The Power of Poetry in the Modern World

Rejoice! The new issue of the South Atlantic Review (vol. 77 nos. 1 & 2, for those of you compiling bibliographies) will soon find its way into print (and onto your local JSTOR server), and it's a special issue on the power of poetry in the modern world—essential reading for anyone interested in understanding how poetry interacts with the larger world.  In addition to poems and reviews, it features the following articles:

Marjorie Perloff, "John Cage as Conceptualist Poet"
Lisa K. Perdigow, "Coming Undone: Entering Jorie Graham's Poststructural Poetics"
Emily R. Rutter, "the story of being: Revising the Posthumous Legacy of Huddie Ledbetter in Tyehimba Bess' leadbelley"
Jason M. Coates, "H.D. and the Hermetic Impulse"
Ronald Schuchard, "Yeats and Olivia Revisited: A Pathway to The Winding Stair and Other Poems"
Tara D. Causey, "Stories of Survivance: The Poetry of Karenne Wood"

There's also my own essay—"The Fall and Rise of Poetry: T.S. Eliot and the Place of Poetry in the Modern World."  Here's how it starts:

T. S. Eliot was far from alone among modern poets in perceiving a crisis in the social position of poetry and in dreaming up a solution to that crisis. Yeats, for example, sought to bring poetry out of the aesthete’s garret by allying it with both mystic rites and nationalism; while Ezra Pound dreamed of a world in which “the damned and despised literati” would, through clarity of language, keep “the whole machinery of social and of individual thought” functional and therefore make themselves crucial to the legislators and governors of the world. Eliot’s particular sense of the nature of the crisis, and of its solution, was colored by the decline of his social class and of the kind of public, moralistic poetry associated with that class. Eliot had strong family connections to a Boston-based, cultivated elite that entered a phase of steep decline around the time of his birth and similarly strong connections to the poetic traditions of that class, traditions whose supporting institutions eroded rapidly in the closing decades of the nineteenth century. Eliot’s reaction to the decline of public poetry was, at first, to retreat from such poetry into the aestheticism of his 1905 graduation ode and later to satirize his declining class and its culture, including its literary culture. Out of his satire, though, emerged a new theory of poetry, in which the energies to which popular culture speaks are harnessed to the civilizing power of a tradition of high culture and spiritual discipline. Eliot sees a public role for this new poetry—but not as a replacement for popular culture. Rather, he sees it as being important in the formation of a new caste of cultural leaders who will, he hopes, have a broad influence in society. When a new class of educated professionals takes up Eliot’s poetry (and humanistic culture more generally) in the postwar era, this class partially fulfills Eliot’s ambition. Unlike Yeats or Pound, Eliot sees his dream for a revivified poetry, with a kind of power in the modern world, come to some measure of fruition.

I'm especially happy to have my essay on Eliot—really a kind of social class analysis of aesthetics in poetry—appear in an issue guest edited by Nancy D. Hargrove, a distinguished Eliot scholar.  The South Atlantic Review is under new and dynamic editorship, and promised great things in the years ahead.  Excelsior!  Now, if only they could do something about cover art...

The Futures of Poetry!

Perloff, Kirsch, Nikolayev, and a full house at the Grolier

How many different timelines can we spin out for the future of poetry? The Grolier Poetry Bookshop in Cambridge, Massachusetts has decided to find out! They've been hosting a series of talks on the topic—the first set by me, Ben Mazer, and Stephen Burt, and the second set by Adam Kirsch, Philip Nikolayev, and Marjorie Perloff. You can check them out here:

Robert Archambeau, March 14, 2014 

Stephen Burt, March 14, 2014

Ben Mazer, March 14, 2014

Adam Kirsch, Philip Nikolayev, Marjorie Perloff, September 12, 2014

I’m not sure who will be involved in the next installment of the series, but I’ve got a pretty good idea where you can hang out with them after their talks. Here’s a hint.

A secret location on Harvard Square

The Birth of the Death of the Author: Uncreative Writing circa 1968

We live in a great age of literary unoriginality.  It comes in many forms, from the mildly sordid and deceptive kind we've seen in prominent poetry plagiarism by C.J. Allen, Christian Ward, and David R. Morgan, to the highly-theorized and honest kind Kenneth Goldsmith and Marjorie Perloff discuss in the context of poetry, to the grand claims for the novel-as-collage put forth  by David Shields.  Advocates of unoriginality should feel a certain satisfaction, then, in acknowledging that the idea of unoriginality is itself something quite long established, and that there is little new in our golden age of the unoriginal.

One could make a strong case for tracing the origins of contemporary unoriginality back to Roland Barthes' great essay of 1968, "The Death of the Author."  The essay seems to present us with a crime scene: the author has been killed.  Who did it?  Of course there is no real corpse, only the death of a certain idea of the author as a personality that can be referred to as the explanation of the text, the owner, the source, and the little god from whose head the poem or novel or essay sprung fully formed.  This figure, born with the rise of the modern bourgeois subject, was killed by a conspiracy of murders, chief among whom was Mallarme (his weapon: a belief that language was more important than the individual author), followed by Proust (wielding books in which the distinction between author and characters dissolved), and a gaggle of Surrealists (bristling with armaments, most of which had to do with the subconscious mind and the disempowering of the ego).  These conspirators were aided and abetted by modern linguists, who were happy to load their weapons with the latest munitions from the structuralist armories, including the explosive notion that the subject as not a person with agency so much as he was a mere function of linguistics.

