farivar characterizes the dispute:

Mostly they adhere to Afghan social norms, treating each other with civility and even deference. Occasionally, they drop by each other's gatherings. But at times, their rivalries have burst into the open.

Members of "An Evening of Sufism" accuse the Dervishes of tearing down their flyers from Afghan stores, and have dubbed them "hash-heads," which in Afghanistan is a term associated with the uneducated.

In fact, the Dervishes seem closer to the group’s origins in a series of evenings when the poets would seriously debate the nuances of classic Afghan texts, pooling their money to call M.I. Negargar, a former Kabul University professor now living in exile in England, to tease out the full potential of the works they were discussing.

If one steps back from the specifics of the current tempest – who tore down whose flyers or who is trying to get whom kicked out of the Masonic Lodge – one sees two distinct approaches to literature emerging, one focused on the historic canon of Afghan poetry and emphasizing continuity with traditional Afghan culture – there is a move among the Dervishes, for example, to ban all forms of musical accompaniment at their readings – the other focused more on the present, which includes contemporary writing and concerns that may affect Afghan exiles in the U.S., but which would be of little import from the perspective of traditional culture in Afghanistan. Finishing a poem in the parking lot just before the start of a reading may not be the best way to present polished writing, but it certainly is one way of foregrounding the value on the present that the other group has.

The article made me wonder just how much these same divisions may underscore roughly parallel, and far older, chasms within American poetry. For example, just how much of the School of Quietude/post-avant debate can still be traced back to this nation’s origins as a gathering of exiles, one group concerned with accentuating its continuity with European cultures, especially British culture, the other hoping to foreground that which is somehow uniquely American about American poetry?¹ How does this compare with the same sort of division, say, back in the U.K., where the distinction seems instead to reflect class divisions as much as anything else (a cleavage that goes back to Shakespeare’s day, at the least, when the Bard initiated the post-avant impulse by composing his own sonnet series to demonstrate that an uneducated writer of popular entertainments from the boonies could perform at least as well as a “University wit” like Ben Jonson).

The U.S. Afghan exile literary scene dates, according to this article, back to the 1980s when the first wave of exiles began to write. The article implies, without seeming to realize that this is what it is suggesting, that the scene in Springfield, VA, represents literary processes that may be larger than just Afghan or U.S. verse, and represents an opportunity to observe an evolution in the social history of poetry not unlike the way a cyclotron enables a scientist to recreate conditions near, if not at, the Big Bang from which all current tendencies necessarily follow. Regardless of where you might fit into these broader literary traditions, the rise of Afghan poetry in the U.S. should be worth watching.

 

¹One could argue that between a colonial imperialism lurking within one tradition & an unexamined nationalism lurking in the other, that both tendencies offer ample territory for critique. This division isn’t so much about who might be “right” as it is about the values being propagated by each tendency’s agenda.

I'm not making this up: "there's no more reliable way of initially entering a poet's private domain than by examining what he or she rhymes with what." This from Brad Leithauser, reviewing the latest slender (78 pages for $20) offering from Seamus Heaney in last Sunday's New York Times. In other news, the latest way to test out the reliability of your new hybrid vehicle is to gauge how many buckets of oats it will eat.

Last Wednesday, when I was demonstrating that a ten year old could write better than some work offered by the School of Quietude, and used Geoffrey Brock as my example, I conceded that I was being unfair: “there are Brock poems that are actually quite good.” I think it makes sense to point to an example of this also, and to say a little why I think it’s exemplary, even tho it’s certainly SoQ to the max.

My favorite Brock poem is a recent piece entitled “Exercitia Spiritualia,” published in Deborah Ager’s zine, 32 Poems. What it does with rhyme would – should – impress any fan of Oulipo.

We met, like lovers in movies, on a quay

Beside the Seine. I was reading Foucault

And feeling smart. She called him an assault 

On sense, and smiled. She was from Paraguay,

Was reading Saint  Ignatius. Naivete

Aroused her, so she guided me to Chartres

And Sacre Coeur, to obscure theatres

For passion plays - she was my exegete.

In Rome (for Paris hadn't been enough)

We took a room, made love on the worn parquet,

Then strolled to Sant'Ignazio. Strange duet:

Pilgrim and pagan, gazing, as though through

That ceiling's flatness, toward some epitome

Of hoped-for depth. I swore I saw a  dome.

