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Seth Abramson

The other day, when I wrote about Marjorie Perloff, anthologies & critical assumptions in a changing context for writing, Seth Abramson responded with the following comment:

Hi Ron,

You really need to revisit that "10,000 publishing poets in the U.S." figure. I know you've used it before, and believe in it, but honestly – given that 10,000 poets have graduated from MFA or Ph.D. in Creative Writing programs in just the past five years – there is absolutely no possibility of it being correct. Likewise, if you consider the number of print and online poetry journals in operation being close to 1,000 (or perhaps over it), and each publishing several dozen (or many more) poets per year, it becomes clear that the number of publishing poets is around 50,000. If by "publishing" you mean only poets with collections, I think that's an incredibly (with all due respect) wrong-headed way to look at how poets publish poetry. Those without books deserve to be counted, lest we – and I won't dwell too much on the fact of it being you doing this – seriously, seriously underestimate the breadth and depth of the poetry community.

Be well,
Seth

Seth’s note made me happy, because (a) I already see people all but faint when I make the claim that there are 10,000 publishing poets in the U.S. and (b) I concluded some months ago that my estimate was low – my only real question is how low. I came to my conclusion working from the fact that my blogroll has swollen to over 1,000 names – and is becoming less & less complete all the time – when I know full well that less than one in ten poets currently has an active blog that discusses poetics (indeed, this would still be true even if I included all the poets who have blogs that only print their own poems, or simply quote poems that they like, two groups I generally do not include here because I don’t see them as furthering discussion between poets, which has always been my primary goal).¹

And I’ve also thought about the ongoing impact of creative writing programs. I don’t think these programs create any poets whatsoever, tho they may encourage more people who write poetry to try & publish who otherwise might not do so. So in that sense they do add to the total. However, when I think through the numbers, I don’t get a figure like 10,000 poets having graduated over the past five years. I don’t know what percentage of the creative writing programs offer graduate degrees, but last I noted there were still somewhat under 500 such programs in the U.S. Being graduate education, these are not huge departments: on average, how many students matriculate from one in any given year. 20? I think the actual average is closer to half that. And at least half of those graduates are focusing on other, more remunerative genres, from fiction to drama or screenwriting to the “creative essay.” So you would need 500 programs graduating 40 students every year each to yield 10,000 poets over a five year period. There is no way this is happening.

Further – and this is the other key dynamic here – what percentage of recent MFAs publish in their first year or two after graduation? Not just books, but anything. The figure is well under 100 percent. More important, what percentage of them are still trying to publish five, ten years post graduation? I would argue that this number dwindles fairly quickly. The gap between college, where you have a ready context for your writing, and the “real world” where you have to make one up, especially if you don’t already happen to live in New York or San Francisco, is the largest single barrier young poets tend to confront, tho having children has a pretty significant impact as well. Those MFA grads who get at least marginally decent teaching jobs – 50 to 60 a year manage that feat – may be professionally goaded into publishing just to keep their positions and move toward tenure. But I’ll wager that the percentage of MFAs that never get a teaching gig who are still publishing five years after graduation is under 50 percent. In practice, this means that we would need 500 schools graduating between 60 & 80 students per year to reach something like 10,000 new poets to add to those already publishing. How you then get from that to 50,000 I can’t begin to imagine.

Now I’m aware that the number of people in the United States who actually write poetry must easily exceed that higher figure. You could persuade me that it exceeds one million, just based on my experiences running a community writers workshop in San Francisco’s Tenderloin. During any given year that I ran that workshop (1979-1981), we had roughly two percent of the adult population of that inner city community show up, half of whom were writing poetry. Spread out over the entire nation, such a percentage would get you to seven digits, but there are reasons why the Tenderloin might well be (or at least have been) a disproportionately writerly population. And the number of poets there who were actively trying to publish was barely in double figures.

All of which is to say that I don’t think 50,000 passes the “smell test” – it just doesn’t sit right. But I do agree with Abramson when he suggests that 10,000 increasingly doesn’t pass it either. An actual figure, which would take an enormous amount of labor (and fairly significant cost) to track down – and which would then be instantly obsolete – falls somewhere in between.

 

¹ Where it might exceed the one-in-ten threshold would be if we also added in the most numerous of all categories: Dead Blogs. Including those embryonic ones that never get past the third or fourth post. But since Lynn Behrendt has been helping me with the blogroll, we’ve been diligent about getting Dead Blogs off that list.

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My trip to Missoula, Montana, was memorable for a number of reasons. Taking place in May of 1989, it occurred just a matter of weeks before the massacre in Tiananmen Square in the People’s Republic of China, a pivotal – if, in the Chinese instance, abortive – event in the global collapse of “actually existing” Stalinist states that would result over the next two years in the fall of the Berlin Wall & implosion of the Soviet Socialist Republics. Indeed, I was already scheduled to spend part of that summer in what was then Leningrad.

I had also just started working – less than four weeks on the job – in the computer industry and had had to negotiate permission to take this week in the Rockies, plus the later time abroad (there were stops along the way in both Finland & Germany), when I first signed my contract with ComputerLand. I had just left my tenure as the executive editor of The Socialist Review (SR) – I remained on the editorial collective for an additional three years – and was making a conscious decision to go into the computer industry, sensing that technology had the potential to change the terms of many social debates of the late ‘80s.

But what makes my trip to Missoula most memorable, well beyond the stunning mountain setting of the University of Montana, very possibly the most beautiful campus in the United States, with osprey hunting fish in the river that runs through it, were my meetings with two people. One was Jean Baudrillard, whom I’d been asked to debate by the organizers of a conference focused around the work of the French philosopher.

