A word about naming. Naming really matters. When the Declaration of Independence stated some 231 years ago

We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just Powers from the consent of the governed,

Thomas Jefferson and his fellow framers may even have intended the word men to include, as my grade school teachers insisted in the 1950s, all people without regard to gender, color, age or property. But it wasn’t an accident that African-American men were commonly addressed as “boy” regardless of their age well into the 20^th century, or that women did not have the right to vote until 1920. Using man as the unmarked case for person did a lot to obscure all the ways in which men generally, and white male heterosexual property owners more specifically held a monopoly on state power until well into the 20^th century. “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all white male heterosexual property owners are created equal” doesn’t have quite the same lofty ring as the original document, but it is in fact what Jefferson’s words meant in practice. An awful lot of pain & suffering would occur over the next two centuries as that one “unmarked” word, men, got itself unpacked, socially. The problem of the Declaration is just this – in the way in which Jefferson used this phrase, there is no such thing as men. Mistaking a subset for the category of the whole – people – distorts everything. There are real consequences.

In an almost parallel, if less critical, mode, there is no such thing as a poet. There are only kinds of poets. The idea that a visual poet, a sound poet, a conventionalist who writes in rhyme & meter, a soft surrealist, a post-language poet, an identarian of any specific ethnicity or sexual orientation, a slam rapper or a cowboy poet, are somehow doing “the same thing” is so vague & confused as to be ludicrous. Yet there is one coterie of writers who insist they are just poets. They are, they contend, the unmarked case. Everybody else is marked in some fashion: gay poet, language poet, NY School, haiku poet, flarf poet, Southern poet, Filipino poet, whatever.

I realize that there are many poets, most in fact, who prefer to think of themselves as poets, period, rather than as this or that type of poet. I’m sympathetic, since I’m really no different in this regard. But I’m reminded of Marx’s adage that people make history, but not as they please. This is precisely the point where our lives as writers intersects with the social. So it’s not surprising that whenever I bring this topic up, I can always count on some response such as the quasi-anonymous Jason last Thursday, so angry that their words in the comments stream are positively sputtering. If they can just kill the messenger, they must think, this will all go away. But it won’t.

This past week’s National Book Award nominations for poetry are a scandal that should get somebody fired, not so much for the poets who were chosen – most are credible examples of the same small school of writing – as for the selection of the panel who did the choosing. Charles Simic, Linda Bierds, David St. John, Vijay Seshadri, and Natasha Trethewey may be diverse in terms of gender, race, even age, but all five represent the same neophobe movement in American letters. There is not one post-avant, not one third-way, visual, slam or other kind of poet. Imagine a National Book Foundation panel that included, say, Jack Hirschman, Antler, Diane DiPrima, Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Janice Mirikitani, all poets associated in some way with the Beat scene, and that they chose a list of possible recipients that included Eileen Myles, David Meltzer, Jack Foley, Michael Rothenberg & Amiri Baraka. There would be howls of outrage, as there were in 1979 when the National Endowment for the Arts attempted to redress that agency’s historic neglect of “marked case poets” of all kinds all at once. If there are not screams & speeches before Congress at the output of this year’s panel, it’s not because the panel represents a broader spectrum of the world of poetry, but only because it represents that tiny sliver that fancies itself as being “just poets.” This panel’s selections reflect not only aesthetic sameness, but all are white, four are published by big trade presses, all but Ellen Bryant Voigt have Ph.D.’s and teach for a living. Voigt, obviously the rebel in this scene, got her MFA at Iowa City. Oh, she too teaches.¹ At 57, Linda Gregerson is the baby of the group. As a cross-section of American poetry, this doesn’t stretch even from A to B.

For the past five years, my response to situations like this, and to the underlying conditions that permit such blatant favoritism, has been to systematically mark the unmarked poets, to name them. The phrase I’ve chosen, School of Quietude, is a term that has its roots in the correspondence of Edgar Allan Poe, who had to deal with the direct ancestors of this very same cabal of poets back in the 1840s & didn’t much appreciate the experience either. But whether I call them the SoQ, conventionalists, neophobes, “cooked” – a 1950s word borrowed from the anthropology of Claude Levi-Strauss that was used during that decade to distinguish the likes of Donald Hall, Robert Pack, Louis Simpson, Robert Lowell & Richard Wilbur from the “raw” New Americans – the one term that shouldn’t apply is “mainstream.” They are no more mainstream than anyone else – that is like calling the Bill O’Reilly Show a “spin-free zone.” It’s calculated to misrepresent the facts.

Historically, the most salient features characterizing this literary movement, from the days of Poe to the present, is a backwards-looking approach to aesthetics combined with a fiercely held monopoly of the major institutions relating to poetry.

The clearest example of this monopoly is the Poet Laureate program of the Library of Congress. In its seventy year history, there have been 47 people invited to serve as the laureate or, in its early days, as the poetry consultant to the Library of Congress. The number sometimes is given as 48 since Louise Glück served two discontinuous terms, one of them as part of a three-person “shared” laureateship during the Y2K celebration. 46 of the 47, a mere 97.9 percent, have all been card-carrying members of the School of Quietude. Indeed, you’d be better off as a traditionalist who is only marginally an American poet, such as Stephen Spender or Joseph Brodsky, than to be anywhere along the Pound-Williams-Stein-Zukofsky lineage, even tho that is also the Whitman-Dickinson lineage & indeed has been the site of most of the important poetry in American history. In reverse order, the following writers have been invited to be our poets laureate:

Charles Simic
Donald Hall
Ted Kooser
Louise Glück
Billy Collins
Stanley Kunitz
Rita Dove, Louise Glück and W.S. Merwin
Robert Pinsky
Robert Hass
Rita Dove
Mona Van Duyn
Joseph Brodsky
Mark Strand
Howard Nemerov
Richard Wilbur
Robert Penn Warren
Gwendolyn Brooks
Reed Whittemore
Robert Fitzgerald
Anthony Hecht
Maxine Kumin
William Meredith
Robert Hayden
Stanley Kunitz
Daniel Hoffman
Josephine Jacobsen
William Stafford
William Jay Smith
James Dickey
Stephen Spender
Reed Whittemore
Howard Nemerov
Louis Untermeyer
Richard Eberhart
Robert Frost
Randall Jarrell
William Carlos Williams
Conrad Aiken
Elizabeth Bishop
Leonie Adams
Robert Lowell
Karl Shapiro
Louise Bogan
Robert Penn Warren
Allen Tate
Joseph Auslander

Only one individual ever invited to serve has declined – William Carlos Williams, the one non-SoQ poet on the entire list. So in practice, our laureates have been 100-percent neophobes now for seventy years. Williams was offered the position in 1952, at a point when his health was already deep into the 15-year cardiac slide that would eventually kill him. His correspondence at the time shows him to have been ambivalent about the program at best – in his mid-sixties, he’d already suffered a lifetime of condescension and neglect from his generation’s traditionalists, the very same New Critics who took over the academy in the 1930s & ‘40s.