When this gang had killed the author, Barthes tells us, they replaced him with a new figure more to their liking, someone Barthes calls the scriptor, whose only power is to mix and mingle pre-exising kinds of writing.  As the great conspiracy took hold, all the authors were killed and replaced with scriptors.  They looked the same, and had the same names, but they were entirely different creatures than the authors they replaced.  When we wanted an explanation of the novels of J.R.R. Tolkien the author, we looked to his life, saw his experiences in the first world war, and concluded that the terrifying battle scenes, pathos of comrades facing destruction, and sense of an overwhelming, continent-wide doom came from the author's own experience of war.  Not so when we looked at Tolkien the scriptor.  His novels made sense as the mingling of pre-existing modes of writing—as the coming-together of saga-literature, Norse mythology, Beowulf, and Victorian realism (no one in Norse mythology has to pack a lunch the way Tolkien's hobbits do).  The same process occurs across the canon of literature, as authors are replaced by scriptors: individual life-events cease to signify, and the Frankenstein-like stitching together of literary bits-and-pieces takes center stage.  All writing becomes rewriting, or even recycling, in the brave new world of the scriptor.

But what if the real crime scene here didn't involve a murder, but a theft?  What if Barthes weren't the originator of the modern idea of unoriginality?  What if he stole it from someone else?  I'm not talking about inheritance, here, although there is a long tradition of writing about the text as something the author doesn't create ex nihilo (think of Plato's Ion here, or Eliot's "Tradition and the Individual Talent").  I'm talking about the possibility of flat-out robbery.

Consider the facts, ladies and gentlemen of the jury.  Consider that in 1967, a year before the appearance of Mr. Barthes' essay, the novelist Italo Calvino wrote in a letter "For the critic, the author does not exist, only a certain number of writings exist."  Consider a later letter, in which he elaborated on the topic, saying "The living author, I believe, can never be taken into consideration.  To be able to study a writer, he must be dead, that is, if he is alive, he must be killed."  Consider, too, that Mr. Calvino knew Barthes—indeed, in the period leading up to Mr. Barthes' essay, Mr. Calvino was known to attend regularly Mr. Barthes' lectures in Paris.

It's intriguing to think of Barthes' grand theory of unoriginality being, itself, profoundly unoriginal.  Sadly, though, it's not so likely a case of theft as it seems at first glance.  When we look at the context of Calvino's remarks, it is clear that he's talking about the author as someone who is either ignored by scholars, who act as if he is already dead, or as a figure who disappoints readers after they've formed an image of him on the basis of his books.  His phrasing is as bold as Barthes'—and it is not inconceivable that the French critic pinched a good phrase from the Italian novelist—but his ideas are much more conventional.  Barthes' essay on the death of the author may present us with an exquisite irony: that there was considerable originality in the most powerful modern theory of the unoriginal.

The Last Habsburg Poet: Marjorie Perloff on Paul Celan

Richard Strier was already a few minutes into his introduction when I & my colleague Josh Corey stumbled into a packed room in the University of Chicago's new Logan Center to hear Marjorie Perloff talk about Paul Celan yesterday afternoon.  We slipped into the very last seats, just behind Michael Anania, Simone Muench, and Garin Cycholl, and next to Ray Bianchi.  Chicu Reddy was perched across the aisle.  Just as I cracked open my notebook and took in the large map of the Habsburg empire, Marjorie began her talk.

At first, I was a little surprised by the direction she took: I'd been expecting Big Ideas, but what we were getting was a mixture of biography and geography.  Marjorie talked about Celan's birth in Czernowitz, an outpost of the West far, far from the German or French spheres, more oriented toward the Ottoman Empire than Paris or London, and about the polyglot, multiethnic nature of the place: Romanian but not Romanian, Christian, Jewish, with an endless number of languages, including a German quite different from the German of Berlin.  She then talked in great detail about Celan's poetry, but not the poetry most known to American readers.  She described his early Surrealist poems, his Romanian poems, and, above all, his love poetry—something he wrote for many years, and used in his role as expert seducer, often presenting the same poems to different women, with generally successful results.

I wasn't at all sure where this was all leading, but when Marjorie said it was a version of material that would form the epilogue to a book on Austro-Modernism it all began to come into focus.  And, indeed, it all began to seem part of a very Big Idea indeed, and a good one.  This wasn't just a ramble in poetic biography: the point of all of the context and focus on Celan's particular brand of Austrian German language was to recontextualize Celan entirely, and, in so doing, to propose not just a new way of understanding Celan, but a new way of understanding a whole branch of modern European literature.

