Something Kenny Goldsmith wrote in the current issue of Poetry has been nagging at me:

Start making sense. Disjunction is dead. The fragment, which ruled poetry for the past one hundred years, has left the building. Subjectivity, emotion, the body, and desire, as expressed in whole units of plain English with normative syntax, has returned. But not in ways you would imagine. This new poetry wears its sincerity on its sleeve . . . yet no one means a word of it. Come to think of it, no one’s really written a word of it. It’s been grabbed, cut, pasted, processed, machined, honed, flattened, repurposed, regurgitated, and reframed from the great mass of free-floating language out there just begging to be turned into poetry. Why atomize, shatter, and splay language into nonsensical shards when you can hoard, store, mold, squeeze, shovel, soil, scrub, package, and cram the stuff into towers of words and castles of language with a stroke of the keyboard? And what fun to wreck it: knock it down, hit delete, and start all over again. There’s a sense of gluttony, of joy, and of fun. Like kids at a touch table, we’re delighted to feel language again, to roll in it, to get our hands dirty. With so much available language, does anyone really need to write more? Instead, let’s just process what exists. Language as matter; language as material. How much did you say that paragraph weighed?

This is the first paragraph of Kenny G’s introduction to the current issue of Poetry’s collection of flarf & conceptual writing, a follow-up to Geof Huth’s portfolio of vispo last November, primary evidence that Poetry – the magazine, that is – is gradually catching up with Poetry the website in showing off American poetics in all its glorious diversity, something that the magazine hasn’t even aspired toward since the untimely death of Henry Rago some 40 years ago. I’m happy to see all these kinds of writing suddenly appear in its pages after decades of relegating all modes of the post-avant to the status on the disappeared. So my basic response to the current issue of the magazine is pure joy.

Or would be if I didn’t have this nagging feeling. In a word, I think Kenny is right about one thing here: no one means a word of it. Or at least he doesn’t. Kenneth Goldsmith has been the king of disjunction. He means his poetry to represent a rupture with whatever has come before. A graduate of the Rhode Island School of Design, he’s well versed in the marketing principles that underscore the contemporary art world, and is convinced it would seem that they will work as well in the capital-starved demi-monde of verse as the galleries of Chelsea or 57^th Street. If anything, Goldsmith is more 57^th Street than Chelsea (let alone Brooklyn). So it’s worth watching the sleight of hand whenever he asks you to identify which shell contains the prize (in this case, The New).

The ringer – or at least the first one – in that paragraph is the second sentence, Goldsmith’s topic sentence, his attempt to shout a la Robert Grenier “I HATE SPEECH.” Is there any poet anywhere who has depended more, or benefitted more, from disjunction than Kenny G? Consider his masterwork Day, published in 2003 by The Figures. A transcription – a scanning, really – of The New York Times of September 1, 2000, Goldsmith makes it new precisely by his erasure of print’s little borders, so that story jams against story or ends even mid-sentence as with this example from page 13:

All this week, Mr. Bush has criti-
Continued on Page A22
PRESIDENT VETOES EFFORT TO REPEAL TAXES ON ESTATES

A part of what Goldsmith is doing here recognizes that readers have dealt with the abrupt changes of the new sentence for decades. One whole rationale for USA Today is that it only lets one or two articles in each edition “jump” to another page. Most newspapers, like the Times, routinely disrupt the reading experience to force the poor reader to shift from A1 (from which the example above was taken) to A22, coming across in the process all of the day’s ads that occur in the front section of the paper. The whole point of the Times & its peers in the rapidly dying world of print is to get you to turn the page. But even in 1982, when USA Today first appeared, the disjunction of the jump was being attacked from within the field of journalism itself.¹ To have noticed this in 2003 is not quite as earth-shattering as Goldsmith’s overheated prose makes it sound.

Furthermore, what is Goldsmith suggesting is so all-fired new? The use of found language being folded, spindled & mutilated in a variety of fashions, many of which look precisely like older poetic forms. How does this differ from Jackson Mac Low’s use of insurance texts in Stanzas for Iris Lezak, or Kathy Acker’s appropriation of the work of Harold Robbins or in re Van Geldern in the 1970s? Is Goldsmith arguing that the primary difference between K. Silem Mohammad & Bruce Andrews is that Andrews is sincere?

I don’t think so. But I don’t think he’s arguing against disjunction either. Rather, he’s pointing out ways in which disjunction is occuring at different levels than, say, just the sentence-by-sentence nature one finds in some language poetry. Its reach has expanded. Still, it’s hard to see precisely what the difference is between a flarfy text that is so bad it’s good (or vice versa) and the more writerly work of, say, Tony Lopez, whose Darwin, just out from Acts of Language, just might be the most beautiful book of poems ever written. Both make extensive use of language as material, a concept I dare say that is as old as The Cantos.

So disjunction is not dead. If anything, it’s more active – being used in more ways to more ends – than ever. And exhibit A is none other than Kenneth Goldsmith himself.

 

¹ It’s worth noting that Goldsmith’s claim to transforming the Times rests almost entirely on his run-together presentation of one page after the next. So you get to read sizeable chunks of stories before you get to the “Continued on…” He could have, as easily, truly run the pages together, line by line, so that a single line might take you through four or five stories, depending on the number of columns. But Goldsmith isn’t reproducing the New York Times so much as he is the experience of the Times & the truth is that any reader follows the text in chunks.

It’s also worth noting that USA Today is one of the major reasons why today’s dailies feel permitted to drop some home editions each week as they confront the fiscal limits of their death-spiral. Publishing just five days a week, USA Today has grown into the second-most-widely distributed English language paper in the world, after the Times of India.

American Hybrid is an important book, but also a very curious one. The anthology, edited by Cole Swensen & David St. John, is an attempt at a comprehensive anthology of “Third Way” poetics by poets representing both of the major traditions that feed into the hybridization process. This fact alone ensures the book’s historic importance, not only for the effort at codifying what hybrid poetics might actually be, but also because one of these two traditions has been historically shy about announcing its collective identity in the form of movements, wings, tendencies, whatever you might wish to call the collective formation of like-thinking writers.¹

The last significant instance of a Quietist movement, as such, was New Formalism, which was a lot like the Old Formalism, only younger, rising up about 20 years ago after the Iowists & Leaping Poets had taken the quietist mode of free verse lyric & confessional monolog about as far as they could go. Not unlike the New Coast / Apex of the M uprising at the same time amongst post-avant poetics, New Formalism saw itself as a corrective, a return to core values of a literary tradition that had been abandoned by their elders in a postmodern time. In parallel mode, Apex of the M noted that Language Writing, as such, had neglected Christian mysticism, which was true enough if you ignored the front-and-center-presence of Fanny Howe, the role of religion in the work of poets as diverse as Rae Armantrout & Alan Davies & all these connections that many langpos had to other spiritual traditions, from Zen to Judaism. New Formalism noted that the Old Formalists had come up empty – one anthology of formalism in the 20^th century had not a single contributor born in the 1930s, as so many Old Formies had become apostate Quietist rebels, from Bill Merwin to Adrienne Rich to Donald Hall to Robert Bly & James Wright.

