Over at “Stoning the Devil,” Adam Fieled has chosen to re-engage via comments on the poems I’ve posted by Philip Levine and Adrienne Rich. He takes me to task for not explicating the poems, but as I told him in his comment stream, “I have no intention of explicating the poems, although I may comment on them in a general way as I continue to post more examples. The fact that you’ve ‘approved’ the Rich poem makes my core point—that so-called ‘SoQ’ poets have produced excellent poems—so I’m just going to put the whole thing to rest at my end, as far as the ‘quarrel’ goes. We’re arguing over nothing but personal taste, and to devote our energies to pretending otherwise is a waste of time.”
After posting that comment it occurred to me that really, all this time, I’ve been arguing through Adam with Ron Silliman, who after all invented the term “School of Quietude” as a pejorative designation meaning “any poet I [Ron, that is] doesn’t like.” Look back, what drew me into debating Adam was his support of the SoQ term and its implications vis-à-vis the so-called “post-avant.” Given the fact that there are several “post-avant” poets whose work I value, what in the world am I arguing about?
I stumbled upon the answer in a book by Joseph Harrington called Poetry and the Public: The Social Form of Modern U.S. Poetics:
[A variety of poets] all, in one way or another and to a greater or lesser extent, agreed that poetry possesses an intrinsic or potential duty toward or power among reading (or listening) publics. Accordingly, they all became suspect in the eyes of the institutionally ascendant modernist critics. It is only under the institutional influence of “high modernist” poetics that the poem comes to seem more important than either the poet or the public; the modernist poet therefore renounces the ethical duty toward an audience, or anyone else.
One could easily substitute “post-avant” for “modernist” in that passage. While post-avant writers are not (yet) “institutionally ascendant,” they certainly renounce the idea that a poet should write with a more than fractional audience in mind, and their endless complaining about being marginalized by the SoQ is a symptom of their wish to become institutionally ascendant. Kenneth Goldsmith, in a recent Harriet post, took this complaint to a whole new level with a post entitled, “It’s Always a Bad Time for Poetry”—meaning, of course, his kind of poetry; and in a reply to a comment on this post by Linh Dinh, Goldsmith stated gave clear support to that desire: “Linh: Everyone wants power. And money. And fame. Get over it.”
The lust for institutionally ascendant status on the part of post-avant polemicists like Silliman and Goldsmith—and in certain posts, Adam Fieled—is what I find so annoying. I have written over and over that I favor openness; I try, but sometimes fail, to cultivate it in my own reading and writing. Then along comes Silliman & Co., whose aim is to replace one gated community with another. The oppressiveness of the modernist hegemony in the Academy can’t be cured by a post-avant hegemony. I’m not saying that we all need to agree, or even “get along”; I’m all in favor of strong opinions intensely argued. But I do think the craven desire for power, money and fame is corrupting for poets, bad for readers (assuming one thinks that readers matter at all), and destructive per se for the art of poetry.
Excellent point, Andrew. Hadn’t thought about the opening irony provides. Hmmmm….
"[G]et out in the world, write, be curious about other people’s experiences, and read other work–not so much to further my intellect, but that dopey Platonic ideal of becoming a better person."<BR/><BR/>File me under "dopey" too, Joseph—though I’ve never been too sure about how much poetry improves anybody. It didn’t keep Heidegger from being a Nazi, or save Neruda from genuflecting to Stalin.
<I>I’m old enough to remember when New Formalists and Free Verse Poets wouldn’t sit together at lunch tables during writers conferences. Silly stuff….</I><BR/><BR/>The more things change, the more…well, you know.<BR/><BR/>I had a laugh at this, though. When the worms are going through our bodies, what will all this bickering amounted to? Writers in 30 years will look back at the current "
In the sense that the persona is very clearly defined, Levine’s poem is surely "closed" in an important sense. But that does not mean that it is not "open" in other senses. The poem tells us how to interpret the persona, but as is always the case with personae, the persona’s quirks reflect back on and ironize other elements of the poem, calling the poem’s straightforwardness into question.<BR/><
Hi, Joseph—thanks for the thoughtful comment, and of course you’re right. Art develops outside the public vocabulary (maybe that’s too strong; it uses that vocabulary in new ways, maybe? often with the intention of subverting it in one way or another?) and takes time to find acceptance in the public consciousness. I’m all for that kind of change. But when it starts hardening into positions, no
As I just noted on Adam’s post, I found it interesting that his discussion of Levine’s "What Work Is," though utterly dismissive of the poem, does inadvertently admit that the poem successfully creates a vivid persona for the speaker.
Upon reading your blog (via Adam’s), I thought about the case of the art museum: at any given day in many art museums across the land, hordes of people walk through floors of contemporary art and ask, "What the fuck?" (or some variation on that).<BR/><BR/>And I get that it’s frustrating to not really have any lens to understand a piece save for the few who studied "X" theory.<BR/><BR/>But,