 

This is the first strategy for an A-B-B-A rhyme scheme, to call it that, that could make me envision wanting to read a long poem in it, at least until the deadening metrics overcome me like so much carbon monoxide. Sonnet-sized, tho, they don’t detract.

This is rhyme at the level of the graphic signifier, not the audible one, exploiting a feature within English’s notorious pliability to demonstrate the ongoing slide between sound, sense & visual representation. While there is nothing here that could be called opaque, as such, the scandal of opacity – representation’s ultimate failure-from-within – lurks everywhere.

Another poem, I find effective, but problematic, is “Hopes for My Daughter,” which appeared in The Hudson Review in Winter, 2003:

I hope that, once or twice, she's chosen last.

I hope that some friend's trusted smile

Proves false, and that when she betrays a trust

She hates herself a while.

I hope a handsome good-for-nothing boy

Bruises her heart when her heart's strong.

I hope she isn't granted each wished-for joy,

Occasionally is wrong,

And learns firsthand what loss is, and regret.

I hope she faces prejudice.

I hope her world will still need saving - yet

Not be as dire as this.

I hope her father's flaws are, in her eyes,

Flaws. And if she has children too

If anyone still does - I hope she dies

Before the children do.

 

The variable line lengths soften the predictability of the rhyme scheme enough so that one focuses first on the content, a poem that echoes works by such disparate souls as Robert Creeley & Weldon Kees. The trick is that, like Kees, Brock has no daughter. The poem is also an exercise in speculative fiction. That detail, I suspect, also elevates the layers of irony at work in the final lines.

Yet this latter poem is also filled with eyebrow-raising clichés – trusted smile, handsome good-for-nothing boy – and language added just to pad out lines (handsome good-for-nothing again, but also If anyone still does). My experience has been that the more times you read this poem, the larger & more gaping these flaws seem, so that the power of the initial reading is followed by a series of progressively larger disappointments. Still, the power of that first reader cannot & should not be denied.

When I contrast these two poems with the cringingly bathetic piece I ran last Wednesday, it demands an act of imagination to conceive that they were written by the same human being. Yet there must exist some place, some perspective, from which all three make a kind of sense that is compelling enough for Brock to put his name to all three.

So while I would actually agree with Curtis Faville’s point from the Comments trail the other day that School of Quietude poetry is not necessarily always bad poetry, my own conclusion is that the tradition offers a framework that perpetually invites the mawkish, the overstuffed, the conflation of pattern with form. Great SoQ poems are being written, but almost invariably it is in spite of the tradition from which they arise.

From my perspective, there are two negatives to the concept of the School of Quietude, the idea of an aesthetically & culturally conservative (and ultimately Anglophiliac) literary movement that I’ve adapted from the correspondence of Edgar Allan Poe. One is that it lumps together too crudely all manner of conservative-to-outright-reactionary writing, without sufficient regard to the subtleties therein. But the more serious problem lies within Poe’s term itself, which could be misread as suggesting that quietness itself is not an appropriate register for writing. There are, in fact, many quiet poets who are (a) excellent writers and (b) not at all quietudinous, so to speak. I’ve noted both Tom Meyer & Devin Johnston as instances of this circumstance in the past. But perhaps the best example is the poetry of Merrill Gilfillan.

I’ve praised Gilfillan here before, so it should not come as much surprise to find out that I think of the man as the pre-eminent nature writer of my generation, indeed since Thoreau. The key to this, whether in his poetry or in his essays, lies in the specificity of Gilfillan’s language. He is principally a descriptive poet, even when it is all the many other little things kicked up by his description that ultimately catches our eye:

Morning with Chokecherries

Douse them, wet
they shine like brilliant
caviar (dust devils whirling,
cranes circling, babies
laughing, halfmoon sailing,
ravens, old station wagons
circling and circling), set
them in the sun.

Or:

Smoke Today

To the west
just off that lightning-rod
ridge, a lazy gray
smoke curl, a simple up

and out, left
to right. Burning off
the tumbleweeds, burning off
piranha ticks.

It makes me long
for a Lucky Strike.

Early today, far above
faroff Prairie Dog Creek,
a mile-long ribbon

flowed elegantly east,
undulant fretless umber
almost not quite really there –
burning off the buckaroo

wallpaper. It made me dream
of a Gauloise blue.