The second was with the painter Mel Laubach, a one-time roommate of mine in San Francisco. Mel & I had put together a collective household in a seven-bedroom Victorian – total rent for the entire building was $350 – in 1975, a group that lasted with some rolling changes until the fall of 1977 when a leaky roof & recalcitrant landlord led to a rent strike & eventual eviction. Mel had been a student at the San Francisco Art Institute when I first met him, working mostly with abstracts in oil – imagine Franz Kline with paints as thick as some of Jess’ portraits of Robert Duncan – but graduated and had moved to New York City, seeking the proverbial great gallery deal & fame & fortune. I’d lost touch with him entirely until one day, when I had gotten my first East Coast reading tour ever, Charles Bernstein picked me up at the Newark airport and we were driving back into Manhattan. As we pulled through the Holland Tunnel and came to the first red light, one of the passersby in the crosswalk was Mel. We actually blocked traffic – it wasn’t going anywhere very fast anyway – for a couple of minutes as I got his contact information & told him about the reading.

Not only was Mel living in New York, but he had become the super of his building on the Lower East Side. As I was to learn that same weekend, one of the tenants in that building was Hannah Weiner. Talk about weird coincidences. I met with Mel several more times in New York – one of our old housemates actually succeeded him as that building’s super – the last time when he was working at an outdoor & camping equipment chain, thinking about going back to grad school. But when I got back to the city again, he was gone and I had no way of knowing where.

So I was floored when, as I was walking through the lobby of the Performing Arts Center in Missoula, about to deliver my talk, I ran into Mel again. He had settled in Missoula and was getting his MFA in painting there. He had not even realized that I was speaking there that night, and had never heard of Baudrillard. He’d simply heard that there was going to be a debate with a weird French philosopher and that it ought to be pretty funny. In Missoula, that was reason enough to head out of the house.

I spent a good portion of the next day with Mel. Indeed, a screw in the frame of my glasses had fallen out & disappeared the night before as I was addressing the audience of some 600 people & Mel knew which mall had a good optician who quickly repaired them – a good thing as I had a reading that night with jazz musician Eugene Chadbourne, complete with his electric rake.

I lost touch with Mel again after that & it was only a couple of months ago, after I’d googled him, looking to see if there were any jpegs of recent paintings available on the web, that I discovered that he’d been killed in 2004 in an auto accident in Missoula. And it was only after I’d emailed his widow – he’d been single when I’d seen him last – that I discovered that she was the sister of one of my co-workers from the California Institute of Integral Studies, where I’d been the director of development for several years before taking over the editorship at Socialist Review. I still have a painting of Mel’s from his Art Institute days just ten feet from where I’m typing right now.

Baudrillard was another matter. I’d read the books, of course, and had originally been interested in him as a provocative protégé of Henri Lefebvre, but had never met the person. In 1989, his star in the world of celebrity academics was at its peak & responding to him on the same stage was, in some fashion, a big deal. For me, it was an opportunity to present in a different context than any I’d had previously, tho my work at SR had put me into some pretty interesting spots, and during that period I was very much involved with working out what I felt were that mostly amnesiac premises of what in those days constituted post-modernism. Amnesiac because nobody, at least other than Jurgen Habermas, was prepared to address the problems of modernity from which the post-modern presumably sprang. Baudrillard presented a terrific opportunity to address this question and the draft of his talk that I’d been given by conference co-chair William Chaloupka – “Transpolitics, Transexuality, Transaesthetics,” maybe 90 percent of the version he eventually published in Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics – made it self-evident that I shouldn’t pass up this opportunity.

Shorter than I’d expected but perfectly affable, Baudrillard had the star routine down solid. He hadn’t flown directly into Missoula, but had landed either in the LA or Las Vegas & rented a car, seeking to drive north through the desert that he loved so much about America – I always thought that he was the one person besides Nabokov who really saw that landscape as sensuous. Unfortunately, the rental car died along the route, perhaps in Utah, and some poor grad student had had to be dispatched to fetch the stranded philosopher. The rental car was just left on the side of the road, with Baudrillard saying succinctly, “Oh, I’m sure the university will take care of that.” He’d also arrived entirely without cash – a trick I’ve seen one or two other celebrity academics pull – so that grad students were perpetually having to buy everything for him. And he was not without his appetites.

I think I surprised him in our session together. If you read his talk – and especially in the back & forth session that followed our presentations – it was clear that he expected me to represent the aesthetic in some relatively pure form, lyric poetry perhaps. But that wasn’t me and certainly what I wasn’t doing. My own piece, when I published it in that same volume¹, was entitled “What Do Cyborgs Want? (Paris, Suburb of the Twentieth Century),” playing of course off of the title of the famous Donna Haraway essay, “Cyborg Manifesto,” that had first appeared in the pages of SR a couple of years earlier.

Jean Baudrillard: The Disappearance of Art and Politics has been out of print for some time & a search of the web suggests that there are no used copies to be had at all. I’ll post my piece from the conference tomorrow if all goes well. (See alternate accounts of this conference by Thomas Dumm and Bill Borneman.)

 

¹ The book's subtitle was a play on my “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” which Chaloupka and his co-editor William Stearns republished in that volume as well.

To accompany the Modern Language Association (MLA) in Philadelphia, the local paper ran an upbeat article with the improbable headline “Creative Writing, Poetry are Hot,” indicating that

There were 69 available creative-writing jobs advertised across the nation in October, up from 52 in October of last year.

