Being There: Facebook vs. Danny's Tavern

Robert Archambeau: I was all set to blog about Nicanor Parra and Roberto Bolaño, but talked my ideas out late last night after too much coffee at my favorite breakfast-for-dinner joint. Signs now point to no bloggery today: consider yourselves spared, people of earth!

That, people of earth, was my Facebook update this morning, but it seems I'm not much of a prophet: I'm blogging after all. Not about Parra and Bolaño, though: rather, I'm posting a Facebook exchange I had with Seth Abramson shortly after posting my update about the two Latin American poets and the late-night breakfast. Strangely enough, given my recent talking-out-live those comments that might have gone into a blog post, the exchange with Seth was about the relative importance of live and virtual discussions of poetry.

As I was scrolling around on Facebook, I ran across this, a provocative update of Seth's, apparently intended as a response to the developments in Chicago-area poetry that Kent Johnson, the present humble blogger, and others had been blogging about, as well as to Steve Burt's Chicago-heavy roster of "New Thing" poets. Those of you who don't waste hours in online social networking might be surprised by Seth's use of the third-person to describe himself. Rest assured he's not emulating Caesar's Gallic Wars: Facebook's format sort of encourages you to write this way:

Seth Abramson: thinks one can't apply pre-internet school-creation models to the Internet Age. Proximity is no longer a prerequisite for an aesthetic school. There is no New Thing or New Chicago School. Poets are inspiring each other from great distances, and to think it requires sharing a bar with someone to be like-minded/mutually-inspired is to take a literal view of how art moves that hasn't been relevant since 1980.

Seth, a veteran of many internet conversations, followed this up almost immediately with the following comment, designed to prevent people from jumpily assuming he was out to attack anyone's poetry:

Seth Abramson This is not to, in any way, denigrate the poets now being associated with those schools, who are (many of them) extraordinarily talented. Their work simply cannot be aligned, however, merely on the basis of either Flood Editions (The New Thing) or Danny's (NCS), etcetera. The world's a lot bigger than that now. Bigger than Chicago. Bigger than a single excellent independent publisher. We need to think about schools in new ways, and not listen to those who would have us trying to re-create cultural artifacts from the 50s and 60s.

Ah! I thought. This is interesting! And it's made all the more interesting in that it's a comment being made at exactly the same point in time that a bunch of Chicago's poetry people have gathered at the Hyde Park Art Center for a day-long conference on the poetry of our fair city (a conference I'd have been part of if I hadn't dinged up my leg in a cycling accident that still has me stuck with limited mobility for several more weeks).

The question of the relation of virtual networking and actual face-to-face contact became more vexed when I received, via Facebook, a Blackberry-sent note from Larry Sawyer, saying he was down at the conference. I messaged back, asking him to tell Ray Bianchi and Bill Allegrezza that I wished I could have been there. I was sure there were interesting conversations taking place down at the Art Center (and due to take place at Jimmy's Woodlawn Tap or some nearby taco dive later) of which I simply wouldn't be a part. At the same time, I was privy to Seth's online comments, and semi-involved in the Hyde Park event via Larry's trusty Blackberry and the good graces of Facebook. Which kind of proximity, real or virtual, mattered most? I typed out a reply to Seth:

Robert Archambeau: I agree that proximity is less important than ever, but I don't think it's completely over with yet. Let's call it residual and declining rather than obsolete. Like CDs.

The other big factor that remains, even in the internet age, is the whole old-school tie thing: networks of people who went to grad school together seem to be pretty important. The campus could be the new unit of literary history for a while.

Things got a little muddled after that, as Seth and I cross-posted (not that live encounters lack such confusion: had Seth and I met live, in, say, that favorite hang of Chicago poets, Danny's Tavern, we probably would have had to repeat ourselves over the din of the assembled literati, hipsters, and assorted bar barnacles):

Seth Abramson: Robert, I'm glad you mentioned this--I was about to add a comment about Kent Johnson's reference to Iowa. It's odd to think I would be more influenced by (say) Iowa classmates I never, in many instances, workshopped with or socialized with than--great example--Ron Silliman, whose work I first discovered through his blog. I am, without a doubt, an Iowa poet more influenced (now) by Silliman than any student I studied with at Iowa. MFA programs don't really traffic in influence in that way; my classmates all had their own visions. And Peter Gizzi affected me the most of any professor I had--and he teaches at UMass.

Seth Abramson: To add to my above comment, Robert: I mean to say that what happens between MFA students happens primarily, I think, post-graduation, not on campus. Those networks b/t peers who also become lifelong friends and cooperative readers. Brown--not Iowa--is actually the very best example of this.

