There is an interesting image in Barbara Guest’s excellent biography of Hilda Doolittle, Herself Defined, of imagism as a movement after Ezra Pound had moved on to join Wyndham Lewis in declaring Vorticism. The image Guest leaves the reader with is one of a lone major Imagiste, H.D., a second-but-inferior entrepreneurial huckster in Amy Lowell, and a handful of second-tier poets of the likes of John Gould Fletcher and Richard Aldington, having to carry on with no clear sense of direction. Guest outlines the ways in which the Imagism of these latter poets was invariably compromised – either too Georgian or just too muddled. The implication is that once Pound turned his attention elsewhere, Imagism lost its “head.” Ultimately, and Guest is fairly explicit about this, there would be only one “true” Imagist: H.D.

Which opens, for me, the deeper question of what an –ism can possibly be. The idea of poetry organized in some fashion around a common purpose necessarily implies the possibility of shared motives. That’s a concept that comes more directly from French painting (& secondarily French symbolist poetry) than it does the tradition of Anglo-American letters. Still there are sporadic foretastes, including the mid-19^th century squabbling between the Young Americans and the anglophiles of the School of Quietude. Underlying this concept is some sense of how a “common purpose” might be characterized. Does it require, for example, a defining statement of principles – a manifesto for want of a better term – and the adoption of a name? Guest is clear that Pound, for example, was less of a namer of movements than he was an appropriator of names, such as T.E. Hume’s imagism or Lewis’ Vorticism. Even Objectivism, although Guest doesn’t mention it, might be described in these same terms – a name & an accompanying statement of principles, primarily put forward (at least in 1932) for the purposes of marketing. The need thus was external to the poetry, indeed was imposed on the poets by Zukofsky only at the insistence of Harriet Monroe.

An –ism of this order strikes me as being essentially hollow, aimed less at the poets than at some externalized audience. Contrast this with, for example, the most pronounced ism of the 1950s, Projectivism. While Olson, Creeley, Dorn, Duncan & Sorrentino all wrote substantive works of critical writing – and some of Olson’s in particular embody the rhetoric of a manifesto – they’re really aimed at one another. What we are reading in their works is much more of an internal discussion – they’re goading one another to write better & to take greater chances in their work. One sees this also, I think, in the relatively few critical works to emerge from the New York School (O’Hara’s “Personism”) or the so-called Beat Scene (primarily Kerouac’s statements on prosody & spontaneous writing). Indeed, the Projectivists never once in their writings ever called themselves by that name & the Beats were accorded that moniker by a San Francisco gossip columnist, Herb Caen. “Personism,” the only true –ism of that decade, employed that term strictly as a joke. Even the term New York School, which was employed only by its second generation, was used half as a joke. While the marketing aspect of a group brand was not altogether absent with the NY School, any more than it was with the Beats, the focus was much more decisively around the question of internal discourse. The –isms of the 1950s were thus more communities in their orientation than the ones of the teens or the 1930s. And, no surprise, it was this aspect of these “movements” that I think appealed most to the poets who came to be known in the 1970s as language poets.

It’s not that Pound wasn’t interested in communicating with other poets, but his rather frenetic social organizing never moved toward a community because that was never its purpose.

Dale Smith asked me if I had any theories why “the day book, dated poems and journals became so important” to the New Americans. It’s a good question & especially fortuitous that Dale thought to include dated poems as an element in the sequence. What follows isn’t an answer so much as a series notes that I would follow up if I were to try to develop this line of thinking further. But I see the concern for the daily, or however you want to characterize it, as a specific moment in a larger sweep of changes within the poem – one that begins in the 19^th century and which continues onward well after the New Americans discovered their own versions of FiloFax and the Day-Timer.  For example, one immediate beneficiary of this phenomenon was, I would argue, Clark Coolidge, particularly with his early long poems Polaroid & The Maintains.* Let me explain.