One might argue that Gwendolyn Brooks borders on the post-avant, or that Rita Dove doesn’t show the same Anglophile traits that are the commonest denominator on this list. Their presence here, however, demonstrates one of the least attractive neophobe traits, akin to plantation liberalism: African-Americans (but only African-Americans) are given greater leeway to stray from conventionalist writing styles. It’s not, as a result, any accident that two of the most recent post-avants to be nominated or win major literary awards should be Harryette Mullen & Nate Mackey. They richly deserve the accolades, but their selection is consistent with the most cynical of interpretations about the governance of these institutions.

But it is true that, as the number of publishing poets in the United States has grown from a few hundred in the 1950s to over 10,000 today, neophobes have lost their stranglehold on some literary institutions. Not only have counter-institutions grown up, such as the poetics programs at New College and Naropa, but a number of degree-granting institutions – from SUNY Buffalo to Mills to Brown to Bard to Penn to UC San Diego – have become known as sites of the post-avant. Even Iowa City – never quite comfortable with the Anglophile New England scene that dominates the trade presses & awards – now has a diverse faculty. Over the past 18 months, The Nation has begun to publish poets like Rae Armantrout, Jordan Davis & Jennifer Moxley. This year's Lenore Marshall prize went to Alice Notley . . . without a single post-avant on the selection committee.

It’s not that there are no great neophobe poets – Robert Hass, one of this year’s NBA finalists, & Wendell Berry are as good as any post-avant alive, as were Elizabeth Bishop & Thom Gunn. But the School of Q is just one scene among many and for it to exercise the kind of hold it has had on an institution like the Poet Laureate’s slot should be embarrassing to everyone. As for the National Book Award process, this year’s honey pot simply reveals the degree to which the National Book Foundation is just a marketing tool for the major trade publishers & distributors, who have always been the captive of one this little scene. The name of this game isn’t who picks the winner, but rather who picks the judges.

 

¹ Keep in mind that if each of the 450 degree-granting writing programs employ six poets as professors – a number that is certainly high – fewer than 3,000 of the 10,000 publishing poets teach in such programs. At least seventy percent do something else.

Brian Calvin’s Half Mast is the cover image
for Graham Foust’s Necessary Stranger

This started out as a rave review for Graham Foust’s Necessary Stranger, a book that certainly warrants that response. Over successive books Foust has demonstrated that the easy brilliance of his first works was not in any sense a fluke, and that he is one of the best younger poets now writing. But then I thought about what I take to be the real risk in his work, that of recognizability. Foust’s works do things with language that are not quite like anything I’ve read before, but the poems themselves feel immediately familiar as text. Consider “Huffy”:

August, the thick end
of summer where I’m
from. I’ve a grill, shrewd
tools, a bag of glue,
some Neil Young. (The world
eats what it orders.)
My neighbors cough and
wave and wave and frown.
Your youngest cousin
weaves by on a shit-
to-bed ten-speed, two
crutches tucked under
her too-white right arm.
This is to refer
to almost falling
from falling. It’s a
dream I’m not ashamed.

What in this poem makes me feel that it’s special? (Which I do feel.) Certainly poems have presented dreamscapes before, even if not particularly this accurately. Poets have been writing this sort of single-stanza free verse affair now for decades. Think of David Ignatow and Alan Dugan, both masters of the form. Yet there are details here that seem out of place, or not explained by this readily recognizable framework. What’s the bag of glue for? It’s emphasized by running the vowel-consonant combination by in reverse order in the word tools, that same central vowel at the heart also of the prior adjective shrewd. Note even the hard g and trilled l in the earlier grill. That’s an awful lot of a set-up for a detail that goes by in passing with no further mention.

Similarly, the reiteration of the phrase and wave, this time mid-line rather than over a linebreak alters the syncopation of the poem – it also sets up the later falling / from falling. Foust is brilliant with these little details that foreground certain elements almost in passing – it creates a tone to the poem that you can’t ever quite put your finger on, which is important in a text where the subject is never quite announced. Consider, for example, just how long the sentence goes that introduces the cousin before it gets to her gender, present only in a pronoun: five freakin’ lines.

There is, I think, a possible sequence of connotation that then builds from too-white, taken symbolically rather than, say, as an allusion to a recently removed cast, tying to the poem’s final word ashamed. The number of plausible schema available to the parsimony principle here is not small, ranging from having caused an accident that resulted in broken limbs all the way to child sexual abuse, real or simply imagined. One could likewise build back from that rather opaque title, “Huffy” – is that a description of the girl, I first thought, of the neighbors? – to the bag of glue (glue doesn’t come in bags, silly, unless you’re planning to sniff it), that suggests that the hidden word here is huffing, the process of getting high from fumes.

Foust’s poems often present just this sort of conundrum – at one level a suburban still-life, on another a tale of depravity just below the surface – the economy with which all this is accomplished can be startling, and is why I feel no hesitation in praising this work to the skies. Yet the frame of this poem, its presentation of a lyric dreamscape, something akin to a daydream, is so familiar that you can’t tell if Foust is the most avant-garde of writers, packing meaning in as densely as any writer we have, or the quietest of the School of Quietude? Yes, he is doing all these many things at once, and yet it’s all so recognizable, familiar, even comfortable.

This is an aspect of Foust’s work that he shares with Rae Armantrout, the poet of whom he most reminds me. (The one time I met him was at one of Rae’s readings.) It’s something I see as well in the writing of Michael Palmer and Fanny Howe, among those of my own generation. I’m sure it’s why Billy Collins seems so ravishingly fond of the work of Ron Padgett, among the poets in the generation immediately before mine. Or why many readers and more than a few critics preferred Robert Creeley or Denise Levertov among the Black Mountain poets, rather than Robert Duncan or Charles Olson.

It’s a question that Armantrout gets at obliquely in her famous essay, “Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?” which leads off her new Collected Prose just out from Singing Horse Press. The implication in that question, of course, is that her work is comprehensible, whereas the likes of myself or Bruce Andrews will drive a reasonable reader to tears. Armantrout’s essay is hardly any longer than this note as she demonstrates how Susan Howe, Carla Harryman & Lyn Hejinian all write work that brings “the underlying structures of language/thought into consciousness.” Their work is no less “language-oriented” than David Melnick or P. Inman, it just takes something of a different form.

So it’s not an accident that Armantrout and Fanny Howe have appeared in The New Yorker and The Nation, where Foust also recently turned up. While I don’t think it’s impossible any more for the likes of a Christian Bök or Kenny Goldsmith to turn up in these venues, it’s certainly less likely. And P. Inman or Geof Huth? Don’t hold your breath.