I had just gotten off the phone with a reporter for the San Francisco Chronicle, doing background work for an obit of David Bromige, when I got an email telling me that Victoria Rathbun, a fine young poet who hung with the Actualists in the late 1970s, had passed away last month. Actualism was the brainchild of Darrell Gray, an attempt to create a 3^rd-generation NY School out of the Iowa City-Bay Area axis, and a number of its practitioners were first-rate poets. Of course the whole idea of the NY School sans New York is an interesting, if problematic, concept to begin with, but Actualism was never able to transcend Darrell’s mercurial (and fatal) alcoholism. If you hunt for Victoria Rathbun (there’s more than one) on Google, what you’ll find for the poet is the Dick Grossinger-Kevin Karrane anthology, Baseball Diamonds, in which she has work alongside Tom Clark, John Sayles, Philip Roth, Fielding Dawson, Roger Angell and A. Bartlett Giamatti; records of two readings at the Grand Piano (one a Punk Rock Reading – a quintessentially Actualist event – with G.P. Skratz & Michael-Sean Lazarchuk, the other with me); a reading & chat with Alan Bernheimer on the radio show In the American Tree (MP3); and mention of her participating in an Actualist Convention video among the archives of the defundt La Mamelle artspace.

A note that appeared in my comments stream the other day gave me pause. Responding to my look at the work of Cole Swensen through the frame of conceptualism – and vice versa – Michael Theune wrote:

I'm a bit surprised this post hasn't gotten more attention than it has. It seems to me as though this post is monumental in terms of Ron's thought. For, if nothing else, it signals a willingness to critique the Quietist / Post-Avant binary. Now it's (at least) a ternary relationship: Quietist / Post-Avant / Conceptual. Such repositioning puts the Post-Avant in a new light, revealing it to be more traditional (Quietistic?) than it used to seem when it was the privileged term in the old binary.

An insightful, discriminating, and (potentially) radical post, Ron - thank you for it.

Michael’s interpretation is not quite accurate. I would characterize conceptual poetics as just one mode of post-avant, which I see as a much broader, more inclusive category. I would add – just for starters – flarf, slow poetics, language, vispo, the new narrative, the jazz poetics of Umbra, all the generations of the New York School, ditto the multiple versions of Beat poetics, the new minimalism (Joseph Massey, Graham Foust, etc.), the Canadian sound/performance poetics of the 1980s, Actualism, the women's writing movement that grew up around Judy Grahn & other separatists of the 1970s as well as the women's writing movement that grew up around the journal HOW(ever) plus any lingering manifestations of Black Mountain and New Western / Zen Cowboy poetics as other discernible types of post-avant poetics. Plus any poet who is working from any combination of these influences. It’s a broad swath and not all of these poetries sit comfortably side by side. Post-avant poetics involves literally thousands of American writers. It would be very easy for me to do nothing but focus on just this portion of English-language poetry in my blog, as tho nothing else existed. But that’s the fundamental move Quietism makes that I would challenge, so I don’t.

The avant became the post-avant the minute poets began to think of themselves as part of a broader avant-garde tradition, given that avant-gardism is a fundamentally synchronic move within the arts and tradition is fundamentally diachronic, rendering “avant-garde tradition” an oxymoron of practice. You can see it as early as the 1930s with the deep ambivalence that many of the Objectivists had to Zukofsky’s shoe-horning what might otherwise have been thought of as leftwing post-imagism into his frame. With the arrival of the New American poetries in the 1950s (and with it the common usage of the phrase “the Pound-Williams tradition”), the shift from avant to post-avant was complete. When the Allen anthology clusters together different poetics within the range of the New American poetries (never mind how fanciful some of those divisions may have been), the dynamics of the post-avant were already pretty much in place. (Think, for example, just how hostile some of the younger New York School and projectivist poets seemed in the 1960s toward one another. Clayton Eshleman’s Caterpillar was born of a desire to open up a space within that dynamics, where the work of post-avants outside of the New York school, but still in & around Manhattan – himself, Robert Kelly, David Antin, Diane Wakoski, Jerry Rothenberg – could flourish.)

The School of Quietude, as I’ve noted before, is simply a placeholder for that other poetry tradition which tries so very hard to be the unmarked case. I won’t call it Mainstream, because it is not. I don’t think it qualifies as Official Verse Culture either, although that often is how it seems to present itself. In the past couple of decades only the New Formalists have had the courage and wit to stand up for their work within that frame, but in fact I would argue at Quietism is no less rich with subcategories and differentiations (and contradictions) than post-avant poetics, but it remains foggy precisely because it refuses to name itself. That refusal is a power move – nothing more, nothing less. (You might say that my naming it is likewise, and you would be right.) From the perspective of its poetics, I think the denial of self-identification is a mistake. I think the School of Q would be infinitely richer, more robust & more rigorous if its different clusters would begin to discuss what they were doing and why. Why are the new formalists not like soft surrealism? And what is it about surrealism that permits softness to uproot it from its avant-garde heritage? Scoping out the territory of this fundamentally anti-modernist poetics that I call Quietude really represents a huge opportunity.

I’ve called the term Quietude a placeholder because I think that, as an outsider (mostly), I can’t really do that work, plus it’s ultimately not my responsibility. I’ve hoped that the term I’ve chosen would prove just irksome enough to goad a young Donald Hall or Louise Glück to take up the challenge and to begin to fill out the map and provide a better name.

Not only could such a poet-critic map this space, they could answer some important questions, such as why become the poetry without a name? Why is it so important not to acknowledge the existence of other kinds of poetry? Or why do so many Quietists trace their roots back to various avants of decades past (the appropriation of Whitman & Dickinson being the most obvious), rather than to “mainstream” poetics from those same periods? Why is Frost the first Quietist they tend to acknowledge? Why is there so little attention paid to their own heritage that relatively major Quietists (Roethke, Jarrell, Berryman, James Dickey) become footnotes at best the instant they die? Or explain the patent jingoism that permits only poets of color to deviate from normative quietist writing strategies?

There are enough critical challenges defining (let alone defending) the pathologies of Quietism for a dozen careers.