 

The issue as I see it has to do with what the poem is about. Or, perhaps more accurately, with the problem of aboutness. It’s worth noting that the very same 1802 Preface to Lyrical Ballads that initiates, for English, the discussion of the role of speech in poetry – and which anticipates the prose poem** – also opens the question of what poetry should be about:

 

It has been said that each of these poems has a purpose. Another circumstance must be mentioned which distinguishes these Poems from the popular Poetry of the day; it is this, that the feel therein developed gives importance to the action and situation, and not the action and situation to the feeling.

 

The word feeling no doubt serves crudely as an umbrella category for a wide range of meaning effects. Yet the distinction being drawn between poems that proceed from meaning & those for which meaning is imposed from the outside remains a fairly reliable demarcation between all the various alternative traditions on the one hand, which can trace their roots back to Wordsworth, Coleridge & Blake, and the all various schools of quietude that, to this day, attempt to perpetuate the 18^th century in verse.

 

This impulse arrives in America somewhat over a half century later in the twin guises of Whitman, whose cumulative project Leaves of Grass to this day challenges our definition of the book, and Dickinson with all her untitled poems. Not that, for any of these writers, the move away from meaning-giving master narratives was accomplished either entirely or all at once. One sees the same struggle repeated over & again throughout the 20^th century. The Pound of Mawberly – the Pound begrudgingly acknowledged by the American school of quietude – versus the Pound of The Cantos. Yet one can play this same scenario this way: Pound’s Cantos (&/or WCW’s Paterson) vs. Zukofsky’s “A.” & one could play different sections of “A” off one another likewise.*** Stein, living in a nation in which Lautréamont & Rimbaud had already moved at least as far as Zukofsky by the 1870s, never had trouble with this issue. She got it, day one – which is why, in part, it took so long for her to be incorporated “seriously” into American literature. More than a few parallels might be drawn to Joyce, whose Ulysses has often been interpreted as a “making heroic” of a single day of plebian life, but might just as easily be read the other way around, as a trenchant satire on the nature of heroic narrative. And whose wake could not be misread in such terms – its narrative dimension is at best a game.

 

This issue of aboutness had been roiling around in unfinished, incomplete modes for nearly a century by the time the New Americans show up in the early 1950s. If it’s most often visible in the large undertakings of the major modernists, it’s also often there in a deeply conflicted way. Thus Crane’s The Bridge can be read only as an extreme of the problem, not radically dissimilar from, say, The Cantos, The Waste Land or the later Paterson. Thus H.D. uses Grecian images & themes to “write about nothing” almost as insistently as Stein, but in such a way as to appeal constantly to a certain readerly nostalgia. With the New Americans, however, several now elements come into play more or less simultaneously:

 

§         Olson’s interest the poem as documentation of the thinking process

 

§         Kerouac’s interest in the poem as documentation of the writing process

 

§         Asian influences, at first through Rexroth & later Snyder & Whalen, introducing a tradition in which various diary-modes had long existed

 

§         An interest in modernist literary diaries through Duncan (Anaïs Nin) and the NY School (Ned Rorem)

 

§         The impact of the late stages of Pound’s Cantos & Pound’s life, the latter in particular demonstrating all too clearly why a master narrative is invariably a totalitarian one

 

§         A visible critique of ego beginning to show up in music, from Cage’s uses of chance to Harry Partch’s appropriation of hobo graffiti for texts

 

The poem of dailiness becomes the perfect – if temporary – expression of this convergence.

 

Frank O’Hara first uses a date to title a poem on October 26, 1952 – the title even gives the hour “10:30 O’clock.” Duncan follows suit starting with some of his Stein imitations in 1953. Whalen does it in 1957. Olson, whose epistolary mode of public letters in Maximus could be read as an alternate model – one to which Duncan was at least partially drawn – doesn’t use a date in the title of a Maximus until the very end of ’59.

 

The journal consolidates this interest. The first instance I can recall of a New American project that proposed itself explicitly as a journal, thus acknowledging that form as such, was Ted Enslin’s New Sharon’s Prospect and Journals, published as a special issue of Coyote’s Journal+ in 1966. Enslin’s work linked both prose & verse. As his later long poems, really meditations on the possibility of the line, would make evident – Enslin, something of a late comer among the New Americans, arrived at a point in his writing where any interest in a master narrative, an overarching meaning into which all other meanings roll up, was simply of no interest.

