Emily Warn asked me to re-post my entry on the Chicago Review articles by Young/Spahr and Ashton so it can appear alongside hers and Alicia’s. I just want to add a caveat: I wrote this post under the assumption that the CR articles to which it refers would be online. They are not. I’m not sure how much sense this post will make to you unless you have read those articles, so please keep that in mind as you read my argument (below the fold) that the avant-garde is more sexist than the mainstream. You can look at the chart, at any rate, to see some evidence for my claim. Thanks for reading.
The issue of unequitable representation wouldn’t exist if women themselves a) threw more money around poetry and b) hustled more (editing, pitching, essaying). This very site is named for Harriet Monroe, the founder of Poetry magazine; it is funded by Ruth Lilly’s bequest. The editors who solicited my work for this site have been women. So my presence here does not feel like an accident, much less a demographic token. But among the more academic and avant-garde publications, which are supposedly more progressive and ideologically transparent, only a quarter to a third of contributors are women.
Women, it has been said over and over, are shy of blanketing editors with submissions. I myself am guilty of this – I haven’t knocked on any new doors all year (though I have responded to solicitations). Most women I know who withhold their work are proud of not hustling, not playing the game, keeping themselves pure.
In addition, poets intensely aware of the “innovative tradition” are by definition conflicted about success and notions of purity. I remember a pseudonymous female commenter congratulating me on being co-opted when I first appeared on the Poetry Foundation website. (But plenty of experimental poets had chequered histories, so to speak. Several got their start at Harvard. Objectivists published in Poetry magazine. Language Poets have Pews.)
Female reticence is a quirk; it’s the other part that constitutes what the Materialists (Materialians? Materi-alienists?) like to call “a system.” Hence my contention that the community has created a subeconomy of scarcity (“innovative”) in the larger economy of scarcity (poetry). Scarcity of love and attention in addition to scarcity of award monies and prestigious publication. The “avant-garde” community, drawing from anti-bourgeois, anti-individualist leftist theory, disparages the reward system of the “mainstream” and replaces it with something far more nebulous and neurotic: Are people talking about you? And so we have poets like Elizabeth Treadwell sniping at Ron Silliman for praising Pattie McCarthy. Is this what it’s come to? With our high-minded ideals, we gamble on writing the poetry of the future, only to break down in public when Ron Silliman endorses another female poet working in near obscurity? Am I the only one who thinks that was not exactly a “feminist intervention,” but a sign of madness bubbling up from the insular temple of Small Press Traffic?
I was first put onto the articles by Young, Spahr and Ashton by Brent Cunningham here. I had suggested in this comment thread that Christian Bok’s agenda for innovation sounded fairly masculinist to me. (His list of friends and influences are all men.) My dis-ease found a correlative in Jennifer Scappettone’s complaint that “I’ve been subjected to hours-long conversations or seminars about literature and poetry in which not a single woman was mentioned as agent or matrix of influence.” There are and have been women practitioners of the avant-garde, better ones than Steve McCaffery, and it is dispiriting not to see them listed with the same naturalness that Steve Burt refers to Lorine Neidecker or Denise Riley. But was I too succumbing to neurosis by taking offense? The obvious antidote would be to give Steve Burt more of my attention and Christian Bok less.
At the same time, I was thinking, some of the most famous innovative women poets are more lyric than anti-lyric: Barbara Guest, Fanny Howe, Susan Howe, Jennifer Moxley, Eleni Sikelianos. This complicates their reception, because the most radical avant-garde is supposed to be anti-lyric above all else (including original). Eventually, we realize, there is no innovative poetry; just “innovative poetries,” with some groups largely invisible to other groups. As groups divide and subdivide, neurosis multiplies.
And so to Ashton’s claim, that the subgrouping of innovative poetry into “women’s innovative poetry” is a categorical chimera. I could have agreed with her. But I now doubt the wisdom of identifying with “innovative poetics” at all, both because I’m more interested in “poems” than “poetry” (an increasingly critical distinction), and because I’m female. For who decides what innovative is? Judging by the blogs, men do. See here, here, here, here, here, here, here, here, and here. (I confess, a few of the comment threads are so indecipherable to me that I have come to the conclusion that when some men argue with each other, they are pretending to understand what the other is saying, and each accepts this fiction because it is so flattering to be argued with.) By this token, the old-school feminist poetry is looking better and better!