We tend to see Celan almost exclusively in the context of Holocaust writing, with John Felstiner's Paul Celan: Poet, Survivor, Jew as the great explanatory text.  Celan certainly is a Holocaust poet—plausibly the greatest of Holocaust poets—but we are wrong to think that this exhausts his meaning and the range of his achievement.  In focusing on Celan's early life and his love poetry (which he continued to write after the war) Perloff showed us a fuller, less iconic, more humanized figure, a Celan who wasn't just a Survivor, but a man, with all the foibles and idiosyncrasies one might expect in a somewhat coddled aesthete raised by adoring and indulgent parents (Jean Daive has been working on something along these humanizing lines as well).

Not only did Perloff reveal this Celan to us: in stressing the differences between his German and the German spoken in Frankfurt or Berlin (and, indeed, in stressing the vast geographic removal of Czernowitz from Germany proper) she showed us Celan as a representative of a culture quite distinct from that of Germany: the Austro-Hungarian Empire in the traditionally Habsburg (alternately Hapsburg) lands.  The Empire's German was distinct, and Marjorie was quite convincing in demonstrating that many of the legendary 'difficulties' of Celan's poems are actually quite clear, at least to one hearing "with an Austrian ear."  And the Empire was by no means an Empire of German:  it was a polyglot culture of many languages, and no one spoke just one.  Indeed, the multicultural Imperial identity, in which many peoples felt equally enfranchised, was utterly different from German identity, and it showed in the culture: "There is no way Wittgenstein could have been a German writer," Marjorie said, "and no way Heidegger could have been an Austro-Hungarian one."

Celan the product of this multicultural and polyglot sphere, to which belong the works of Robert Musil, Elias Canetti, Sigmund Freud, Karl Kraus, Joseph Roth, and Franz Kafka—but he was the product of this world in a special way, because he was the product of that world's dissolution.  Born just two years after the end of the Austro-Hungarian Empire, he came of age in the penumbra of loss, with a sense of the ghostliness of his own multicultural and polyglot identity.

In the end, Marjorie wasn't just telling us that we would do well to think of Celan in the broad context of the dying Habsburg culture: she was telling us that we have a great deal of work ahead of us in reconstructing the lost Empire as a cultural field, and in finding the meaning of its writers not in some generalized Germanic tradition, but in the shadows and fragments of a dying polyglot state.  We would be as wrong to discuss Musil or Kafka or Celan outside this context as we would to discuss William Carlos Williams without reference to his Americanness.  This, I thought, is a big idea—it proposes not just a new understanding of Celan, but a new field of literary study.

The room in the Logan center was full of bright looking young graduate students.  If they had their ears open, they now know they've got their work cut out for them.

The Battersea Review and the Failure of Yeats!

Hot soup, people—the  much-anticipated new issue of the Battersea Review is finally here!

Marjorie Perloff on John Cage!

Adam Kirsch on superfluity and anxiety!

William Logan!

Charles Bernstein!

William Logan and Charles Bernstein together!

Translations of Rilke’s Russian poems!

Saskia Hamilton!

Unearthed poetry by J. Robert Oppenheimer!

Robert Archambeau! Me! On W.B. Yeats and poetry as minority culture!

More! Much more!

My own contribution begins this way:

It was June in the year 1311 when the people of Siena walked in a great procession bearing Duccio's Maestà—his altarpiece depicting the Virgin Mary in the glorious golden Italo-Byzantine style—to the cathedral that would become its home. It was a momentous occasion for the entire city: Duccio's painting was to replace the fabled "Madonna of the Large Eyes," to which the Sienese had appealed a half-century earlier, when the fate of their soldiers hung in the balance in the war with Siena's bitter rivals, the Florentines. The Madonna, it was said, had worked miracles that assured the Sienese victory, and it was the intercession of Mary on behalf of Siena in that battle that led the Sienese to make her their patron saint. Now they wished to commemorate her in a suitably grand sacred image. The event involved the entire city, from the highest grandees to the lowest beggars. One contemporary describes the procession of the Maestà this way:

And on that day when it was brought into the cathedral, all workshops remained closed, and the bishop commanded a great host of devoted priests and monks to file past in solemn procession. This was accompanied by all the high officers of the Commune and by all the people; all honorable citizens of Siena surrounded said panel with candles held in their hands, and women and children followed humbly behind. They accompanied the panel amidst the glorious pealing of bells after a solemn procession on the Piazza del Campo into the very cathedral; and all this out of reverence for the costly panel… The poor received many alms, and we prayed to the Holy Mother of God, our patron saint, that she might in her infinite mercy preserve this our city of Siena from every misfortune, traitor or enemy. 

The occasion of the installation of the Maestà was an aesthetic event, of course, but it was a religious event too. It was also a civic event, connected to the city's military past and to its prestige in the future. And, as the distribution of alms indicates, it was also an economic event, an opportunity to redistribute wealth so as to maintain the social fabric, legitimate the civic rulers, and perform the religious duty of charity. We could not be further from the way artworks are unveiled in our own time, in the pristine white cube of the gallery space, where artists and art-lovers have gathered for an event far more specialized, and far narrower in appeal and intention, than the Sienese procession of the Maestà.

