Facebook Live: Talking Wit in Louisville

I've been back in Chicago for five days, but I'm only now getting caught-up enough to pull together my thoughts about the latest Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture since 1900 — a terrible name for a great conference.  The consensus among the crowd with whom I hang seems to be that this was one of the best iterations of the conference yet, and that was certainly my experience.  There were the usual charms: interesting panels, good readings, a good party, and meeting face-to-face with people one is generally only in virtual contact with for much of the year ("it's Facebook live," said Robert Zamsky at one point, when he and I found ourselves sitting with Mark Scroggins and Joe Donoghue in the lobby, talking about the same stuff we talk about online).


One of the advantages of living in a big airport hub city like Chicago is that, when one sets out for a conference, there's a good chance of running into someone else on the way to the conference, an old grad school friend, a colleague from a hinterland university, or even the Big Cheese main speaker herself.  This time out it was all a but uncanny, though, as I found myself seated in a departure lounge next to a woman who looked, for all the world, like a tired and uncharacteristically grumpy Rae Armantrout.  I thought about introducing myself, but I've got godawful facial recognition skills, so I second-guessed my identification of her.  Besides, what would Armantrout, who lives in San Diego, be doing on a 7:00 a.m. flight out of Chicago?  It didn't add up.  As it turned out, though, it was Armantrout, who'd been through some kind of hellish system of delays and reroutings.  So I missed my chance to get my seat reassigned next to hers and bore her for an hour with My Fine Insights into Matters Poetic after telling her how much I like the new book, Money Shot.


Anyway.  I can report that Louisville's eating-and-drinking scene has improved since I started going to the conference in the early 90s.  While the Persian joint everyone was so keen to get to was just okay (seriously: I've had kebabs that good served up in styrofoam with a soda on the side for, like, six bucks), the Mayan Cafe was tremendous and not-to-be-missed, especially if you like your rabbit with mole sauce.  The place is down on Market Street, which seems to have gentrified lately.  There's a microbrew bar out that way called The Beer Store that I'd definitely hit again, supplementing my favorite Louisville dive bar (Freddie's) with a tonier drink or two.


But you wanted to know about the conference, not the places where I jabbered the night away with the usual villainous collection of poets, critics, and scholars.  It began auspiciously for me: no sooner had I stepped in the door and started sniffing out a coffee urn than I was waylaid by Norman Finkelstein, Jane Augustine, Michael Heller, and Henry Weinfield (who gracefully endured me over-enthusiastically reciting his poem "Song for the In-Itself and For-Itself" while we were introduced).  From there it was a blur of panels and conversations until Rae Armantrout's big reading, which went very well.  She reads unostentatiously, and does a lot of the things you're not supposed to do when performing (such as apologizing for the imposition of the performance -- "I'll just read three more, I know people are tired").  But the whole thing worked, I think in large part due to the way she just sort of radiates benevolence.  I've seen some very slick poetic acts that were undone by the clear and present fact that the reader was some kind of arrogant, self-absorbed shit-heel.  Armantrout's reading was very much the opposite sort of affair.  And it has me all hot and bothered to blog about her poetry soon.


My own panel, on contemporary poetry and wit, began with a disappointment and ended with the kind of controversy for which I'd kind of hoped.  The disappointment was the absence of Joyelle McSweeney, who couldn't make it due to a brood of sick kids at home.  But this was offset by the extra time Mike Theune could take in his talk on the paradelle — an allegedly historic poetic form invented by Billy Collins, who successfully hoaxed quite a few people, who took to writing paradelles as if they were the long-lost cousins of sestinas and villanelles.  This is a thankless task, in that the parameters of the paradelle are, in fact, such as to pretty much doom the poem to dire, flat-footed failure.  Here's the definition Collins cooked up, and many others swallowed whole:

The paradelle is one of the more demanding French fixed forms, first appearing in the langue d'oc love poetry of the eleventh century. It is a poem of four six-line stanzas in which the first and second lines, as well as the third and fourth lines of the first three stanzas, must be identical. The fifth and sixth lines, which traditionally resolve these stanzas, must use all the words from the preceding lines and only those words. Similarly, the final stanza must use every word from all the preceding stanzas and only these words.

The sincere paradelles written in the wake of Collins are, it seems, all-but-universally horrible.  Try one at home sometime and see how it comes out.


It was my own paper, though, that provoked a bit of controversy, though much of it can, I think, be explained by my failure to make myself clear.  Long story short, my paper took up a topic I blogged about a while ago — the difference between the predominant forms of wit in eighteenth-century England and in contemporary American poetry, and what those differences tell us about the social and institutional norms determining the nature of poetry then and now.

Here it is.  Much of it is verbatim from this very blog, some of it is new.  At a couple of places I’ve indicated big tracts of stuff that I deleted from the too-long version I cut down to conference-paper size.

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True Wit, False Wit, and the Situation of Poetry

We live in an age of false wit in poetry, but that’s not a bad thing.  And “false” should not be taken to mean “bad” here, any more than “minor” should be taken to mean “insignificant” when Deleuze and Guattari use the term to describe Kafka’s oeuvre.  But if we look at the dominant mode of wit in contemporary American poetry, and describe it in terms of the classical categories of poetic wit, it is indeed a “false” wit that dominates.  Of course this tells us as much about the values underlying the classical categories of wit, and the eighteenth-century England in which they were developed, as it tells us about our own poetry of wit, and the environment in which that poetry is produced and received.  Both the old categories of wit, and the dominant contemporary mode of wit are, after all, products of their social and institutional contexts.  Social being determines consciousness, as Marx said — and not just other people’s consciousness.  If there’s any excuse for what I’m about to do (that is, to spend half of a paper at a conference on “literature and culture since 1900” on eighteenth century matters) it’s that the task of understanding the assumptions underlying our own values and aesthetics requires a kind of echo-location, a contrast of where we are with some other time and place.

So.  The word “wit” has meant many things since it tumbled out of old German into the English language, but it begins to take on something like the contemporary sense when John Locke, in his Essay Concerning Human Understanding, drew a distinction between judgment and wit: judgment was the capacity for discerning fine differences, whereas wit was a capacity for finding similarities, such as the similarities upon which metaphors are founded.  Hence, Locke concluded, the snickering wits of London were unlikely to have much good judgment; while sage, sober, men of judgment were unlikely to crack a smile at a bon mot (a prospect we might rightly regard with terror).  But it took the eighteenth century to really codify wit, and it was Joseph Addison who popularized an elaboration of Locke’s idea of wit and made it into something like a norm for poetry.