This should be ever so promising to the graduates of the more than 400 creative writing programs that are currently members of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs (AWP). With, say, an average 10 graduates per program per year in all creative writing disciplines, some 4,000 new MFAs have a 1.7 percent chance of actually scoring a teaching job. Unless of course you consider the 4,000 still unemployed graduates from those programs the previous year, which would drop the prospective number down to around 0.8 percent. Unless of course you also consider the graduates of the year before & the year before that. You get the picture. A new MFA may have a better chance of getting hit by a car than landing a teaching job.

Hey, it could be worse. Try publishing a novel. The annual write-a-novel-in-one-month event in November is said to have started out with 80,000 participants this year and ended with over 13,000 having been written. Imagine exactly how many of those will see the light of day at FSG or Knopf.

AWP advertises that it represents some 28,000 writers. The circulation of Poets & Writers is currently 60,000. And there are 69 creative-writing jobs advertised. Such is the definition of “hot” in the current job market.

The meat market aspect of the MLA has always been its darkest side, and I glimpsed that in passing again this year, interviewers stressed out by watching people whom they know to be brilliant & creative “blow up” during the process, interviewees who, in the words of one, watch their opportunity “just lay down & die on the interview table.” Especially tragic are the members whose badges no longer reflect any institutional affiliation and who are doing one last round of interviews, wondering if this is the final year they will even get that far, beginning to recognize that having a Ph.D. or MFA isn’t ever going to get them a job. And that a life of adjuncting is the very best they can hope for.

Happily poetry isn’t about teaching or the academy any more than it is about the trade book industry. The Venn diagram overlap between these three worlds gets to be less every year, and we’re at that point now where these three circles barely even touch.

So how contrast that bleak picture with the great energy, joy & camaraderie that was manifest everywhere at the Philadelphia Arts Alliance for the annual offsite reading, an event that has been going on annually since Rod Smith started it in 1989 & which Aldon Nielsen likens to a "floating Burning Man of verse?" Tho the University of Alabama Press sponsored the event this year, it is held off-site so that all of the local poets (somewhere between one third & one half of all the readers) don’t have to pony up an MLA membership just to go to a reading.¹ One of the great things about this event is being reminded so palpably that poetry is a community. The great myth of the poet as operating purely in isolation, offered to us first as tragedy (Emily Dickinson) and then as farce (Jack Gilbert), is in fact just that: myth. There are a few poets who work better off by themselves, but so many more of us are not unlike Jack Spicer, who may have been a misanthrope, but thoroughly depended on his beloved circle, whether at Aquatic Park in the afternoons talking poetry & listening to Giants games over the radio, or at Gino & Carlo’s saloon, or at the various homes & locales where the group, as group, met, including the Hotel Wentley (now the Polk-Sutter apartments), 707 Scott Street or the San Francisco Public Library, site of the Magic Workshop.

Poetry obviously is not only a community – there is still that blank page, just waiting – but that it is also (always already as we used to say) a community as well is precisely the recognition that separates the post-avant from the old avant-garde formations (the latter admitted community only with rigid gating requirements, such as the membership invitation rituals both of the surrealists &, more recently, Oulipo). And when you’re in a room with as many people who know why they write what they write – which has nothing to do with jobs, schools or trade presses – the actual joy of the occasion is terrific.² This is the sense in which poetry truly is “hot.”

 

¹ Note to self: think through more carefully this year the role of those few academic presses, including (but not limited to) Alabama, California & Wesleyan, that show a serious commitment to post-avant literature. They are neither small nor trade presses, and their role is more complicated than just fitting “in between” those two worlds.

² Consider, for example, the “rejection sonata” presented by William Howe & his three collaborators at the off-site reading, a sound poem worthy of the ole Four Horsemen based entirely on “we regret to inform you” type language

Echoes in the mind’s eye after the 2006 MLA:

Somebody – I think it may have been Dan Waterman of the University of Alabama press – telling me that this was the “all-poetry-all-the-time MLA.” Then hearing ten other people tell me the same thing over the next two days.

Seeing oodles of old friends, meeting some folks for the first time (hi, Kirby!). Rosmarie Waldrop, Susan Howe, Hank Lazer, Brent Cunningham, Jonathan Mayhew, Carla Harryman, Ben Friedlander, Laura Hinton, George Hartley, Michael Davidson, Norma Cole, Tom Orange, Linh Dinh, Laura Moriarty, & Tim Yu were just the tip of the veritable iceberg.

Finally meeting Kenny Goldsmith. Being introduced to Tracie Morris, whom I know, over & over. Meeting Aaron Belz, seeing Aaron Kunin. Hard to believe that, before Thursday, the only poet I’d ever even seen named Aaron was Mr. Shurin.

Seeing a spiral-bound mockup of The Age of Huts (compleat) in the UC Press booth.

Seeing Norma Cole read, the first time I’ve seen her do that since her stroke.

Seeing 23 poets read for the very first time among the 55 readers at the off-site event.

Sensing three concentric circles on the Pound panel: Ben Friedlander focused in on Pound, what he did or didn’t do, and why (looking closely at the economic motivation by the radio broadcasts, and asking how they fit in with the motivations of the Italian fascist regime, which did not, for example, particularly share Pound’s anti-Semitism); Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Jennifer Scappetone looking at Pound as influence, Scappetone with regards to Jackson Mac Low, DuPlessis with regards to herself & other contemporary poets; then Barrett Watten looking at Pound as symptom, reading him through The Authoritarian Personality (Adorno et al.), both with respect to the 1940s & the work in the 50s that led to that Frankfort School project, but to the present moment as well.

Opening the Philadelphia Inquirer to see a poem by Charles Bernstein on the op-ed page.

Barrett Watten’s poem, ”Dream of a Post-Soviet MLA.”

Susan Schultz calling me “old fashioned” when she came up to the podium right after my little one-minute reading.