There are two kinds of risk at play here, perhaps more. The first is that a young poet who discovers in him- or herself the capacity to write in such a manner that their work succeeds in reaching both traditions in American letters will decide ultimately to do only that, which then turns into a kind of holding back, atrophying the writing. This is, I think, the problem with the later work of George Oppen, for example, which is sentimental & lax in comparison to his earlier books. And I think it’s what ultimately kept Gustaf Sobin from becoming more than a footnote to expat literature. It’s an active element in the increasingly rapid production of self-similar books, all modeled on The Double Dream of Spring, in the writing of John Ashbery, and why, I think, his poetry is most likely to known not for that, but for the exceptions, the earliest books plus Three Poems, Vermont Notebook, Flow Chart, even Girls on the Run.

The second of risk is broader and effects us all. As MFA programs pop up like mushrooms in a damp forest climate, and the number of publishing poets in the USA moves beyond 10,000 toward the 20,000 mark or thereabouts, nobody will have any hope whatsoever of reading even a fraction of what is being written and American verse, which has suffered from its two competing visions now since the middle of the 19^th century, will fragment that much further, so that there will be one audience that reads only the likes of Graham Foust, Lee Ann Brown, Laura Sims & Linh Dinh, another that reads only the next generation of Quietists, some of whom – take Daisy Fried and Alice Jones as examples – are terrific, while a third lives entirely in a world of performance, flash poetics & vispo. Plus a hundred or so metro scenes, poets who prefer their audiences face-to-face. Etc. Etc.

To some degree, what I see as the promise of a Graham Foust is that I think he works from any perspective. If you’re a fan of Wendell Berry, you will like Foust. If you’re a fan of Billy Collins, you will like Foust. If you like C.D. Wright, or Charles Bernstein or Lynne Dreyer, you will like Graham Foust. In this sense, he is one of the younger poets who strikes me as having moved toward a post-militant American poetics, neither post-avant nor Quietist. Which in a way is what Third Way poets, from Bob Hass to Forrest Gander to Ann Lauterbach to Jorie Graham have been advocating for years now. But the Third Way has always struck me as predicated upon the existence of the other two. Younger poets today I think have more of an opportunity of learning from all worlds without having to sign up & pick sides. And that in turn will itself impact how writing gets done, going forward.

One of the more interesting moments in the history of the School That Shall Not Be Named is the revolt of many of its younger stars in the 1950s when confronted with the reality of the New American Poets. Look, for example, at the poems Robert Bly published in Poetry in the early 1950s, or the first books of Bill Merwin or Adrienne Rich, or the magazine verse that James Wright was turning out until Bly recruited him. All were clearly little Lowells, little Wilburs & then, whammo, they were penning The Lice, discovering surrealism, doing all manner of things not heretofore admissible on the campuses of Kenyon or Harvard. The one book I know that really touches on this is David Ossman’s The Sullen Art, published by Corinth in 1963. A member of the famed Fire Sign Theater in Los Angeles, Ossman interviewed a number of postwar American poets for the Pacifica Radio station there, then transcribed the interviews for publication. In addition to New Americans such as Paul Blackburn, Robert Creeley, Gilbert Sorrentino, Denise Levertov, LeRoi Jones (now Amiri Baraka), Ed Dorn and Allen Ginsberg, plus even Kenneth Rexroth & Paul Carroll, Ossman thought to interview the new Deep Image poets who were then emerging as their own literary revolt, including Bly, Jerry Rothenberg & Robert Kelly. He also interviews Merwin and John Logan, then two of the major young stars of the Quietist landscape. But he’s very conscious of the turmoil Quietists are experiencing. Bly is already in full revolt, while Merwin is already proposing something akin to a Third Way:

I don’t know what either “school” is supposed to consist of, but I don’t think I’ve ever been a part of either.

That’s disingenuous to the point of dishonest, but in fact Merwin’s already trying to imagine something beyond, tho he’s not very clear exactly what that might mean.

It’s interesting that the only one of this first generation of disaffected Lowell protégés to ever come close to the New American Poetry, as such, has been Adrienne Rich, who has long been a friend and advocate for the work, editorial & literary, of Clayton Eshleman, not necessarily whom you might think of if you were free associating from the conjunction of “New American” and “feminist.”

The others, including the non-Brahmin Quietists at Iowa City, who borrowed from Williams without ever really grasping the implications of his work (hence Open Poetry), all seem to have already crossed the New Americans off their list of possible places to go. At least once Bly, Kelly & Rothenberg came to realize just how incompatible their concepts of Deep Image really were. The long-term result of these revolts within Quietism was a pluralizing of the tradition. But one of the difficulties of participating in the School That Shall Not Be Named is that it’s difficult to discuss trends with That Which We Shall Pretend Does Not Exist. Thus one-time Stanley Plumly student & University of George Press poetry series editor Bin Ramke gets characterized as a member of the avant-garde by Poets & Writers in its September issue when he’s never really had a direct connection with the Pound-Williams-Stein-Zukofsky tradition at all – he’s a Quietist, an interesting one at that, who’s moved into some other directions altogether.

Ramke’s problem is exactly the opposite of Foust’s: Ramke seems to have become unrecognizable where Foust’s recognizability is apparent to any reader even if he turns out not to be quite what he seems.

When, in editing the first volume of Poet’s Bookshelf, Peter Davis got some 81 poets to respond to his request for a list of

5-10 books that have been most “essential” to you, as a poet

and asked his respondents further to “Please write some comments about your list,” he got an awesomely, if predictably, wide range of reactions. At one extreme were minimalist responses, such as J.D. McClatchy’s list of three:

Virgil, The Aeneid
The American Heritage Dictionary
William Shakespeare

followed by a five-paragraph essay that begins “The Aeneid is undoubtedly the greatest poem ever written….” Only two other contributors mention Virgil on their lists at all. Clark Coolidge tries the opposite approach to minimalism, citing 16 books, twelve of whose authors were in Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry and the other four (William Carlos Williams, Bill Berkson, Ted Berrigan, Joe Ceravolo) of whom would have been included in the Allen had they only been a little older or a little younger. Coolidge is marvelously specific as to which publication proved “essential,” noting that the version of Jack Kerouac’s Old Angel Midnight he has in mind is the selection of “the first 49 sections as printed in Big Table magazine, no. 1, 1959.” Coolidge is the only contributor to the first volume of Davis’ Poet’s Bookshelf to list Ray Bremser, let alone Drive Suite.

I was given a copy of Ray’s typescript by Buell Neidlinger, Cecil Taylor’s bass player in the fifties, in 1961.

But Coolidge’s entire discussion beyond the specificity of his list is extremely brief:

The publication dates are, unless otherwise indicated, also the years of first possession.

I do not intend this list as any sort of “canon.” This is the contemporary American poetry that most excited me as I began to seriously attempt the art.

As essays go, this is twice the length of Elizabeth Spires’ contribution:

These are authors and books that I greatly admire, and that I have been influenced by, but that seem to me “overlooked.”