Addison first sketched out his schema of the varieties of wit in a 1711 issue of The Spectator.  Following Locke, he defines wit as the capacity to find similarities, but he goes on to claim there’s more to it than just noticing that one’s mistresses’ eyes, being bright, are like the sun:

[Locke’s] is, I think, the best and most philosophical account that I have ever met with of wit, which generally, though not always, consists in such a resemblance and congruity of ideas as this author mentions. I shall only add to it, by way of explanation, that every resemblance of ideas is not that which we call wit, unless it be such an one that gives delight and surprise to the reader. …. Thus when a poet tells us, the bosom of his mistress is as white as snow, there is no wit in the comparison; but when he adds, with a sigh, that it is as cold too, it then grows into wit.

It’s a decent working definition, as Addison himself isn’t too shy to mention, saying it “comprehends most of the species of wit, [such] as metaphors, similitudes, allegories, enigmas… dramatic writings, burlesque, and all the methods of allusion...”  John Donne’s famous comparison of two separated lovers as the two arms of a compass, in “A Valediction Forbidding Mourning,” certainly fits the bill as a poem of wit.  There, the central, unmoving arm of the compass represents the woman left behind, and the other arm represents the man who returns.  The surprising resemblance is the one between the compass and (shall we say) a certain physiological effect of the prospect of a romantic reunion on the returning, male lover:

And though it in the center sit,

Yet when the other far doth roam,

It leans, and hearkens after it,

And grows erect, as it comes home.

This isn’t just wit, by Addison’s definition: more precisely, it is a poem of “true wit,” since wit, for Addison, can be either true or false.

True wit, in this view, involves a substantial resemblance of things in the world, or referents (the upright drawn-in compass really does have a similarity to the man’s anatomy), while false wit involves only a resemblance of words.  False wit, says Addison, takes many forms: “sometimes of single letters, as in anagrams, chronograms, lipograms, and acrostics; sometimes of syllables, as in echoes… sometimes of words, as in puns...”

[Post-conference addendum: I tried to do a bit of Addisonian “true wit” myself on Facebook after the conference, saying: “Giving a midterm today, which means all I have to do is sit silently, try to look serious, and zone out while everyone else in the room works nervously and worries about the outcome. It's kind of like being Clarence Thomas.”  I don’t know if I carried off any surprise or delight, but the resemblance is between two portly, zoned out idiots, me and Justice Thomas, rather than between two syllables or words, so in at least that one respect it fits Addison’s model.]

Why, one wonders, does Addison hold up a wit based on the resemblance of things in the world over a wit based on verbal or phonetic cleverness without reference to the truth of the resemblance in world?  Why value wit that says something about things rather than wit that plays with linguistic resemblance — the wit of puns or zeugmas or other verbal elements?

One finds the explanation in the social role of journals like The Spectator in eighteenth century England.  More so than in any other European nation (with the possible exception of the Dutch), the English of the early eighteenth century were seeing a rise in commerce and finance, and a consequent rise of a bourgeois class without ties to the old aristocratic families.  It was the Financial Revolution of the 1690s that really allowed a new elite group, based on trade and finance rather than land, to emerge — the 1690s saw the founding of the stock market, the Bank of England, and the national debt, the last of which gave unprecedented power and influence to investors in public credit.  There was a new branch of the elite, a sober bunch of people who’d clawed their way up through prudence and calculation.  In this, they were unlike the bon-vivant aristocrats, inheritors of privilege and lovers of wit as a form of sophisticated play. The role of Addison’s journal here was, essentially, to find a cultural ground in which these different elites could forge something like a common identity.  In this context, the idea of true wit can be seen as a kind of compromise between the rational, hard-nosed, distrusting-of-mere-play viewpoint of the early commercial and financial bourgeoisie, and the more playful and aesthetic world of the hereditary landed classes.  [You might imagine here extensive quotation from The Spectator, and huge tracts of tedious social analysis drawn from Raymond Williams and Stefan Collini.]

Having spent the first part of this presentation in the eighteenth century, I find I’m going to have to a rather bold synecdoche, taking one contemporary poet to stand for the dominant form of poetry in the dominant institution of poetry of our time — the university (which Ron Silliman famously described as “the 500 pound gorilla at the party of poets”).  The poet is Harryette Mullen, the form of poetry a broadly-conceived set of genres generally described as “linguistically innovative,” “formally experimental,” or “elliptical” — and these are the dominant, though by no means the only, forms within the university in terms of several criteria: amount of critical discussion, prominence at prestige institutions like Brown, Harvard, Iowa, and UCLA, where Mullen herself teaches, etc.  And, I might add, prominence at this conference over the years.  I don’t mean that this dominance is or isn’t justified, merely that it exists.  I refer you to Keith Tuma’s wonderful article “After the Boom” in the most recent Chicago Review for an analysis of the situation. 

Mullen is often described as both experimental and as witty (by, among others, me).  But what would Addison think?  Surely he’d look at many of her lines as examples of false wit, as based primarily of the resemblance of words or phonemes or other linguistic elements rather than on the resemblance of things in the world.  The line “as silverware as it were,” say, from the poem “Wipe that Simile Off Your Aphasia” gives a witty phonetic resemblance between “silverware” and “as it were,” but doesn’t make much of a statement about the resemblance of objects in the world.  And what about the verbally playful prose-poems for which she is best known?  Here’s one, called “Of a girl, in white,”:

Of a girl, in white, between the lines, in the spaces where nothing is written. Her starched petticoats, giving him the slip. Loose lips, a telltale spot, where she was kissed, and told. Who would believe her, lying still between the sheets. The pillow cases, the dirty laundry laundered. Pillow talk-show on a leather couch, slips in and out of dreams. Without permission, slips out the door. A name adores a Freudian slip.

So what have we got, wit-wise?  Well, there’s the pun on petticoats “giving him the slip” — where slip refers to lingerie and to a kind of escape.  This is followed right away by the reference to “loose lips,” which is bound to the previous statement loosely, with only the similarity in sound between “slip” and “ship” (“ship” being an absent but implied word here, as it is loose lips that sink ships).  We then get another bit of verbal play in the reference to the place “where she was kissed, and told,” in which we can hear a reference to the old saying “don’t kiss and tell.”  This is reinforced by the notion of the “Pillow talk-show,” a kind of portmanteau-ing of “pillow talk” and “talk show.”  We’ve got quite a lot of verbal resemblance between phrases in the poem and other verbal structures such as familiar platitudes.  But is there anything that Addison would see as a resemblance between things in the world?  There’s some sort of implied statement lurking in the poem, something about the making public of private eros, but the poem isn’t really referential enough to deal in those resemblances of referents that Addison thought of as essential to true wit.

