Looking for the Door
June 25, 2009
[wow, this post got mangled somehow. I've fixed it. I think.]
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.
Tags:
avant garde, poetics, poetry, post-avant, reading
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June 26th, 2009 at 12:21 pm
From previous chats I know we agree on a lot of this (though I am probably less generous and more cynical than you, at least outwardly so, though I like to think I’m open to be proven wrong).
My one disagreement is with the sentence, “Despite the diversity, my own tastes remain largely mainstream.” which suggests that the “mainstream” contains little if any diversity.
This minor disagreement, of course, may hinge upon one’s definition of “mainstream”.
June 26th, 2009 at 1:42 pm
I think it’s definitional… I’m not meaning to say that mainstream has no diversity (I don’t think that’s what I said), but to my mind the breadth of the mainstream is a small part of the overall spectrum that I am referring to with the word “diversity” in that sentence.
Every “school” or whatchmacallit has diversity within itself. We/they might argue the relative size of the section that is called mainstream, but certainly there is diversity within it.
One way I think of the world of poetry is as a kind of spectrum. On one far end is classical and traditional on the other end the avant-garde (in function, not the particularly named movement of the past… I don’t think the post-avant is actually post- anything because I don’t consider the avant garde to be a bounded movement as “modernism” is usually considered). Somewhere in the middle, whether covering a little to the left or right or in total pushed a bit to one side or another, depending on one’s definition, is what I consider mainstream. Within it is a diverse range of poetry, but the entire range of mainstream isn’t necessarily even a majority of the entire spectrum.
And, in practice, what appears on the avant garde side filters down, eventually and in a filtered kind of form, into the mainstream and over time becomes part of the traditional. At heart of the post-avant argument is their contention that what I consider mainstream is really just a rehash of the traditional rather than, as I see it, a fluid, porous space.
Generosity is something I am learning, in part because I have spent a significant amount of effort interacting with post-avant poets in different ways. I can’t maintain my earlier feelings that they are generally pranksters or suffering from a mass delusion or simply taking advantage of a system where they can find a social and cultural reward through taking on appearances. It doesn’t mean I have to love or even like most of it. But I have to believe– based on all of my other aesthetic experiences– that where I am missing something, a good part of the “fault” lies with me.
Really, that large groups of people can come to any aesthetic agreement at all is a kind of miracle, all things considered… I can’t ignore the number of smart people “over there” just because I don’t get (much of) it.
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July 21st, 2009 at 5:18 am
If I may be so bold, I’d like to offer a “door” into post-avant poetry: the poetic turn.
The turn, or volta, is at the heart not only of the sonnet tradition but it is employed in a whole host of popular mainstream poems. (Billy Collins loves the turn–it’s no wonder that Poetry 180 is subtitled A Turning back to Poetry.) However, the turn also is vital in a number of post-avant poems and for a number of post-avant poets. Jorie Graham has made significant reference to the turn, and Hank Lazer’s essay (“Lyricisim of the Swerve”) on Rae Armantrout focuses on the turn in Armantrout’s poetry.
The turn won’t magically decipher the post-avant, but I do think that knowing more about the turn helps to make the post-avant more accessible–it’s one door.
July 21st, 2009 at 6:13 am
Thanks, Michael. I’ll check out the Graham (though her poetry raises my hackles rather quickly) and the essay– I’ve enjoyed some of Armantrout’s work. Of course the Sillimanites don’t consider her post-avant enough, but that’s a different discussion…
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