 

The journal presents a model for writing that borders on, if not always fully engages in, plotlessness in a format that readers will inherently recognize. That is, I think, both its strength & its curse. That’s also why it passed through a late phase of the New American movement rather in the manner of a flash flood. And why the logical next step belongs to Clark Coolidge, moving writing to a point where the question of self-actualizing meaning suddenly becomes the issue for form. Interestingly, Blackburn, whose published journals begin in 1967, as well as Coolidge, then writing much more like a young Phil Whalen, appeared in Coyote’s Journal immediately prior to Enslin’s New Sharon’s Prospect and Journals.

 

 

 

 

 

* A comic take on the phenomenon of numbering in titles can be seen in Kit Robinson’s newest book, 9:45, in which every poem has some form of numbering system for a title.

 

** ”It may safely be affirmed, that there neither is, not can be any essential difference between the language of prose and metrical composition.”

 

*** Eliot’s stock among the quietus set fell demonstrably after the publication of the drafts of The Waste Land in which it became clear that – if you could excise all of “Gerontion” & still yield the larger text – TWL was not nearly so committed to any master narrative at all, but functioned rather as a series of inspired riffs

 

+ Easily the most under-documented, under-acknowledged little magazine of the 1960s. It was the model for Caterpillar , for example. Coyote’s Journal  came about, as did Big Table in Chicago, after a campus magazine in Oregon was shut down for printing the Beats. Coyote’s Journal’s editors were James Koller, Edward van Aelstyn & William Wroth.  

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

GOOOOOOR! GOOOOOOOOOO!

GOOOOOOOOOR!

GRAHHH! GRAHH! GRAHH!

Grah goooor! Ghahh! Graaarr! Greeeeeer! Grayowhr!

Greeeeee

GRAHHRR! RAHHR! GRAHHHRR! RAHR!

RAHR! RAHHR! GRAHHHR! GAHHR! HRAHR!

BE NOT SUGAR BUT BE LOVE

looking for sugar!

GAHHHHHHHH!

ROWRR!

GROOOOOOOOOOH!

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

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

 

 

 

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

 

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

Matthew Zapruder objects:

Dear Mr. Silliman,

I was one part amazed, and one part appalled, to read the recent entry featuring the disagreement between Noah Gordon and the organizers of the reading to protest the war in Northampton, MA.

Where to start? Well, how about with what the hell does the "aesthetics of dissent" mean? That's the mother of all straw men if I've ever met her. Is the implication of the use of that term that the organizers were trying to make (or were the unwitting victims of, in which case policing seems like the wrong, yet perfectly passive aggressive, term) firm categories about what kind of poetry is acceptable to protest the war, and what isn't? Come on, does that really seem plausible, or to the point? Isn't it more likely that they were doing the best they can to hold an event with a bunch of readers for an audience probably not used to listening to poetry, and making the judgment (to which Noah is of course, since we still live in a democracy, entitled to disagree) that his poem wasn't going to work in this particular situation?

"Policing the aesthetics of dissent?" Holy unnecessary jargon, Batman! It seems that the organizers were pretty clear, not to mention polite, in expressing that they just thought that Noah's poem wasn't going to work in that context, because of its "density" (i.e. the more elusive relationship it has than your usual anti-war poem to protesting the war). Agree or disagree, but they are the ones who are responsible for throwing the event, and making it work, and they honestly seemed to think the poem wasn't appropriate for the venue or situation, which seems like a very reasonable thing to think about given the fact that this is not a poetry reading for Noah, but a WAR PROTEST. If I wanted to get up and read a ten page poem about a wilting flower as an allegory for this war's effect on democracy, I think the organizers would be pretty well within their rights to tell me to go find something a little less brilliant to read.