Another one of Mullen’s prose poems, “Denigration,” takes on weightier issues, and certainly does so with wit.  But what kind of wit?  Here it is:

Did we surprise our teachers who had niggling doubts about the picayune brains of small black children who reminded them of clean pickaninnies on a box of laundry soap? How muddy is the Mississippi compared to the third longest river of the darkest continent? In the land of the Ibo, the Hausa and the Yoruba, what is the price per barrel of nigrescence?

The verbal resemblance between “niggling” and “nigrescence” (and, for that matter, of the title word “denigration”) and the most offensive of terms for for “African-American” is clear enough, and there’s the play on “picayune” and “pickaninny” — so we’re reminded, by analogy with the resemblance of words, of how racism manifests itself even in those places where we least expect it.  The comparison of the Mississippi to the Niger River (the river near which the tribal groups Mullen mentions reside) is important in this context, in that it reminds us that there are places where Africans are identified by tribe, not by race, and are certainly not identified by the denigrating American term for their race.  There is certainly a politics to the poem, but the wit of the piece is based entirely on verbal resemblances, not resemblances of objects in the world of referents (such as bright eyes and the sun, say, or a raised compass and the tumid male appendage).  In Addisonian terms, we’re still operating in the world of false wit.

I want to stress here that I am making a description, not a judgment — though Addison’s classifications of wit as true or false is inherently judgmental, and were he able to decipher such a resolutely postmodern poems he would surely judge them an inferior form of wit.  But we need not accept the literary values of Addison’s age.  Indeed, it is unlikely that we would, since we are not the products of his circumstances. 

To understand why Mullen’s kind of wit has become so prominent (and it is with of this kind that we find most prominently in most branches of linguistically innovative poetry), we need to look to our own circumstances.  

I suppose the briefest way to describe our circumstances is to say this: we live better than a century into an era of relative aesthetic autonomy in poetry (one could and should qualify this in any number of ways, but, caveats aside, to say otherwise is to misrepresent the history of Western poetry).  What I mean is this: for reasons that I bore people with in another article, poetry has long-since turned against a feeling of responsibility toward the dominant logic of modernity — the logic of the market.  Hollywood screenwriters and writers of genre fiction tend to write first and foremost with an eye to serving the market.  At least since the days of Pater and Mallarmé, though, poets have not: they turn their backs on the market that has turned its back on them.  This turning-of-backs is a feature of the bohemian environment in which poetry, like many arts, operated throughout the early twentieth century, and in which it, to some extent, operates in our own time.  It is also a deep, underlying principle of the institutionalization of literary study and literary creativity in university departments of English [Imagine here a great deal of quotation from César Graña’s work on bohemia, as well as Gerald Graff’s Professing Literature, along with some amusing quotes from the correspondence of the New Critics about how to establish literary studies as an autonomous field, and similar quotes from debates during the rise, and eventual containment, of cultural studies as a possible new paradigm in English departments].

One of the things this century of relative aestheric autonomy has meant is an increasing emphasis on form and medium (in poetry’s case, on language).  Pierre Bourdieu has, in both The Field of Cultural Production and The Rules of Art, charted the social dynamics of this, showing that as fields of artistic endeavor become more autonomous from the market, they become increasingly interested in their inner workings — in poetry’s case, this means linguistic innovation, a movement against the transparency of language and toward its foregrounding (one might think here of Charles Bernstein’s “Artifice of Absorption,” with its militant rejection of poetry in which language tries to disappear to make way for its referents — or one might think of Ron Silliman’s argument in the essay “Disappearance of the Word, Appearance of the World,” which argues powerfully for the foregrounding of language).

This institutionalizing of aesthetic autonomy (in bohemian and academic form) is an enormous underlying force in how poets operate, a force that runs deeper than we are generally aware.  What was the old Buffalo poetics scene if not a confluence of bohemian and university environments?  Such a confluence is central to the formation of many poets, and it was central to Harryette Mullen’s formation, too: she began writing in an Austin-based community of writers, artists, and musicians, and has taught at Cornell and UCLA. (She’s also been connected to the Black Arts movement, which adds a community-oriented dimension to her writing, along with the prominence of form).  But she, like most of us, is oriented toward language itself to an extent that prior eras, such as Addison’s eighteenth century, would find shocking, and false.  I don’t think this is a bad thing: it is, in fact, strong evidence that we can use in understanding where we are in the social and aesthetic history of poetry.  And I think any understanding of poetry that means to get beyond the polemical expression of current norms would do well to look to this kind of historically comparative evidence.

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When I looked up after mumbling my way through all that, I was afraid I’d see what one often sees at conferences: a bunch of tired looking people making their way for the exit.  Instead, it seemed that almost everyone in the room had a hand in the air. I particularly noticed Bill Howe who, in the back, extended a Conan-the-Barbarian like limb high, as if to smite down upon his opponent with great force and mighty vengeance.  

A number of the comments were positive, but let's not bother with those: it's the negative ones from which one really learns.  The first thing I learned was that I'd somehow fucked up, and failed to make it clear that I didn't think Mullen's poetry was non-referential.  Several people wanted very much to make the point that her poems do refer to things in the world, and have all sorts of social and political things to say.  I agree!  I'd meant merely that the center of gravity in her wit had to do with the resemblance phonetic elements: she, like a lot of langpo/post-avant types, riffs off of phonetic resemblances in words ("as silverware as it were"), and much of the surprise and delight in her poetry depends on that kind of technique, as opposed, say, to the kind of resemblance between objects that I tried to work on in my own clumsy "I am like Clarence Thomas" comment. Mullen does compare things in the world, like the Mississippi and Niger rivers, but that particular comparison doesn't seem to aim at surprise and delight.  Anyway, I don't deny that there are instances of what Addison would call true wit in Mullen: I just mean that the center of gravity in her wit is more on the phonetics side. Later, a couple of bottles of wine into the evening Grant Jenkins demanded that I give the percentage, which I couldn't do. He proposed something like 60/40 true to false wit, and a big-ass balloon glass of Cabernet later I proposed 80/20 — but neither of us really knows.  Maybe we need a research assistant to check it out.

