I recently lamented the lack of teachers (in the general sense of the term) of new poetries. Tonight I made the mistake of trying yet again to make some sense of the post avant/quietist (god I hate those terms) debate with an eye, as usual, not to resolving the debate, but to read between the lines and see what readers of the former kind of poetry find in it. It’s now 3:45a, but I think I can finally go to sleep because I discovered a post with a poetry enthusiast doing exactly what I was asking for.

In “The Surgeries and Cuts of Ivan Blatsky,” Johannes Goransson shares a bit of how he reads this poem:

MISSPELLED

So restoration is not spelled au
I spelled it so thinking of the czech word restaurace
to restore
and go with a lady to the Room
like a unicorn in the mirror
all naked in the mirrors
so that I could see the blood trickling.

Setting aside the wrangling between Goransson and Joseph Hutchison, I greatly appreciate what Goransson has done in his post. I, like many of the mystified, recognize that there is a tension between traditional ways of examing a poem and newer poetries that don’t necessarily rely on the characteristics those methods were designed for. The tools are misfit. As Goransson prefaces:

I am opposed to defending a poem that I love; I am opposed to the idea that there must be some kind of organic unity of the poem that can be revealed through close (but apparently, as you’ll see, not very close afterall!) reading; I am opposed to the idea that sharp turns in poems are bad, or that ephemerality is bad; and I am opposed to the use of “avant-garde tics” as a criticism

But then he gets down to business and does exactly the kind of thing I think we need a lot more of, sharing what and how the poem means– and I use that phrasing purposefully– to him. As he puts it:

However, against my better judgment, I will now attempt the stunt of showing how this poem makes a lot of sense and perhaps to show however sketchily what appeals to me about it.

I hope Johansson doesn’t retrospectively feel he made the wrong decision. And I know it’s a lot of work to put together a reading like this. But it’s desperately needed. I think many readers are like me– they don’t dislike new poetries, they are baffled by it. I suspect many also, like me, want to find a way to read the poems. Who desires dislike or distaste? But where we spend many years being taught to read classic, traditional and mainstream poetry, we get very little exposure to the basic features of new poetry or ways to read it.

If I could find more examples of this kind of writing– sharing personal feelings about specific poems without engaging in divisiveness or derision– I would feel a lot less despondent about contemporary poetry. It’s amazing to me that there is so much (often heated) discussion of poetry and poetics and so little attention to poems.

Specialized knowledges pervade the book—tennis, recreational drug use, optics, burglary, even punting (surely the most narrowly specialized position in football). But one of the more (in)famous elements of “research” in the novel is the filmography Wallace includes in endnote 24. In the age of IMDb, we might be apt to forget that the filmography is (or was) actually a highly specialized and intensely laborious feat of archival research, but the almost eight-and-a-half pages of James O. Incandenza’s collected works should surely remind us that a filmography is actually the product of research, and not Googling.

Yet there was, of course, no research necessary for composing this “artifact”—having no basis in reality, everything in it is a pure product of imagination. Yet Wallace never seems comfortable simply acknowledging that the imagination that produced it is his own. In just about as many ways as possible, Wallace continually disrupts the filmography with secondary or tertiary commentary to let us know that he’s looking at it from the outside too: I kept waiting for that click where the self-distancing irony would drop away and, as with Borges or Pynchon or Bolaño or even (especially) Auster, you get a real note of dread or mystery where the author seems to have been finally convinced of the reality of his artifice. Even in the last entry, which is about The Entertainment itself, there are three skeptical footnotes embedded.

And a bit later concludes:

Most of Infinite Jest, I think, does not do this approximate deconstruction act; the bulk of it is what can be defined as specialist realism—which I think is actually a broadly popular mode of writing. I don’t think very many people mind writerly ostentation by itself: there are simply far too many popular authors who are grossly ostentatious for this to be the case. And readers of all kinds are capable of showing enormous patience with heavily-detailed and at times rather tedious passages of questionable importance to the overall novel. “Specialist realism” is not terribly problematic to most readers, and is often even considered enjoyable. (Consider, here, Wallace’s enthusiasm for Tom Clancy: there is not as great a distance between the two as one might think.) This mode of writing, however, sometimes slips into a different mode of writing that is indecisively subversive—a lukewarm irony that I think turns nearly everyone off. This is present, too, in Infinite Jest, and in order to have a conversation among people who really like the book and people who can’t get through it, I think it’s necessary to begin by separating this lukewarmness from the specialist realism that actually makes the novel so captivating.