Even as Gilfillan creates a context in which undulant fretless umber does not sound excessively lush & almost not quite really there remains articulate in all its qualifications, Gilfillan yokes together two disparate domains, one that of the landscape of northern Wyoming, the other the cultural imagery of tobacco brands, both brands retro, one almost comically exotic. It’s a touch not unlike the parallel Gilfillan draws in the first poem between cranes (whooping or sandhill, the reader wants to ask) & station wagons.

Both of these poems are to be found in Undanceable, just out from Flood Editions. They are about as noisy as Gilfillan gets. Much quieter are the six serial poems here, ranging from four to a dozen pages, perhaps because they can circumambulate their ostensible subject (or, in the case of “Six Songs,” radiate outward from the idea of the title). They don’t much need to go anywhere, closure being an option more than a necessity, the presentness of everything – word, image, intellection – being always the about in What’s this about. Thus there is no forced drama hidden in the first section of “Yampa Crows at Yampa Evening,” Yampa itself the name of a river & valley in Gilfillan’s adopted state of Colorado:

Subject pilfered,
lightly repainted: poetry
as subtlest of craws: crows

at sundown
fine print for omnivores.
They sit on old boxcars –

“Alabama State Docks/
Port of Mobile” – doors
wide open, see right through:

sand bar, willows, Yampa,
alders, foothills, half-lit peaks:
the Williams Fork Range.

Gilfillan’s vocabulary, a la Forrest Gander, keeps me close to a dictionary when reading him. In the nine sections of “Yampa Crows,” I find cecropia, firn, feuille mort, alpenglow.

Poetry as meditative as this is, in its own way, as “pure” or “extreme” or “abstract” (take your pick) as Clark Coolidge’s Polaroid or The Maintains. Tho, of course, it is not abstract in the slightest & abjures extremism. I could read such writing without limit, and with total pleasure at all points, which is pretty much what reading’s all about. Undanceable makes for terrific music.

It is true, as somebody suggested, that I can figure out who is posting anonymously, even pseudonymously, to the comments section of this weblog. I’ve sent the fellow – you knew it was a guy, didn’t you? – who was railing on Fence this past week a note, but as he’s already apologized (albeit anonymously) I won’t out him.

 

His paranoia – especially with the conspiratorial tones regarding Iowa City – reminds me more than a little of Foetry, a curious little act of literary muckraking. Foetry’s argument is simple enough – many literary contests either are rigged or might as well be, given the numerous points of contact between judges, hosts & winners. While the website’s thesis falls apart somewhat when it gets down to specifics, its deeper premise is even more true than I think they themselves imagine. Because poetry is social – not, repeat not, individual – all poetry contests, awards, prizes, fellowships, you name it, are always rigged all of the time. That’s not the important distinction. Some of them are competently done and others are not – that’s one important distinction. Certain groups of human beings have organized themselves more tightly around such institutions than others – that’s another point worth discussing, tho it’s not quite the same thing.

 

What do I mean by this? First, that there is no method known to human beings to remove the social from a social practice, but this is what would be required to fully expunge personal preference from the process of identifying “the best” manuscript. For the most part, blind screening such as is done, for example, by that National Endowment for the Arts, simply inserts a filter of incompetence as a randomizing factor. But ultimately the judges, real human beings, will sort what makes it through this literary spawning challenge to select those texts to which they most respond.

 

The idea of prohibiting judges from selecting their students or former students or colleagues or spouses or even the cute kid they slept with at the writer’s conference last summer, however you want to define that, even maybe just the one they thought they wanted to sleep with, is the kind of pro forma rule you put in place precisely because you don’t trust the competence of the judge or judges in the first place. The most significant volume ever published in the Yale Younger Poets Series, John Ashbery’s Some Trees, was virtually recruited by W.H. Auden. It wasn’t even Ashbery’s first book. Yet one might point to it as an example of “the process” working at its finest. Auden picked the best possible manuscript by a young writer available, and did a better job locating it than the bureaucratic procedures put in place by the Yale University Press.

 

What seems to me more disturbing, actually, is the idea anyone would have that a prize, whether it’s the Nobel or Jimmy’s Crush List, represents some kind of “objective” or “impartial” validation. That isn’t how prizes work – it’s the other way around: the winner validates the prize. Or not, as the case may be. Consider, for example, the Oscars. Does anyone imagine that giving the Best Picture award to a film such as Rocky or Chicago or Out of Africa means that these celluloid dogs can dance? It’s the same for the Pulitzer.