Some other comments took us into a discussion of degrees of falseness in wit (with the reminder that the term "false," while a judgmental one for Addison, was only a descriptive term for us).  My own contender for "instance of falsest wit" was a brilliant bit of spontaneous comic performance by Charles Bernstein, as reported by Daisy Fried in the New York Times.  Here's what she wrote:

At a reading I attended in the Smith College science lecture hall a few years ago, Charles Bernstein, famous as a poet and anti-poet, pointed to the giant poster on the wall behind him and said, “I want to thank the Poetry Center for putting up my poem ‘The Periodic Table of the Elements.’ ” He then proceeded to give a mock-dramatic rendition of the symbols, left to right, down the page. “H, He, Li, Be!” he panted, growled and spluttered. “Why!?” he complained when he got to yttrium (Y). “I!” he declared solemnly for iodine, as if toasting his own ego. He slowed down, sped up. “No!” he bellowed for nobelium, then finally whispered “Lr,” the last chemical symbol. He turned to face the audience. “I’ve always wondered if I should have ended with ‘No’ rather than putting that ‘Lr’ on the end. I think it was a mistake. I think it would have been more emphatic with the negation.” This was the funniest, most impromptu-­brilliant, serious moment I’ve ever witnessed at a poetry reading — and very much about sound, language, expression and communication.

Fantastic! Brilliant! Wonderful!  And, in Addisonian terms, utterly false as wit!  I mean, think about it.  First of all, part of the conceit here is to strip the periodic table of its reference to actual chemical elements, and to treat it as a kind of sound poem.  In fact, the act of comparison is between the periodic table and a zaum-like kind of poetry based purely on sounds (like Alexei Kruchenykh's work).  So we've got the verbal resemblance between the periodic table as sound and a kind of poetry based only on sound.  It's the phonetic resemblance of the chart to a purely phonetic kind of poetry that creates the surprise and delight.  Reference to things outside of language is minimal (there's no "a compass is like a penis" or "I am like Clarence Thomas" move operating at all).  And the fact that both the reading and our discussion of it took place in academic rooms was just sort of perfect, given the historical connection between a foregrounding of language and the academic institutionalization of literature.


This little discussion of Bernstein generated it's own objections ("It's not just false wit! It's performance! It's Charles being Charles!") all of which I grant — there are a lot of different things happening in that bravado performance.  Among those things, though, is a kind of word play that the Addisonian eighteenth century, being for various socio-historical reasons more uptight about these matters than we are, would condemn.  Which is interesting, I think.  I also think that not everyone in the room got past the accusatory sound of the word "false."  Maybe I should have said "Addison calls this false, but we'll call it language-based."  But I wanted to keep present the sense that Addison's time and our own had very different aesthetic values, so that we could think about how and why those differences came about.


One really good question came from Alan Golding, who asked what was to be gained from reviving "wit" as a category of critical analysis.  While I actually think it would be interesting to go through contemporary poetry with a whole set of aesthetic categories from other cultural moments (wit, the beautiful, the dynamic sublime, the mathematical sublime, the picturesque, etc. — as opposed to the terms we use now, like innovative, the gurlesque, the abject, and so forth).  But that's not the exercise I was trying to engage in.  I talked about wit, but I could have talked about something else, so long as there was a point of comparison and contrast between different cultural moments.  Any such point is interesting, because it is through points of contrast that we can understand the differences between contemporary and earlier aesthetic values, and through examining the factors that gave rise to those different values we can understand a lot.  Specifically, we can understand why the past was as it was, and we can understand things about ourselves that are concealed to us if we only ever examine our values on our own terms.  Self-reflexivity is tricky: you need to bounce your observations off something culturally remote in a kind of echo-location.  Or maybe the better analogy is to say that trying to understand ourselves is like trying to look at the back of one's own head: you can't do it directly. You need some reflective surfaces to do it.  So the game, for me, isn't "let's revive wit!" — it's "what are we doing and why?"  And we need to understand ourselves on terms other than our own if we're really going to be able to play that game.  So: let's let the past interrogate us, and listen to what it says.  That sort of thing doesn't really get done much in the academic humanities, where the game is so often "let's expose the assumptions of other times and places" or even "let's judge the past on our terms, and find it morally appalling for believing things we don't believe."  


There were other really good comments: Tyrone Williams telling me that many African-American interpreters of Mullen read "A Girl, in white" not as a poem about eros, but as a poem about passing.  I really hadn't seen that angle before (talk about being blind to our own assumptions!).  And Scott Pound discovered, from the paper, that he and I have been working on similar projects in the history of aesthetic autonomy.  We've been emailing each other files of our work ever since.  But my favorite comment came from Keith Tuma, later, at a party.  I was a bit glassy-eyed by that point, but I think his words were  "I admire you, Bob, because there's no foxhole you won't blunder into, and do it with good humor." He then said something about me criticizing the Cambridge poets in The Cambridge Literary Review, and calling Mullen, a beloved African-American experimental poet, a "false wit" in a room full of her friends.  I think Tuma might have been saying something about my ham-fisted, bull-in-a-china-shop naïveté, but I don't get a lot of people coming up to me and starting a sentence with "I admire you," so I'll take what I can get.  And I think I'll head back to Louisville next year.

The Vicissitudes of Literary Fame

I don't make it down to the campus mailroom much anymore, despite the fact that the current pooh-bah down there knows a good beer when he sees one, and is a good guy with whom to down a few.  Packages are delivered straight to the office, and almost nothing important comes by actual, envelope-encased mail any more.  But I meandered down that way earlier today in quest of some student center chicken curry, and when I popped open my mailbox I found, in amongst the book catalogs, the miniscule royalty checks, and the miscellaneous ephemera, something I hadn't expected: another review of Laureates and Heretics.  The book has had the good fortune to receive long, positive notice in a few places (notably PN Review and Contemporary Literature) and a very brief but also nice notice in the New York Times.  This new one is by Barry Wallenstein, and comes from Choice.  It goes like this:

Archambeau’s unique study will please—perhaps fascinate—those with a serious interest in US poetry. [Yvor] Winters was a major literary critic and theorist and a proponent of the New Criticism movement; the other five [Robert Hass, Robert Pinsky, John Matthias, John Peck, and James McMichael] were in Winters' last batch of graduate students at Stanford (ca. 1962). Two of them — Pinsky, Hass — became poets laureate, the others gained modest reputations.  In observing that the non-laureates and Winters were "heretics" writing "outside the laws of canonization," Archambeau (poet, critic, scholar, Lake Forest College) — who opposed the 2001 appointment of Billy Collins as poet laureate and backed Anselm Hollo as "anti-laureate" — might have used "whims" instead of "laws."  Why some writers become famous and others do not is as interesting as the larger questions of artistic mastery.  In looking at how Winters helped shape the poetics and careers of these then-young poets, Archambeau taps deep into the traditions of poetry in English, revealing his knowledge of the many schools and tendencies that developed in Winters' lifetime and about previous critical work (n.b., ten pages of works cited).   The chapters on Winters’s literary offspring provide worthy introductions, but his book is ultimately a meditation on taste and the vicissitudes of literary fame.