Realizing that this wasn’t just the “all-poetry-all-the-time MLA,” but rather was the “all-post-avant-poetry-all-the-time” MLA. I never have seen an MLA where I couldn’t get to every post-avant panel because there were three and four going on in every single slot. Realizing that this was really the “Marjorie Perloff MLA” & she’d pulled out all the stops. (See Barrett Watten’s more in-depth analysis of this here.)

Richard Sieburth delivering a passionate 15-minute talk in a panel on the role of sound in translation on the role of the & in a 16^th-century poem and the history of that device in later editions & translations, becoming more & more emotional as he spoke.

Tyrone Williams' close reading of Taylor Brady’s Yesterday’s News in the panel on poetics and cultural studies.

___ ______ leaning over to me in the audience to whisper, “Who is Taylor Brady?”

People just walking up to me to thank me for this blog.

Marjorie Perloff telling me that “even in San Marcos, Texas,” people are asking her if she agrees with “what Silliman says in that blog.”

Poets talking about their own practice & influences were for me a consistently high point of the meetings: Rachel Blau DuPlessis in the Pound panel; Carla Harryman talking about her work in poets’ theater & Poets’ Theatre; everyone on the sound in translation panel – a revolutionary concept for this particular institution, tho the poets in the room appeared to think it was a perfectly obvious & reasonable thing to discuss (as, of course, it is).

The poetics and cultural studies panel – which went straight after cultural studies for its failure to use poetry as anything other than a symptom, not to mention its rather incompetent fixation with narrative – was the best panel I attended. Alas, there appeared to be no cultural studies folks there, but then there were very few of them at this MLA at all. Jeffrey Nealon’s deconstruction of Fred Jameson is a tour de force. When Watten posts the papers, I’m going to have to close read that one in particular.

Realizing that, in 40 years, nobody will remember cultural studies if we don’t refer to it in our poems.

Seeing Rachel Blau DuPlessis sitting at the U. of Alabama Press booth in the exhibit hall as I left the conference on Thursday. Seeing Rachel Blau DuPlessis sitting at the U. of Alabama Press booth in the exhibit hall first thing on arriving at the conference on Friday.

Tim Yu thanking Bob Perelman for not organizing the offsite reading alphabetically by last name.

Yunte Huang noting the irony of having his name – coming as it does from a non-alphabetic language – put into alphabetical order by first name for the offsite reading.

Patrick Durgin introducing himself as Charles Bernstein. Yunte Huang introducing himself as Walter Lew.

Leevi Lehto teaching people how to pronounce his name in Finnish – Lĕvē Lĕchto – then introducing himself at the offsite reading both in Finnish and in “American” (Lēvī Lāto).

Leevi Lehto giving a terrific reading of a sound poem in “barbaric Finnish”

Craig Dworkin trying to ask me if he could put Tottels up on the Eclipse website while I was trying to ask him, simultaneously, the same question.

Seeing Kirby Olson & C.A. Conrad in the same room.

Steve Benson, dressed only in a shower curtain, looking very young in a video clip of Third Man from Carla Harryman’s presentation in the panel on poets’ theater.

Carla Harryman acknowledging the importance of the work of Nick Robinson & Eileen Corder in the evolution of poets’ theater in the Bay Area (and realizing that I never thought I would hear that at an MLA event).

Tracie Morris’ gospel-cum-sound poetry reading at the offsite.

Walter Lew diving across the grand piano at the Philadelphia Arts Alliance at the start of his reading, playing a few bars of Miles Davis, then reading from the index of an Aldon Nielsen book he’d just bought, then lunging at Aldon & literally cutting Nielsen’s tie in half.

The look on Aldon’s face.

Gabe Gudding loves the role of trouble maker. You can see it in his poetry, his criticism, his weblog, his missives to listservs, the people he chooses to champion. He lists “tastelessness” as a research interest on his web page at Illinois State University in Normal and is photographed there in front of the razor-wire fence of a prison.

Not unlike Kent Johnson, Gudding is one of those people whom it’s possible to admire even as you want to slap him across the face with an old trout. The impulse behind the ruckus is often good, but the impulse itself comes with a lot of baggage. It’s taken me years, for example, to get around to reading his essay, “From Petit to Langpo: A History of Solipsism and Experience in American Poetics Since the Rise of Creative Writing,” which I finally loaded onto my Palm TX & read while I was in California. The title is off-putting enough, but somewhere early on when it was first posted to the FlashPoint magazine website in 1999 I scanned it, saw a cheesy comment about Charles Bernstein (“arguably one of the most benighted and boring writers in the United States”), an aside that actually had nothing to do with the point then being made in the paper & thought of all the other times that Gudding has gone jousting against some of my own favorite windmills, myself included, and decided for the time being that I didn’t need to read that.

In fact, I was wrong. In spite of its somewhat misleading title – the subtitle is where all the action is here – Gudding’s essay is an attempt to understand the impact of creative writing programs on poetry itself, both the verse being written and, even more so, the divorce between the poet as experiencer of Big Feelings – what everyone from Oprah to Garrison Keeler mean by the adjective poetic – and the contemporary writer of poems that are often dismissed as too difficult or insular to bother reading. While there are a few poets – Robert Bly, Billy Collins, Ted Kooser, Amiri Baraka – who deliberately produce verse for audiences who don’t otherwise read poetry, most poets, regardless of their literary heritage or tendencies, are readily dismissed by mass audiences.