Her list contains seven poets, including Josephine Jacobsen, A. R. Ammons, John Berryman, Elizabeth Coatsworth, May Swenson, William Meredith and Gwen Harwood. Considering that I have never even heard of two of her choices, I wish she’d expanded somewhat on what it is about them that makes them, for her, special.

Some contributions are eye opening. Thom Gunn lists no School of Quietude poets whatsoever, choosing instead:

William Shakespeare
John Donne
Charles Baudelaire
William Carlos Williams
Basil Bunting, Briggflatts and Other Poems

Another poet who for all purposes chooses no School of Quietude poets is Franz Wright, at least unless you count Hart Crane or Theodore Roethke among such – both special cases who suggest the limits of that designation. Seven contributors list James Wright as a primary influence; son Franz is not among them.

Here is Fanny Howe’s contribution, in its entirety:

Years ago Edward Dahlberg gave me a list of ten book that I was allowed to read, all the rest being trash. Some of the trash included Melville, the Brontës, Thomas Hardy, Dickinson, Yeats, Rilke and Joyce. These writers have populated my bookshelves for decades. Dahlberg would have been repelled by anthologies that I own: Jerome Rothenberg’s America: A Prophecy, The Negro Caravan, edited by Sterling Brown, Donald Allen’s The New American Poetry, Moving Borders, edited by Mary Margaret Sloan, and Early Celtic Poetry. He despised almost all fiction, and my large collection of contemporary fiction, which includes many friends and world poets, he would have called “an utter waste of time.” I will not provide his approved list here. But I will say that Dahlberg’s own autobiography, Because I Was Flesh, stays with me as an object and a model of enlightened prose literature. What would he make of that?

At the other extreme, Clayton Eshleman lists “Nine Fire Sources,” just four of which are books of poems. The others include “Tea for Two” by Bud Powell, Origin magazine, the paintings of Chaϊm Soutine, Wilhelm Reich’s The Function of the Orgasm and Mikhail Bakhtin’s Rabelais and His World. Eshleman then writes twelve pages of commentary on these nine sources, making his contribution something akin to The Education of Clayton Eshleman. Tho his choices won’t be surprising to any of his readers, his discussion is the most detailed in the volume & thereby the most illuminating.

Barrett Watten’s draft of a response for a future edition of Poet’s Bookshelf on his website at Wayne State is in the same general vein as Eshleman. One value for me here is that it is not all just poetry – Watten, like Eshleman, includes music, art and theoretical writing. And Watten goes into greater depth, offering twelve categories and suggesting multiple possibilities for each, with some brief comments on each group. Beyond this, I have my own personal stake in Watten’s influences – Barrett is clearly one of the individuals who has had the greatest influence on my own life and work. Along with Rae Armantrout & Robert Grenier, he has had more impact on how I think about poetry & literature generally than just about anyone else.

With the exception of a category Watten labels “Great Books” (four pre-20^th century authors, plus the German novelists Alfred Döblin & W. G. Sebald) which Watten posits last, literally on the far side of theory, film and the visual arts, his literary selections are grouped together in six clusters at the start of his piece:

Modernists
Postmoderns
Proto-Language
Language Writing
Hybrid Texts
New York School

The modernists are predictable precisely because disputes over that generation, at least with regards to English language literature, appear to have been settled once Stein – who was almost entirely ignored in the 1950s & ‘60s – was returned to a central role: Joyce, Woolf, Stein, Pound, Williams, McKay, with the text selected from this group being Spring & All. That book was one of two by Williams on my own list of 12 in the first volume of this series¹ so this makes complete sense to me. My own list for this category would see Faulkner in place of Woolf or McKay, and possibly Hart Crane as well. But my real sense is that the deeper question here is the exclusivity of Watten’s focus on English-language modernism. I would almost certainly include Vladimir Maykofsky & Velimir Khlebnikov. I know there are people who would argue for Stevens or even Eliot, but I’d have to put Woolf & McKay back in, as well as a host of other writers (Brecht, Riding, Hughes, Hikmet, Cavafy, Borges, Kafka), before I’d get to Stevens. The list is a whole lot longer before I would reach Eliot.

The structure of Watten’s next five categories is worth thinking about, because it begins with one grouping, the postmoderns, who basically represent the Objectivists plus every kind of New American Poetry (NAP) other than the New York School, and ends with the NY School after proceeding through three groupings more of contemporary writers: Proto-Language, Language Writing & Hybrid Texts. The idea of breaking the New American Poetry into a binary strikes me as emotionally “right” in that I think most poets of my own generation tended to focus on just one of the NAP’s different possibilities – New York School, Projectivist (a.k.a Black Mountain), Beat, the Spicer Circle or New Western/Zen Cowboy² – grouping whatever was outside of one’s focus more or less as a friendly-but-less-interesting Other. My own focus differs from Watten – if I had to reduce it to two groups, it would be Projectivist & Other, with a lot of the Spicer Circle foregrounded in the latter. The incorporation of the Objectivists into this model makes a lot of sense, even if they were writing somewhat cohesively two decades before the NAP, since their books didn’t start becoming widely available until the 1960s, actually after most of the other NAP formations.

Watten’s own Other, his “postmoderns,” turns out to be the three horsemen of the Projectivist movement – Olson, Duncan & Creeley – plus sort of one each of the other non-NY schools: Zukofsky (Objectivism), Ginsberg (Beat) & Joanne Kyger (both Spicer & the Zen Cowboy clusters). The book he highlights as key here is Creeley’s Pieces, also one of the twelves volumes I had on my list in the first volume. Watten gets the New York School right also in including Koch for When the Sun Tries to Go On and recognizing “Second Avenue” as Frank O’Hara’s crowning achievement. I don’t share his enthusiasm for Ashbery’s Double Dream of Spring, at least not when compared against Three Poems or Rivers and Mountains or even The Vermont Notebook or Flow Chart. And while there is a rightness in including Mayer & Brainard in this grouping, I couldn’t personally imagine a New York School cluster without David Shapiro or Joe Ceravolo. Among the works Watten lists, Ted Berrigan’s Sonnets makes sense as the volume highlighted. But I’d personally have picked Three Poems instead.