I really do think there are something like laws of canonization, and that we can, with enough study, come to something like an understanding of the mechanisms by which these things operate.  But that's a minor point of disagreement with Wallenstein.  And a guy who refers to me as "Archambeau (poet, critic, scholar)," and remembers my little Collins stunt of a million years ago is okay by me.  I may have to declare him the next anti-laureate.

I Remember Louisville

I've been going to The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture — what everybody just calls "the Louisville Conference" — on and off since I was a graduate student, and I should probably be writing up my paper for this year's conference, which takes place later this month.  Instead, though, I've been thinking about the conference and all the changes it's gone through over the years.  The name has changed — it used to be the "twentieth century literature" conference, but the 21st century brought that to an end.  The post-conference party venue has changed — from Alan Golding's little house to his new, big house.  The attendance went down after the Modernist Studies Conference came along and never really came back to what it was.  And the old jeans-and-blazer look seems to have been supplanted by a grad-students-in-cheap-suits aesthetic, which might have something to do with the lousy job market.  What I remember most, though, was how the conference provided the best seats in the Theater of Academe from which to watch the language poets enter the universities.   Anyway, in commemoration of my past visits, and in anticipation of this year's events, here's a bit of Joe Brainard-inspired conference memoir:

I Remember Louisville

I remember little plastic tablet desks and cinderblock walls.

I remember knowing it was the south because the girls out jogging had Aqauanetted their hair into immobile perfection.

I remember Lyn Hejinian sitting down next to me in the school bus they used as a shuttle and saying “Hi, I’m Lyn,” like it was my first day at a new school and she was being the nice kid.

I remember how tight the jazz combo was in the Seelbach lounge, and my friend Grant, who was another kind of tight, woo-ing and hooting his approval in the otherwise silent crowd.

I remember being surprised, every year, that Alan Golding wears an ear-cuff, and writing a haiku about it for my blog.

I remember a lot of red brick buildings on campus, and a lot of cab rides to get Ethiopian food.

I remember a beautiful African-American woman sidling up to me at a bar, fingering the edge of the tweed vest I picked up in Ireland, and saying “you rich, huh?”

I remember not wanting to go see Judith Roof talk about “female comic seconds” and then being glad I went.

I remember Gary Geddes running out to the book display where they were selling his collected poems and asking, with a big grin, “has there been a run on them yet?”

I remember a bunch of the language poets standing in a circle in the lobby with their cell phones out.

I remember not having a cell phone and using the last remaining pay phone to call my dad and tell him the ceramic artist Peter Voulkos had died.  They were friends.

I remember going with my grad school friends down to Bardstown Road and, year after year, seeing the same band.  We hadn’t planned it.  They were called “El Roosters.”

I remember the singer from El Roosters looking, at first, like a young Jim Morrison, then like an older, puffy Jim Morrison.  Every year he said they’d be going to Nashville next year to cut a record.

I remember always thinking I should book the F. Scott Fitzgerald suite at the Seelbach, then forgetting until it was too late.

I remember being at some kind of reception in a fancy building when a woman with a name-tag came rushing up to me and pointed at a piece of furniture.  “What is this thing called?” she demanded.  It was a credenza.

I remember C.D. Wright reading “Deepstep Come Shining” and the top of my head being lifted off, just like Emily Dickinson said.  It was beautiful.

I remember bedposts carved with tobacco leaves.

I remember Mark Scroggins sitting at the desk in my hotel room looking through the course pack for my theory seminar.  He asked me something.  I forget what it was, but I remember I changed the syllabus after that.

I remember telling some bullshit story at a long table full of Jamaican food and grad students.  They all laughed when I wanted them to and it felt great.

I remember Charlie Altieri saying he found my paper on Pinsky irritating, but that he didn’t find the other papers on the panel interesting enough to be irritating.  That felt great too.

I remember someone at Alan Golding’s end-of-conference party changing the CD from The Beatles to some old-school rap, and how Alan came in, switched it back, nodded curtly, and left.  No harm no foul.

I remember leaving early when someone I love had some bad medical news, the airport empty at four a.m.

I remember Burt Hatlen being the biggest, oldest, smilingest man at the conference.  I want to always remember him that way.

Can Poems Communicate? Yeats, Magic, and the Problem of Modernity

"Where can you go in your poetry," the grand old poet-critic Donald Davie once wondered, "when the King James Bible has become a recondite source?"  The problem Davie framed is an old one, and was already eating away at W.B. Yeats in the 1890s, when he constantly worried over whether there was a public language through which poems could connect with the wider world.  What can a poet do when he or she can't expect a shared frame of cultural reference with an audience?


Yeats has taken a lot of heat over the decades for his interest — no, let's not soft-pedal it — his belief in magic.  And I'm as put-off by some elements of this as the next secular humanist.  In fact, I'm probably more put-off, since it's not just the whole supernaturalist angle that bothers me, but the authoritarianism of it: cults with hierarchies and secret knowledges not to be explained to outsiders are odious things, if you believe (as I do) that knowledge should be as widely disseminated as possible.  But much of Yeats' thinking about magic was actually a way of thinking about the nature of symbolic communication, and the place of symbols in modern life.  Consider the following passage from his 1901 essay on magic:

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are:--- (1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

There are a couple of different ways to read this passage.  What we might call the strong interpretation would stress the supernaturalism.  In this view, Yeats is talking about a kind of collective soul, or group dreaming, or telepathy, or symbols that radiate some kind of glowing mist of mojo throughout creation. Me, I grow a bit queasy at such a reading, and prefer what we might call the weak interpretation of the passage.  In this view, Yeats is saying something not too different from what people like Jung or Northrop Frye have to say: that there are large cultural systems of symbols and images, that these symbols and images inform our thinking, and unite groups of people in terms of their assumptions and ideals, often in ways those groups do not apprehend consciously.  This isn't all that different from the sort of thing structural anthropologists study.  Of course in actuality both readings apply: Yeats wants to get away from Arnoldian skepticism, and the atheism of his Darwinian father: hence the supernaturalism.  He also wants to get away from the individualism that the triumphant late-Victorian bourgeoisie rode down the boulevards of the capitals of Europe like some giant white pachyderm: hence the interest in collective experience.  And if a belief in magic was what it took for him escape bourgeois individualism, well, okay.


