The Fast Food Analogy
April 27, 2005
This is my problem with the “fast food analogy” of art (Josh Corey invoked it regarding his discriminating palate for difficult poetry, I’ve used it to talk about consumption of quality and pop music): it implies a hierarchy that only exists in one’s imagination, most likely an artifact of the common path by which we come to appreciate the “good”– or, more accurately, the “current”– stuff.
Most people follow a similar path through/to poetry– they get some exposure to old “classics,” followed by a dose of relatively contemporary SOQ or OVC or whatever the cool kids are calling it nowadays, and if they are “lucky” they get exposed to some of what is currently in opposition to that group, and if they are luckier still they are supported well enough by those who have (or at least claim to have) understanding of these new kinds of poetries to help them understand just a bit of what is going on. Some take to it and revel in it, others cry with bewilderment that the emperor has no clothes, some slackers like myself ride the fence.
Three problems:
1) This sequence doesn’t create a hierarchy of quality as people who have followed it would like to think. Indeed, if people like Jonathan are right (I don’t believe he *is*), then modern undergrads and other young people will be able to make more sense of post-avant poetries, being situated in their contexts. If that’s the case, then they will have yet before them the discovery of all the wonderful poets they have missed from the past… with no presumption that this makes the oldest poets better either. It just makes their discovery newer. The passage of time confers no particular quality unless one is caught up in the “cult of the new” which I have described here before.
2) The SOQOVC is a contemporaneous style, not a historical movement. There is still good work being done there. I still find new poems which do something to my heart and soul in publications that might not be official organs like APR or Poetry, but which are clearly not in the Avant Garde. Which leads me to:
3) Why the need to don blinders? I will always love Ray Carver’s poetry. I like a lot of Rae Armentrout’s work. It’s OK to enjoy Ray *and* Rae. I’m the last person to invoke the feeble relativism that everything is this way– I don’t believe that every poet is good, that every child is special, or that we shouldn’t keep scores in soccer games– but these poets were/are both good, just different.
I don’t see anything particularly great about an evolution in one’s poetics which is exclusionary. Those who follow this path may momentarily see themselves as the most beautiful poetic creatures, but their speciality is what will ultimately doom them to a short branch in the fossil record. They are evolving themselves right out of the ability to breath the poetic air.
The junk food analogy tries to belittle that which was meat and milk before in order to elevate the speaker. But it’s an illusion. Keats isn’t junk food even if your own affinities have changed. A hot dog will still best a steak in many contexts.
The more I read people like Silliman and his defenders and then Bill Knott and his defenders, the more I realize that this argument isn’t about poetry at all. It’s about pride and self-esteem. It’s about elevating oneself above others, one’s taste above others, one’s completely coincidental time and context above others. And the longer and more repetitious the argument becomes, the less and less about any kind of art or appreciation or beauty it becomes. It’s about who does or doesn’t get a seat at their table to share in the taste of their discriminating palates…
Tags:
Poetry and Poetics
content rss
April 27th, 2005 at 12:21 pm
This makes sense to me, Chris. I’m starting to think differently & am no longer that creature you mentioned, but I think as a young writer I’ve tried some different “ideas” on. I like your approach. It’s a confusing issue, one that will no doubt fill many pages before it’s “over.”