Wallace may have had very well-thought-out, very theoretically smart reasons for trying to have things both (or more) ways, for trying to be indecisive, but there are lots of things which are really theoretically well-grounded which are simply annoying. I’m sure there are folks who think that the lukewarm ironical mode is really brilliant and is actually the most brilliant thing about the novel. I’d be happy to hear those arguments, but I want to make clear that I don’t really find this lukewarmness all that much of an obstacle to enjoying the book. So please, don’t confuse me with attacking Wallace or “hysterical realism” or any of that stuff.

The interesting question is how intentional the “lukewarm irony” (not sure I like the term; I have nothing better… and I think Wallace was jesting with the list that mentions Clancy, though the point still stands, but in a way I’m not sure matters much). I guess I’m squarely straddling the fance. Is it intentional? Just about every bit of it. Could Wallace have achieved the kind of distance that Borges did? I don’t think so. I think that inability is a fundamental characteristic of the fiction because it was a fundamental characteristic of Wallace’s philosophy– of language, of story and of life.

What was fascinating about Wallace’s work– to myself and many others– was this absurdly heightened self-consciousness, which many of us share, paired with such incredible gifts, which most of us don’t. In this respect Wallace’s life might have been a train wreck. But a beautiful (why do I keep thinking of Ballard’s Crash here?) sometimes elegant one. Wallace crashed. We all do. But what a way to delve deep into what I believe to be an inescapable part of the (excuse me for this) postmodern condition! Borges would be a very different writer were he writing now. In fact, I’m not sure he could be Borges at all. And I think he’d agree, though he might– Pierre Menard style– create a better Borges than Borges himself.

Q: Although “Wilco (The Album)” was released on Tuesday, you streamed the songs free online in May after they surfaced illegally on the Internet.

Wilco: As a musician, I don’t want to expend any energy whatsoever preventing people from hearing our music. I think that’s antithetical to the idea of making it. Yes, we streamed it. Basically we set it up so people who felt guilty about stealing our music could donate some money to our favorite charity.

Oh, and he explains why the band is called Wilco, which you may have known, but I didn’t.

I assume the flarf poems were worked and shaped and basically in some way crafted by the authors, but I see little evidence in the result, which is generally about as (un)interesting to read as it is to randomly Google (which was fun for the first few days of Google’s existence; the novelty quickly wore off), or flip through a book reading random sentences. Which is to say: not very.

I had pretty much the exact opposite reaction to the entire issue of Poetry than Stan Apps, who shares in excruciating detail how horrible he found the “Poems” and how fantastically interesting the “Flarf and Conceptual Writing.” For all the vitriol Stan directs at Tony Hoagland’s poem, at least that poem conveys something from the author, where stanzas such as:

RadioShack
GNC
Sears
Crabree & Evelyn

or

Ink on a 5.5 by 9 inch substrate of 60-pound offset matte white paper. Composed of: varnish (soy bean oil [C57 H98 06], used as a plasticizer: 52%.

are essentially only poetry if I use them to create a poem in my head with or between the assemblage I’ve been given. And that assemblage is pretty thin. Sandra Beasley’s “Unit of Measure” it seems to me, has much the same intent as a flarf list, but also tells a story (of a kind), crafting the search-engine like facts into a sequence that is thoughtful and amusing.

Some flarf is funny. Nada Gordon’s poem made me smile when I wasn’t wincing, both of which may well be part of the flarfist intent. The 22-panel Emo cartoon was funny, and reminiscent of a number of web cartoons I read regularly, though it was 14 panels too long. But John Hodgen’s poem “For the man with the erection lasting more than four hours” was funnier than both, as was Beasley’s “Let Me Count the Waves.”

Which isn’t to say there aren’t some bad entries on the “Poems” side of the ledger: Philip Levine and Charles Simic, for example, have pieces in the issue I can’t believe would make it out of the slush pile if they’d been submitted by anyone else. But overall, I think Poetry has—in the past few years—become a much more interesting publication publishing more variety than ever, as both the flarf and recent vizpo features demonstrate, not to mention poems like those by Ange Mlinko and Amy Beeder in this double issue. And it’s been my reading experience that the flarfists and post-avants are in no way immune to the same kind of name- and relationship-based favoritism they despise in the world of the mainstream.