Let's stick with the weak reading for now, with Yeats trying to articulate his sense that communication depends upon large, enduring sets of collectively apprehended symbols.  The problem, for him, was that modernity had become inimical to such symbolic systems.  Just after the passage quoted above he writes:

I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.

Yeats' disgust with modernity has many sources: all the really shitty moments of his childhood took place in then-hyper-modern London, where he was despised for his Irishness; he identified modernity with the English oppressors of Ireland; and the intellectual atmosphere of his childhood home was saturated with Pre-Raphaelitism, with the medievalism of Ruskin, and with William Morris, who wondered, in his great essay "How I Became a Socialist" whether modern civilization was "all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap?"  But the problem is also one of communication, and, ultimately, of cultural cohesion.  In Yeats' view, we were once united by a "centuries old quality of mind" that modern, urban, industrial capitalism has somehow swept to the sidelines.


We get a better sense of the endangered world of shared symbols when we look into Yeats' essay "What is 'Popular' Poetry?" which appeared in print a year after the essay on magic (both are collected in Yeats' book Ideas of Good and Evil, if you want to check them out).  Here, he distinguishes between three types of poetry: popular poetry, coterie poetry, and poetry of "the unwritten tradition."


The last one is the really interesting one, so let's start there.  For Yeats, the "unwritten tradition" is the oral folk tradition, still viable in the more out-of-the-way parts of Ireland in his lifetime (indeed, he took a lot of inspiration from the folksongs and tales he heard around his mother's family's place in Sligo).  The "true poetry of the people," whether written or oral, says Yeats, comes from this unwritten tradition, and gains its power and resonance from a framework of allusions, echoes, and references that are, at some level, familiar to the whole community.  The words of such a poetry "borrow their beauty from those that used them before," and the full resonance of the poems comes from seeing the events they depict or the emotions they express as if they were "moving before a half-faded curtain embroidered with kings and queens, their loves and battles and their days out hunting, or else with holy letters and images of so great an antiquity that nobody can tell the god or goddess they would commend to an unfading memory."  The tapestry image is a very Pre-Raphaelite inflected way of describing the archive of collectively remembered past usage that would give poems resonance for the community, isn't it?  But the idea at stake here really is something like a set of archetypes, or at least of points of reference.  It's interesting, too, that Yeats gives as examples both Celtic legend and Theosophical spirituality, since these were exactly the cultural archives he was using in his own poetry.  At times he even tries to unify them, making the Celtic legends a kind of local manifestation of a trans-cultural primal mythology — but that's another story.  The main point is that this kind of poetry has resonance because it comes out of  points of reference that have been shared by a community over time.  It communicates rich and complex meanings, because it doesn't just have a simple denotative meaning: it references a whole shared archive of meanings and connotations.  I think what Yeats is claiming for written or oral poetry that rises up out of the "unwritten tradition" is something like what George Steiner claims when, in "On Difficulty," he says:

Poetry is knit of words compacted with every conceivable mode of operative force. These words are, in Coleridge's simile, 'hooked atoms', so construed as to mesh and cross-mesh with the greatest possible cluster of other words in the reticulations of the total body of language. The poet attempts to anchor the particular word in the dynamic mould of its own history, enriching the core of its present definition with the echo and alloy of previous use…. The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energized field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision... Multiplicity of meaning, 'enclosedness', are the rule rather than the exception. We are meant to hear both solid and sullied, both toil and coil in the famous Shakespearean cruces. Lexical resistance is the armature of meaning, guarding the poem from the necessary commonalties of prose.

Over against this kind of poetry, Yeats places "popular poetry," which for him is a stunted and attenuated thing, and less the property of the people per se than of the modern bourgeoisie.  He just hates this stuff. "Popular poetry," says Yeats, "never came from the people at all."  Rather, it came from and spoke to "a predominant portion of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the written tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of themselves."  The middle classes, having disinherited themselves, have started to disinherit the general populace, as the peasants move into the cities and become proletarianized.  This kind of poetry communicates immediately and easily, but does so at a terrible cost: it loses all the frames of reference (and therefore all the subtlety) of poetry that comes from the unwritten tradition.  Its main features are "the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most typical expression is Longfellow."  And Longfellow, says Yeats, "has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it."  There's no tapestry of ancient kings and battles behind this stuff: just the plain, cheap wallpaper of a Victorian parlor, cast in the harsh glare of gaslight.


The third type of poetry — the poetry of the coteries — is the unpopular poetry of Yeats' time, poetry that works by literary reference and codes of allusion, perhaps ultimately derived from unwritten traditions, but filtered through layer after layer of bookishness, and flavored with a strong dash of aestheticism.  It is the poetry of the Rhymer's Club, of Dowson and Symons and the rest of the guys Yeats visited when he was living in London.  It has the same allusive quality built into its words as does the poetry of the unwritten tradition, and is, in some sense, that tradition's ally.  This may seem like a bit of a stretch, this linkage of the peasant's oral tradition and the deeply cloistered and rather hothouse poetry of London aestheticism in the 1890s, but Yeats claims (perhaps more out of psychological need than factual accuracy) that the two go hand in hand, because of their allusive richness.  And they have common enemies, these two types of poetry: the modern middle class and the commercial world it has brought into being:

...it is certain that before the counting- house had created a new class and a new art without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister, the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the coteries as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion, with the unchanging speech of the poets.

So there it is: the cloister (of coteries, the modern version of monasticism), the aristocracy, and the peasants are all allied, for Yeats, in their cultural traditions, traditions that propose a language and a poetry of depth and resonance.  Against them we see the world of the counting-house (which I'd bet money is a deliberate reference to William Morris' essay), a world of efficient, shallow communication, and of poetry that does little but entertain shallowly.


There's something a bit questionable in the linking of the world of erudite, remote, vaguely symboliste poetry with the poetry of the oral tradition.  And there's something a bit questionable in the valorizing of the hierarchical, narrow world of agrarian society, too.  But what Yeats is reacting to is real: there's a big transformation afoot in his lifetime, a transformation involving the rise of mass literacy, cheap books sold in high volume (making the selling of poetry economically marginal for publishers, which it had not been in the 1850s and 60s), and the displacement of poetry as a respected medium for knowledge (I touch on all this in my essay "The Discursive Situation of Poetry" in Biddinger and Gallaher's book The Monkey and the Wrench, and T.W. Heyck really lays it out in The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, and Richard Altick's good old standby The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public still has a lot to say on the transformation, if you want to understand it in detail).  Yeats doesn't have a very clear socio-historical understanding of the events happening around him (who does?) but he's right about the general trend of things, and right about what it means for the language of poetry: with the dissolving of old agrarian communities, and the rise of complex, diverse social formations, the old frames of reference that gave poetic language such power and resonance start to fall apart.  Only a coterie audience of mandarins (and, in Yeats' nostalgic view, a hardy peasantry) still feel connected to those frames of reference.