William Butler Yeats, that most vacillating and self-reinventive of poets, imagined many different roles for art in society—but if there is one dream he dreams most passionately, it is one along the lines of the installation of Duccio's Maestà. That is, he yearned for a world where art was integrated into the culture at large, and where all social institutions were woven into each other, in the manner of medieval Sienese society. But why would he have this dream? The short answer is that he had seen the limits of aesthetic autonomy—of art for its own sake—and felt pinched by the boundaries of the self-exiled minority culture in which so many poets of the fin de siècle lived. Having helped found that bastion of the aesthetes, the Rhymer's Club, he grew disillusioned with the small scope of interests expressed in the group's meetings at the Cheshire Cheese pub, and even more disillusioned at the limited public impact of the group.

*

All honor to U.S. Dhuga, Ben Mazer, and the Battersea crew for putting together a 300-pound per square inch pressurized tank of literary splendor!

Us vs. Them: Poetry and the Limits of Binary Thinking

Experimental vs. formalist; formalist vs. free verse; post-avant vs. quietude; lyric vs. language-based — you know the old binaries that people drag around when they write and talk about poetry.  They're like the weather as described by Mark Twain: everybody talks about them, but nobody does anything about them.  Until now! The good people at Boston Review (Timothy Donnelly, B.K. Fischer, and David Johnson) have put together a great forum on binary thinking in contemporary poetics, now available online.

Back in May, Boston Review ran a Marjorie Perloff essay called "Poetry on the Brink," which sparked some lively and contentious conversation.  Since much of the conversation involved the question of just how useful (or harmful) our old critical binaries were, the editors asked a group of poets and critics to write short essays addressing the question "what is the most significant, troubling, relevant, recalcitrant, misunderstood, or egregious set of opposing terms in discussions about poetics today, and, by extension, what are the limits of binary thinking about poetry?"

Responses came in various forms.

Maureen McLane and Ange Mlinko replied with poems, Mlinko's consisting of a series of rhyming couplets, beginning with: "M.P. is right: much free verse exists to give a pass/to naïfs who only learned of poems from a glass..."

Annie Finch waved the proud banner of poetic meter.

Stephen Burt struck the note of the expert overwhelmed by the plenitude of poetry and poetry-talk (which you may remember from an earlier essay of his).  This time he tells us "So many binaries circulate in and around contemporary poems that I find myself running out of Ibuprofen as I pursue the most useful."

DeSales Harrison comes out swinging, saying that Perloff's essay is at times mired in "self-regarding sludge" (I would advise Harrison to shy away from Orono, Buffalo, Louisville, and other stomping grounds of the Perloff enthusiasts for a while).  

Matthew Zapruder and Lytton Smith stand up for music, with Zapruder defending song lyrics as poetry and Smith taking issue with the visual/auditory divide.

Sandra Lim reminds us of Matvei Yankelevich's contribution to this discussion.

Katie Degentesh wins the Wicked Wit award for the line "If it’s not a legitimate poem, your body has ways to try to shut that whole thing down."

Dan Beachy-Quick seeks a middle ground between lyricism and the dissolved self; while Noah Eli Gordon notes the conundrum of the poet-professor, drawn to both indeterminacy and clarities more readily adaptable to a pedagogical context.  Dorothea Lasky works with a similar division, claiming that "a young poet today, finding his or her own way, must decide to be either a mystic or a scientist."

Samuel Amadon notes that labels tend to be imposed on poets from without, saying "American poetry is littered with schools and movements that no one claims to be a member of."


Cathy Park Hong accuses Perloff of being "disingenuous" in her treatment of poets of color (look out!).


Anthony Madrid, who has a strong claim as the possessor of Best Head of Hair in American Poetry (men's division) decries the insistence that irony and feeling must be at odds with one another.

Rebecca Wolff notes that her journal, Fence, has been interested in the binary question for years.

Evie Shockley dislikes the very idea of binaries, while some guy named Archambeau doesn't want to go without them even though he advises treating them with suspicion and getting promiscuous with the things.

Marjorie Perloff writes a reply in which she addresses various contributions, and manages an answer to DeSales Harrison that deftly sidesteps the issue of sludge.

Orono Conference Report: The Golden Lobster Awards!

The National Poetry Foundation conference on the poetry of the 1980s has wrapped up, and the gathered poets, critics, and professors have dispersed, fleeing Orono, Maine for points south and west.  You know what this means: it's time for the post-conference Golden Lobster awards, given for distinction in conference-going.

Presenting this year's awards will be the ghost of Edwin Arlington Robinson, pride of Head Tide, Maine, author of Richard Cory, Miniver Cheevy, and Matthias at the Door, and favorite poet of Theodore Roosevelt.  Take it away, Eddy!