Gudding’s genius here has been not to ascribe this disjunction to one literary tendency or another (tho he also, just as clearly, demonstrates that its roots, if not its effects, are as far from the post-avant tradition as one could imagine), but would appear to be grounded in the history of American education as such, specifically in the rise of English departments, a phenomenon that did not exist 200 years ago, and within them the rise of creative writing courses. Gudding makes great use of John Dewey’s Art and Experience and the writings and work of William Hughes Mearns, whom Gudding credits as the first to teach the subject by name.

Gudding’s point is that creative writing never was intended to produce poets, fictioneers, playwrights or (the latest and most telling development, tho Gudding somewhat surprisingly doesn’t mention it to support his case, which it surely does) professional purveyors of the “personal essay.” Rather, from the beginning, the purpose was to develop, in Mearns’ words, “self-expression as a means of growth, and not poetry…. The business of making professional poets is still another matter – with which this writer has never had the least interest” (Gudding’s ellipsis). Mearns’ efforts might not have created poets, but it sure did create jobs for them, paid work aimed precisely at replicating the same fuzzy experiential agenda – the idea that a creative writing course is the one class in college that is explicitly about You. Gudding cites a then-current University of Montana creative writing program’s brochure that quotes the late Richard Hugo saying “a creative writing class may be one of the last places where you can go where your life still matters." Gudding implies, and he’s not wrong, that this isn’t necessarily a good thing. While I was out in California last week – staying at the home of one of Hugo’s former students, no less, now a psychotherapist whose bookshelves are full of the Pablo Neruda-to-Jane Kenyon spectrum of verse – one former Mills professor told me of a “revolt” that occurred in one of his classes when he had the temerity to suggest that his students actually read contemporary poetry.

The very same poetics of experience that lies at the heart of this growth agenda – Gudding calls it “democratic freighting,” acknowledging the impulses behind Dewey’s view of curriculum – leads to an aesthetic of the overwrought on the side of the School of Quietude, and to a phenomenology of the signifier among post avants, neither of which is calculated to gain a broad readership in a world where the lowest common denominator seems to be Dan Brown’s plot-driven conspiracy narratives.

Gudding concludes by demonstrating just how pervasive this aesthetic of the personal has become, quoting poet after poet, from all literary tendencies, who argue, in form or another, that the poem is found – the contemporary poet doesn’t so much write the poem as she or he discovers it – rather than constructed (the alternate model Gudding traces back to Coleridge): Robert Frost, Eudora Welty, Ed Dorn, Robert Creeley, Bill Stafford. A secondary, but not unimportant aspect of Gudding’s panoply of consequences is the rise of prose within poetry, precisely on the theory – Russell Edson is cited here – on the grounds that it is closer to experience because prose entails less of a formal dimension.

At its heart, Gudding’s argument is fascinating and troubling pretty much in equal amounts. At its heart, what it asks us to do is to think what the poem might be absent this particular literary history. That’s a profoundly important question.

But Gudding’s execution – this appears to have been written while he was himself still in the MFA program at Cornell – is beyond sloppy. His gratuitous dismissal of Charles Bernstein ignores Bernstein’s own work in this area – and Bernstein’s Brechtian send-ups of the personal in his own poetry would seem to be exactly what Gudding is tacitly advocating.

Further, Gudding’s description of prose as an anti-formal aesthetic strategy sounds very 1960s and the constructivist tendencies of the language school are nowhere considered, particularly since they (we) are being dismissed out of hand. It puts Gudding into the convoluted position of arguing for things that he otherwise trashes. One wishes, for example, that he had simply set aside the cheap shots and made the sort of meticulous case for his position that one associates, say, with the work on the history of canons done by Alan Golding. It wouldn’t have been that hard to do, but FlashPoint is hardly the only online journal that seems to think that editing stops with accepting a particular work.

But Gudding shouldn’t be dismissed just because he may be his own worst enemy rhetorically. The argument that he is making – however incomplete and riddled with problems it might be – has elements that ring true and would be good to think out at far greater length. Gudding’s own poetry might be characterized as neo-Georgian, particularly with its emphasis on satire and social wit, as if the only way to sidestep the problematics of the personal might be to go back to the last period in which such concerns were not (yet) an issue. I’m not convinced of this, either by the poems themselves or by Gudding’s reasoning here, but at the very least this misnamed essay offers gateways through which one might begin to address such issues.

I don’t teach that often, maybe once every five or six years, save for one-day deals here & there. Over the years I’ve turned down a couple of tenure-track positions – they always assume you’re willing to take a 50 percent (or more) cut in pay – as well as a number of adjunct and one-semester or one-year positions. So when I actually do run into a class of bright, energetic, talented individuals, especially at the graduate level (thus having thought enough about what they want to do for writing to be more than a distraction in the undergrad hookup scene), I get a great rush of enthusiasm. These folks are great and a few of them have the chops to do something serious with writing.

But they’re so unread! This was an observation I made with my first grad level class at San Francisco State in 1982 & it really isn’t any different today. If anything, the sheer fragmentation of literary communities as the number of published books of poetry have expanded each year has made the problem far more daunting. When I was at SF State, I passed around a list of 25 author and 25 book titles – typical examples would have Ed Dorn & Sylvia Plath, Gunslinger & Ariel – asking my students to connect names to the titles. Nobody in that class got more than a quarter of the answers right. At Naropa, I’ve run into students – not all of them, thankfully – who had not previously heard of Charles Olson or Robert Duncan, let alone all that has happened in the 40 years of American poetry since the New Americans reigned pretty much unchallenged over the post-avant landscape in the 1960s. Don’t even get me started on who had heard of the Objectivists.