A poetic practice that holds us hostage to vague pecking orders and passive-aggressive exclusions is one that abets our worst tendencies, turns underdogs into police dogs, and uses progressive politics as a double bind. Women serious about poems must eventually reject this model in which a closed community offers deliverance from scarcity by positing more scarcity. Otherwise, we are going to have a long boustrophedon to hoe.
Thanks so much for this — I have been interested in what you’ve been saying on all this for the past months…
Posted By: Jennifer on November 4, 2007 at 8:50 amHow great — the idea that opposite lines would be read in opposite directions!
I have been thinking about this idea you started this piece with quite a bit lately. For one thing I’ve just started publishing and editing, and am continually discouraged by the fact that submissions come in from strong and well established male poets, while women are much harder to track down and to solicit from. I’ve found this is true of white writers as well… I’m beginning to think that the position of privilege allows for the freedom — maybe to take risks on journals — also as you say to barrage the best (and the luxury to barrage the new). Don’t get me wrong, I’m grateful for the strong submissions wherever they come from, but have wondered where are the women…
There was an interesting article in the Times last weekend about women and their role in their standing in the workplace. It too points out the fact that women withhold and don’t ask for as much.(Interesting side question — what is this article doing in the fashion section of the paper?)
I do think there is something to a difference between the way women and men write — I’ve been thinking about this idea for the last few years, and the conversation you referred to here reminded me of it when I first read it. I think that women often write the way that they participate — around corners and with codes and in a language of secret communication that has been necessary as the men have dominated the landscape. Also it’s the language of caretaking (as un-PC as it may sound) — softening obscuring but still cutting and hard within the obscurity. I think that this style of writing is disrespected and discouraged by many editors, publishers, teachers and writers. It would be interesting to look at acceptance rates; also to look at the liberties editors take with the work of women and men side by side. So I think women’s poetics does often get sent back for these reasons — I’ve heard friends, and accomplished ones, talking about the need to change their writing or languish… it can’t all be that we are coy.
Thanks for the thinking!
Jennifer
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Thanks for your response, Jennifer, and kudos to you for publishing and editing. I did see that depressing NYT article (and duly noted its burial in the Styles section. I hate the Styles section).
Posted By: Ange on November 4, 2007 at 8:51 amI wouldn’t want to make big pronouncements on the differences between men & women’s writing (it’s too hotly contested — and I’m not writing a Ph.D.), but I tentatively agree that something is different. I keep coming back to the example of Barbara Guest. She seems quintessentially feminine somehow, and was “overlooked” for so long.
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Hear hear for the call for “poems, not poetry!” And you’re right — such a call is anti-avant. “Poetry not poems!” is practically a quote from Clayton Eshleman, referring to the practice of Olson and Artaud, and, by extension, his own.
Posted By: john on November 4, 2007 at 8:52 amAnti-lyric is a species of lyric. I hold with lyric theorist/historian W. R. Johnson, who argues that lyric can take various forms:
* The personal I/Thou lyric in which the poet loves or hates the particular person being addressed;
* The choral lyric in which the community speaks;
* The meditative lyric in which the poet soliloquizes to herself or himself.
The anti-lyricists *pretend* to be choral lyricists (”the entire universe speaks through my poem”), but are really meditative lyricists. If their anti-lyrics do not attempt to depict a meditating consciousness, they at the very least provide objects for meditation without conventional narrative or drama.
Many of the anti-lyricists disguise their lyrics by grafting them into long, long poems. But the American longpoem (as Rexroth argued) tends to be a medley of lyric moments.
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I didn’t mean to characterize “Women’s Poetry,” or the difference between genders of writers. I miswrote. What I meant is that I think there is a specific way that women — some women, sometimes — write. A way that encompasses some inherently female experience. A way that is specifically discouraged. Guest being exactly in the genre. Thanks!
Posted By: Jennifer on November 4, 2007 at 8:53 amReport this comment
Well I have to admit, this whole discussion is making me reconsider my “screw it, I’m just publishing poems on my blog from now on” position from earlier this year.