Robert Archambeau: What I mean is this: people are likely to be in contact with the poets they met in grad school, likely to bear some relation to their prof's work (even if it is rejection), likely to stay in some kind of touch, likely to publish one another over the years, etc.

I take your point about you and Silliman. But I also think that even now, our face-to-face contacts still exert some influence. I think about the people I knew at Notre Dame, who almost all think of John Matthias as a hugely important poet. Very few people who went elsewhere seem to feel that way. And this is true even in a time when physical proximity is in decline.

Robert Archambeau: Looks like we cross-posted, Seth, and are more or less in agreement about all this.

Seth Abramson: I do agree--we must "meet" those who will influence us. Many of those "meetings" take place online or via books we read (i.e., often it is a unilateral "meeting" whose other half may never know it's even occurred). MFA programs allow some of these meetings to happen, even if the actual influence will exert itself over many off-campus years of contact through phone, e-mail, blog, or book publications. Kent's essay about the New Chicago School was so literal about "place" that he required all members of a school to be within not just driving distance of one another, but reasonable driving distance. Does this mean Peter Gizzi (Brown) is no longer influenced by Lisa Jarnot (Brown), because they both went there but then moved off to their own lives and pursuits (while remaining friends)?

When I left for more coffee, the conversation was still going on, with contributions from Angela Genusa, David Groff, and others. I'm hoping to check in on it later: I'm as interesting in hearing what went on there as I am in finding out what happened in Hyde Park. For now, at least, both kinds of conversations matter.

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In other news, Johannes Goransson makes some important points about "Double Gesture," an essay I wrote for Boston Review about Lars Gustafsson and Frederik Nyberg, Swedish poets of different generations.

Also, Henry Gould continues his meditation on manifestos, which began as a letter about an essay I wrote for Poetry about the future of manifestoes.

The New Chicago School

So there I was, leafing through some of my old notes on Carl Sandburg, Theodore Dreiser, and Nelson Algren, pulling together a plan for the next installment of the seminar I'm teaching on the literature of Chicago, when an email from Kent Johnson dropped out of the sky, announcing his post on what he's calling The New Chicago School of poetry. Dragging myself out of the past is never easy: it's like answering the call of the alarm clock and pulling myself out of dreamy reverie and into a world where things are actually happening, and I'm called on to play my own part. But Kent's post is worth shaking yourself awake: he spells out, more convincingly than anyone I've seen yet, just what it is that's been happening (and something has definitely been happening) in the literary life of our city.

A couple of years ago Kevin Killian's quipped that, when young poets ask him where to go, he says "Chicago is the most exciting scene around. Years from now we'll be looking back at the early 21st century and wishing we'd all relocated there at this time in poetry history," and I think he was on to something, although just what it was that was happening remained a bit obscure. Around the same time, Bill Allegrezza and Ray Bianchi released their anthology The City Visible: Chicago Poetry for the New Millennium , putting forth a range of poets and groping toward a sense of what is most vital in the city's poetry at this point. Two younger poets, Adam Fieled and Steve Halle, also made attempts at defining the city's new poetic scene. Fieled ventured the term "Chicago Eliotics" for a group of formal-yet-experimental types including Allegrezza, Bianchi, Eric Elshtain, Simone Muench, Larry Sawyer, Jordan Stempleman and myself. Halle edited (and still edits) Seven Corners a blog-journal devoted to showcasing the work he finds most exciting from Chicago and environs. Attempts at definition came from the realm of Respectable Authority, with the University of Chicago launching an annual symposium on Chicago poetry, and Harvard's Steve Burt giving a special tip of the hat to Chicago-based poets in his Boston Review article "The New Thing," which put neo-objectivism at the heart of what is new and vital in American poetry.

Noble attempts! But Kent has, I think, come closer to getting at just what has been most characteristic (and, to me, most fascinating) about the poetic vortex that's been gathering around Chicago for the past few years. Here's how Johnson begins his piece, called "The New Chicago School::

My proposal: That the closest thing we presently have to a “School” of younger, rigorously innovative poets in the U.S. (one that stands closest chance of being retrospectively seen as akin in significance to the NY School in its first-​generation, proto-​formation years ... is what I’ll call the New Chicago School. It’s a list of accomplished, experimental writers, more poetically focused as a collective, per­haps, than the contents list of the City Visible anthology of a couple years back, and more geographically focused, too, inasmuch as all the poets have roots in the city...