And holy naked act of self promotion, Batman! Call my a cynic, but I don't think that the fact that at least one of these parties (the other being dragged in clearly against his will) is willing, if not eager, to share his correspondence (not to mention his poem) proves anything about anyone's "best possible intentions." For, lo and behold, in the guise of a discussion on the "aesthetics of dissent," we end up discussing ... Noah's poem! I also love the repeated reference to Sean Bishop as a "student" organizing a reading against the war. Whose student? Noah's? Noah Gordon also happens to be a student, of the MFA Writing Program at UMass, which is a very fine thing to be, and certainly doesn't stop anyone from being a good poet and publishing worthy poems long before getting a degree. Yet I have the inescapable feeling that what really pisses Noah off (in a polite and patronizing way) is that a student had the gall to judge his work, or at least its potential effect on an audience. Frankly, the politics of that situation seem a lot more hierarchical and problematic than worrying about anyone "policing the aesthetics of dissent."

This is particularly evident in the part of Noah's letter which discusses the abstraction of the war. This just seems like a clever point to make, with at best tenuous relevance. Is the fact that people in the U.S. tend to apprehend the war as an "abstraction" (i.e. something that's not "real," but just an idea, which in a way seems the exact opposite of the problem -- people aren't thinking ENOUGH about the ideas and rationales for this war, and just accepting the given terms) somehow a justification for Noah reading an "abstract" poem, whatever that means? What a weird kind of mimeticism.

And does Noah really accept the definition of his poem as "abstract" (which it isn't, as you correctly point out)? Those of us who teach know that when a student says a poem is "abstract," what they really mean is, "I don't know what you're talking about, and/or why you've bothered to say it." It's mainly a word to hide the word "bad" behind. In this case, to give the organizers credit, what I think they meant was that they felt the relationship between the anti-war sentiment and the imagery and general mechanisms of the poem wasn't clear enough for the situation of this particular reading.

They may be right or wrong in their judgment (I personally think there's some good stuff in the poem, but it's kind of histrionic and self-righteous ... it seems to treat the whole war as a personal problem for the poet, which is the thing that makes writing political poetry really really hard). But here's the real point: if the motivation to read at a war protest is, in fact, to protest the war -- and not to read our latest poems to a lucky, albeit captive, audience -- then I would think that even if the organizers were so horribly misguided as to incorrectly judge the possible effect one of our brilliant poems would have on said audience (which by the way, they have taken the time, responsibility, and trouble to assemble), then perhaps we could put up with their lamentable short-sightedness and stupidity and figure out another way to put our queer or otherwise shoulders to the wheel.

The fact that Noah decided not only not to read another poem, but not even to attend, makes his whole motivation more than a little suspect. I don't want to sound crude, but what's more important to Noah: Noah's poem, or protesting the war?

Well, I can think of other reasons why a war protest in Northampton might be a waste of time ... talk about preaching to the converted. If there is a poor sucker living in that town who actually is in favor of the war, I almost feel sorry for him, if he hasn't already been garroted by a hemp friendship necklace. So one may ask, if one is still reading, why am I wasting my time with this?

Because first of all, as should be obvious, I disagree with everything that Noah has said, and just find the hypocrisy and self-righteousness really annoying. Also, when I see a poet self-righteously complain in a public forum about whether his poem was suppressed or not, under the guise of defending the right of poetry to be able to do whatever it is that he thinks his poem is doing, while bombs are about to fall on Iraq, as a poet I feel embarrassed. And third, because poets ought not sit with our arms folded pretending that all poetry is equally apprehendable (regardless or difficulty of syntax, or unfamiliarity of imagery, etc.), and that anyone who can't see that is a cretin. On the contrary, it's our job to try to help educate and prepare our readers for the next new thing. The way we do that is by making an implicit contract with them: if you promise to listen carefully, I will promise to make something that hangs together in some way, and (here's what's important here) exists for a reason other than to promote myself.