Posted By: Jilly on November 4, 2007 at 8:55 amAnd I’m glad I’m not the only one who is confounded by the comments on some blogs, which make me feel sometimes that I am too stupid to be a poet / illegitimate.
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Hi Ange –
Posted By: Simon DeDeo on November 4, 2007 at 10:22 amI think your response here is raw and I think rawness is what this discussion needs. I made some remarks of my own in an open letter here. Yes, that’s another male blogger here.
I don’t want to spoil the Chicago Review’s revenue stream, but if people want they can use anonymouse.org to disguise their IP address and get the “Europe-only” copy here. You just have to promise to buy a real copy too. There’s plenty of great stuff in the issue, and it’s well worth the price.
One of the interesting footnotes in the original article deals with the question of whether the experiences of sexism (or racism, etc.) drive women towards a particular kind of lyric, heavy on narrative, etc. etc. The drive to report. I just don’t think this is valid (it’s not a point J & S touch.) I do think that male-dominanted critical scenes — not the avant garde, this time — do tend to reward a particular kind of feminine poetry, and I think it’s a very convoluted terrain.
There’s also the question of criticism versus poetry — I personally take some pretty avant gardy stands in my critical work, but my poetic production is rather conservative, at least, it probably wouldn’t pass muster with the “comment fields” that both Jilly and I find somewhat opaque.
Anyway, I elaborate on some of these issues in the open letter I reference above.
Yours,
Simon
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I’m reluctant to enter this particular fray–the kind that’s guarenteed to fill the comment boxes. But. I find it interesting/confusing that if I were to venture my own anecdotally evidenced guess on this topic, I would have said that the percentages are pretty even, all around. What is this based on–nothing but my own perception and that, of course, is always suspect when we’re dealing with cold hard facts. My perceptions (and in all honesty, might even have said that I thought the percentages were in the favor of women poets) only prove that we view matters from our own perspective–just as the anti-semite sees too many Jews in the media and the phil-semite sees too few. (The issue having to do more with defintions of “too few” and “too many.”) For this reason I do get somewhat nervous and uncomfortable with comments that tend to explain the low percentage of women published with intensely personal and idiosyncratic reasons. Yes, having a baby to care for exiles a writer to mindless realms from which it’s hard to take vacations. And yes, women have been socialized into less aggressive and pushy realms. (Though that doesn’t seem to stop several of them already promoting themselves as solutions to correct matters–right here in these comment boxes.) But yes, too, jobs that primary earners have can also deaden–how much can I (to make the political personal) really expect to write when I’m teaching 7 classes a semester/16 a year at a community college and also helping to raise 3 kids? I don’t know what the solution should be–I just opened two journals that sit next to my computer and the stats are such: Field–20 out 38 writers are female; Crab Orchard Review–33 out of 50, or 65%.
Posted By: myshkin2 on November 4, 2007 at 11:57 amReport this comment
“I do think that male-dominanted critical scenes — not the avant garde, this time — do tend to reward a particular kind of feminine poetry, and I think it’s a very convoluted terrain.”
Posted By: Ange on November 4, 2007 at 12:00 pmBut I’m saying the a-g is male-dominated and it does reward a particular kind of feminine poetry.
And male too, right? That’s the whole point. The a-g is all about telling you what to do, how to write, and whom to address. The unshakable faith in programs.
There are a lot of things to say about your own post at Rhubarb, but let me just say this: I was most intrigued by your position that “While the number of male modes (for whites — compare the treatment of Amiri Baraka to Fredrick Seidel) is broad to the point of freedom, it is, in my experience that women do not have this freedom.” Seidel is not considered an avant-gardist. If you want to look at some poetry by women that doesn’t adhere to the Cole Swenson mode (and Lauterbach, Welish and Berssenbrugge et al. — hey, I went to Brown after all: Swenson is a latecomer), you have to look outside the heavily policed borders of the a-g. I find, for instance, much of Maggie Nelson’s and Daisy Fried’s work refreshing and earthy and stylish and precise compared to anything you could find here. Yes, they’re narrative and they report, but so do I. It was good enough for Marianne Moore!
