First book awards are apt to be contentious. The major ones—Yale Younger Poets, the APR/Honickman, Cave Canem, the Walt Whitman—produce winners that are as often ignored as praised. In poetry, everything is arguable. But the 2013 Academy of American Poets’ Walt Whitman Award winner is especially distressing. Judge John Ashbery chose Chris Hosea‘s Put Your Hands In, which has been issued by Louisiana State University Press. I have to confess that I haven’t read the book and will not, based on the odious excerpts from it published in the Spring-Summer 2014 issue of American Poets. Here is what Ashbery has to say about Hosea’s book by way of introducing Hosea’s poems:
Exactly a century ago, the Armory show brought European avant-garde art to New York. We are still experiencing its consequences. Among the works on view as Marcel Duchamp‘s notorious Nude Descending a Staircase, which a derisive critic wanted to rename, “Explosion in a Shingle Factory.” Both titles come to mind as one reads Chris Hosea’s Put Your Hands In, which somehow subsumes derision and erotic energy and comes out on top. Maybe that’s because “poetry is the cruelest month,” as he says, correcting T. S. Eliot. Transfixed in mid-paroxysm, the poems also remind us of Samuel Beckett‘s line (in Watt): “The pain not yet pleasure, the pleasure not yet pain.” One feels plunged in a wave of happening that is about to crest.
Now, it’s clear that Ashbery has no idea what to say about the book he has chosen and so falls back on the magical invocation of Duchamp—a value-free gesture meant as an avant-garde stamp of approval akin to “Gluten-Free”. What “subsumes derision and erotic energy” means is anybody’s guess, as is the sense of Hosea’s poems being “transfixed in mid-paroxysm.” It may not be idle to point out that “paroxysm” in its medical sense means “a sudden recurrence or attack of a disease; a sudden worsening of symptoms.” In fact, when one finishes puzzling over Ashbery’s nonsensical praise and confronts the poems offered up as exemplary, the medical meaning seems the most appropriate.
Here are the first two of the three offered up in American Poets. I have scanned the pages because I figured that otherwise I might be accused of making these things up.
Is it any wonder that this stuff has to depend on the incoherent puffery of John Ashbery, whose poetry has been in steady and sad decline since the mid-1980s? Far be it from me to declare what is and what is not poetry, of course, but if this is what poetry has become, if this is what the poetry establishment—through its inscrutable but lionized master—aims to foist on whatever small audience for poetry remains in this nation, a nation whose idealized image fed the dreams of Walt Whitman and now must leave him spinning in his grave … well, kindly count me out.
“Creating our own images and allusions” is not what poetry is for. It’s what the world is for. A mirror, a tree root, a glass office building reflecting clouds … they can all inspire images and allusions. (It’s hard for me to look at a glass office building without thinking of Rae Armantrout’s spider.) “Black Steel” is not a poem. It is an empty gesture, a vapidity, a con. You may feel drawn to “engage” with its emptiness, to insult Emily Dickinson by conflating Hosea’s blanks with her dashes, but the meaning you’re investing in this thing is random and doesn’t in any sense come from the work itself. I’m not at all distressed by the fact that Hosea produced this thing, only that John Ashbery in his dotage praises the poet for gestures that were new 100 years ago but are no longer interesting and that poor old Walt Whitman is used like a trademarked character–like Mickey Mouse or Betty Crocker or Marcel Duchamp–to sell the illusion of value.
I like Black Steel. I like that as readers we have to engage with it — creating our own images and allusions — to make any sense of it. Structurally it made me think of Emily Dickenson — all those dashes — which then brought me to THIS, here transformed into (thing) and turned into blank signifiers. Then the title — how many ways can we scan Black Steel? With the help of all those dashes I
Once years ago at an open mike reading I did kind of an experiment — picked around two dozen words out of a Russian-English dictionary, and read the list of Russian words, two or three at a time along with English translations of the words. I paced the reading, didn't hurry through it, and paused three or four times to suggest a "stanza."<br /><br />When I finished, people clapped.
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I'm not against bad poetry. Every age has it. It's the mud the good stuff springs from and rises above. We all—hell, even Rimbaud!—start out writing it. What irks me is the seal of approval that can do nothing but convince the public (whatever public there is) that poetry is simply not worth reading. Ashbery may have served the interests of his clique but he has done a disservice to
his Education did this to him (Hosea)… found three more of his "poems" :<br />http://www.poets.org/poetsorg/poems/46740<br /><br />this kind of dreck should not be allowed out in public…I mean… you gonna "teach" this stuff to undergrads in MFA pograms ? As for Hosea's "erotics"… jeesh. <br /><br /><br />
Duchamp at least had the good sense to give up art for chess at age 36 (around 1923), when his few artistic ideas had clearly become exhausted. Ashbery at 36 (about 1963) was just beginning hit the early stride that is still exhilarating: moving from the collagist dabblings of <i>The Tennis Court Oath</i> to the truly astounding poetry of <i>Rivers and Mountains</i>, <i>The Double Dream of Spring
Well, we know what Hosea received from Ashbery but what did John receive from the Academy of American Poets? I'd like to think that whatever legal tender the venerable old mutt took away for his toils, it was accompanied by a replica of Duchamp's "Fountain".