Robinson: Thank you, thank you, and welcome one and all to this gala event here in the Rae Armantrout Auditorium in Archambeau's Secret Backyard Writing Dojo.  A special welcome to President Obama and the first lady—sorry we couldn't get you better seats, but the tables at the front have been reserved for alumni of the Buffalo Poetics Program.  Console yourself with the thought that you aren't at the Iowa MFA table, which someone seems to have placed back by the men's room and the disused cigarette machine.  Let's not look to deeply into how that happened, and proceed without further ado to a list the winners in each category!

The Golden Lobster for the Demonstrable Power of the Word goes to... Alan Golding.  Professor Golding's talk on Armand Schwerner's poetic sequence The Tablets led to a run on copies of that title at the book fair, which sold out less than an hour after Golding's presentation.

The Golden Lobster for Professorial Gadgetry goes to...Aldon Nielson, whose array of laptops, tablets, cellular gewgaws and gizmos topped those of even the most geeked out grad students.  Some may have thought Nielson's digital watch was a disqualifying throwback to an earlier era, or perhaps a tribute to the calculator watches of the Reagan years (fitting in the context of the 1980s), but we have it on good authority that the watch actually controls the other electronic trinkets in Nielson's kit.  We look forward to seeing what Neilson brings to the next conference from what we can only imagine is a pre-conference visit to whatever equivalent Penn State has to Q's laboratory from the 007 films.

The Golden Lobster for the Clown Car Effect goes to Patrick Pritchett, who drove up from Harvard in a Honda Civic, into which he was seen wedging an unseemly mass of literary types on his return from Orono's only brew pub on Saturday night.  One portly Canadian poet-critic is still complaining about the imprint of the stick shift on his left buttock, though the bruise bears some resemblance to a patriotic maple leaf.

The Golden Lobster for Going Against Type goes to Norman Finkelstein, who was seen for the first time since childhood wearing a color other than black.  No more let it be said that he is the Johnny Cash of American poetry.

The Golden Lobster for Natty Attire goes to... oh! It's a tie!  Keith Tuma and Kathy Lou Schultz will share the award.  Tuma's floral-lined purple shirt and pork pie hat narrowly edged out another attendee's seersucker suit and cobalt blue shirt, since the panel judged the seersucker man to be wearing a few too many bangles and a mustache too overtly reminiscent of late-period Nietzsche.  Schultz's outfit, which might have come from the closet of Dorothy Parker, won extra points for matching her flapper-era high society bob haircut.  Could our schlubbish profession be undergoing a fashion renaissance?  Where are the chest-high shorts and madras shirts of yore?

The Golden Lobster for Audacity in Projected Scholarship goes to Joe Donahue, who was overheard in a local bar proclaiming that his paper at next year's Louisville conference will be called "The Gnostic Poetics of Barrett Watten."  I'll expect the ghost of Robert Duncan to be in attendance, his arms loaded with old copies of Poetry Flash.

The Golden Lobster for Stone Cold Badass Presence goes to...well, there's no surprise here, people.  It goes to Nathaniel Mackey, who, during his reading, emanated a vibe aptly described by one conference attendee as "Miles Davis with a trumpet mute."

The Golden Lobster for Breadth of Reference goes to Marjorie Perloff, whose plenary talk started out by drawing distinctions between Susan Howe and Charles Bernstein ("you don't get a lot of Cotton Mather in Bernstein") but ended up taking us from the tennis-and-martini aesthetic of the Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets to the miseducation of the young to the theory death of the avant-garde to the change in style of poets' essays since the 1980s to the differences between philosophy and critical theory to a comparative analysis of the job market for poets over the decades.  Our telegraph operator admits to having run out of ticker-tape, and was unable to send the full transcript to our headquarters, but even the partial evidence justifies the award.

The Golden Lobster for the Kavorka goes, as it goes every year, to Grant Jenkins, who was seen standing in a mustard colored corduroy jacket in the lobby of the University Inn Academic Suites hotel as he was approached by wayward members of a bachelorette party, who swarmed about him, stroking his lapels and cooing about how nice his outfit was.  The next day (and this, I must stress, is not something I am making up) his hair gel set off the airport body scanner, reading as an "anomalous substance."  It is not known if the incidents are connected.

The Golden Lobster for Cornucopia Ex Nihilo goes to Steve Evans, Ben Friedlander, Jennifer Moxley, and Carla Billitteri, for delivering an amazing conference experience for all of their guests despite brutal budget cuts and all the usual constraints that conspire against conference organizers.

And finally... the Golden Lobster for Benevolent Spirit Presence goes to the late Burton Hatlen, who meant so much to poetry and to the University of Maine.  Let's close this ceremony with a round of applause in his honor.  We will not see his like again.

Archambeau with Golden Lobster winner Joe Donahue.  Norman Finkelstein listens to Patrick Pritchett in the background (photo: Star Black)

The Academization of Avant-Garde Poetry?

           

Some come to praise, some come to bury, but all the poets and critics have come to comment on Jake Berry’s thorny, problematic, provocative little essay "Poetry Wide Open (Fragments in Motion)."  Berry’s essay appeared some time ago in The Argotist, and now we have a host of responses—some 16 in all—by poets and critics from both sides of the Atlantic and all over the spectrum of poetics.