But Michael Theune is right: there are poetries that lie outside both of these frameworks. Slam poetics and the American haiku movement, to pick just two, tho there are some folks in both of these worlds who may have one foot likewise in post-avant poetics, a kind of hybridism that American Hybrid seems not to anticipate.

Hybrid poetics, or third-way poetics (a term Theune seems to prefer), or Ellipticism (Stephen Burt’s category, the earliest to identify the new hybrid tendency) represents an attempt to bring together aspects of the Quietist tradition with aspects of post-avant poetics. This is an impulse I would trace back at least to Marianne Moore. Hybrid poetics strikes me as interesting and hopeful, though flawed in its logic. It seeks to transcend this larger binary, which I think is impossible so long as at least one of the traditions pretends it doesn’t exist. Or, rather, pretends that it is everything and that all the other kinds of poetries, the hyphenated kind, are just weird little outcroppings.

Rather than being the best-of-all-worlds, hybrid poetics inevitably must become a thing in (and for) itself & one might read newer hybridists, such as Donna Stonecipher, as instances of this. Where it eventually will sit vis-à-vis the two older, broader traditions is, ultimately, up for grabs. But I tend to think of it in gravitational terms – I think it’s destined to fall into the orbit of one or the other pole.

Now is there a poetics in this country that exists entirely outside of this broader framework that I’m sketching here? I think the answer is yes, but it’s yes in the same sense that the singing of Susan Boyle, the recent Scottish contestant on Britain’s Got Talent, might be said to exist outside of any of the frames of professional music. Can Boyle make music? You bet. Even there, however, keep in mind that Boyle picked a tune from Les Miserables, attended the Edinburgh Acting School, performed in the Edinburgh Fringe &, in 1999, recorded a charity CD of Cry Me a River. She may herself not exist fully as part of the professional show tune framework, but she is not free of its orbit. In much that same way it is possible for writers who are inarticulate about their relationship to all that has been written could also be said to exist outside the framework of these traditions. But “writers who are inarticulate” is a category unto itself.

By the time you read these words, this blog may well have crossed the 2,000,000 visits threshold. The Site Meter counter on the left will tell the tale. I continue to be amazed at the number of visits this blog receives each day, on average over 1,700. People click on roughly twice that number of links; the amount of time the average visitor spends on this site has increased by more than 50 percent in the past year. And the numbers continue to rise: it took six years, four months & three weeks to reach two million, but at the current run rate it would take just four years to reach the next two million. The record for the most number of visits in one hour – 197 – was set January 16.

It was Daniel Silliman who first persuaded me that one could blog about serious topics. Laura Willey taught me the little I know about HTML. Lynn Behrendt has stepped in during the past year to make sure that the blogroll is current. If I had a dollar for every typo that Lynn and others have pointed out, I could probably throw one heck of a party for everyone who has ever read these pages.

As it evolves, this blog is less about me and more about poetry, which is, I think, as it should be. My goal in starting the blog was not simply to promote my own ideas about a form I’ve loved & practiced since I was a teenager, but to get poets themselves talking again, without having to go through the grotesque filter of the academy to do so. The presence of more than one thousand blogs in the blogroll to the left is the best test of how well I might be doing.

I have stayed with a simple format, and with Blogspot, the entire time precisely because I want to make the point that any one can do this. It takes no particular genius, and only the most modest computer skills, to create a blog. Some of the features I’ve added over time, such as the links lists that turn up here once or twice per week, could be replicated by anyone. The actual format of the links list owes a debt to the poetry of Ted Berrigan as well as to Robert Creeley’s Pieces. I started by putting together some Google alerts, but at this point the majority of links are suggested by readers.

I’m pleased obviously that some of my ideas – that of the post-avant, the School of Quietude, the idea of a New Western or Zen Cowboy tradition of poetry coming out of the New American poetics – have demonstrated some legs. I agree with my harshest critics that School of Quietude, as a construct, is (as one wag put it) criminally vague, but it was never intended as anything other (or better) than a place holder. The minute someone within that tradition begins to take on the responsibility for describing with much greater accuracy its many sub-tendencies and internal points of contention (which surely exist), the phrase will disappear like fog burning off in a morning sky.

That nobody in the past five years has taken up that challenge suggests just how strongly the poetics of the unmarked case is invested in its own invisibility, in the false notion that it is “just poetry,” with the inevitable implication that any poetics that is preceded by an adjective is in some manner marginal, not to be taken seriously. I don’t agree with the phrase Official Verse Culture (and even less with the concept “mainstream,” which is an outright lie) because I don’t think there is any necessary connection between this verse tradition and institutional power. Power is something that could & should be shared by all the traditions of poetry.

Described and conceptualized correctly, the conservative tradition that I have been characterizing as the School of Quietude has a history that is long & interesting, perhaps more than one might think since its roots are pretty much forgotten. In the U.S., it extends back not to Dickinson & Whitman, but to Jones Very, James Russell Lowell, Sidney Lanier & their peers. One of the great questions for the School of Quietude is why does it let its history languish so? A second one might be why are so many of its greatest practitioners, starting with Hart Crane & Wallace Stevens, perpetually rebelling against its norms? If I were a young poet working in that tradition (and, forty-plus years ago, I was just such a poet), the implications of questions like these would make me think very hard about the long-term wisdom of what I was doing.

So I will keep making this point, obnoxious as it surely is, until somebody shuts me up by actually doing the work needed to describe the true terrain of that side of the literary spectrum. But I agree that once somebody does this, the acronym SoQ will very quickly go into the dustbin of history.

Conversely, I’m also very pleased to see the emergence of actual tendencies of poetry in the U.S. that are clear enough in their aesthetics, their politics, and their sense of themselves to take on names – flarf, conceptual poetics, possibly even American hybrid (a better term than elliptical, tho I’m not convinced that it’s any more descriptive of what’s really going on there than “third way”). More than anything, I think this new militancy represents a generational change in poetry, and all to the good. The poets (if not the poetry) that came after language writing tended very much to avoid such terms and group designations. To a significant degree, I think that that allergy toward self- and group identification ran historically parallel to the ascendancy of the right after the election of Ronald Reagan (& deepened by the so-called fall of Communism). Perhaps we all owe George W. Bush a big vote of thanks for bringing that period to a close. That poets no longer feel so constrained is, I think, a good thing. But I think that there is also lots of room for argument, even among post-avants, as to what’s useful or interesting to do.