To turn this situation into a discussion on aesthetics, or the nature of dissent, seems disingenuous and self-absorbed, which is particularly upsetting given the stakes. For whatever reason, the organizers didn't want Noah to read his poem. I don't think they're suppressing dissent in the least: Noah could have read a different poem, or (god forbid) a poem by another poet, one that would have been more easily apprehendable to the audience at this reading. Or he could have just gone to the reading and clapped when other poets read their poems. And if he thinks that this particular poem is such a great way to protest the war, why doesn't he get up and read it in the middle of Main Street?

It seems evident that there is a time and a place to fight this battle, and a war protest is neither. I realize that with this last sentence I am going to open myself up to all kinds of attacks ("when IS the right time to defend poetry?" "what's the real battle we're fighting here?" "isn't the struggle for clarity of language, versus easy propaganda?"). In fact, I've listened to "My Back Pages" probably too many times, as have we all ... here's to hoping we can all be a little bit older, if not wiser, than that now.

Matthew Zapruder

Zapruder appears not to agree with my presumption that Noah Eli Gordon is “motivated here by the best possible intentions” – as in fact I think both sides in that exchange are. What I found troubling – and the reason I thought to include the correspondence, poem & all, in the blog – was precisely the point that Zapruder blithely accepts with regards to the poem:

they just thought that Noah's poem wasn't going to work in that context, because of its "density" (i.e. the more elusive relationship it has than your usual anti-war poem to protesting the war).

The problem – and this is why it was important to include Gordon’s text – is that the claim of density or elusiveness patently isn’t true. And, if it isn’t, then the rest of Zapruder’s argument more or less dissolves into smoke. For the claim to be true, the Northampton audience would have to be not merely focused more on the war than on aesthetics, but functionally illiterate.

I agree completely with Zapruder – & I think Gordon agrees also – that stopping the war is far more important than any poetry reading. But I’m concerned about a practice that would edit out a poem that would not have been either dense or particularly elusive at a protest for World War I. What bothers me about it is how neatly this dumbing down of density fits into a broader pattern of behavior that dates back decades now, of treating progressive writing, from the modernists to the current post-avant community, as though it were difficult – & thereby excludable – when, in fact, that is not the case.

Such behavior is part & parcel of the (not very) benign neglect that underlies not merely the sort of editorial malfeasance one associates with the likes of a Helen Vendler, but even, alas, with the Poets Against the War project. If one sees the broader spectrum of poets who have contributed to its website, the poetry that is part of its official “chapbook” is notably skewed toward the school of quietude – the principle exceptions are Robert Creeley, Phil Whalen* & a pair of Beat generation chestnuts, Lawrence Ferlinghetti & Diane Di Prima. Even the project’s Poem of the Day selection, intended to bring out a broader representation than the chapbook’s ”selection of especially powerful poems and statements by prominent poets,” to date has managed only one poet generally associated with the post-avant world, Kent Johnson. We wonder if the Poets Against the War editors recognize that Margaret Wise Brown, the author of Goodnight Moon, which Johnson’s poem gently parodies, saw herself as an active follower of Gertrude Stein & was writing within a framework of progressive educational theory.

This sort of intellectual bad faith has become so widely & deeply associated with the broader school of quietude that it, in fact, always needs to be publicly pointed out whenever & wherever it shows up. Not only is such erasure profoundly anti-democratic & inherently dishonest in & of itself, the process reinforces – just as the establishmentarian poetics of the school of quietude do – the larger social forces that argue always against social change & for a traditionalism whose sole justification is inertia.** From the perspective of the poets who commit such misdemeanors of editing, this dumbing down is merely self-contradictory and self-defeating behavior. For the poets who are consistently disappeared by this process, it’s invariably a painful reminder of the structural inequalities at the heart of the “American way.”

* Whalen deserves extra credit for submitting his work while dead.

** It’s no accident that the great antiwar poet of the Vietnam era was Allen Ginsberg & not, say, James Dickey or Robert Bly or Donald Justice, all of whom also wrote antiwar poetry.