Here are a few highlights from the commentaries:

Norman Finkestein:

Breaking away from established forms is not in and of itself a virtue: Berry does not escape the still commonly held fetishism of “make it new.”  But I do agree with Berry that most of the poetry produced in creative writing programs is indeed “a reproduction or reworking of the original works and methods.”  The development of a poet as an “individual talent,” as T. S. Eliot understood the term, is tremendously difficult, given the dialectic of tradition and originality which Eliot describes in his classic essay.  My sense is that such growth is not made any easier, and may well be stifled, in most creative programs. To be sure, there are gifted teachers in many programs who nurture their students’ talents without imposing a party line. But it is in the nature of creative writing programs, within an academic system that emphasizes professionalism and career advancement, to inculcate one or another aesthetic ideology to which students are encouraged to conform, in order to get published and secure a teaching post. Given the explosion of online publications in recent years, the former goal may be somewhat easier to reach. Given our current economic situation, the latter is far more difficult.

Marjorie Perloff:

Publishing today is extremely eclectic and—with exceptions like New Directions, which has a certain trademark--one can never tell who will publish what, where, and when. It’s a pretty open and fluid situation. Just when you label Princeton as quite conservative, they publish Andre Codrescu. Columbia has just published Kenneth Goldsmith’s critical prose Uncreative Writing. It seems that the real contrast is between “experimentalism” 1980s-90s style and that of the present. Historical change is certainly important to consider. But Berry’s dichotomy between Iowa and Language seems to me a false one. Bear in mind that some of our leading Language poets attended the Iowa Workshop: for example, Silliman, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten.  But such contemporary poets as Craig Dworkin, Uljana Wolf, Cia Rinne, Caroline Bergvall, Vanessa Place are quite outside the Iowa orbit and yet they do get published, even if, for now, at smaller presses. 

Dale Smith:

Private audiences tend to embrace the coteries and in-groups that acknowledge contexts outside the mainstream. For some, there’s a certain fierce pride in developing consumer practices outside of mainstream cultural production. Aficionados, amateurs, and those experienced and engaged in the loose affiliations of poetry often seek out art that is decisively outside the domain of mass culture. In many ways, this private concern for poetry enables an “Otherstream,” even as it is buried under an enormous veil of mass concerns stemming from commodity culture...

Henry Weinfield:

Berry will probably be criticized for oversimplifying the current situation—that is, for locating the poetry of the academic mainstream in terms of only two, diametrically opposed positions, those of the Iowa and Language Schools. I myself have no quarrel with this representation because it seems to me that contemporary poetry, cut off from its roots in the tradition, continues to oscillate between polarities of this kind, even if the Iowa and Language Schools have given way to other tendencies. Neither is capable of producing lasting poetry, in my view, because both are based on a fragmentary conception of the art. (At the end of his essay, Berry seems to abandon the very possibility of poetry lasting, and I shall have something to say about this later on.) The term “language poetry” is a tautology, as has often been said, because all poetry worthy of the name is language poetry; that is, its medium of expression is as much its message as what it conveys. The very fact that the Language School adopted this name suggests that most mainstream poetry for many years has been written as if language were not important, as if the poem could be reduced to a speech-act of some kind. Indeed, most of the poetry that comes out of the Iowa School poetry has no music and no language. This is poetry that fetishizes the “individual voice,” as Berry observes, which is ironic because most of the poets who work in this mode sound alike. Their work is based on what Jack Spicer called “the big lie of the personal.” So, the poets of the Language School were quite right to attack the Iowa mainstream, though wrong in the way they went about it, and ultimately part of the same futile enantiodromia (Jung’s term, borrowed from Heraclitus, for the violent shuttling between opposites).

Thanks to Jeffrey Side for putting together what amounts to a small symposium on the state of poetry (and apologies to him for not having the time to take part, except as an enthusiastic reader).

Laureates, Poetry Aversion Therapy, and a Note on Progress vs. Pluralism

A couple of evenings ago I found myself hanging around the big modernist caverns of the Arts Club of Chicago, munching on scallops wrapped in bacon, eyeballing the Kandinskys and Motherwells, and jawing with some of the local literati — Calvin Forbes, Simone Muench, Mike Puican, Chicu Reddy, Suzanne Buffam, Fred Sasaki, and others, including my colleague Josh Corey.  We’d been summoned down to see Poetry Foundation’s Pegasus Awards, a ceremonial giving-out of glory and cash in the form of the Children’s Poet Laureateship and the Ruth Lilly Award.  For me, the big attraction was getting to hear David Ferry (the Ruth Lilly winner) read.  Well, that and the hors d’oeuvres: the Arts Club food is always credible. 