These folks are not dunderheads, not in the slightest, but unless you’ve had John Taggart as a teacher (one of my students has), studied at one of a handful of identifiable schools like SUNY Buffalo, Brown, Bard, Temple, Penn, Mills, Wayne State or UC San Diego, or are some kind of manic autodidact, your chances of entering a graduate school program with even a remote understanding of the history of American poetry over the past half century are pretty minimal. (High schools, where poetry is routinely taught by people who don’t even read it for pleasure, are of course a million times worse.)

Think for a moment of just what the problem is. If you read two books of poetry per week, you will fall behind in your knowledge of what exists and is out there to the tune of 3,900 books a year at minimum. Another way of putting it is that, at two books per week, you could read the poetry books published in the U.S. just in 2006 by roughly 2045. If you read a book a day, however, you can get it done by the end of 2014 or thereabouts. And then you could begin on 2007.

This is obviously where canons, anthologies and selection comes in. You really don’t want to read all 4,000 titles that will be published this year, regardless of what your allegiance is to aesthetic camps. Indeed, you can’t possibly read just the post-avant texts that will be published this year, just because it’s probably the largest single semi-coherent grouping of those titles today. It would not shock me to discover that, of the 4,000 titles, as many as 1,500 can be identified as post-avant, either some kind of poetry that grew out of the various traditions once represented by the New American poetry or some other postmodern tendency (Stein, dada, surrealism, sound poetry & vispo, for example, were all noticeably not a part of the New American scene). Perhaps 500 books out of that pile of 4,000 can be traced likewise back to the School of Quietude, itself an ensemble of different tendencies wedded toward a view of poetics that shuns ongoing formal development. Maybe another 500 are involved principally in some kind of identarian practice. And the last 1,500 have no allegiance or connection really to anything. Some of these are fiercely independent isolatos, but the bulk are no more well read than are my students this week. These authors are disconnected because they really are disconnected.¹

Now I may have my numbers wrong here – there may be as many as 2,000 post-avant books, for example – but if you want to challenge the numbers, I suggest you put up some alternative ones of your own, thank you.

The culprit here no doubt is undergraduate curricula, which sees no need to teach contemporary poetry, or does so ahistorically, without reference to the shape of the landscape. You can call that educational malpractice – and it surely is – but the real question isn’t what to call it, but rather what to do about it. I would presume, for example, that even the sleepiest of MFA programs² confront the same problem with each incoming class.

I do have a suggestion. Two actually. One for students, another for schools. For students I would seriously recommend taking a year off between your undergraduate education & any MFA program you might be thinking about. Use this year to read voluminously and historically. I would start with Donald M. Allen’s The New American Poetry. Of the 44 poets in that volume, there are least 30 whose work you should know pretty much in its entirety. You should also be able to trace at least three of the groupings – the Projectivists, the New York School and the Beats – to their current manifestations. How do you get from Robert Creeley to Graham Foust? From John Ashbery to Laura Sims or Catherine Wagner? From Charles Olson or Ed Dorn to Dale Smith? From any one of the Beats, say, to Lee Ann Brown? Then take your favorite contemporary poets and trace their lineages, their influences, back to the 1950s. Does it take you to the Allen anthology or lead elsewhere? For example, is Philip Lamantia the only connection you can find in the Allen for what Linh Dinh is doing now? Is there any evidence that Dinh has even read Lamantia? If not, what common sources elsewhere might these two very different writers have?

There are more recent anthologies, of which Paul Hoover’s Norton Postmodern is almost certainly the best, that attempt to give a sense of the broader contemporary landscape. How do these poets fit into those same historic lineages? Then take an anthology devoted to new poets – such as Stephanie Young’s Bay Poetics – and conduct the same exercise. If you can get through all this in one year, ask yourself why there has not been a good anthology of Objectivist poetry – the generation that comes after Pound & Williams, but before the New Americans – since 1932. Read all of them & then work your way back to the modernists.

That would be a year of excellent reading, and it would give you a foundation to build upon as a poet. The choices you made for your own poetry would be based on some perspective, not simply because you don’t know better.

For schools, my recommendation isn’t so different. Rather than simply admitting students to MFA programs if they have a remotely decent manuscript (or simply the dollars necessary to pay the tuition), grad programs should require prospective students to write a critical or historical paper. For prospective poets, that paper would take the Allen anthology, The New American Poetry, as its starting point. Students would have a large number of options including tracing on grouping in the anthology up to the present, identifying major new poets and formal evolutions along the way, analyzing the relationships between one another (and between the poetry of one another) of one or more writers from each of the different sections of the anthology, writing about the absence of people of color from the anthology and the relationship of a particular identarian poetics to the poetics of the Allen anthology as it has developed from the 1960s to the present, writing about the relative absence of women from the anthology and doing pretty much the same thing there, writing about a new trend in American poetics and how it relates to (or contests) the poetics implicit in the Allen anthology, writing about a particular kind of poetics or poet (vispo, deep image, performance poetics, chance poetry, W.S. Merwin, Robert Lowell, Robert Bly, James Wright, rap poetics etc.) that is absent from the anthology, analyzing why that is and what that means, and tracing the influence of that alternative poetics to the present. All of these essays would require prospective student finally to position themselves with regards to whatever they’re writing about, and to write about their hopes for this line of development going forward and how they fit into that.

This is not, you might have noticed, so terribly different from the questionnaire that Jack Spicer used for his own Magic Workshop back in the 1950s, where he asked prospective attendees to choose one of two models for literary inheritance (one looks like a genealogy chart, the other planets in outer space, some larger, others smaller, some central, others not) and to fill in the boxes. Spicer’s Magic Workshop was not only a seminal event in the history of U.S. poetry in the 1950s, it should be noted that some of the successful applicants went on to become significant poets of a kind completely unlike Spicer, such as Jack Gilbert.