 

It’s this need for external validation that strikes me as sad, finally, though I’m sure I crave it just as badly as the next human being, maybe more. What makes it sad is what it says about how our culture doesn’t let us value the act of writing itself, for its own sake, as its own reward. And that craving, that index of our own lack of self-confidence, is what is exploited by contests, especially those that are intended not to find, say, publishable manuscripts, but just to raise funds. Are they any worse than the flood of writing conferences that the School o’ Quietude puts on each summer? Contests are cheaper & leave you with fewer mosquito bites. But you might enjoy a week in the woods with like-minded people a whole lot more.

 

So Foetry might be right in the most trivial sense, but it’s so completely missing the larger picture that it warrants the great So What. The real story about literary prizes isn’t who picks whom, but the larger anthropological question of how value is concentrated & assigned, both across society & within ourselves.

The Washington Post changed its online format over the weekend, so that I couldn’t find Edward Hirsch’s weekly poetry column until I got my (also weekly) email from Poetry Daily with a proper link. It should come as no surprise to my readers that Hirsch & I have different views of the world of poetry — he represents the school of quietude (SoQ) at its most hushed — but I do check out his column every Sunday. He takes his responsibility as a reporter on poetry for a mostly non-poetic readership seriously & the column on occasion is an opportunity for me to check in on older SoQ poets that I haven’t thought about in awhile, as well as to learn about new ones. 

 

As it so happens, his column this past Sunday focused on a poet for whom he & I both share an enthusiasm, George Oppen. But in his reading of Oppen — he quotes portions of two poems from This in Which, one from Of Being Numerous — Hirsch creates a poet rather unlike the man I knew in San Francisco. He sets up his revisionist interpretation instantly in his opening sentence:

 

George Oppen (1908-1984) is widely known as an Objectivist poet, but I think of him more as an American solitary, akin to Edward Hopper. (emphasis added)

 

Thus this Communist organizer, this partaker of literary & political movements, turns out secretly to have been that libertarian icon, the Rugged Individual. It’s an odd, but interesting, twist to give to the man & his work, and I can’t help but think that Hirsch must have some idea what he is doing here.

 

His argument is anything but gratuitous. Particularly given that Hirsch has only some 530 words in which to make it — and that a second (if unwritten) rule of his newspaper column is to quote a certain amount of poetry* — Hirsch’s waltzes through a deft series of critical moves, taking on poems that can be seen as central to Oppen’s project. In Hirsch’s reading, Oppen envisions the natural as radically Other & opaque, but that words fail people because they cannot make themselves transparent & thus bring that Other clearly to us. Oppen’s goal, in this reading, is to establish “clarity in relationship, for the ‘this in which,’ the determination of the human in relation to the Other.” So far as this goes, I have no great problem with it.

 

But Hirsch takes it a step further — “Oppen's self-reflexive poetry of consciousness strives to restore meaning to language by faithfully using it to refer outward to a world of things” — and this seems not at all accurate to my sense of Oppen. For one thing, to restore meaning to language imposes a narrative to the conception of meaning that feels foreign to Oppen’s sensibility. And the idea that one might use it “faithfully . . . to refer outward to a world of things” cascades a series of assumptions over the conception of language that the Oppen I read would have some trouble recognizing, precisely because it is wrong.

 

Hirsch’s evidence, the poem this is leading up to, is “Psalm,” one of Oppen’s anthology pieces, which the online version of the Post makes a hash of, obliterating indentations, stanza breaks & the distinction of the epigram’s font.** [A correct printing of the text can be found here.] “Psalm” provides the title for This in Which, Oppen’s third collection (and second after the 25 year hiatus between Discrete Series & The Materials). It’s something of an unusual work for Oppen, in that he uses a more fixed, reiterative stanza than was generally his practice.*** After an initial three-line stanza setting up an image of deer bedding down in a forest, each of the other stanzas is introduced with a single indented line announcing its focus. The progression is worth noting:

 

·         Their eyes

 

·         The roots of it

 

·         Their paths

 

·         The small nouns

 

After these announcements, each stanza follows with three lines in what appears to be free verse. Yet each of the next three stanzas also proceeds by focusing the reader’s attention on a single anomalous word positioned near or at the end of the stanza’s next to last line:

 

·         the alien small teeth

 

·         the strange woods

 

·         the distances

 

Such nebulous, judgmental terms as alien & strange seem out of place for a poet whose “ethical imperative is to reach for the actual,” in Hirsch’s terms. These words do the exact opposite of reaching “outward to a world of things.” They are, by both position & content, the most telling & important words of their respective stanzas. They are the terms on which each stanza pivots.