Which brings us to Donald Davie's cri de coeur.  Where do you go in your poetry when the old frames of reference have become the property of coteries?  T.S. Eliot, at least early on in his career, dramatized the conundrum ("these fragments have I shored against my ruins," etc.).  Other poets, deliberately or intuitively, went in the direction of popular culture, though the gains there may be temporary: nothing fades as fast as pop (not because it's bad, but because pop is a business of fashions, and you have to hustle old stock out to bring in this year's model).  Others ditched the idea of resonance-with-historical-usage and went for a kind of play of syntax and formal properties (the "new sentence," anyone?), or for a poetry that eschews matters of meaning and historically resonant language (Merz and Zaum are early examples).  Others have soldiered along with the poetics of allusive and resonant language, either content with a coterie audience, or filled with uncomprehending rage at a reading public with whom they have difficulty communicating.  Still others celebrate obscurity, in ways both sophisticated and otherwise.


What would Yeats do, were he with us?  Good question!  I imagine he'd embody all of the contradictory responses in poems that argued against each other.  That is, after all, what he did in the period from which the essays I've quoted come.  The results — the poems of The Wind Among the Reeds and In the Seven Woods — include some of the finest in the Yeats canon.  He dramatizes and embodies the contradictions of poetry in an age when its ability to communicate is questionable.  To judge from the results, this might not be a bad way to go in one's poetry in an age when the King James Bible has become a recondite source.

Addendum: chart of Yeatsian concerns, 1889-1914, drawn on paper stolen from Alan Golding's printer at his post-conference party in Louisville, 2/26/2011.  Click to enlarge.

Know Your Rights: Poetry and Copyright

So there I was, stepping into the offices of the Poetry Foundation to drop off a contract for a piece I'd written and pick up a couple of lunch companions, when I found someone pressing a svelte little printed document into my hand. Glancing down, I read the title: "Code of Best Practices for Poetry."  Fantastic, I thought: here at last was the guide that would give me such useful tips as "Don't use too many rhyming couplets — people find that annoying nowadays" and "Writing another pseudo-Ashbery poem? Ask yourself why before proceeding with extreme caution."  I wondered: dare we hope for an appendix on the care and feeding of egomaniacal power-brokers in the poetry demimonde?

Four hours later, when the remains of the massaman curry had long-since been carted away by the long-suffering waiters at Star of Siam, and Issues of Great Importance permanently resolved by the consensus of the gathered poets, I popped the document out of my pocket for a proper looking-over.  As it turns out, it wasn't a guide to the best practices for poetry: it was a guide to the best practices "in fair use for poetry" — a set of guidelines for using copyrighted material in criticism, scholarship, performance, and in one's own poetry.  And it was good, too: we've needed something like this for some time (if for no other reason than to put bullies like Paul Zukofsky in their place — I mean, PZ has been trying to intimidate people for years about the use of Louis Zukofsky's poetry, and now his over-stepping of his legal rights  will be seen for what it is).

I had the privilege of playing a small supporting part in the creation of these guidelines, which emerged from interviews with many poets across the country.  But the real work was done by a host of legal minds, under the general guidance of Peter Jazsi of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University, who worked along with Professor Patricia Aufderheide  of American University's Center for Social Media and a Legal Advisory Board including Michael J. Madison, of University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Gloria C. Phares, of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, and Elizabeth Townsend-Gard, Tulane University School of Law.  These are some serious people in the field of copyright law: they're responsible for the Best Practices guidelines for documentary film, and they've advised many other industries on these issues.  They know what they're talking about, and they know how to listen, too: the guidelines they developed represent a consensus view from a broad and deep survey of people in the field.

The general consensus, says the document, is this:

Poetry, as a highly allusive art form, fundamentally relies on the poet’s ability to quote, to copy, and to “play” with others’ language, and poetry scholars and commentators equally rely on their ability to quote the poetry they are discussing. In fact, poets generally acknowledge that essentially everything they do in their workaday lives, from making their poems to writing about poetry to teaching poetry, builds on the work of others.

And here, in the briefest form possible, are the general guidelines on fair use for material that remains in copyright:

1. Regarding Parody and Satire

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, a poet may adapt a poem or a portion of a poem in order to (1) offer a direct or indirect critique of that poem, its author, or its genre; (2) present a genuine homage to a poet or genre; or (3) hold up to ridicule a social, political, or cultural trend or phenomenon.

2. Regarding Allusion, Remixing, Pastiche, Found Material, etc.

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, a poet may make use of quotations from existing poetry, literary prose, and non-literary material, if these quotations are re-presented in poetic forms that add value through significant imaginative or intellectual transformation, whether direct or (as in the case of poetry-generating software) indirect. 

3. Regarding  Education

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, instructors at all levels who devote class time to teaching examples of published poetry may reproduce those poems fully or partially in their teaching materials and make them available to students using the conventional educational technologies most appropriate for their instructional purposes. 

4.  Regarding Criticism and Illustration

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, a critic discussing a published poem or body of poetry may quote freely as justified by the critical purpose; likewise, a commentator may quote to exemplify or illuminate a cultural/historical phenomenon, and a visual artist may incorporate relevant quotations into his or her work. 

5. Regarding Epigraphs

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, an author may use brief quotations of poetry to introduce chapters and sections of a prose work or long poem, so long as there is an articulable relationship between the quotation and the content of the section in question.

6. Regarding Online Use

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, an online resource (such as a blog or web site) may make examples of selected published poetry electronically available to the public, provided that the site also includes substantial additional cultural resources, including but not limited to critique or commentary, that contextualize or otherwise add value to the selections. 

7. Regarding Literary Performance

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, a person other than the poet may read a poem to a live audience, even in circumstances where the doctrine otherwise would not apply, if the context is (1) a reading in which the reader’s own work also is included, or (2) a reading primarily intended to celebrate the poet in question. 

There are, of course, subtler points to be made regarding each of these principles, including limitations.  You can find the whole document online if you're interested. It's a great way to begin to understand your rights. 