For one thing, it’s worth noting that the only literary movement that truly is post-language poetry in the sense of doing things langpo never envisioned would seem to be flarf. Conceptual poetics seems weighted down with neo-Dada / neo-Fluxus nostalgia (& Fluxus already was a movement dripping with nostalgia). Hybrid writing is that aesthetic of not taking sides – it should work out as well for these poets as it did for M.L. Rosenthal’s idea of confessionalism, that pained & silly attempt to suggest that Robert Lowell & Anne Sexton were doing the same thing as Allen Ginsberg & the Beats & therefore really were more interesting than their poetry.

And I don’t think anybody yet has figured out how to handle the evolving revolution in poetry’s relationship to its audience. We have way more than ten thousand publishing poets in the English language, which is maybe ten times what it was when I was in my early 20s & close to 100 times what it was when the New Americans were making their way in the 1950s. In another decade, we will easily have more than 20,000 publishing poets. Does anybody think that the actual reading audience for poetry has grown proportionately? (The only way to answer yes to that is if you think nobody reads poetry – or at least reads it seriously – but poets.) This is a far more profound change than, say, the collapse of trade publishing, the death of bookstores that won’t carry your chapbook, or the fact that we are producing close to a thousand new poets every year when the number of jobs for poets expands by about 50.

All of which is to say that there is a lot to talk about, think about, do if you’re a poet or even vaguely interested in the art. Thanks for coming along for the ride this far. I appreciate your comments, your contributions, and your own blogs more than you’ll ever know.

I know I’m repeating myself, but this seems to be a point that a lot of people get stuck on. Plus this is my 2,000^th post to the blog, and I’m feeling feisty. The history of poetry, like the history of any art form, is not a procession of its “best works.” Indeed, the well-wrought urn is, if anything, the deservedly forgotten one. Having codified and smoothed out the rough edges of any given tendency in poetry, such works are monuments to triviality and soon ignored.

In the 1960s, there were dozens of young poets who wrote “just like” Robert Creeley or any of a number of other, first-generation Projectivists. John Sinclair was a terrific approximation of Charles Olson transplanted to Detroit. Ross Feld had Jack Spicer down cold. More than a few poets during that same period “did” John Ashbery almost better than Ashbery himself. And there quite a few Allen Ginsbergs & Gary Snyders as well. Where are they now? Those that persevered – many did not – have changed, sometimes quite radically. There were a hundred Ted Berrigans, but it is worth noting that Alice Notley has not been one of them. Last I heard, John Sinclair was a DJ down in New Orleans – his great magazine Work has had its title appropriated by some folks out in Oakland – I wonder if they even know the literary heritage of that name.

In The New American Poetry, Ron Loewinsohn – just 23 when the book was first published – demonstrated an uncanny ability to channel the style of William Carlos Williams. A look at his professor emeritus page at UC Berkeley shows no publication of new poetry since 1976, no new writing of any kind in over twenty years. Yet Against the Silences to Come, Loewinsohn’s 1965 chapbook from Four Seasons Foundation, arguably is the best work ever written “in the Williams mode” of stepped free verse. Who (but me) celebrates that?

That’s the phenomenon in micro- form. It has a macro- variation as well. Articulating the possibilities of the prose poem, say, or dramatic monologue, or free verse – the three great formal innovations of the 19^th century – has meant dramatically transforming what those genre mean. Charles Olson’s Maximus is possibly the only innovation in dramatic monolog in the 20^th century even worth discussing. But look at how Pessoa’s heteronyms carry the underlying dynamics of dissociating author from speaker in a completely different direction. Now, a few decades hence, heteronyms are a dime a dozen as well.

The history of poetry is the history of change in poetry, an account not of best works, but of shifts in direction, new devices, new forms, as Williams once put it, “as additions to nature.” The cruder writing & rougher edges of the first to do X, whatever it might be, invariably are preferable. Better Spicer than Ross Feld. Better Howl than _________ – you can fill in that blank yourself.

There are of course poets and readers who hate change, sometimes hate it intensely. There are, for example, those who claim that Pound’s “good” writing stops basically at “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly,” avant The Cantos. Pound in those years was something of a stylistic gigolo, plagiarizing all that was interesting in Victorian poetics. Had he stopped there, he would have been the Ron Loewinsohn of his generation. And you would never have read him.

This may be why, actually, the School of Quietude generally does such a poor job of celebrating, preserving and carrying forward the work of its own stalwarts. Does anyone think you could fill up an auditorium at Columbia for a weekend, for example, to celebrate the centenary of Yvor Winters, Allen Tate, Robert Francis or Richard Eberhart, the SoQ poets closest in age to Louis Zukofsky? Why is it that the London Review of Books still thinks it necessary to order a hit piece of Zukofsky when all these contemporaries of his have long since disappeared from view? Or that Charlie Simic does the same to Robert Creeley (or William Logan ditto to Frank O’Hara)? It’s not that the SoQ poets, then and now, were bad writers – I think you can demonstrate that it’s objectively not the case. But they didn’t create change for poetry in their poetry (and, indeed, the most interesting of that earlier quartet are the two who helped to create institutional change in the academy through their critical writing, tho they did so precisely to thwart a modernism that was already threatening our shores). The assaults on Zukofsky, Creeley & O’Hara are little more than tantrums on the part of writers who understand that they’re the Robert Francises & Richard Eberharts of today, and are doomed to be just as widely read. They’d love to be able to curb the influence Zukofsky et al are having and will continue to have on younger writers, but they know already that this is impossible. Their pain is real.

Each art form has its own dynamic around issues such as form and change. For example, one could argue that the visual arts world, at least in New York & London, has become self-trivializing by thrusting change into warp drive because of the market needs of the gallery system. There, capital demands newness at a pace that hardly ever lets a shift in the paradigm marinate awhile. I seriously wonder if any innovation in that world since the Pop artists let in the found imagery of the mid-century commercial landscape has ever had a chance to settle in. That settling process seems to be an important part of the run-up in helping to generate the power of reaction, to motivate whatever comes next. The problem with the visual arts scene today is that innovation is constant, but always unmotivated.

Poetry has the advantage of not being corrupted by too much cash in the system. That ensures that change can occur at a pace that has more to do with the inner needs of writers as they confront their lives. Change, when it occurs, is driven by this confrontation.

But this may also be why, at least partly, there are so many poets still thoroughly, even comfortably, ensconced in the aesthetics of the 19^th, let alone 20^th, century. Why not? There are plenty of people to read you now. Do you even care what readers think 40 years after you’re gone? By their actions, Simic & Kleinzahler & Logan are telling us they do, but should we assume that this is true of every conservative or traditional poet? Can’t you just be Wendell Berry & do your thing? I’d like to say, sure – just don’t go throwing tantrums. (Those tantrums aren’t about aesthetics, anyway – they’re about power.)