 

It is when we recognize the function of these pivot terms that the stanzaic symmetries come into focus – not just the number of lines, but that every second stanza ends in a period (which means also that every stanza beginning with Their ends without punctuation). This poem is as far from the organic mimicry of forms as Oppen will ever get in his writing – it’s a closed pattern as tight as any of Zukofsky’s.

 

So it is worth noting what comes in that same position in the next to last line of the final stanza: the wild deer. This positioning does two things at once – first it refocuses our attention onto the ontology of deer-ness in the first place; second, & more important, it underscores that the adjective wild is every bit as strange, conceptual & ultimately empty of content as the terms used in each of the three preceding stanzas. It is the opposite of natural, the opposite of being “rooted in the thing,” it is cultural . . . almost in the anthropological sense of that word. The term wild has no meaning in the context of deer other than as an index of the distance from our own realm, the not wild.

 

Which is why the announced topic of the final stanza is so critical – The small nouns. The deer, these deer certainly & in some sense all others, exist not in “the wild,” but rather in this in which they stare back at us – through language. Escher-like in its process, the poem unveils itself at last not to be about deer, but about language. That they are there! – the final line of the first stanza now takes on a powerful new meaning that both is & is not an assertion of nature’s immanence.

 

The poem literally stands Hirsch’s assertion – that Oppen seeks “to restore meaning to language by faithfully using it to refer outward to a world of things” – on its head. The poem is an analog to Wordsworth’s crossing of the alps in The Prelude, looking into nature only to see his mind, unable to get beyond. The poem argues against the restoration of something that never existed in the first place, a transparent language.

 

So Hirsch gets the poem exactly backwards. And it’s a misreading, I would argue, that occurs in good part because he wants to take Oppen out of context, right there in his very first sentence, to make of Oppen something he never was. For to take Oppen at his word would be to challenge everything Edward Hirsch holds dear. Edward, you must change your life.

 

 

 

 

 

* Which is why, I suppose, the column is not the newspaper standard 700 words.

 

** Why can’t newspaper typesetters get this right, even on the web? The mangling of poetic form seems to be journalism’s primary contribution to the history of poetry. 

 

*** Indeed, it is an anthology piece for Oppen in part for the same reason that “The Yachts” is one for Williams – it is the poem those who don’t like his more “extreme” works can get into, because it looks deceptively familiar.

It was Kasey Mohammad’s brilliant note, appended as a comment to my September 9 blog, that got me thinking more about the Houlihan question yesterday. Kasey’s argument is that

 

you've sketched an axis whose poles are the external ("audience") and the internal ("community"); I wonder whether there couldn’t be other axes that figure in here as well. 

 

In that sentence “you” is me and “I” is him (which sounds like it ought to be out of a John Lennon song somewhere). And I of course agree that things never are that simple. But simply recasting my terms thus reminded me instead of how much our Official Poets of late have in fact cast their lot around a series of activities that posits appreciation as the major relationship towards the poem. Robert Pinsky’s Favorite Poem Project, Billy Collins’ Poetry 180 and Dana Gioia’s “Art for the Masses” NEA Shakespeare Campaign all are premised on a few common presumptions, principally that poetry is written by the very few & consumed largely by a passive audience of non-writers. That seems to me to be a very specific – and very political – theory of literature.

 

One feature of post-avant poetics, regardless of the tendency, is that readings often occur in which the audience is at least half composed by other poets. It’s not unusual for the poet to know a good number of the poets in his or her audience, even when reading in a new city for the very first time. That’s an implicit presumption in Frank O’Hara’s “Personism” manifesto & it is what literally authorizes the use of a form of shorthand in the critical writing, for example, of Charles Olson. It’s also the feature of post-avant poetics that is being identified whenever a School of Quietude poet accuses some part of the post-avant scene of having coterie poetics.

 

That’s always struck me as being a peculiarly Orwellian charge, in that the presumption of the literacy of an audience – that its members could just as easily be the writers speaking – is taken as a sign of elitism, whereas the contrasting model is one of a functionally non-literate (because non-writing) audience appreciating the work of an anointed few. That Gioia’s anglophilia takes him out of American literature altogether is almost too deliciously ironic for words.