He then names names, including (out at the edge of things, in an uncertain netherworld between poet, critic, and scholar) that of the current humble blogger:

William Fuller, Ed Roberson (these first two the elder fig ures of the group), Anthony Madrid, John Tipton, Devin Johnston, Peter O’Leary, Robyn Schiff, Bill Allegrezza, Dan Beachy-​Quick, Michael Robbins, John Beer, Arielle Greenberg, Lisa Fishman, Jesse Seldess, Nick Twemlow, Suzanne Buffam, Srikanth Reddy, Jennifer Scappettone, Francesco Levato, Eric Elshtain, Jennifer Karmin, Leila Wilson, Nathalie Stephens, Joshua Marie Wilkinson, Garin Cyncholl, Joel Felix, Chris Glomski, Erica Bernheim, Larry Sawyer, Patrick Durgin, Joshua Corey out in the suburbs, Tony Trigilio, Daniel Borzutzky (though some thing of a separate case, the work of these last two, perhaps)… and a gaggle of brilliant scholar-​editors associated, past or present, with the Chicago Review, along with Robert Archambeau, on the outskirts of town at Lake Forest.

He lists other groups (especially of younger poets) before asking "From a poetic standpoint, what would justify the set?" After making the obligatory gesture toward the limits of any broad definition, he offers the following idea of what connects this group:

....it’s held together by a vibrant, active scene and certain broad affinities of poetic predisposition and — quite often, and with the necessary exceptions — affect. The tilt is towards a “scholarly,” brainy, less “pop-cultural” and more self-​consciously “critical” mode than tends to be the case around St. Mark’s, for example. And, I’d argue, the work by and large tends to be more thematically ambitious, more novel and challeng ing in its registers and forms, more earnestly in tune with the international than the work of the younger NY scene, still largely caught, the latter, within tonal frames of the hip, the pop, the vernacular, the anecdotal, the flarf.

Kent's on to something here: his thesis is certainly true to my own, previously inarticulate, sense of what makes Chicago poetry more than just poetry written in the greater metropolitan area. Kent's article is up online, courtesy of Bobby Baird at Digital Emunction. It's got big shoulders.

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In other news, John Matthias (along with Michael Anania an intellectual and artistic godfather to untold numbers of Chicago poets) seems to be ramping up for a full-scale prose memoir, with autobiographically-based pieces appearing in the recent issues of Harvard Review, Parnassus, and Chicago Review. Be the first on your block to collect the set!

Johnson & Klein on "Poetry/Not Poetry"

I've been surprised by the amount of feedback I've been getting back-channel about the Poetry/Not Poetry Post (I suppose back-channel is the only way to get feedback, since I'm the only blogger in the world who hasn't turned the "comments" section on). Anyway, here are two comments I thought were particularly interesting, pointing as they do to some of the shortcomings of the post. I think both Kent and Lucas are dead right.

*From Kent Johnson:

Just wanted to say I really liked the last blog post on Poetry/Not Poetry. A collection of these clear, instructive pieces would make for a book that could attract some attention, I think. I've sent the link out to a few folks, already, today.

Just a couple comments, if you don't mind: There seems to be a slight weakness in the essay, inasmuch as your case of the Augustans as exemplary model of Pre-Romantic notions of poetry gets contradicted a bit when you quote Coleridge on Shakespeare as exemplary model of organic form! In other words, I'm not sure Pope and Dryden so neatly stand as representative of some unbroken attitude towards poetry's nature (prose with versification added, as you have it) dominant before Romanticism. In their conjoining of the poetic and didactically discursive, the Augustans themselves represent a historical break and turn, really. I know that your point is a general one, and the essay does a great job of putting forward a helpful, broad, heuristic frame. But I wonder if a couple sentences of qualification there might be good: Systems of patronage aside, there are important differences of poetic attitude and belief, surely, between the Elizabethans and the Metaphysical poets, for example, vis a vis the 18th century masters...

The other thing I was thinking you could qualify/clarify is that you are speaking about the *Western tradition*. It's very interesting that Chinese poets in the late Tang, for instance, or Japanese renga poets for centuries--and long before the Romantics--were practicing a very elliptical, even "postmodern," "discontinuous language" kind of poetry (Renga is the prototype of the New Sentence!). Of course, some of this classical work has helped make our own modern and "post" period in English-language poetics what it is, starting with Pound, and so on, so it's not like it's new. But in other ways, we're just beginning to appreciate how ahead of "us" (by something like 1000 years!) the Chinese, for example, were.

Anyway, and really, excellent stuff. It's refreshing to see, frankly, complex ideas put into clear and even entertaining prose. So just quickly sending you these comments, for what they're worth.

*From Lucas Klein:

I found myself really responding to your blog entry. I think it helps me clear up a number of things I've been thinking about recently. One quibbly question, though: when you say "Suddenly, poetry wasn't more-or-less continuous with prose, or prose-plus-special-effects," I wonder if this shouldn't actually mean that prose wasn't poetry-minus-special-effects. Isn't poetry older than prose?