I don’t imagine that this exercise would beget a generation of students who sought to write like the next New American Poetry, only that it would help generate a cohort of MFA students who were not illiterates when it comes to American literary history. That way MFA programs would not have to spend at least half of their two-year programs on remedial education. And it just might cause a few more undergraduate programs to look at what they’re doing when they teach contemporary poetry.

 

¹ These numbers also suggest that the quickest way to become famous as a poet is to become a School of Quietude writer. There aren’t as many of them, they have almost bizarre dominance over the Big Six trade presses with all the distribution that implies, and you don’t have to be very good to be one of the very best. It’s exactly this same logic that has enabled Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice to become historic trendsetters in the African-American community, without ever being even remotely close to being the best or brightest. This strategy does mean that you’ll have to play at the shallow end of the pool all your days, but some folks find that to be their comfort zone.

² And wouldn’t it be fun to have contest identifying those.

When I was a student at Berkeley circa 1970, Fred Crews used to teach a course on literature & ideology. His reading list had all the usual suspects, starting with Orwell & Brecht. And that was part of what kept me from ever bothering to take the course – it struck me as obvious that the writing one ought to be reading in such a class were exactly the works that appeared to be “non-ideological” and not about politics at all. The politics of a Pound or Celine or Bellow, on the right, or a Rushdie or Vonnegut or Denise Levertov or Amiri Baraka are all over their work. But what about the politics of John Ashbery or Billy Collins or Ted Kooser or Ted Berrigan? It’s not that they don’t have ideological commitments, even if their personal politics might be incoherent, but rather that they don’t foreground this dimension in their writing. That always struck me as being the right place to look if you wanted to have a truly useful discussion of a dimension like ideology.

Similarly, this summer at Naropa, I’m teaching a course that looks at the dividing line between self & other in contemporary writing. There are, of course, a million works these days in which the poet has brought in various literary devices to ensure that everything in the work is not the “pure expression” of the poet’s ego. In class, we’ve discussed John Cage, Jackson Mac Low, Oulipo, flarf, Kenny Goldsmith’s uncreative writing. At the same time we’re reading three major critical pieces by Charles Olson – “Projective Verse” and “Letter to Elaine Feinstein,” two of his programmatic statements of projectivism, very much articulations of how the self might proceed in poetics, as well as “Proprioception,” Olson’s dialectics, which contains within itself a glimpse finally not just of self, but of other. Against this, what I didn’t want to do was simply pose works that offer the polar opposite practice, such as Mac Low or Goldsmith (different as they from one another), but in fact writers who don’t normally proceed as if the self/other question in the work is a major axis of their writing. The three books I chose were Aaron Shurin’s Involuntary Lyrics, Christian Bök’s Eunoia, and Geraldine Kim’s Povel. Not only does each poet come to a very different conclusion in these works as to how this question plays out in their writing, each represents a different demographic approaching this issue.

Shurin, with whom I went to UC Berkeley (for all I know, he may have taken Crews’ class), is a member of my own generation, old enough now to have had a couple of different careers as a poet, emerging first as one of the gay activist poets of the post-Stonewall period, then pushing himself further toward a post-avant poetics after working with Robert Duncan at New College. Involuntary Lyrics represents a return to the line after 15 years of prose poems, but for the project he chose the end words of Shakespeare’s sonnets (not necessarily in the same order as they appear in that sonnet) for which he wrote new lines, so to speak.

The best-selling poetry book in Canadian history, Eunoia is a marvel of narrative & sonic invention, as Bök, a generation younger than Shurin &, like many Canadians, as close to the European tradition of experimental literature as he is to the U.S. poetry scene. You can, if you wish, read (and even hear) the whole of Eunoia online, which you should. If you’re like me, you will still need to own both the book & CD as well, tho I must say that Bök’s reading on the CD seems muted & paced in comparison with the high-energy performance I heard him give of this at Temple a couple of years back. Each section of Eunoia presents a tale written entirely using a single vowel. The story of Helen is told all using words that contain only e, and there are some fabulously obscene moments in the i chapter. If the question in Shurin’s work is where does he end & Shakespeare begin (or vice versa), the question for the Oulipo-influenced Bök is where is he in the work?

Gerald Kim’s Povel presents this issue in exactly the opposite way. One could read her new sentence structured verse novel as tho it were an autobiographical text and, tho her book received the 2005 Fence Modern Poets Series prize from Fence (Forrest Gander was the judge), at least some reviews treat the book as though it were entirely a novel. Born in 1983 – she couldn’t have been more than 21 when she wrote Povel – Kim is of a new generation entirely, as well as a Korean-American writer, a cultural take that U.S. literature is only now getting to know. But the best part of this is that the distance between the Abbott Street neighborhood in Worcester, Massachusetts, where Charles Olson grew up and Brooks Crossing, West Boylston, the street on which Kim was raised, is just 7.4 miles.

Megan Swihart asked a couple of questions that I’ve heard more than once before:

What possibilities are opened and what problems/limitations are created by the academic location of language poets in the academy? Do you feel that language poetry still remains on the margins of American poetry?

Of the 40 poets included in In the American Tree, eleven either have – or have retired from – regular jobs teaching literature &/or writing in the academy. A few others work in or around the academy in different situations. Bruce Andrews teaches, but not literature. Eleven out of 40 is hardly a vast percentage – what is the ratio for contributors to Ploughshares? – yet it clearly is a much higher number than, say, in 1978, the year L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E was first published, when I believe only David Bromige & Michael Davidson were teaching literature.