All of which is to say that I take the current murmurings of flarf, conceptual poetry & now even slow poetry to be a very good thing indeed. In contrast with Simic et al, this really is the right way to discuss change. Not that any one of these is the “solution” to the question of What Comes Next in poetry, nor even that the roster of possibilities is anywhere near to being filled out. But we are hearing the first signs of a new discussion and that’s a necessary stage, preparing the ground for whatever will in fact show up. Which ought to be some great writing (and in some instances already is).

Part of this discussion, at least as its currently being framed, makes me wonder just how much of these aesthetics are being conditioned, for example, by the existence of the net, and beyond that by changes in technology, capital formation & globalization. Both conceptualism and flarf are, in very different ways, enabled by the existence of new technology, while slow poetry seems precisely to define itself by carrying forward other, older literary values. You could probably do a Harvey Ball chart plotting how each of these formations relate to a series of these kinds of issues and the answers would be interesting. Maybe even enlightening.

Some people have been complaining about the use of labels in this discussion – they’re still pissed at the idea of post-avant & the School of Q, which (to my mind, at least) designate much broader & looser aesthetic formations. Stephen Burt’s idea of ellipticism, of a third-way poetics, sort of an avant-quietude, gets similarly abused. I think these complainers are misreading the use of all these terms. Rather than representing constraints, such labels as flarf or slow poetry or uncreative writing are really statements of positionality. (It’s no accident that each occurs within – or in Burt’s case, right at the edge of – the terrain of the post-avant, since that’s the tradition that’s friendly to ideas of change.) Each term organizes how we see the entire field of poetic practice. In a sense, they’re aesthetic markers that might be as clear as saying Amherst, Iowa City , San Francisco, the Lower East Side. And it seems to me obvious that these catch phrases are necessary because, without such terms, people wouldn’t be able to talk about what’s changing and what still needs to do so. For example, conceptual poetry and uncreative writing are often used to refer to the same set of poets, but these phrases have radically different aesthetic implications. You could call Jena Osman & Juliana Spahr conceptual, but I don’t think you could call either uncreative, not even in the highly ironized meta- use of that term. As I’ve written here more than once, there is no such thing as poetry, only kinds of poetry. An example like this shows exactly how that works in practice.

If you step back and look at all this anthropologically, it has a logic – almost an inevitability – to it that seems unassailable. This discussion – where is poetry going? – needs to occur right now, and we need it to be passionate and detailed and committed. I can see pros & cons to every position out there, and I really don’t have a dog in this race. Or maybe mine just hasn’t shown up yet. But I look at other, just slightly earlier formations – I’m thinking of New Brutalism and the PhillySound – that made use of this same kind of group adhesive without positing an accompanying aesthetics. It’s as if they were announcing the need for this discussion without actually starting it. What I wonder is will they – can they – now revisit the question (all these questions) and come forward with their own ideas? Here’s hoping they can.

Am I the only one who has noticed that what we have just experienced were three relatively mutually exclusive post-avant poetry conferences in this country? Mutually exclusive mostly because they occurred at the same time, mas o menos, but at least partly because they focused the idea of what the post-avant might be in such different ways. Having been to none of them, my sense of what they must have been were:

♥    An academic conference that focused on the poetries of 30 years ago, all still quite active & present to this day. Held at a college in the center of Maine, it was relatively difficult to get to, tho apparently quite a few folks from around the Northeast made the trek.

♥    An academic conference that focused on just one of the poetries of the present moment, similarly held at a geographic remove from the major urban writing centers of either coast. My impression is that this was the least well-attended of the three.

♥    A community-based conference held in San Francisco that sounds very much like it centered around a poetics of the aggrieved. It’s worth noting that this is the only one of the three conferences where a discussion of the relative absence of women did not ensue.

What’s missing? A flarf conference? Community-based conferences in Chicago & New York? How would the latter look like / unlike a flarf conference? Was the Naropa Summer Writing Program up & running yet? If so, what was going on there?

For all the world, this scenario sounds to me like the different conceivable aesthetic coalitions of the moment are tentatively stalking out their ground. These conferences may be the antithesis of the summer writing camps of the School of Q, manuscript & workshop-based gatherings of wannabes learning that writing means submitting to hierarchy. But for the folks who are always getting on my case about my sorting poets into this or that socially defined bucket, I wonder if anyone is really paying attention to just what is going on. Take a step back & think about it.

In recent years, different Poets Laureate of the United States – a position Donald Hall transforms into the acronym PLOTUS – have seen and used their tenure very differently. Robert Hass, in many ways the first of the contemporary holders of the office, used his tenure to actively promote poetry, which Robert Pinsky did also – he continues to write the “Poet’s Choice” column in the Washington Post every Sunday. You can argue about Pinsky’s choices, but he almost always tries to show what he likes in a positive light & to explain for a mass audience why he does. Donald Hall has done much the same, on a smaller scale, just by going around, giving readings and interviews during his year. Just giving interviews was quite enough work for Stanley Kunitz as he neared his 100^th birthday. Billy Collins and especially Ted Kooser used their stints in the post to try and dumb poetry down – they want a verse that is accessible to people who don’t read poetry, or at least don’t much like it. That’s a debatable, but not unimaginable, goal. Indeed, of the recent laureates only Louise Gluck essentially did nothing with the post. Her term passed quickly and all but silently, perhaps fitting for a job that has never actually gone to anyone not already a member in good standing of the School of Quietude.

Charles Simic, it would seem, has a different idea. He wants to use his term as PLOTUS to enhance his newly self-appointed role as the enforcer of neophobe literary values. Simic has been given, it would seem, a big stick and he plans to use it. His role as the chair of the most embarrassing set of National Book Award nominees in recent history is one item and he already shares the poetry editing responsibilities at the moribund Paris Review. His article on Robert Creeley in the October 25^th issue of the New York Review of Books represents an even clearer instance of this agenda, and it’s worth looking more closely at what the article says and why. Simic’s article has been controversial since it first appeared in NYRB, a journal founded in part of Robert Lowell & his wife Elizabeth Hardwick that was important in the 1960s for its presumption that public intellectuals were, by definition, tenured. One poet – who has read publicly with Simic since the article appeared – told me that reading it made them “want to throw up in my mouth.” Other reactions have hardly been more tempered.