Patrick Herron almost always has something interesting to say, viz this note to the ImitaPo list:

The presence of the quotidian in verse seems to remain an essential and perhaps even distinguishing characteristic of what is commonly lumped and labeled as "American" poetry.  We can find it in Whitman, Pound, Eliot ("hurry up please it's time"), O'Hara (who expands it to regularly include personal names), Ginsberg, and especially Ron all over your work ("Nissan stanza" or "The beer can on the sidewalk had been crushed flat" as two of perhaps thousands of examples).  Alan too.  I was just reading one of Kasey's poems on VeRT and it was laden with almost paranoiac quotidian statements, statements that should be shocking but just aren't.  I find myself using the web for finding and co-opting quotidian text from time to time (similar to what is in Kasey's poem I'd guess).  But I don't understand why or what makes the quotidian poetic.  Is it in the nominal grounding of the abstract, perhaps as some sort of exalted discrepancy with a vast valley between the peaks of the particular and the general?

Shklovsky somewhere talks about how the aesthetic – I’m not sure if that’s how he identifies the category, but it is how I remember it – always moves to incorporate all that is on its fringe, rather like The Blob. Or imperialism. Put more positively: one of the duties of poetry is to continually expand what poetry can include & discuss.

For me, at least, this isn’t about theory. I’ve written before about the importance of William Carlos Williams’ poem, “The Desert Music,” in shaping my recognition that I was to be a poet. While, in retrospect, this is the most traditionally narrative of Williams’ poems, it was precisely its other elements – especially the depiction of the person sleeping on the bridge – that enabled me at the age of 16 to “get” how poetry was uniquely able to incorporate what Williams would have characterized as despised materials, but which I would have identified (then & now) as the “invisible,” the background, the details that in fact make up the surfaces and textures of daily life. It was exactly this capacity for what Patrick calls the quotidian that brought me to poetry.

I had been writing since the age of 10 in order, I realize now – I couldn’t have articulated it then – to bring order to my world. Like more than a few other poets, I was raised in a classically dysfunctional family – the 500 pound gorilla in our living room that went unseen & undiscussed was my grandmother’s mental illness – and writing gave me not only a place to escape (although it did that also), but critical tools I could not have found any other way as a pre-teen.

However, raised in a house in which the only creative work around were four-to-a-volume Readers Digest Condensed Novels, the idea of poetry, let alone all its possibilities, was outside my field of vision until I picked up that volume by Williams in the Albany Public Library sometime around 1962. At that time, I was writing dreadful teenage fiction. I was under the impression – and I’ve seen some of the responses to Patrick’s post on ImitaPo that reflect this position – that one was constrained to craft novels around characters and action in order to get to this “real” material, the so-called background detail. From my perspective, the so-called elements of the “narrative drive” of a novel were really just an excuse for enabling the author to incorporate what mattered most: these tiny elements at the margins. The idea of a literature that could raise the invisible up to the field of vision, in & of itself, was a revelation.

So for me, the quotidian, to call it that (I never think of it as such), is not about adding a layer of texture for the sake of enhancing a reality effect. The invisible or marginal is not adjunct to the work: it is the work itself. I want you to understand that dust bunny in the corner under your desk. The whole of human history can be found there.

But how that history is to be discovered matters terribly. One of the primary objections I have to the school of quietude is its grotesque sense of heroism, even when it’s a heroism of everyday objects. A trowel is not a trope. This always seems to me a fundamental dishonesty, a true violation of any pact with the reader, even with the self. It’s a betrayal of the world of objects & of the objective. Such poetry is founded on precisely the dynamics that render the most critical elements of the world invisible. So when I take exception to the writing of a Robert Lowell or a Phil Levine or a Linda Gregg or an Alfred Corn, it’s really an allegiance to that ten year old boy I once was to which I continue to stand fast. I won’t betray him by creating a false world, a poetry of lies.

Against this I would pose Francis Ponge’s uses of the object as exemplary. His use of soap, his elaboration of fauna. His insistence on the thingness of things. To this I would add the thingness of words, their literal immanence, which is what I get out of Stein and so much of the best writing of the past thirty years. This has very little to do with any grounding of the abstract. Rather, I see it as an issue of being present in my own life. This is how poetry matters.