Having inflicted a book called Laureates and Heretics on the world, I’ve probably spent more time thinking about the meaning of laureateships than anybody should, and I certainly have my share of preconceptions about what such laurels mean.  The roots of laureateships lie in societies quite different from our own, and the idea of such an award certainly sits more easily in times and places that are more formally hierarchical and less culturally diverse than the United States in the early 21^st century.  In England, the poet laureate used to have to swear an oath of loyalty to the monarch, since his words were in some sense the official verse of the nation — John Dryden, the only English laureate ever to be kicked out of office, was so booted because of his refusal to take an oath to the protestant William of Orange (Dryden had converted to Catholicism some years earlier).  But the notion of the laureate as the official literary spokesman of the realm was already wobbling in the Romantic era, when the winds of democratic reform and social leveling were blowing across the Channel from France: Byron was clearly joking when he wrote that the laureate Robert Southey was “representative of all the race.”  In our own time, the laureateship of the U.K. has seen a reduction in status, with the former life appointment done away with in favor of ten-year terms.  Britain may still knight people for life, but the laureateship now rotates, albeit slowly, so as to accommodate a greater variety of aesthetic and social constituencies: a typically British moderate adaptation of old institutions to newer, more diverse and democratic times.

But what about the laureateship in the United States?  It's sort of like a Palladian villa in the hills above Los Angeles: it pretends to be older than it is, and fools nobody.  That is, we’ve only really had American poets laureate for 25 years, after Ronald Reagan signed off on a law changing the older position of Consultant in Poetry to the Library of Congress, which has been around since the 1930s, into a laureateship.  Some poets bemoaned the development (the poet Michael Anania told me his first thought was “well, now no one interesting will ever get the job").  Others gnashed their teeth at the idea of hierarchy and official culture.  Many more began polishing their resumes, hoping for a shot at the illusory immortality one gains from being enshrined in a footnote to literary history. 

Right from the start the position was a sort of weird mish-mash of various American impulses.  There was, of course, a dash of England-envy, a desire for the sexy otherness of titles, pomp, and an archaic past.  It was, after all, the 80s, and all the wannabe princesses of America still turned their yearning eyes to Charles and Diana.  But that was really just a veneer behind which lay both a populism — at odds with the yearning for titles and pomp — and a strong dose of Rotarian style boosterism, or even hucksterism.  When the American laureateship came into being, the Brits were still appointing laureates for life.  But in the U.S., the job was conceived of as a one-year gig, so that it would rotate among representatives of different social and aesthetic groups, a principle observed more in the breach than in actual practice.  Additionally, the laureate was given a charge to promote poetry — a kind of glorified sales job, really.  Some poets ignored that part of the role, or went at it impractically: Joseph Brodsky, for example, would issue demands that anthologies of poetry be placed in all hotel rooms, like Gideon Bibles, but do so without any follow-up in terms of fund-raising, editing, or schmoozing with hotel tycoons.  Others took to the role as if they’d been born for it.  Robert Pinsky spent three terms barnstorming the country, delivering speeches and readings and launching the “favorite poem” project, which sought to promote the poetry that non-poets knew and loved.

You’d think the biggest problem with an American laureateship would be the inherent contradiction between an office with a title that links it to hierarchy and official culture, on the one hand, and a non-hierarchical country without a unified cultural tradition, on the other (of course we have all kinds of hierarchies in America, but officially we don’t — and when you leave the world of the super-rich, who know where they stand in relation to the populace, and the world of the righteously irate intellectual, where you and I live, damn near everyone insists that they are middle class).  But the complaints I hear about the institution tend to echo that of Anania: that the poets selected for the job aren’t aesthetically interesting or challenging.  Maybe that speaks about the crowd with whom I hang.  I think, though, that it says something about the way the populist demands of the position — that it be given to someone willing to promote poetry to a large public — are at odds with the socio-cultural position of most American poets.  Most poets, now, produce for other producers: they live in a world of academic specialization, and write for other specialists.  I don’t think of this as a good or a bad thing: it’s simply something that has come to pass, for reasons larger than the whims of any poet, critic, or any single cultural institution (my short version of how and why this came about is in an essay called “The Discursive Situation of Poetry” in Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher’s book The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics; I’m still working on the long version, a book called Power and Poetics).  Anyway: it’s hardly surprising that an office that comes with a populist mandate would end up disappointing a group of people whose tastes are formed by non-populist principles.

My own sense of laureateships, for what it’s worth, has been not to take them particularly seriously, except as cultural phenomenon that can reveal a bit about the social position of poetry, in all its contradictions and complexities.  At a gut level, I’ve generally been kind of against the things, in part because of my general Jacobinism: I don’t like titles or hierarchies of any kind.  I even wince when my colleagues call themselves “doctor” or put bumper stickers indicating attendance at prestige universities on their cars.  I mean, it’s just a short step from that to wearing little lapel ribbons indicating membership in the legion d’honneur.  And I’ve also thought that laureateships encourage poets in the direction of the wrong kind of ambition: the desire for prominence and recognition.  Isn’t that kind of ego-gluttony exactly the sort of thing that the best parts of every religious tradition from Catholicism to Buddhism, and every philosophy from Stoicism to (pre-Nietzschean) German Idealism tells us will make us into unhappy, envious wretches? 