But I do appreciate that some of those commenting on the flarf issue have pointed to poems and lines they like rather than attempting to elevate their preferred pieces by denigrating others, which is useless to me approximately 99.341% of the time. There’s a fine line between productive contrast (such as Stan Apps’ comparison of Hoagland’s “At the Galleria Shopping Mall” with Fitterman’s “Directory,” which I don’t buy at all and, in fact, illustrates precisely the problem I have with a lot of flarf, which is that Stan Apps’ reading—his creation using Fitterman’s words—is interesting; Fitterman’s poem is not) and the dubious taste of adrenalinized attack that emotions can propel us past rather quickly)

As I’ve noted here many times, including at length recently, I continue to look for my way into some of these different poetries, so I truly appreciate the blog entries and willing commenters that follow them. And whether I find much “there” there or not, I applaud Poetry’s effort to present a more diverse range of voices and approaches to poetry. In some ways the editors put themselves in a no-win position doing so, alienating some of the mainstream readers while inviting mockery from the rest, but it doesn’t appear to deter them from doing their best to revitalize the magazine.

[…]

In a controversial 1996 article in Harper’s called “Say it Ain’t So, Huck,” Jane Smiley wrote that she was “stunned” by the idea “that this is a great novel, that this is even a serious novel.” According to Smiley, one of the book’s disqualifying flaws is Huck’s decision to take Jim down the Mississippi River instead of across it to Illinois. She sees this as a moral failure on Huck’s part, and therefore on Mark Twain’s part as well.

“So Jane Smiley would have crossed the Mississippi to the free state of Illinois with her Jim and freed him without delay,” responded a reader named Anson J. Cameron. (Mr. Cameron hails from Port Melbourne, Australia, and may thus be above the American fray.)

And if she kept her description of the river and the Southern sky to a minimum and the dialogue to just a few muttering about many slaveholder’s houses he was set to raze, she could probably free Jim inside of a page. Now, supposing she should keep writing (and Huck could keep rowing) at this pace, she might invent and free upwards of three hundred slaves in the course of her Huck Finn, whereas Twain, farting around with humor and other such distractions, only got around to freeing one.

I’m with Mr. Cameron. I’m very grateful that Huck Finn and Mark Twain were so inefficient and unethical that they didn’t manage to wind up their book on page 54, a few paragraphs after the raft sets off down the river. (And that Homer didn’t send Odysseus straight home.)

–Anne Fadiman
from “Procrustes and the Culture Wars”
found in At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

[…After this he put to death Procrustes, as he was called, who dwelt in what was known as Corydallus in Attica; this man compelled the travelers who passed by to lie down upon a bed, and if any were too long for the bed he cut of the parts of their body which protruded, while in the case of such as were too shot for it he stretched (prokrouein) their legs, this being the reason why he was given the name Procrustes. –Diodorus Siculus]

The Procrustean bed, Diodorus model, suggests itself with dispiriting aptness as a metaphor for the Culture Wars, right down to the blandishments with which Procrustes must have lured his guests over the threshold. (I picture him as a handsome fellow with a large vocabulary and an oleaginous tongue, not unlike the chairman of many English departments.) There’s just one crucial difference. Sometimes Procrustes lopped off his victims, and sometimes he stretched them, but the Culture Wars always lop. I have never seen cultural politics enlarge a work of literature, only diminish it.

By the Culture Wars, I mean that peculiar development of the last two decades or so that takes culture—a multidimensional thing if there ever was one—and attempts to compress it to a skinny line running from left to right. No matter how idiosyncratic, how ambivalent, how anarchic, how complicated, how big, how messy—it’s just got to fit that Procrustean bed. So out comes the handsaw, an WHOP! With a few quick strokes, it’s cut down to size and, as a kind of casual side effect, murdered.

Both armies in the Culture Wars are eager to recruit new soldiers for this limb-attenuation campaign.

[…]

You need not become a conscientious objector—there are plenty of ideas worth shedding blood for—but if in every battle you look around and see the same people fighting alongside you, you should ask yourself whether you are demonstrating an admirable constancy or a Procrustean intransigence.

[…]

College students—over whose souls the goriest battles in the Culture Wars are fought—are, by virtue of their youth, deeply engrossed in character building. Is it wrong to enlist the help of Shakespeare and Plato in this difficult task? But if that’s all that young readers do, then narcissism (Should I emulate Tybalt or Mercutio? If I liberate my soul from dependence on my body, as the Phaedo suggests, can I still have sex with Tiffany?) trumps aesthetics, and great books are reduced, by a process that trims away all the most beautiful parts, to self-help manuals.

–Anne Fadiman
from “Procrustes and the Culture Wars”
found in At Large and At Small: Familiar Essays

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I’m convinced that the variety of contemporary poetry scenes and the poems that emerge from them provide clear evidence that poetry is not only alive and well, but more vital than ever thanks to blogs and other forms of powerful personal publishing and social networks allowing poets to discover and connect with one another in ways a generation before couldn’t even dream of.