Ashbery shows up again in one of the three groupings that tend to be more contemporary, one of two authors to turn up in two clusters, the other being Clark Coolidge (who also is included under “new music/jazz” for his collection Sound as Thought). Both Coolidge & Ashbery turn up in the Proto Language. The whole concept of proto language – the idea, as I understand it, of writing that “arrived at” language poetry without necessarily meaning to get there, which includes The Tennis Court Oath, Coolidge’s The Maintains, Larry Eigner’s Another Time in Fragments, Hannah Weiner’s Clairvoyant Journal, Robert Grenier’s Sentences and Rae Armantrout’s first book, Extremities – is interesting to contemplate. It certainly is the case that there are a number of people – Michael Palmer, Bernadette Mayer, Jackson Mac Low, Ted Greenwald, as well as the ones Watten lists – who either have been uncomfortable with any association with langpo, so-called, or whom others have felt were “roped in” just to lend the phenomenon some legitimacy. But just as, in the 1950s, Denise Levertov had virtually nothing in common with the “Beat” writers so many of the New American Poets initially were typed as, any literary movement, if it has any force, any serious social as well as aesthetic meaning, tends to incorporate any number of such “border cases.” Is John Clellon Holmes a Beat novelist? F. T. Prince a “New York School” poet? What about John Koethe? What about Tom Clark, who spent his years as poetry editor of the Paris Review first in England, then in the Bay Area? Why isn’t Aram Saroyan a langpo, at least for his minimalist works? Once you get going, questions like this become rather endless, and indeed one of their downsides is that they can enable the construction of pseudogroups like M. L. Rosethal’s confessional poets, a tendency that was alleged to include both Anne Sexton & Allen Ginsberg, Robert Lowell & Gregory Corso. As a concept, confessionalism was sillier even than the idea of a San Francisco Renaissance, but at least the latter seems to have been originally conceived in jest.

So I like the concept of Proto Language, simply because it acknowledges the complexity of categories per se, tho I don’t draw the Venn diagrams of poetry in the same way as Barrett – I don’t see anything “proto” about Armantrout, Grenier or Weiner, tho I could probably be persuaded about it with regards to Coolidge, and the likes of a Palmer or Mayer strike me as a no-brainer for this category. I’m persuaded, for example, that a purely formal definition of language writing, or for that matter any literary tendency, is both ahistorical as well as apolitical. That is why, for example, Rae Armantrout strikes me as a canonic example of language writing, whereas Peter Ganick & Sheila Murphy seem entirely outside the phenomenon. It’s not a question of the value of the writing any of the three, only one of historical & social context – and not being a New Critic, I do think those enter in.

But a second question might be if one were to break contemporary poetry into just three possible tendencies to list as “most formative,” are these the ones you would pick? I realize, of course, that Watten wasn’t asked to account for the whole of poetry, only what was personally important to/for him. There’s no need for him to identify his “most influential School of Quietude” poets. If I were to try to replicate this phenomenon for myself, I would obviously include langpo, a second category for writers whom I think of as simpatico, but ultimately doing something else – Bev Dahlen, Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Leslie Scalapino, C.D. Wright, Craig Watson, Elizabeth Willis, Rod Smith, Jennifer Moxley, Lisa Jarnot, Forrest Gander, Joseph Massey & Graham Foust would all be on that list. But I would also have to have a third list just for writing the longpoem, again with Bev Dahlen & Rachel Blau DuPlessis, but also Frank Stanford, Ronald Johnson, Ted Enslin, Robert Kelly (especially for Axon Dendron Tree), bpNichol, Basil Bunting, even Hart Crane & Donald Finkel. Not to mention Wordsworth, Blake, Whitman, Pound, Zukofsky, Olson & Duncan.

But I would also have to add another category for more or less contemporary foreign writing in translation. For me, that is a list that would begin with Francis Ponge (maybe even St.-John Perse & Victor Segalen), would include Ivan Zhdanov, Arkadii Dragomoshchenko, Alexei Parschikov & Nina Iskrenko. This would need to be paired with English-language poetry from outside the U.S., starting with Steve McCaffery & Tom Raworth, but extending out for many, many names beyond that.

And while I like Watten’s concept here of the hybrid text – I can see how that makes sense for Barry and his own writing – I think my own experience would be to divide that idean into one category for poet’s fiction, starting with Kerouac’s Visions of Cody and This Railroad Earth, lots of Fielding Dawson, as well as Acker, Sorrentino, Leslie Dick, Nicole Brossard, while putting the likes of Harryman & Benson back into langpo proper.

A lot of this has to do with mental maps &, as always, that is a concept that turns me back to the questionnaire Jack Spicer used for entrance into his Magic Workshop at the San Francisco Public Library fifty years ago, where he asked respondents to pick one of two templates for a map of literary influences – one vaguely genealogical, the other looking like clusters of galaxies in the night sky. Pick one and fill it in with names. My own doesn’t look like anything Spicer might have recognized, but it’s also interesting to see how different the map is from somebody of my own generation & cohort like Watten. Both Watten & Spicer, it is worth noting, made my own list of 12 books.

 

¹ The other being The Desert Music, the volume that literally was my introduction to the pleasures of contemporary poetry.

² This isn’t the breakdown according to Donald Allen, but what really existed.

Henry Rago (second from right) with the editorial staff of Poetry, 1956
L-R: Robert Mueller, Margaret Danner, Elizabeth Wright, Rago, Frederick Bock

Because I wanted to reread – for a third time – Roberto González Echevaría’s review of Clayton Eshleman’s translation of César Vallejo’s The Complete Poetry, I held onto the May 21^st edition of The Nation. Vallejo, for me, is both fascinating & problematic, terms that I might choose to describe Eshleman as well. More than any other poet, Vallejo is the one who challenges whatever received simplicities I might still carry about in my head as to how modernism spread in the 20^th century & the moment at which one had (has) to acknowledge that there is far more to world literature than the Europeans & a few classic texts from Asia. Yet just how “non-European” is Vallejo? Half of this deceptively fat volume (with facing Spanish, there are roughly 300 pages of poetry) was written during Vallejo’s eleven years in France & Spain. Vallejo is full of questions like that – how much Spanish, how much Indian influence, how much French, the language lurches & veers to a degree that I think I, at least, still find unsettling. Eshleman, one of the strongest personalities in poetry over the past few generations, has made a lifework of this project & done so faithfully, even brilliantly. Yet there is always that question in translation, especially when, as here, or as in Pierre Joris’ Celan, the translator is himself a major poet, how much Vallejo, how much Eshleman? I’m persuaded that Clayton lets as much Vallejo through as is humanly possible, which makes it more of a question for Walter Benjamin: how much is that?

Echevaria’s review isn’t that illuminating on the questions of translation – he nitpicks a few gotchas mostly & reminds us that, as a young scholar, he turned to Eshleman for help reading Wallace Stevens, assistance for which he is obviously grateful. But the bulk of his piece is a decent history of Vallejo, which is what I actually was after. This time, tho, it was The Nation as a whole that caught my eye. For the May 21^st issue also contained the 2007 Discovery / The Nation prizewinners, the thirty-third annual selection of a “new poets’” award that has, with a couple of exceptions, been the kiss of death for many a School of Quietude poet over the past three decades. And, completely separate from this year’s Discovery poets, there is a poem in the same issue by one of my favorite writers, Graham Foust:

Poem Windy and Continued

very cold. My small
and panicked last
kiss was like making
a noise to make sure
I was there.