I’ve read Simic for decades. He’s never been my cup of tea, but that’s true for all of the soft surrealists who grew up around James Tate in the 1960s.¹ I could never distinguish a poem of Simic’s from any unsigned translation of the work of Vasko Popa and I still can’t. The time George Quasha brought Simic by my little North Oakland cottage in the summer of 1970, Simic struck me as a man with an accent that would have been fabulous to process through the careful oral annotation that was at the heart of Charles Olson’s projective methodology. Could one actually capture that lilt in which English, French & Serbian all perceptibly cohabit each sentence & every phrase? I always thought that his impact on American letters would have been far greater & more lasting if he had. Instead, he has written in a way that seems calculated to efface any trace of the Other. A true neophobe, the last thing Simic wants to represent is the new – soft surrealism itself is about packaging such disquieting phenomena in ways that are always already understood. It is, in this sense, the antithesis not just of the original surrealist movement, but even of more recent surrealist practitioners, from Bly & Wright to Joseph Ceravolo or David Shapiro.

It should be noted, however, that Simic’s assault on Creeley isn’t exactly that. Instead, he uses Creeley to make a larger – and much more pernicious – argument. His real target is the post-avant.

Simic’s essay begins by bemoaning “the large number of collected poems appearing in the last few years . . . as if there was a huge, untapped market for every poem ever written by every dead and living American poet.” This “challenge of sheer quantity” should not be unfamiliar to anyone who has read the critical writing, say, of Hilton Kramer over the past twenty years, bemoaning the fact that critical writing no longer serves a hypothetical role as gate-keeper. Simic pretends not to recognize that a collected poems serves a different social function, say, than a City Lights Pocket Poets volume that “one can comfortably read to oneself on a park bench or to a lover in bed,” and asserts “there are not many poets, even among our best ones, who are likely to have more than eighty pages worth reading.” That is the sort of blanket assertion that readers of this blog might be more apt to expect from one of the loose canons of the comments stream, but it is particularly disturbing coming from our Poet Laureate. The implicit argument, of course, is that if there are only 80 pages of, say, Charles Simic worth reading, then the control of literature properly belongs to those who select those 80 pages – critics and editors. In this sense, Simic’s goal is exactly the opposite of his predecessors Hass & Pinsky – whereas they sought to broaden the audience for poetry, of all kinds really, Simic wants to reassert its containment. The appropriate attitude toward any writer’s collected poems, thus, is “both curiosity and dread.”

It’s worth meditating on that word dread awhile. Even if we actually believe that a reader as sophisticated as Simic really doesn’t grasp the difference between a collected & an 80-page selection in terms of its social function as published object, the idea of dreading poetry is worth contemplating. It’s in little moments like this that a writer such as Simic, who likes to suggest that he has no theory, tells us precisely what his theory is. He’s willing to make exceptions to his dictum that nobody has more than 80 pages worth reading – only one of his four examples, Frost, is likewise a neophobe– but not many. The others (Whitman, Dickinson, Stevens) either belong to the non-phobic tradition that is ever open to the different, such as Whitman & Dickinson, or at the least willing to play the two traditions off one another, as with Stevens. The image of poetry this suggests – fewer poets, slimmer volumes – just happens to look a lot like poetry circa 1954, a time when Allen Ginsberg had not yet upset the apple cart with his poem “Howl.” In a world of 10,000 publishing English-language poets, one can only imagine what “the challenge of sheer quantity” might mean to someone committed to returning us back to the days in which literature could be contained & upstarts like the Objectivists virtually disappeared.

It’s at this point in his essay that Simic finally introduces Creeley, characterizing him as having once been “a cult figure.” That’s an interesting phrase, every bit as dubious as the assertion about collected books. The definition of “cult” given – that Creeley had nearly as many readers as Ginsberg or Lowell – doesn’t say why this should be a cult phenomenon unless Creeley for some reason did not deserve that many readers. If anything, the poet among the three whom more properly fits the traditional dictionary definition of a cult would be Lowell, a poet raised high by a sect whose influence dwindles rapidly south of Manhattan or west of Amherst and whose reputation has declined even more rapidly than T.S. Eliot’s. It’s worth checking off these assertions that are arguable if not patently false. It’s not that Charles Simic isn’t allowed to have his opinions, even when they’re silly, but rather a pattern of coercive frames inserted into this essay that underscore the degree to which Simic’s actively trying to resurrect the gate-keeping role he imagines (wrongly) serious neophobe poet-critics once had. He’s not done with these misstatements.

Waving the charged term cult does serve at least one function – as a prophylactic against a critique such as this one, since any nay-sayer arguably might be a member of the Creeley “cult.” It should be noted, as I have done on this blog, that the distinction between early Creeley – the volumes largely gathered in the first volume of his Collected Poems – and late Creeley is not imaginary. There has long been a discussion, sometimes heated, among Creeley’s most devoted readers, as to the arc of his career – should the later work be read as a falling off of his talents or as a shift away from the constant push toward innovation that characterized his early books, having finally arrived at the poetry he personally needed? This is, I suspect, one of those unsolvable puzzles, tho one can take (and fiercely hold) one side or the other. This debate is Simic’s frame, but not his ultimate focus.

Simic spends two paragraphs introducing Creeley generally:

His poems seemed both adventurous and old-fashioned…. They were almost all about love…. A member of the little-understood but already fabled circle of poets that included Charles Olson, Robert Duncan, Denise Levertov, Paul Blackburn, and Ed Dorn, he came across as both a poet and an intellectual.

This almost sounds like praise, and bits of it actually are. Soon enough we will discover that Simic wants to trim this wild writer of a two-volume collected down to a topiary he thinks of as Creeley the love poet, and he’s carefully laying out the grounds for his move. We will see before the essay is over that old-fashioned is higher praise than adventurous and that intellectual is no praise at all. After all, the result of being an intellectual is that your work may end up little understood even if already fabled.

Simic now shifts gears and gives us a biographical background that is as long as this introductory movement. For the most part, this is what you could get out of Wikipedia. It also serves the important function of introducing Charles Olson, and with Olson the ideas associated with Projective Verse. Here is Simic’s representation of those core ideas:

[Olson] argued for “open form poetry” in which traditional ideas of form would be replaced by poems in which form would depend on the content. In other words, the right form for a poem trying to describe a red wheelbarrow next to a couple of white chickens, or one about staring into a bathroom mirror at midnight, is to be found in the experience itself and is not to imposed mechanically from outside. So understood, form is not what Shakespeare and Keats thought it was, but the property of the content and the language of everyday experience.