So those were my preconceptions when I walked into the Arts Club.  But a funny thing happened midway through the speech by J. Patrick Lewis, the newly-anointed Children’s Laureate.  Lewis, who seemed a very sincere man, and was quite clearly a guy who would appeal to children, talked about how much he enjoyed the many visits he’d made to schools to read from his books and talk about poetry.  “Children,” he said, “approach poetry as they approach people: with no preconceptions whatsoever.”  Fair enough, I thought, from my seat in the back row of the auditorium, where the local poets had clustered.  And it was a point to which I could relate, not only as the father of a two-year-old daughter, but as a person with no knowledge, let alone preconceptions, about children’s poetry.  I’ve got plenty of opinions about poetry for adults — sometimes those opinions are even strong enough and weird enough and wrong enough to get people angry with me.  But I couldn’t name a half dozen contemporary poets writing primarily for children.  And here’s where the value of an institution like a laureateship — even a foundation-sponsored, non-federal laureateship like the one bestowed upon Lewis — dawned on me.  I mean, think of it: it won’t be long before I’ll want to get some children’s poetry into my daughter’s hands, and I really don’t know where to begin at all.  Now, at least, I know a name: J. Patrick Lewis.  I may not know his work, I may not know exactly how strong or interesting it is in comparison to the work of his peers, but I do know that some people who care about children’s poetry thought he was worthwhile.  It’s not exactly a divine guarantee of absolute and timeless awesomeness, but it’s not nothing either.  It’s sort of like the kind of movie criticism Siskel and Ebert used to do back in the 80s, when they’d get together and give thumbs-up or thumbs-down to movies: it’s hardly the be all and end all of film criticism, but for an otherwise uninformed audience, it’s something, a place to start.  In a sense, the official United States laureateship has a similar value: not for poetry professionals, but for people in the wider world.  For all of my general griping about laureateships, I can recognize that.

*

Several of Chris Wiman’s remarks, as he introduced David Ferry, touched on the condition of the poetry professional.  Chris mentioned that he and Don Share have been editing an anthology of poems drawn from the last century of Poetry magazine, which meant he’d recently read some 300,000 poems, a task, he told us, that might just make him start banging his head against his podium like a woodpecker at any moment.  I sympathize: if Chris and Don split that number of poems up, each taking on half of the reading, and spent, say, five minutes with each poem, that would still mean more than 200 hours each of reading: five solid work weeks each, nine to five, assuming they kept the pace up all day and skipped lunch — all this on top of regular jobs consisting, in large measure, of… reading large numbers of poems.  This, I thought, would be a good way to learn to despise poetry, at least temporarily: the process resembles nothing so much as the kind of aversion therapy parents used to practice on children caught smoking, when they’d make the child smoke cigarette after cigarette until the poor kids turned green and couldn’t stand to anywhere near tobacco smoke anymore.  Chris seems, somehow, not to have succumbed to his particular round of poetry-aversion therapy, but his patience with the most common kind of poetry written by younger poets — which he described as “willed eccentricity, even willed grotesqueness” — seems to have become a bit strained, his attitude seeming to have become, at least for the moment, a version of “not that there’s anything wrong with that sort of thing, but…”

*

The evening closed with David Ferry reading from his works, including, much to my delight, his translations, which I’m not alone in seeing as his best work — though history may disagree with me: as Chris Wiman pointed out, “for many years Ezra Pound was best known as a translator.”  When it was over, Calvin Forbes and I agreed that, if either of us give a reading like Ferry’s when we’re pushing 90, we’ll be damned proud of ourselves.  We also both noted that everything, even the translations (which featured a fine version of the journey to the underworld in The Iliad), was about death.  “When I heard Archibald MacLeish read as an old man,” said Calvin, “it was all about looking at pretty girls.”  So often poetry at old age seems to get down to sex and death: Yeats’ “Politics” or his "Cuchulain Comforted.”  You know, the fundamentals.

*

In other Poetry-related news, Marjorie Perloff and I have been in touch regarding my review of her study Unoriginal Genius.  I stand by what I wrote — especially what I said about Perloff being the best and most prominent spokesperson for a whole range of poetries — but after we’d corresponded a little, I asked if I might reproduce this note, since it allows Perloff to clarify her sense of things:

Dear Robert:

I wanted to thank you for your long detailed review and say that I think you’re right that there’s no ‘progress’ in poetry; if I gave that impression, I’m surely wrong. The fact is, I don't believe in a progress model but that poetry, like furniture or clothing, cannot ignore its own time.  "A

mythology reflects its region."  Not that poetry gets better —far from it — it just gets different.  My own preference as you must sense is for the Moderns, no one can beat Yeats or Eliot or Pound in my lexicon!  And by the way, I start with Eliot and his citations so where did you get the idea that I ignore TSE and EP?

But I should have made my own view of literary history clearer and as a result of criticisms of Unoriginal Genius, I am doing that in various new things I¹ve been writing‹specifically a long essay ‘corrective’ on Duchamp that I hope you¹ll see some time.

You make many salient points and I hope we can discuss them some day before too long.  I'm a big admirer of your writing!

Thanks, Robert and all the very best,

Marjorie