Your quiet
mouth was only
space – a kiss
reversed and kept
inside to bite.

This off-kilter lyric – something Foust does as well as any living poet – actually appears on the corner of a page (the third of four) of Echevaría’s piece, as if insinuating that some of the spirit of Vallejo has sipped into American poetry. This is quite an amazing leap for a journal like The Nation, a well-intended, but culturally plodding, progressive publication whose curiously bellicose title reminds readers to this day that it was first started to support the northern cause during the Civil War. If you count Calvin Trillin’s regular feature as “deadline poet” among the op-ed pieces at the issue’s front (I seldom do, but this is one of Trillan’s better efforts), the May 21^st issue has not one, but four different items related to poetry in a single edition. I’ve been reading The Nation since 1963 & I can’t even remember a solstice books issue that did that before.

But consider Trillan’s immortal lines, which begin

So who ever thunk
That Tenet’s “slam dunk”
Was really the chunk
Of intelligence junk
That got our boys sunk
In quagmire gunk?

Then turn to the hapless works by this year’s Discovery winners, Paula Bohince, Darcie Dennigan, Joseph Heithaus and Melissa Range, chosen by Mark Jarman, Brigit Pegeen Kelly and Phillis Levin (which “associate coordinator Ellen Paschen helped to screen”). Here are the opening lines of “Green”:

The child affixes one of her little pictures to my refrigerator.
She asks, Can you detect the radiation?

There is a house, one tree, and grass in dark slashes. A sun
shining. Beneath, in her child letters, she has written Chernobyl.

At kindergarten they must be having nuclear energy week.

This is one of those “excuse me” moments in literature, in which writing so padded that it suffocates thought: “little pictures,” “child letters,” really? One can only imagine how the losers of this competition must write if something like this leaked through. At least in the first line of the second stanza there is that string of single syllable words leading up to the two-syllable shining to suggest that something is occurring cognitively. But what we have here is the start of a dumbed-down allegorical narrative that mostly reveals the poet not to be a serious thinker about radiation, about children, or about poetry.

At least Darcie Dennigan spares us the tub-thumping metrics offered by Melissa Range:

His every hair and shred
sheds two uses, or more, for our daily bread.

Good sidekick, stock stand-by,
he helps us tear the ground and haul the rye.

Too much sweetgrass made him lame,
or we did; to much bridle made him tame,

which we did. Nails in the foot
mean he’s not good-for-naught;

disease in the hoof, he’s a no-shoe
no-show on the field. It’s a no-go,

when he founders on the clock:
he’ll go free, barefooted, to the block.

And so on for another eight sterling couplets.

Paula Bohince at least appears to be writing after the birth of Vallejo (1892) with her “Hide Out,” which begins

Stiff as a fish
in a boat, I lie in the grove
of crabapples,
inhaling dirt’s pepper, my cheek
wet against stubble,
eye to mineral eye,

tracing the bodies of fish
onto wood’s floor – infinity in mud,
curves of hourglass
repeating –

until I cannot hear
my breathing….

The poet re-enacting her childhood: here’s a cliché that really needs to be revisited. At least she has some idea of line that is not stiff as a fish in a boat.

Alongside a discussion of Vallejo or the poetry of Graham Foust, these are not just comically bad expressions of a brain-death aesthetic, they’re bad writing alongside Calvin Trillan. At least Joseph Heithaus offers some of the density & linguistic acrobatics that raise, say, Geoffrey Hill or Paul Muldoon above this sort of swamp. Heithaus merely asks that you believe he talks to sheep. With School of Quietude poets, I’m ready to believe almost anything.

Green False Hellebore
Veratrum Woodii

We must warn the good sheep: Dear pregnant ewes,
stay away from the stout, erect, unbranched
stems, pleated leaves, flowers B inconspicuous
clusters, green or greenish white. I blanched

at what they do to you, your little lamb.
If you eat false hellebore on the fourteenth
day of gestation, expect your new ram
to be monkey-faced, cycloptic, come a month

early or die. Really, aside from weakness,
trembling, the stomach ache you’ll feel, you’ll give
birth to truth, small brained, defected, helpless,
just for taking what you thought sheep might live

on. This is nature’s justice, something cruel
to chew: we’re empty headed beasts, poison’s fool.

Just wait till he starts writing as tho he were born after 1892. This at least is worth reading, tho frankly there’s less to think about than meets the ear. It’s ultimately a set piece intended to display the verbal dexterity of the poet. That there is some to display is its saving grace.

Between these four selections, we have an interesting phenomenon, The Nation displaying the very different directions of contemporary poetry, from something completely new (Foust) & groundbreaking work of the 20^th century (Vallejo), to poetry that imagines that, by simple denial, it can erase the writing of the last 150 years, first as tragedy (the Discovery four), then as farce (Trillan). I’m reminded that John Palattella recently replaced Grace Shulman as poetry editor of The Nation, and it’s his presence that I credit for the Foust, maybe even Echevaría’s review of the Vallejo. But obviously the Discovery prize still lays in the hands of the old regime.

In the years before I became the executive editor of the Socialist Review (SR), I used to marvel at the breadth of that publication, which had been started in the very early 1970s under the name of Socialist Revolution to be a place where the veteran on-campus organizers of the 1960s might discuss the theoretical implications of their post-school work “in the real world.” There could be a discussion of class in the sugar industry in the Caribbean followed, literally, by Donna Haraway’s “Manifesto for Cyborgs.” It wasn’t until I actually joined the Bay Area editorial collective that it fully dawned on me that this was the result of SR having not one, but two editorial collectives – there was very briefly a third, albeit before my time – and that the Boston collective was predictably the origin of economic materialist analysis, some of quite good, but much of it old school Stalinist Marxism at its most reified. What had happened was the journal began with a single collective in San Francisco – the funding for the journal came at first from Jimmy Weinstein, a veteran of Studies on the Left, the 1960s antecedent to SR, and later the founder of In These Times. Most of the first collective were off-campus organizers, but as the 1970s wore on, a number headed back to grad school and the collective became closely identified with the grad students in the UC sociology department – at least those who were not part of the number-crunching faction. When the first generation of these graduated and some got jobs with colleges in Boston, they started the second collective, which now was a phenomenon of junior (and later senior) faculty at a number of schools, people whose evolution in their careers led them in different directions than the Bay Area collective, which remained constantly evolving and continued its focus around graduate Soc students (the longest term member, Carol Hatch, was a departmental secretary, something that could never have occurred in the Boston collective which increasingly got involved in tenure disputes at the different schools there). By the time I arrived in 1986, just a year after the “Manifesto for Cyborgs” publication, the two collectives were barely speaking to one another. Indeed, the bitterness over publishing Haraway – seen as pure heresy by the Boston collective – kept the SF collective from later having the courage to run Samuel R. Delaney’s even more highly metaphoric analysis of it, which had lost out on publication by a single vote shortly before I arrived (and which, two years later, lost again when I tried to revisit that decision). Within three months of joining the collective & immediately making a journey to Boston to meet the collective there (which was not pleased in the slightest that a poet with few academic credentials was now executive editor), I was able to go back, literally, for years, pointing out which article had been accepted for publication by which collective. The great eclecticism of SR, really its strength throughout most of its history, was in fact a construct, the result of ongoing – and often internally quite hostile – conflict between two editorial groups with radically different ideas about what the left was, and the role a journal might play in that.