Nothing in this Life: Nick Cave and the Romantics

The latest Horizon Review is out, assembled by the able editorial hands of the poet Katy Evans-Bush. Among the poems, essays, stories, and interviews lies an essay of mine called "Nothing in this Life: Nick Cave and the Romantics," about the special bond between Nick Cave and poets, who seem to adore him. The essay takes its title from the lyrics to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' song "There She Goes, My Beautiful World," and it begins like this:

Not long ago a pair of young poets approached me and asked if I’d like to contribute to an anthology they were editing. I write prose quickly, but I’m a slow poet, and don’t keep much ready-to-publish material on hand, so I was a bit wary. “What’s the theme?” I asked, as a series of possibilities for an anthology in which I might belong flickered through my head. Rapidly graying poets? White guys who could lose some poundage? The last generation of poets to get on the tenure track before the general derailment of academe? It turned out to be none of the above: the young poets wanted to put together an anthology of poetry inspired by Nick Cave.


When I mentioned the project to the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, he didn’t miss a beat. Nick Cave? Lumsden had written a poem for Nick Cave and, through a series of events too complex and unlikely to present here, he’d heard from an octogenarian friend who’d lunched with Cave that the great man himself had pored over the little chapbook in which the poem appeared — pored repeatedly, apparently fascinated, but inscrutable. There seems to be some special connection between Cave and the poets, and I think I know what it is.

The rest is online here.

Let's Hear it for the Boys, or: The Plinko Theory of Poetry

“Let’s Hear it for the Boys” is not a title I expected to find on a review of my book Laureates and Heretics, but I think I see why Brian Reed chose it for his piece on the book in the latest issue of Contemporary Literature: my book does, after all, treat a bunch of white guys as they make their way through the cultural politics of the sixties, seventies, and eighties — the very decades when the hegemonic cultural position of American white guys was starting to break apart.  There have been other bright things said about the book (notably by Henry King in the English journal PN Review) but Reed’s the first guy to make much of the way the book treats how people from the old dominant group react to the changes they live through and try to understand.

Here’s how Reed’s review opens. It had me a bit worried, really:

Robert Archambeau’s Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry begins by offering a reassessment of the irascible, archconservative poet-critic Yvor Winters. It then proceeds to discuss several poets from the“last generation of students” to work with Winters at Stanford University, all of whom “arrived in Palo Alto around 1962” and were later featured in the Carcanet Press anthology Five American Poets (1979): Robert Hass, John Matthias, James McMichael, John Peck, and Robert Pinsky. Each of these figures receives a chapter that summarizes his career, comments on his principal publications, and accounts for his reception history. Described in this manner, the book might not sound promising.

But then things warm up:

Despite these obstacles, Laureates and Heretics turns out to be a compelling meditation on the mechanics of canonization. Building on the work of David Kellogg, Alan Golding, and Jed Rasula, the study focuses on the institutional and social dynamics that produce different levels of popular and critical success among authors active during the same time period.

And soon thereafter Reed turns to the business of the effect of identity politics on “the boys”:

No longer could white men speak unreflectively “of, for, and to a presumably general community.” A comparative study of Winters’s students proves to be a new and inventive means of supporting this last proposition. Hass, Matthias, McMichael, Peck, and Pinsky all came of age in an era of intense ideological demystification. They did not, however, respond to that challenge in the same way. Just as the counter- cultural poetries of the period were internally diverse and mounted a variety of critiques of entrenched authority, so too the elite-educated individuals with easier access to prominent venues for publication, employment, and promotion likewise exhibited a range of behaviors. To understand the literary system of the later twentieth century, Archambeau contends, one has to set aside reductive accusations of sexism, homophobia, and racism and understand that the establishment, too, was a mercurial, complex, self-contradictory entity, fitfully and unpredictably responsive to shifts in the larger poetry field.

Reed's got it, dead-on.  After the rise of identity politics and feminism, you really couldn't go around acting like "Robert Lowell, National Voice of Poetry" or even "Allen Ginsberg, National Voice of Rebellious Poetry."  Things were different, and you had to figure out how, and why, and what to do, not from above or after the event, but during the changes as they happened.

Soon after this part comes my favorite image in the review: the depiction of The Plinko Theory of Poetic Reputation, which is actually a pretty good way to hold in one’s mind the nature of poetic reputation-making, which isn’t primarily about the quality of the work, but about how your trajectory happens to intersect with the various forces at work in the cultural field (this does not mean that bad work gets rewarded, or good work shunted aside, only that one’s work will be popular if it has affinities with cultural imperatives, and finds its way to light through channels that happen to serve large or powerful or coherent constituencies):

Laureates and Heretics offers a theory of canonization that resembles the game Plinko on the television show The Price Is Right. A contestant drops disks from different possible starting points and then watches how initial conditions affect their paths as they descend toward more or less lucrative possible outcomes. Pinsky and Hass could never have predicted that their specific swerves away from Winters would lead plink-plink-plink to their selection as poets laureate. In retrospect, however, one can see that the “poetry field” of the 1970s and 1980s tended to reward certain moves while penalizing others. This kind of experiment could easily be repeated, perhaps with a more eclectic group. What would it be like to read a book that devotes a chapter each to the likes of Agha Shahid Ali, Mary Jo Bang, Charles Bernstein, Rick Kenney, Dana Levin, Eileen Myles, and Tupac Shakur? Would it be chaos, or a way of gaining a more comprehensive overview of poetic production in the late twen- tieth century? Archambeau has shown that there is now enough historical distance on the post–Vietnam War era that one can fruitfully approach its poetry with the cool gaze of a sociologist.

From now on, I’m going to refer to the Archambeau-Reed Plinko Theorem as if it were the General Theory of Relativity or something.

Anyway, here’s the grand finale, which I think gets me exactly right, depicting me as a man aiming at disinterested objectivity and almost but not quite getting there:

One senses that Pinsky and Hass interest him primarily as literary-historical riddles (how did they come out on top?).  He writes well about McMichael, but Peck appears to intrigue him more, and his admiration for Matthias is patent. One suspects that, if pressed, he would admit that his money is on modernist ambition and seriousness as the true route to lasting achievement. The beauty of Laureates and Heretics is Archambeau’s ability to restrain himself from making such pronouncements. He takes the tools of practical criticism and puts them in the service of a relatively unbiased literary history. No matter who their favorite poets might be, others will be able to build on his arguments. The field needs more books like Laureates and Heretics.

And I can't resist ending with this, a celebration of Brian Reed's title (I couldn't quite bring myself to post Deneice Williams' "Let's Hear it for the Boy"):