Further, and more important, langpo has been incorporated into academic discourse well beyond the actual employment of a couple of handfuls of individuals. There are many schools that now include writers who might not have been in the Tree, but certainly are not far removed from its concerns as writers. Even more teach different langpos from time to time as a part of the curriculum. And then there are the programs, like the Electronic Poetry Center, PENNsound, Ubuweb, Modern American Poetry & others that make the work of many poets available, and which include language poetry as a regular part of the landscape. Finally, there are university presses from California to Wesleyan to Alabama that are now publishing langpos from time to time.

At one level, this sounds not unlike the experience of the New American Poets twenty years earlier. 20 of the 44 poets included in the Allen anthology went on to have sustained teaching careers, and three – Snyder, Ashbery & Schuyler – have thus far received Pulitzers, not to mention a host of other awards (not, strictly speaking, a function of the academy, but rather an infrastructural adjunct to the trade press world) that have not yet been accorded any of the langpos. Thus language poets have had far less involvement with the academy & other institutions of what Charles Bernstein likes to call Official Verse Culture – not exactly identical to the School of Quietude, tho the overlaps are worth noting – than did the prior generation. Yet this limited engagement has been a point of continuing curiosity & comment with regards to language writing, hardly at all with regards to the New American Poets.

Why is that?

Part of the answer, I think, has been the efficacy of that engagement. There are two dimensions to this, one theoretical, the other institutional. Langpos are perceived to have integrated easily into the academy – at least the nine who actually did once anybody began using the phrase language writing – in part because their ease with theoretical discourse resonated with a theory-driven period in humanities programs in general. This, however, discounts much if not all of the theoretical and critical writing of the previous generation, as if Olson’s critical theory, or Duncan’s, the voluminous reviews and short statements penned by Robert Creeley & Gilbert Sorrentino, the political writing of Amiri Baraka, the various editorial-critical projects of Ed Dorn, the art criticism penned by John Ashbery (and a host of second & third-gen NY Schoolers), the ecological writing of Gary Snyder, the lectures given by Jack Spicer, Lew Welch’s book on Gertrude Stein weren’t, somehow, already there. Or at least were not to be taken seriously outside of certain constrained contexts.

It may well be that with the exception of a couple of famous examples – Harold Bloom’s advocacy for a certain side of John Ashbery, in particular – New American Poets found the impact of their critical work muted by the larger institutional base enjoyed by the School of Quietude in the 1950s & ‘60s, which was just then emerging from the institutional monopoly enjoyed by New Criticism in the 1940s. Yet what was Black Mountain College during the Olson years but an attempt to enact theory in full-blown institutional practice? It was the New American Poets, and some others like Tom Pickard & Andrew Crozier immediately influenced by them, who resurrected the Objectivists – Duncan, Creeley, Levertov & Jonathan Williams raised Zukofsky up from virtual obscurity. It was Allen Ginsberg & Anne Waldman at Naropa who, taking the hint from Black Mountain, showed that an alternative writing & poetics program was indeed possible, Duncan in turn leading the same sort of effort at New College in San Francisco. And it was Olson, Creeley & Allen De Loach who made Buffalo a home for the post-avant long before Charles Bernstein arrived.

If the language poets who moved into the academy in the 1980s & ‘90s flourished there, a major part of the reason was because of the work New American Poets had done a generation earlier to make this possible. Of particular importance – and something seldom noted – were contributions made by that “in-between” generation of poets too young to have been included in the Allen anthology & already mature artists by the time langpo rolled around, people like Robert Kelly at Bard & Kathleen Fraser at San Francisco State, David Antin & Jerry Rothenberg at UC San Diego, Rachel Blau DuPlessis & Toby Olson at Temple, Keith Waldrop at Brown, Kenneth Irby at Kansas, Hank Lazer at Alabama, Ted Berrigan & Anselm Hollo at several different institutions – and the truth is that this list omits more examples than it includes.

So some of the “success” of a few language writers in the academy is really more a matter of them receiving credit for a process that is both larger – and longer in coming – than their own contributions, as such. It’s more as if people just noticed the presence of the post-avant once contributors to In the American Tree showed up. Yet of the 400 writing programs that are a part of the AWP, just how many could one really call post-avant, let alone language oriented, in their flavor? Twenty out of 400? Forty?

Finally, langpo – and the post-avant in general – has been successful because it is centered not in the academy at all, but in the major metro areas of the United States. If 11 out of 40 contributors to the Tree teach writing, or have done so for extended periods, then 72.5 percent have not. They’ve worked as health inspectors, therapists, newspaper editors, typesetters, librarians, marketers, lingerie designers, in non-profit organizations and in the computer industry. That’s where the center of American poetry always has been – as indeed the students in those other 360 or so writing programs will soon discover the moment they don’t get teaching jobs.

So it is in that sense that I would argue that, no, language poetry – a literary tendency I see as an historical moment, say 1970 into the very early 1980s, more than a lifelong description of the writing of those of us tarred with that brush – is not at all marginal to American poetry. It is one part of a much larger, expanded center that I see as quite continuous back to the end of the Second World War & beyond, continuing now, some 20 years after the idea of “language poetry” as something cohesively militant last really made sense , as this much broader post-avant scene that one sees today. The breadth of this is such that one might have, say, Geof Huth at one extreme& Henry Gould & John Latta at another (all librarians, I do believe) – but it’s far larger than any one literary tendency can possibly direct, govern or probably even influence.

So if, by “the academy,” what we mean are those people who teach writing and/or literature for a living, really the question I would pose to Megan Swihart is just the reverse: Should the academy feel that it remains on the margins of American poetry? Less, I think, than was the case some 50 years ago, when Olson, Creeley & to some extent Duncan first pioneered the idea of post-avants teaching for money, tho it still has a long way to go.