So what I see in this really peculiar single issue of The Nation is something not that terribly different. I don’t think John Palattella is necessarily a post-avant type personally, my sense is that he’s trying to be broader than that, but he is somebody who reads, intelligently so (based on the reviews I’ve seen), the likes of Ted Berrigan & Allen Ginsberg, something that a poetry editor at The Nation hasn’t done since the days when Denise Levertov was there in the 1960s. And the result may be that we are going to get, at least for a time, this sort of quirky, uneven coverage as the journal presents a wider view simply because different editors think very differently.

I’m reminded that the one brief renaissance in the history of Poetry magazine came not during the years when Ezra Pound was periodically breaking through the deadened crust of work Harriet Monroe preferred, but rather the latter half of Henry Rago’s tenure in the 1960s. During the first several years of his editorship, Rago was the same sort of predictable School of Quietude type that the journal had grown moldy with in the post-Monroe years. But then, around 1962, Rago came to some sort of epiphany that the magazine ought to represent all of American poetry, and for the next seven years it did (until a heart attack killed Rago on his sabbatical, leaving the publication in the worst of hands, Daryl Hine, who made it even more a repository for reaction than had Monroe). I still keep the three double-issues that punctuated the early years of Rago’s renewed vision by my desk. The fiftieth anniversary issue, October-November, 1962, has just a glimmer of what was to come, presenting its poets in alphabetic order and including, among others, Conrad Aiken, Ben Belitt, John Berryman, Louise Bogan, Hayden Carruth, John Ciardi, Robert Creeley, e.e. cummings, James Dickey, Alan Dugan, Robert Duncan, Robert Frost, Robert Graves, Thom Gunn, Anthony Hecht, Randall Jarrell, Kenneth Koch, Stanley Kunitz, Denise Levertov, Robert Lowell, Hugh Mac Diarmid, James Merrill, W.S. Merwin, Howard Nemerov, Charles Olson, Ezra Pound, Kenneth Rexroth, Muriel Rukeyser, Delmore Schwartz, Anne Sexton, Karl Shapiro, Stephen Spender, Charles Tomlinson, Richard Wilbur, William Carlos Williams, James Wright & Louis Zukofsky.

The simple presence of Creeley, Duncan, Levertov, Koch, Mac Diarmid, Olson, Rexroth & Zukofsky in this list was revolutionary in 1962. But it merely was the piercing of the veil of benign neglect with which the Pound-Williams tradition had previously been treated, and it was, frankly, tokenistic. Thirty months later, the April-May 1965 double issue devoted to works-in-progress, long poems & sequences actually reflected the world more as it was. Its contributors included, again in alphabetical order (and this is the complete list), Wendell Berry, Carruth, Creeley, Duncan, Ronald Johnson, Galway Kinnell, Koch, Levertov, Olson, David Posner, Adrienne Rich, Ernest Sandeen, Sexton, Gary Snyder, Tomlinson, Gael Turnbull, Theodore Weiss & Philip Whalen. The issue feels as tho its 20 – maybe 50 – years more contemporary than the one less than three years earlier. Indeed, more contemporary than any issues of Poetry that have been published in the past 20 years.

Since the Poetry Foundation got its boatload of cash from a sheltered pharmaceutical heir a few years back, the organization has gone through some convulsions that suggest that it too is having some of the same sorts of pressures straining on it that we may be seeing in The Nation. The website for Poetry is already much more interesting than the journal, but there have been some token attempts even in the publication not to seem completely out of it. This is all to the good, regardless of how incomplete & conflicted these little moments might be.

I’m reminded of Gerald Graff’s refrain to “teach the conflicts,” which I’ve always thought made sense in terms of curriculum, albeit unless one is team teaching with somebody quite opposite one’s own inclinations, one always teaches these conflicts from a particular point of view. There is, after all, a scenario in which the post-avants represent the barbarians at the gates that are disrupting the idylls of quietude & therefore must be repelled. And it’s not like I don’t have a pony, if not a sheep, in this race. So barring the emergence of saintly editors a la the later Rago, perhaps the very most we can hope for in our more public literary institutions is what we find in the May 21^st issue of The Nation, that the rag will actually embody those very conflicts, all sides.

To readers who don’t pay much attention to poetry, this may feel incoherent. There is almost no way to connect the dots between Trillan & Vallejo, Foust & the Discovery 4, that is going to be readily accessible to anyone not immersed in contemporary poetics. That in itself is probably a good thing, since it shows The Nation demonstrating what anthologies like those by Garrison Keillor do not, that it’s not all one thing, but many, diverse, conflicting ones. That Vallejo’s own conflicts over his own poetry & its relation to language, nation, politics, aesthetics are no less tortured than those of any thinking person today.

While I was away in Boston, I received two anthologies one could characterize as thoroughly immersed in something akin to a School-of-Quietude vision of American poetics: Ed Ochester’s American Poetry Now: Pitt Poetry Series Anthology (APN) from the University of Pittsburgh Press, and Poetry Daily:Essentials 2007 (PD), edited by Diane Boller and Don Selby, available from Sourcebooks, Inc., in Napierville, Illinois. Because the two projects appear to share a general worldview, it’s their differences that strike me as most revealing.

The most obvious point in common you might think would be their table of contents. Ochester’s volume contains four dozen of the poets published by the U. of Pittsburgh Press during his 40-year reign as its poetry editor. PD, as I’m going to call the Boller & Selby edition, contains 152 works from the Poetry Daily website that have appeared there since the last such anthology was done in 2003. Among those included in APN are Lorna Dee Cervantes, Wanda Coleman, Billy Collins, Toi Derricotte, Denise Duhamel, Russell Edson, Edward Field, Daisy Fried, Bob Hicok, Etheridge Knight, Ted Kooser, Larry Levis, Peter Meinke, Kathleen Norris, Sharon Olds, Alicia Ostriker, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Muriel Rukeyser, Reginald Shepherd, Afaa Michael Weaver, David Wojahn & Dean Young.