This is an especially weird interpretation, particularly insofar as Olson’s major accomplishment prior to the publication of “Projective Verse” was a study of the profound & positive impact of Shakespeare on Melville. Olson specifically names Chaucer’s Troilus and “S’s Lear” as examples of what ought to be emulated. Simic is committing the third of his ungrounded assertions, presuming that Projective Verse” is aimed at countering everything that has come before in poetry, rather than making choices, inserting the bard & Keats where Tennyson or Housman would have been far more to the point. Simic also is conflating history by invoking a poem of the 1920s, Williams’ “Red Wheelbarrow,” as a demonstration of a method not developed for nearly another 30 years. Olson’s actual proposition is so muddied that it’s hard to tell if Simic is satirizing him. There is also ample evidence, particularly in Creeley’s writing – some of it as early as 1953 – to suggest that Simic’s content-centric reading of “form is nothing more than an extension of content” is a profound misinterpretation and that the dynamics between the signifier & signified in a poem are infinitely more complicated than represented by the paragraph above. If you didn’t know anything about Projective Verse before you read Simic’s account, everything you knew about after those three sentences would be wrong.

Simic appears to want to separate out Olson’s stance from Creeley’s:

Like Pound, Olson saw the role of a poet as a teacher, someone who makes new ideas available to his readers. Creeley thought that what defines our poetry is the prototypical American proclivity since Whitman and Dickinson for speaking in the name of an extraordinary single self, which nevertheless feels itself to be representative.

Those aren’t mutually exclusive ideas, but Simic appears to want to use the latter sentence not just as a wedge against Olson & the poetry of ideas, but also as a foretaste of his account of Creeley the love poet. We will later see the word "teacher" used as a pejorative again, which is eyebrow-raising coming from a retired teacher. The bridge between this passage and that account is a one-paragraph history of The Black Mountain Review, the journal Creeley edited. For Simic, the important thing about the Review is that it

was almost impossible to get hold of except in a few little bookstores around the country. Still, it circulated among poets and was exciting to read since it had poems and essays by Olson, Duncan, Levertov, and Creeley, whose ideas and work were far more intriguing than what one usually encountered in university quarterlies. Not until 1962, when Scribner brought out Creeley’s For Love: Poems 1950-1960, was it possible to have some sense of what his poetry was like unless one happened to come across one of his small-press books published in Spain or North Carolina.

This account, it’s worth noting, directly contradicts Anselm Hollo’s report that one of the great things about the 1950s – when far fewer poets were trying to publish in any format – was that, as a BBC reporter in London, he could easily get any American small press volume at virtually any decent local bookshop. The pyramid between, say, FSG and the humblest of small presses was not nearly so pronounced in an environment in which there were, at most, ten thousand titles of all kinds being published each year, and the present in which there just under 200,000 titles reach print annually. A good-sized bookshop in the 1950s, with maybe 50,000 different titles on its shelves, could pretty much stock five years of everything. That same store today is apt to have far fewer titles, even though 50,000 would represent only what was issued over the past three months. Further, Creeley had been published in 1960 in The New American Poetry, the best selling poetry anthology of all time, where his contribution of 14 poems was exceeded only by Frank O’Hara, and where only he and Charles Olson were permitted two separate statements on poetics. Creeley was hardly the hidden flower of this portrait. My point is not that Simic’s picture of Creeley’s marginality prior to For Love is, to say the least, overblown, but rather that we are seeing another plank in Simic’s theoretical platform set into place: only trade publishing is real, because it aims at a “non-specialist” audience. By “Spain and North Carolina,” what Simic means is “not Boston or New York.”

At this point, something very interesting happens. Simic’s tone changes – not entirely, but substantially – for several pages. Simic now proceeds to close read four poems from early Creeley, and for the most part does so enthusiastically if not brilliantly. He refers to “I Know a Man” as “such a little poem,” but does a credible job reading it, noting that, as “in a number of other Creeley poems, the conflict here is between two sides of the self.” He discusses spelling, line breaks & prosody and does so without misrepresenting the object of his study. Simic’s reading of these four poems may not be my own, but they’re certainly within the range of reasonable. After the loopy start, I almost wondered if he hadn’t actually approached NYRB with a pitch that went something like this – “You know, Creeley’s a great love poet, but not enough people appreciate that about him. Let me write about that.” – and had done so, only to insert it into this polemical superstructure. At least for the first three poems, Simic appears to genuinely like and feel sympathy of Creeley’s project. It starts to turn, though, with the fourth, entitled “The Language”:

Locate I
love you some-
where in

teeth and
eyes, bite
it but

take care not
to hurt, you
want so

much so
little. Words
say everything.

I
love you
again,

then what
is emptiness
for. To

fill, fill.
I heard words
and words full

of holes
aching. Speech
is a mouth.

“Words are holes,” Simic begins, immediately misstating the very lines he has just quoted. This is quite different from Creeley’s proposition here, which could be stated as “Words have holes.” No wonder Simic concludes that what Creeley

ends up espousing is a form of solipsism which holds that the primary reality for the self if the mind and the sole truth is the immediate and unshared experience that occurs there.

With a single word, solipsism, Simic dismisses the broader phenomenological tradition into which Creeley’s work fits. For what it’s worth, Husserl, Heidegger and Merleau-Ponty all refuted this same equation (their point being that phenomenology doesn’t cancel out descriptive objectivity, but rather fixes depiction very close to the observer) but it’s a position that continues to pop up in the literature. But Simic’s not really focusing on Creeley as intellectual here, so much as trying to spell out what he sees as a serious epistemological shift in Creeley’s work, one that he hopes to demolish.

“By broad agreement, For Love is Creeley’s best book,” Simic begins – yet another dubious assertion. Presuming that Simic has read the secondary literature on Creeley, he has to know of the cancellation by Scribners of Creeley’s first Selected Poems, edited by Robert Grenier, which in fact gave just 44 pages to the early poems of For Love and The Charm, centering itself – 91 pages worth – on Words and Pieces. The emphasis is even more clear when you realize that these two volumes were much shorter than For Love and are thus much more deeply represented. You can find this easily enough in the Creeley issue of boundary 2, Spring/Fall 1978, right there on pages 426-429. Scribners’ interest in poetry was waning – the imprint survives today as a brand of the Thomson Gale house, a reference publisher – and with it Creeley’s own relationship with the press. The cancellation precipitated Creeley’s move to New Directions, where Robert Duncan, another Scribners author, had already preceded him.

What Simic is actually doing here is a variation on an old School of Quietude attempt to co-opt Ezra Pound by professing to love the old fascist’s early work gathered in Personae, rejecting the innovative structure of The Cantos, even tho those are the very poems – particularly the early ones in which he articulated his mature method and the much later Pisan Cantos – which gave rise to the whole Pound-Williams-Zukofsky tradition in contemporary poetics. “Words,” Simic writes, “is an uneven book.” Simic notes that there are “several powerful poems” in it, but finds that Creeley is moving away from descriptive or narrative lyrics.

Such specifics are rare in his work. Ordinarily, his lovers, friends, and the places he travels are not shown in any detail. Poetry denies its end in any descriptive act, Creeley has insisted, since it leaves the attention outside the poem.