Despite the diversity, my own tastes remain largely mainstream. I can’t find a way in to many “post-avant” poems, which partially explains why I used to feel cheated by them. When I considered how *I* might write such poems, the best I could come up with was an intuitive assemblage, riffing on words, navigating by connotation alone. At worst I imagined these poems as the hermetic products of a wholly personal randomness, words unworked, their authors stopping at the point of “it means to me,” while I see the work of poetry as fashioning the gift– that can only be a gift if it can be given away, and that must begin wth the author giving that gift to me.

There’s an essential selfishness in my own assumptions. If I don’t understand a poem, eventually I start thinking of it as a sham, a ruse, a trick, rather than suppose the existence of a poetry I just don’t get. But if I accept that the atonal (relative to tradition) music of an avant garde jazz musician has something more behind and in it than the similar sounds made by a beginning saxophone player as I once was, even if I enjoy listening to it about as much, and even if the exact nature of the difference between the two is unclear and to some extent a matter of faith, then it’s not just charitable but more sensible– and perhaps obligatory– to assume that the lack of art I perceive lies not in the maker by in myself.

But how to find that way in? Surely everyone– except William Logan and a similar embittered few who have given in to the slight, reductive comforts of the committed curmudgeon– would rather discover the power of a piece of art than revel in (or resent) its ineffectiveness. I’m eager to find my way to the work, and willing to put my shoulder into doing so, but I don’t have the vocabulary or a handhold among the fundamentals of enough strength to pull myself along. Much of the poetry that continues to mystify me is made of the same materials as the poems I enjoy, but formed in some mysterious forge into an inexplicable stuff so other to me that my reading of it becomes like sustained reading in a foreign language without the benefit of a teacher, bilingual friend or Rosetta stone. a fraction of beautiful music might emerge occasionally from my interpretive butchery, but not enough…

Maybe I should get it and don’t, end of story. But I can’t help wishing I had some help. I clearly recognize the danger posed by thoughtless education and anthologizing, and the damage that can occur when a work of art is reduced to an object lesson, a few surface levels illuminated and the rest ignored until it’s frozen forever into the shape of a popularized, received reading serving as a cultural artifact (Frost anyone?). But someone who loves a poem can share something of that love without smothering either. That nothing approaching the whole, rich existence of a piece can’t be explicated for someone else doesn’t necessarily devalue what can be communicated. If anything it *heightens* the value of the small fraction that can be shared because of its rarity and it creates a currency the new reader can mine from poem to build creations of their own, be they in the shape of reading or writing or both.

Where are the teachers? To whom does a beginner bring his beginner’s mind to learn this new language? Many of the post-avant artists– exhibiting a trait of the avant-garde– are clear about, and take rightful pride in, the value of their part in creating something new and transformative. A significant part of that value derives from how (and how much) their work breaks with inherited conventions and where their work can be located on some mythical map of the poetry cosmos.

This means I need a lot more help finding my way inside the poetry of Bruce Smith and Clark Coolidge than I do Philip Levine or Jack Gilbert. I’ve plenty of handle on Charles Simic, but Jack Spicer remains somewhere beyond enigmatic. I need fewer people telling me who their poetic opposition is and what these new poetries aren’t, and don’t desire to do, and more willing to show me something of what they choose to do and what they are. The negative space around these poetries– whether a product of indifference or hostility or inattention– yields a poem’s position without definition, locates its body in a general relation to poems I understand without providing any clarity about what it is.

I know much can’t be taught. Some things that can be taught arguably shouldn’t be. And some things that can’t shouldn’t be attempted lest the poem end up as dead as Twain’s vivisected frog. But that leaves a lot of room for those who possess the gift of new poetry to give the gift of others in return. One of the greatest things about art is that appreciation, aesthetics and enjoyment are part of an economy of abundance without meaningful counterfeiting. Giving our gifts away increases the gifts we possess.

I dream too of a dream anthology with a true selection from the contemporary scene, even as a I recognize that by definition such an anthology could never be truly contemporaneous. I can go to any library or bookstore and find numerous examples of anthologies of mainstream works up to the present day, but scouring the web with my best Google-fu comes to nothing. For the initiated, the web of poetry blogs and innovative publications is a vast anthology, but for the uninitiated it’s a bewildering array objects trapped behind the clearest glass.

Years ago I asked Ron Silliman what he thought should be in a dream anthology of the post-avant and friends, one from which wandering fools like myself could read and from the knowing be taught. He responded quickly that it was an interesting idea he would have to think about. I guess he’s still thinking. I’m certainly still waiting.