Comments on: The End of History

By: Rene

Rene — Thu, 06 Mar 2008 06:58:49 +0000

To claim that “anything is art” post-Duchamp, as if this were a definitive and monolithic stance shared by everyone in the art world seems spurious. Isn’t that an ongoing conversation?–in art and in poetry. And isn’t the conversation part of the excitement? I doubt flarf would be as interesting if the whole world could come to a boring consensus that flarf is the exact equivalent to the Ode to a Grecian Urn. Same goes for the toilet.
I teach an introductory poetry course filled mostly with students who are writing their first poems ever. Questioning what a poem is, and why, is a discussion that comes up with frequency in class. I find it hard to believe that either I or my students represent an avant-garde flank of poetry, yet we find a lot to argue about on the subject. No one ever comes up with a definition–who cares about that?–but if the question can challenge our practice–everyone’s practice–so much the better.
Perhaps Goldsmith finds the very question–”what is a poem?”–offensive. If not, why object to the dialogue? It’s didactic, not to mention oppressive, to insist that there’s only one legitimate answer–even if that answer is “anything.”

By: shanna

shanna — Tue, 01 May 2007 16:31:30 +0000

Hi Kenneth. When you say it’s an untenable position “that certain things are poetry and that certain things are not” I think that’s right on, and I’d agree that there are so-called “experimental” or “avant-garde” poets who are just as conservative or rigid, in their own way, as (for instance) any new formalist or personal-lyricist. Whether it’s uncreative writing, or an exploration of inappropriate material (as in flarf, or jennifer knox or tao lin or linh dinh or gabe gudding), I find poets who are working directly against the rather fusty definitions of what makes a poem and what belongs in a poem the most interesting. I think the real exciting stuff happens not in the objection “that shouldn’t be there!” but in the question “what the hell is that doing there.” Granted, that’s asking readers to be adventurous, but then, readers are.
I’ll probably never get truly tired of reading a well-written poem, whether or not it is metered or could be a traditional lyric, or whatever, but there are so many other things to be done, and it’s exciting to watch poets tilt at the taboos. It seems self-limiting not to wonder what would happen if this or that “bad idea” or “inappropriate” or “unpoetic” element entered in. Poetry’s not a bronzed artifact, but a growing thing.
I’m digging the new blog format here, by the way. The back and forth between the contribs is a neat dynamic.

By: Tod Marshall

Tod Marshall — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 20:14:34 +0000

Or sometimes we see those conflicting impulses in the same person: Cid Corman (friend of Lorine), driven to reject the American poetry scene to pursue poetry (with a cap P) in Kyoto (thus, ostensibly, in isolation, a “private woods”) but simultaneously writing thousands of letters and going to some length to see that his poetry reached the mowed lawns of the West.

By: emily warn

emily warn — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 19:44:32 +0000

I was walking along this sunny Sunday morning in Seattle wondering whether Kenneth had solved the poetry wars or had simply announced another bloodless abstraction antithetical to poetry when I looked up and saw a man and woman headed toward me, holding hands and pushing a lawnmower. They were causally but smartly dressed as if they were coming from a lazy brunch. Just as we were about to pass each other, the man shoved the mower onto a wide, very long parking strip where it instantly stopped in tall grass packed with dandelions gone to seed–any jiggling and they would fly away. The man and woman stood there staring at the machine. “You’re doomed,” I said. “Well, she said, “At least we got a lawnmower.”
This made me think of Lorine Niedecker’s poem….
“A lawnmower’s one of the babies I’d have
if they’d give me a job and I didn’t get bombed
in the high grass
by the private woods. Getting so
when I look off my space I see waste
I’d like to mow.”
(from New Goose poems)
In this snippet of a poem, Niedecker pulls off a difficult heist. The entire poem is a supposed quote from one of her rural Wisconsin neighbors. This short speech documents how poverty wastes lives, and yet it also manages to gloat: our lives might be impoverished but we resist the constraints of the marketplace–no lawnmowers here. Instead of valuing the acquisition of private goods; the speaker, and by implication anyone who lives a life dedicated to poetry or the arts, value the possibilities of uselessness: “I see waste/I’d like to mow.”
I’ve often thought this day-dreamy communion in the “high grass/by the private woods” is the source that poets draw from to change the art form. We submerge ourselves in real conditions, in a locale and its clan (say the Lower East Side, Orange County, or Jamaica), and in a symbolic tradition, (say a religion, spy movies, jazz, English literature, collecting robots, or visual arts). Out of this mix we manufacture poems that take their place in poetry and history, and influence what comes next. There is no end.
While writing this a loud voice starts shouting—but that’s not true for all poetry. And another voice starts that tedious wondering about what is and is not a poem. As Kenneth points out: “Compared to the art world where, after Duchamp, anything can be art, there’s a sense that in poetry world — even within more innovative camps — that certain things are poetry and that certain things are not.”
What if because of the sheer number of poetic variants we can no longer define it? If all those variants claim to be poetry does that make poetry a borg, or the opposite of a borg? Instead of worrying about what it is, what if we realized that all the variants constitute one poem? This would be a similar to how post-human theorists view consciousness as a “society of mind” in which “a collection of autonomous agents each runs its “own program.”
“In these models consciousness, far from seen as the seat of identity, is one modular program among many. It is distinguished by the continuous monologue it spins to create an illusion of a coherent and unified self. Alongside this monologue other modules are running their own programs, which often contradict the conclusions of the consciousness module.” (N. Katherine Hayles, “The Posthuman Body: Inscription and Incorporation in Galatea 2.2 and Snow Crush)
In this particular poem Niedecker rejects ambition–the need to build a reputation based on subjectivity–the “private woods”–(A nod to John Clare’s poems protesting against Enclosure?) and offers her poetry as a freed space, a commons. And yet for encouragement and comraderie, she depended on Zukiofsky, the epitome of a NY literatti, engaged in defining poetry and reputations–the recluse and the schmoozer were indispenable to each other.

By: Brian Hadd

Brian Hadd — Mon, 30 Apr 2007 18:17:18 +0000

Deconstruction made me think, how is poetic license available now. Can I begin another sentence? Will I want an idea to begin or end or continuing what can come next? The Hood Company