This last sentence may be the focal point for Simic’s entire essay. He needs to deconstruct this position to make his case. He thus quotes Creeley from an interview with Linda Wagner, giving what essentially is a characterization of contemporary verse that sounds very much like the verbal equivalent of action painting, the version of abstract expressionist art favored, say, by Jackson Pollock:

Poetry seems to be written momently – that is, it occupies a moment of time…. I seem to be given to work in some intense moment of whatever possibility, and if I manage to gain the articulation necessary in that moment, then happily there is the poem.

Simic is open enough in his disagreement: “If this is true – and it is not true for most poets – all we can expect from Creeley’s poetry will be jottings, words and phrases about his state of mind which will rely on his knack for colloquial speech to conceal the paucity of content.” Simic can’t bring himself to use the term reference here, for to do so would force him to admit that there is every bit as much content in these poetics as in his own. But it is evident from such phrasings as “all we can expect,” “jottings,” and “paucity” where Simic stands. This analysis also suffers from the minor inconvenience that its first assertion - that it is not true for most poets - fails to acknowledge that it has been true for many for well over three decades now.

So the real target of this piece turns out to be Creeley’s Pieces. “Pieces…,” Simic writes, “is all about such poetry.” He goes after the book with the tenacity of a pit bull. “Having convinced himself” of these poetics – the implication being that this is some sort of delusion – “Creeley eschews even the beginnings and endings of poems.” He quotes, almost arbitrarily, the first half of “A Step,” concluding that “even this much ought to be enough to show the slightness of such poetry.” Acknowledging that he likes “Numbers,” a collaboration with painter Robert Indiana and that there “are a few good poems in his earlier manner in Pieces, but the rest of the book doesn’t amount to much,” Simic sums up his dismissal: “Creeley confused ideas about poetry with poetry itself… Creeley had ceased to be a lyric poet and become a teacher-preacher type giving us classroom demonstrations of how poetry, written according to a particular theory of poetry, works.” Of course, Simic in this essay has shown us his theory by which I suppose we can now dismiss his own writing out of hand.

What Simic is not saying here is what Pieces actually does as writing – he could have found much more provocative examples of what he doesn’t like. And he fails to put the book into any sort of larger context – notably absent in this essay are the two names Ted Berrigan and Louis Zukofsky – since Simic seems to want this to appear to be Creeley’s deviation – the phrase “teacher-preacher” may intend to recall Olson – rather than a broader movement in the arts. The latter, of course, would patently negate this argument.

But, in fact, Pieces was read by a generation of younger poets for the revolutionary work that it is. Its most important review was Grenier’s amid his famous critical statements at the back of the first issue of This, which declares in its second sentence (and in Grenier’s distinct style):

“PROJECTIVE VERSE” is PIECES ON

The statement centered on the page so that you cannot miss its importance, and Grenier’s claim that the same Projective Verse essay that Olson had published some dozen years earlier – Simic himself notes that the manifesto is “famous” and that the “ideas and work were far more intriguing” than the squat neophobe stanzas of the 1950s – has now moved beyond the point of prolepsis, speaking as tho the future were the present, and that Pieces represents the first fully manifested instance of actual projective writing.

This, we should note, is the onset of the revolution in writing that is most often associated with the term Language Poetry, a phrase Simic does not use and whose practitioners he never mentions. From this point forward in the essay, however, it is clear that what Simic is trying to accomplish is to strike from the record everything that has been written in the post-avant tradition from Pieces onward. He quotes both Allen Ginsberg and Robert Duncan to the effect that the new poetry should be intellectually inclusive and move away from the sentimental frameworks of neophobe writing and comments

The most charitable interpretation of these two awful pieces of advice is that Ginsberg was pulling his leg and Duncan meant something else.

Actually, the more charitable one is that Simic himself isn’t intellectually capable of following a serious discussion of the arts. He’s like the jazz fan who likes Miles Davis’ Sketches of Spain or Kind of Blue, or Coltrane’s Giant Steps, only to freak out at their later work because it demands more from him as a listener, let alone the music of Anthony Braxton, Steve Lacy et al, musicians who come along later and take this new material as a given. It confounds him that Creeley doesn’t at least fill his poems with “nicely observed details and memorable stories.” In what I suspect Simic must think of as the crowning touch of this supposed demolition, he writes

The aesthetic theory – and there is always a theory behind such reductive views – may sound persuasive, but it was foolish on Creeley’s part to believe that it could ever validate a poem. If poetics were like cooking and one could write down a recipe for all of one’s future poems, that would be true. However, great cooks rarely bother to consult cookbooks.

What should be obvious to the reader by now is that the theory-ridden poet here is not Creeley, but Simic. And it is a true enough conclusion about Simic’s own poetry, but not a terribly accurate one about Creeley. If anything, the problem of Creeley’s later writing is not that it adheres to the poetics of Pieces, but that it steps back from the boldness of that volume. (I ran my own review of Pieces here three years ago)

Simic continues his essay by reading a couple of the works from the last 30 years which he likes because they contain “comic touches and sharply observed details.” He concludes with the critical equivalent of crocodile tears: “It’s a pity that he felt the need to remain faithful to ideas about composition long after it became clear that they not only were limiting him but were a dead end.” That is, however, a misreading of Creeley – hardly a surprise given how imaginary this figure is in every previous stage in Simic’s hands – and a statement that far more accurately describes Simic’s own writing. He has, at this point, been firing bullets so long that he fails to notice the degree to which his primary opponent is the man in the mirror.

Overall, Simic’s assault wants to be strategic – if Creeley’s Pieces is the linchpin for all of the poetry that has passed him by for the past 35 years, then taking it down would solve ever so many problems. But to do so would actually require reading the book, closely even, noting the degree to which any phenomenological account of poetics has to confront the materials at hand, and that what he terms “slightness” is in fact the very opposite, the magnification of minute particulars to an almost gargantuan focus. That Simic isn’t intellectually capable of handling this task – presuming for a moment that it were possible – is palpable from the fact that he let slide many moments in Pieces that, as is the case with all minimalism, can be extracted from context for ridicule by any Babbitt who comes along.

ONE THING
done, the
rest follows

*

Not from not
but in in.

*

Here here
here. Here.

 

¹ If the surrealism of Robert Bly & James Wright was a conscious rebellion against the Boston Brahmin scene around Lowell, the soft surrealists – who emerged after Tate’s sublime first volume, The Lost Pilot – represented a kind of rapprochement. The three who matter are Tate, Simic & Bill Knott, tho one can detect its influence to this day in the work of, say, Dean Young.