April 27th, 2005 at 12:30 pm
You mention Ray Carver and Rae Armantrout in the same breath as people you can both appreciate: well, what can I say to that but good for you? There was a time when I liked Carver’s poetry a great deal, but that happened to be a time when my knowledge of what was actually out there in terms of contemporary poetry was comparatively miniscule. Now that I’ve read around a bit, I stll have some affection for a few of Carver’s poems, but on the whole I’ve come to find his work sentimental and derivative. Incidentally, I didn’t claim that contemporary post-avant stuff is “better” than Shakespeare just because students might find it easier to access, nor do I think that anyone with a serious interest in poetry in English can afford to pass up acquaintance with Shakespeare, Marvell, Milton, Pope, Wordsworth, Keats (using him to counter my “junk food” analogy just goes to show how little you know about me: I adore Keats), Browning, Tennyson, Whitman, Dickinson, etc., etc., right up to Robert Lowell and Sylvia Plath–i.e., the generally accepted spine of the canon. In fact, I think my notion of poetry is much more inclusive than you realize: my problem with the way poetry is taught and talked about in mainstream organs is the vast array of (mostly postwar) poetries excluded because these writers and editors don’t know about them and haven’t bothered to find out. Many more people know about Ray Carver’s poetry than they do Rae Armantrout’s and I think that’s a shame, because not only is Armantrout a better poet, but she’s a link to a world of poetry more multifaceted than any dreamed of in the Times Book Review’s philosophy. When I first discovered small press poetry, much of it with an experimental bent, it was like discovering a second sun–one that has come to blaze much more brightly than the first. I’m more interested in investigating that astral body, now. As for the sunspots and flares put up by the old sun, well, they’re simply impossible to miss–blinders, even if desirable, wouldn’t help. It’s true that many avant-gardeners like to pretend that Pulitzers and poet laureates don’t exist, but I’m not one of those people: I still grit my teeth every time some dull or bloodless or even merely passable poet is praised to the skies while poets who actually have something to say and a remarkable way of saying it are ignored. It happens all the bloody time, and until it stops happening I’m going to spend most of my critical attention on redressing the imbalance.
I find it strange that those of us interested in experimental poetry should be seen as some kind of high school clique perpetuating a myth of our own coolness; if anything, we’re a bunch of nerds with mimeograph machines sniping at the A-crowd that controls the yearbook, the school newspaper, and the prom decorations committee. But Chris, if you’re really interested in seeing what we’re up to in the basement, we’ll never hold you down and give you a noogie—or, what is more to the point, pretend as the cheerleaders do that you simply don’t exist.
April 27th, 2005 at 4:31 pm
I guess that’s the vexing issue I just can’t figure out. Rae Armantrout *isn’t* a better poet than Ray Carver– they are writing different kinds of poetries. And, for the way that they write, they are pretty damn good examples.
I have read a lot and pretty widely, and I don’t understand the need to put down that which came before. Or, more precisely, how you make the distinction between those you put down and those you don’t.
That’s *precisely* why I picked Keats– because you have admitted your affection for him before (I am a relatively close reader, give me a little credit) and made clear he was excluded in some way from this valuation process.
So, is Rae Armantrout better than Keats? Worse? Or is thre really not much point in comparison? To my mind, the difference between Carver and Armantrout (in terms of WHAT they are doing, not quality) is significant, as clearly is the difference between Armantrout and Keats. Where is your distinction coming from?
And if your position is more inclusive than I know, then I can think of only two people to blame– and I’ve shouldered more than my share of that particular burden already. All I can go by is what you SAY.
Incidentally, if you see much difference between the exclusivity of the post-avant and the exclusivity of the jock crowd that just goes to demonstrate your insiderness. Claiming to be different doesn’t make it so. Like I said, it’s not really about poetry, it’s about recognition. Ron Silliman and others exult in it just as much as the frat house boys and championship quarterbacks do/did.
April 28th, 2005 at 4:24 am
It’s important to remember, I think, that we tend to receive poetry from other eras differently than we do contemporary stuff. Although Keats may have interesting and useful things to say about the conditions of an emerging modernity (circa 1800) that we are still in the grip of, we aren’t going to go to him for the same kind of “news” (to re-invoke WCW’s famous remark) that we seek from someone who’s writing out of the same historical conditions we ourselves are experiencing. When I read contemporary work, I am far more acutely tuned to its context (various institutional frameworks, friends & influences on the particular poet,identity categories such as race and sexual orientation, etc.) than I can be to something I chiefly know from the Norton Anthology. (Though of course I profit a great deal when reading Keats’ poems from also reading his letters, in which I learn both about his evolving poetics and his struggles to establish himself within a critical environment that was often hostile to him.) It’s my expanding knowledge of those contexts and the impact they have on my experience of the poem that changed in the move from Ray to Rae. But that move is also personal to my experience: in my twenties, I was attracted to poems by men with drinking problems and a romantic notion of the writer’s vocation: Carver, James Wright, Richard Hugo were a sort of trinity for me. My adolescent need for tough-talking yet vulnerable male heroes has faded somewhat, while my experience of poetic possibilities has expanded exponentially. Ironically, it’s only now that I can read the poets mentioned above with a real sense of differentiation between them. As you know, I still esteem Hugo rather highly because of his gorgeously rocky musical rhythms, and because he’s so brutally honest about his self-loathing. Wright has faded a lot for me because anecdotal poetry doesn’t stand up too well to second and third readiings; still, I will always love “Lying on a Hammock on Wiliam Duffy’s Farrm….” Carver is the least of these three as a poet but he’s a hell of a storyteller; there will always be room for a copy of Cathedral on my bookshelves. Yes, Rae and Ray are writing different kinds of poetries, but a) I think Ray’s kind is fairly limited in its range and b) within the category of his kind he’s not as good as Hugo or Wright. Which is not to say that Armantrout’s poetry isn’t also somewhat limited: thank god not everyone writes in short, elliptical lines! But within the circle of her affiliations there’s a MUCH wider range of poetic forms and activities than I see in the Carver cluster I’ve sketched above.