Among those included in PD are Edward Hirsch, Louise Glück, Eamon Grennan, Brendan Calvin, Tony Dent, Dorianne Laux, Karl Kirchwey, Jane Kenyon, Claudia Emerson, Wislawa Szymborska, Kay Ryan, Randing Blasing, Antler, Chase Twichell, William Logan, Jennifer Chang, David Woo, W.D. Snodgrass, David Wojahn, C.K. Williams, Michael Scharf, Liam Rector, Thomas Lux, Louis Simpson, Timothy Liu, Carl Dennis, Simon Armitage, Dan Chiasson, Heather McHugh, Linda Gregg, Charles Simic, Ted Kooser, Bob Hicok, Debora Greger, Colette Inez, Marilyn Hacker, Floyd Skloot, David Antin, Michael Ryan, June Jordan, Gail Mazur, Daisy Fried, Gerald Stern, Albert Goldbarth, John Koethe, Christian Wiman, Yusef Komunyakaa, Maxine Kumin, Charles Wright, Franz Wright, Richard Tillinghast, W.S. Merwin, Stephen Dunn, Gustaf Sobin, David Wagoner, Daniel Hoffman, Natasha Trethewey, Martín Espada, Paul Violi, Robert Hershon & Thomas Lynch.

But here is the kicker: these two volumes have between them 193 poets, only four of whom show up in both volumes: Daisy Fried, Barbara Hamby, Bob Hicock & Ted Kooser. Why this is so and what this might mean intrigues me.

Neither edition is entirely rigid about its boundaries & I feel pretty safe in suggesting that both Ochester and Boller-Selby would probably reject the School of Quietude label outright. Edward Field, who is in the Ochester volume, appeared in Donald Allen’s epoch-making The New American Poetry some 40-plus years ago. And to call Wanda Coleman or Lorna Dee Cervantes, two of Ochester’s other contributors, examples of Quietude would just be misleading. The real story here has been, for several decades now, that writers of color have had dispensation to be lively and thoughtful & to treat American literature as tho it were more than just a sidebar to pre-Romantic British letters. Similarly, “talking at blerancourt” by David Antin may well be PD’s longest single contribution – ten pages of Antin’s patented verbal noodling to respond to the question “what is an artist” – as well as one of its liveliest.

What is really different between the two volumes is Ed Ochester’s editorial vision. Like all good poetry editors, he has a clear sense of what he likes & why. There are almost no formalists, new or old, in APN. PD includes not only old (W.D. Snodgrass) & new (William Logan, Christian Wiman, Karl Kirchwey), but actually existing British pre-Romantics like Simon Armitage, even as it does so in a broader landscape that can include not just a poet like Antin, but other post-avants such as Michael Scharf & the late Gustaf Sobin. And with 152 poems spread over 225 pages – Albert Goldbarth appears twice & Mary Molinary has three short poems from the same appearance in Beloit Poetry Journal, so the number of poets is 149 – PD feels much more like a literary version of Noah’s ark. Or would, if only it were more representative of the poetry even of its own website.

Poetry Daily is, more than anything else, an advertising website that focuses on poetry. Payment as such is not a requirement to having one’s poem picked for the daily feature, but everything on the website suggests an attempt to drive revenue through the site’s affiliate program with Amazon – something that a more self-critical website would think twice about given the impact Amazon is having on independent bookstores – and the site does run ads for conferences & the like. Perhaps because Boller & Selby aren’t strong readers, Poetry Daily is largely captive to those presses that make an active effort to promote their books. And historically, those have been the university & New York trade presses. So while this is nowhere nearly the monolithic publishing universe that was the case, say, 20 years ago, it is still very much not representative of the poetry scene in North America overall.

Unfortunately, this is where Boller & Selby’s weakness as editors makes a significant difference. While their goal actually does seem to be to represent English-language poetry in its richness & breadth, their instincts as editors are much narrower. There is, for example, a broader representation of post-avants among the 365 poets retained in the site’s archive – each poem-of-the-day retained for one year – than shows up here in this collection of 149 writers taken from a roster that must have numbered close to 1,000 possible contributors. For example, post-avants who presently have work in the PD archive who are not represented in this volume include Rae Armantrout, John Ashbery, Dan Beachy-Quick, Charles Bernstein, Stephen Burt, Robert Creeley, Gary Gach, Forrest Gander, Allen Ginsberg, Peter Gizzi, Cynthia Hogue, Robert Kelly, John Kinsella, Kenneth Koch, Ben Lerner, Rachel Loden, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, Alice Notley, Spencer Selby, Evie Shockley, Patricia Smith, Cole Swensen, Elizabeth Treadwell & Bill Zavatsky.

Two things need to be noted here. First, post-avant poets make up a substantial portion of all poets now writing – my guess would be half – so to see what amounts to ten percent of the PD archive itself allocated to half the world tells me just how much work there is left to do to open the world of poetry up just so that every tendency has something approximating equal access to such resources. While I’m pleased to see the likes of Antin, Antler, Scharf, Sobin & Violi in the actual print volume, the reality is that the meager ten percent representation of the website has been reduced to roughly one half of that for this keepsake. This doesn’t especially surprise me since Poetry Today’s website also has a news page that contains links (not unlike the ones that ran here Wednesday), a resource that takes not too much energy to produce – but in which PD consistently misses about 75 percent of all articles relating to post-avants that appear even in major American newspapers. While Boller & Selby do strike me as trying to represent the whole of poetry, much of what’s out there is simply not on their radar in Charlottesville.

Ochester, on the other hand, has a vision & a commitment & it shows in his volume. It doesn’t hurt either that his format gives each writer roughly six pages for work, with a seventh for a photograph & some bio-bibliographic data. American Poetry Now is superbly produced just as a book, whereas PD suffers from cheesy font & paper choices, what you might expect from a printing house that features, as its best-selling book, 50,001 Best Baby Names.

Whether Ochester’s vision is a serious one for poetry is no doubt a different discussion than the one I’m interested in today. At the end of his book, he offers two lists of suggested further reading. The first is identified as “Essential Books of Poetry,” the other merely as “Recommended.” While Pound & Williams & even Frank O’Hara show up on the essential list alongside such immortals as Robert Bly & Phil Levine, and the lengthier recommended list includes many of the New Americans & even the likes of Charles Bernstein, Lyn Hejinian & Harryette Mullen, the total absence of such poets as Louis Zukofsky & Gertrude Stein tells you that Ochester’s vision of the divisions between the raw & the cooked largely ossified at a point in the 1960s before such poets had arrived at their more recent canonic status. As a reading list, it’s really rather sad.

But it is at least a vision & as such makes American Poetry Now a more useful volume than Poetry Daily Essentials 2007. It’s worth noting, finally, that not only is the work in PD a far cry from essential – I suppose “Misrepresentative Smatterings” wouldn’t have sold as well – but two of the things you cannot get from the Ochester volume either are a sense of American poetry and a sense of poetry now. This sort of grandiose misnaming may well be the archetypal gesture of the School of Quietude, which has historically treated anything not in its official field of vision as non-existent for over 150 years. In this sense, Ochester & the team of Selby & Boller are both members of the same militant faction even if the cracks between their efforts is what’s most interesting in these two limited, limiting collections.