 

Those of us in what Bill Knott recently called the School of Noisiness – I’d use terms more like vibrancy & life, Bill, just to contrast it with the embalming elixirs of the Other – really don’t think in terms of audience, precisely because it posits an unbridgeable gap between those who write & those who don’t. So, in fact, I would disagree with Kasey about the model of an axis being posed that has audience at one extreme. Rather I see the universe of writing, which includes all readers, as a series of constantly shifting ensembles of tendencies, directions, & what I’d characterize as interest clusters. And while I do often think about poetry in terms of political organization, the dynamics of it are most amenable to a Gramscian view of a poetics of movement & position, more than one of winners & losers. The short-term gains I posited as one aspect of a position not unlike Houlihan’s yesterday are real, even if the longer term dynamics – School of Quietude poetry always dissolves in the long run, overwhelmed by the crazies, the Blakes, Dickinsons & Whitmans – are likewise inescapable. Periplum, that Greek term for navigating a constantly reconfiguring universe, is indeed the point.

 

 

 

Ш         Ш         Ш

 

 

The blog recorded 441 visits yesterday, a record. There were a total of 729 pages views, also a new high.

I thought about stepping into the Joan Houlihan fiasco – especially the exchange betwixt Dale Smith & Bill Knott on the Skanky Possum blog* – but then I just thought “Ick!” And that Jim Behrle had it pretty much accurate as to Houlihan & the broader social phenomena of which she is only a symptom:

 

·         They don’t get it

·         They’re “scared of us”

·         They think we’re all language poets

 

Houlihan herself underscores that last point when she uses Sheila E. Murphy as an example of, as Houlihan calls it, I=N=C=O=H=E=R=E=N=C=E. But while Murphy’s painterly linguistic abstractions might be viewed as extending from, say, Clark Coolidge’s early books, I don’t believe that I’ve ever seen or heard her describe herself as a language poet, nor have I ever seen anyone I would associate with langpo do likewise. The painterly & abstract elements in her work are entirely her own. Houlihan’s calling Murphy’s work a “language poem” simply demonstrates that, in fact, Houlihan doesn’t know how to read post-avant work in any of its varieties & can’t even see the differences when they’re up front & fairly obvious.** This is just a replay of the review ages ago in The Nation that similarly abused Jorie Graham as a language poet. Sheila Murphy & Jorie Graham are both fine writers, but neither is doing anything remotely similar either to language poetry or to each other.

 

There are other questions one might ask about Houlihan’s performance here: Does she, in fact, know what she is doing? Is this really just a cynical attempt to generate tourist traffic around her writing by generating an artificial scandal? Is Houlihan another Bill Bennett, a compulsive gambler who inveighs on the topic of values while practicing a lifestyle in direct conflict with his screeds? The test of this is whether or not Houlihan really believes what she herself is writing or only thinks that her own supporters are too stupid to know the difference. That’s not an attractive choice, but those really are the options. I often wonder this same thing about William Logan, the New Criterion critic whose fulminations are the closest thing that journal has to a comic strip. Nor are these hardly the first instances of this same phenomenon. We could just as easily ask if Norman Podhoretz understood in 1958 that penning “The Know-Nothing Bohemians” would make him a laughing stock forever. What all of these defenders of a beleaguered norm have in common is not just a rhetorical stance – one that has clear enough political implications – but also a perfect historical track record. Dating at least as far back as Henry Theodore Tuckerman & the original School of Quietude of the 1840s, these misfortunates always lose.

 

So whenever one these routines shows up in a new guise & with a new name, the questions one needs to have answered are:

·         Is this person ignorant of history? (Position A)

·         If not, which of the following are their motives?

o        Short-term gain & notoriety? (Position B)

o        A commitment to values so strong that he or she is willing to accept the historical consequences in order to make a stand? (Position C)

I have a lot of respect for that last position, although it is by the far the most rare. I’ve said this before, but I think that the poetry & work of Wendell Berry is perhaps the best example of Position C extant. Positions A & B are far more common.

 

More interesting, because it is so much more complex, is a certain kind of middle stance taken these days by the likes of bloggers Gabriel Gudding & Henry Gould along with fellow traveler Kent Johnson. None of them is ignorant of history but all three seem to share an instinctive suspicion of much of the new, even as they themselves are often practitioners of same. I don’t think any of them would mind gain or notoriety, frankly, short-term or otherwise, but I also sense that they understand the hollowness of its promise, so that rather than being defenders of an Olde Order, they have chosen instead to become the guilty conscience of the New. There is a risk in this, because it is a complex position, and that is that they can be taken for or confused with the likes of a Houlihan. I’m not sure that any of the three manages that risk as deftly as I would like, but at least I will take what any one of them says seriously, even when, on the face of it, some of their critical writing makes me think we must be inhabiting parallel (if not perpendicular) universes.