As for poetry vs. recognition, they’re not separable for me. Anyone who writes poetry but truly isn’t interested in recognition is not someone whose poetry I’m likely to read, for the simple reason that they’re not going to publish it. I think it’s naive to demand that people stop associating with each other and taking pleasure in that association, a pleasure in part derived from a sense of difference. Doesn’t every passionate young reader feel somewhat alienated growing up, and doesn’t she revel in discovering authors who will, quite literally, keep company with her? Isn’t it as readers that we make these choices–that we encounter a book of poetry or a magazine somewhere and read it and in some way recognize a piece of ourselves that we thought was an incommunicable secret? I think that’s a great thing, maybe even the closest we’re likely to get to a utopian experience of community, and I think it’s a great thing when poets begin to pursue that experience actively rather than passively. You seem to feel excluded from the community I feel myself to be a part of, but I don’t fully understand why. If you want to be a part of it, the door opens the minute you engage with one of its poems. If you don’t want to be a part of it, why should it concern you?
April 28th, 2005 at 6:19 am
I guess I see a difference between wanting to share and self-aggrandizement. By your position, the frat house consigliere should be admired for wanting to elevate himself, no matter how brutally. I feel excluded from the community not because of a shared passion, but because so many people speaking out of the post-avant crowd seem to feel a need to put down at least as much (if not more) than they support. It bothers me only a *little* that you have lost your affection for Carver (it saddens me that you have essentially trained yourself out of the capacity to recognize some moving work, but I’m glad his fiction still has a place– despite the fact that fiction itself has been moved down to the most hidden shelf in your library
, but it bothers me much more that the post avant crowd feels it necessary to demean other traditions and mischaracterize not just the artists who work/worked in it, but those people for whom some of these authors are still held dear.
At first I attributed it to bitterness at being excluded, but the more I watch someone like Silliman and his many adherents work, their poetics of divisiveness seems designed to be just as exclusionary– if not more– than the poets and readers they continue to descry.
If turning up one’s nose at whatever poet is the target of the day, attacking that poet and their readers, creating a partially false history of division in order to support one’s own style of work, and then essentially saying that unless you choose to admire ONLY their chosen works isn’t cliquishness of the highest order, then I don’t know what is…
Maybe I’m just ultra-sensitive to it because– as I’ve said– I don’t understand the need to discard one’s former affections in order to make room for new ones (apparently I have an almost limitless stack in which to store such things– I’m sorry for those who don’t and must “make room” somehow). But it seems exceedingly rare that a post avant commentator can talk positively about something they like without gratuitously bringing in some negative comment about another group or school. A poetics of differentiation I can live with– I think it takes care of itself, don’t you?– but one of division is just wrong, and Ron and the Sillimanites exhibit this tendency in spades.
Note that I don’t cast YOU in that role– I’ve given up on even trying to discuss it with many and I feel much better for it. But there are still people out there whose thinking I admire and it vexes me to feel at such odds for no obvious reason.
May 25th, 2005 at 5:53 pm
Amen, brother. It’s tiresome, this holier-than-thou poetic. Smacks of the last-immigrant phenomenon–”if someone new comes along, then MY piece of the pie will get smaller!”
Robin
May 31st, 2005 at 10:52 am
great page…im sure i’ll come back…best regards