 

 

 

*67 comments to a single blog!

 

**In the same piece, Houlihan misspells Lyn Hejinian’s first name.

I’ve thought about responding in detail to Brian Kim Stefans’ screed over the first half of my Lowell commentary, but found (find) it impossible, at least personally, to untangle his thinking from the ad hominem attacks that he loads into it. Of greater value & interest are Kasey Mohammad’s & Michael Magee’s discussion of the same issue. Though, frankly, Brian’s second approach on the same subject seems less over-the-top & thus more thoughtful. Alas, he slides back into the ad hominem mode for his third commentary.

 

I do want to reiterate that anyone who lived through the 1960s will remember that, in politics, the “third way” strategy advocated by Stefans – Walter Mondale was its apotheosis – invariably came out as road kill. While the intentions of a rapprochement may always be noble, in the world of American letters it requires amnesia to imagine it possible. If you’re anywhere on the post-avant spectrum – as Brian clearly is – the idea of rapprochement is virtually a death wish. Kasey, on the other hand, is exactly on target when he suggests that a “17^th way” will be possible before a “third one” is.

 

Daniel Nester offers a more cogent criticism concerning my comments in his email below:

 

Mr. Silliman:

 

Some quick comments on your otherwise spot-on assessment of all this Lowellmania of late.

 

When you say that when Time "could have focused on the aftermath & implications of the first Harlem riots of the decade, it chose instead to feature Lowell on its cover," I think it misses many points. 

 

To wit: Time could have had another poet, not from his clan, on the cover — Ginsberg, perhaps, an obvious choice, but perhaps a feature on "The New American Poetry."  Granted, that last proposed feature would have been four years late — not so unhip for mainstream media — but my point is by saying Time should have focused on the Harlem riots, you're implying that

 

n       any poet beside Lowell couldn't have competed with him for a Time cover — indeed, if we are to believe poets of your generation (Larry Fagin's asinine bloviating comes to mind), this was a glorious time for poetry, filled with cheap rents, great pot, and hot chicks;

n       Lowell and his lot didn't care about the Harlem riots — they probably did, they being of the aristopoet, armchair purply liberal pedigree;

n       poetry is less important than the Harlem riots — it is not, and to imply it is demonstrates that in the absence of good ideas all we have is moral indignation;

 

Granted, your comparison goes for cheap points, and does point out Time's oversight of engaging with the real world, just as Lowell, in his diction and topics, avoided the real world as well.  But by saying non-pedigreed poets, by right of Time magazine's exclusion, are "down" with Harlem riot concerns suggests alternapoets of the early 60s were political heroes, and the pedigreed ones weren't.  I'm afraid neither is the case.

 

I just don't think you need to invoke the Harlem riots to point out the iniquity of the poetry world back then.  Is all I'm saying.

 

Best, D

 

 

Daniel Nester

editor, Unpleasant Event Schedule

http://unpleasanteventschedule.com/

author, God Save My Queen

http://www.godsavemyqueen.com/

 

Nester is absolutely right in some of his points. I wasn’t trying to suggest that Lowell or his immediate circle were in any way involved in the decision to cover poetry over social eruption on the cover of Time. There is no reason to believe that Lowell didn’t feel some sympathy for the rioters, although frankly at that early moment most of the Left didn’t know how exactly how to react to that event.

 

As an editor, my experience tells me that a “poetry cover” on Time is what you choose for a week of little or no news of great topical importance. In the face of the first modern urban uprising, to have missed that was a major editorial comment on Time’s part. It’s not that poetry is “less important,” but rather that its importance functions on a very different dimension.

 

However, it’s a comment more on the school of quietude’s (SoQ’s) integration into the social milieu of the publishing industry, as such, that Time would think to put Lowell, rather than Ginsberg, on its cover – the latter would almost certainly have sold more copies in 1964. It reminds me of the degree to which many of the quietude poets don’t even know how that world represents their own small press scene. As one Pulitzer-winning SoQ said to me a couple of years back, “It must be hard to come out of college without a book contract.” Yeah. Right.