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Yes, sorry, I wasn’t aiming to contradict you there. Raising a separate issue re: outside the ag. And I wasn’t claiming that either Amiri or Fredrick were avant garde — trying to make a larger point about how poetry is received by the “world” (and if you want to talk about how the world receives poets, you generally have to talk about people outside the avant garde.) I also definitely want to make a distinction between Cole on the one hand and Anne L, Mei-Mei B on the other — I really evaluate their work as far more significant. (Welish I haven’t read.) I cover what I think are some of the essential differences between Cole and Mei-Mei in an essay here.
Posted By: Simon DeDeo on November 4, 2007 at 12:27 pmAll those caveats aside, I think you are hitting on an important point which is the programmatic nature of the avant garde (a mirror image of the demands that a woman, e.g., “testify” in a particular mode.) I really feel that this has been going on too long, and what I am hearing from you and others is — in part — that the procedures by which people are marked as avant garde or not (what I take, e.g., to be Jilly’s remarks on comment fields) are hurting women more than men.
Anyway, for the record, I think the “you must be this ^ doctrinal to ride the avant garde” is bogus in general. One of the important things you are saying here is that this bogusness is even more bogus than I thought.
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“But yes, too, jobs that primary earners have can also deaden–how much can I (to make the political personal) really expect to write when I’m teaching 7 classes a semester/16 a year at a community college and also helping to raise 3 kids?”
Posted By: Ange on November 4, 2007 at 12:36 pmI hear you. It’s not any easier for most men than it is for most women. The difficulties are just a bit different.
There’s a lot in our lives and work that personal anecdotes cannot account for. Alicia has doubts about the effect of domesticity on her writing; I don’t. Some women can’t write with their children around; I can. Who knows, maybe I’m in denial about how much more I’d get done if they weren’t around. But then why was I less than prolific when I was carefree in my twenties? Why do I write more now that I’m at home with baby shit on my hands than when I had a well-paid but sense-depriving office job?
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Thanks, Simon. It does get a lot off my chest.
Posted By: Ange on November 4, 2007 at 12:50 pmI do want to add one thing — amid all this talk of the programmatic nature of the avant-garde, I do think Ron Silliman retains the capacity to surprise. I don’t think he does it enough, but it’s obvious he responds aesthetically to poets like Graham Foust or Daisy Fried, and he responded aesthetically to my book even though he doesn’t look favorably on most NYS-identified writing.
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Ange– Yes, indeed, I haven’t been able to read the CR essay, but thanks for your brilliant post here. As I understand it, what you are saying essentially is, the “AG” is never ever going to be able to fully square up its numbers of women or “minorities” [and I'm more than willing to bet that, especially in the case of the avant garde, class also figures in this list in complex ways] brought into the discussion unless it is willing, as any true avant-garde should be, to change and rethink the very way the game is played, circumscribed, practised, organised, judged. In fact, that would be the whole point of such an exercise of inclusivity– to find and listen to outsiders well placed to move the whole shebang towards genuinely fresh ideas, boundaries and ways of doing things, not some vague feel-good demographic dream that seeks to preserve the business and its lineages as usual. This, as far as I can see, eventually applies to the “mainstream” as well– the better demographics of the mainstream indicate not that it is more open to change and transformation (I think) but rather that it is more organised around money and the persistence of institutions, that it relies on ideas already very widely circulated and sponsored, and that it promises, supposedly, a certain stability of income and career to those who are not able to take that for granted. (Even if, in practice, for every Niedecker–or for that matter Dorn–or Baraka–shut out of the avant, there is a Zora Neale Hurston shut out of the mainstream. I know I’m mixing many things up here, times, periods, etc, but still.)
Posted By: Vivek Narayanan on November 4, 2007 at 1:29 pmOf course where this all takes us next is your suggestions about the obscuring ways in which the battle between the “mainstream” and the “AG” is staged by certain (usually white, male, middle or upper class, anglo-american) narrators and cliques, and moreover to the notion that the AG produces, by now, within itself a mainstream and a periphery. [Is this what you mean by "scarcity within a scarcity"? I didn't quite understand that.] The mainstream of this avant garde is a very particular orthodoxy, of lineage first of all, but also of style, form and tone–not to mention ways of doing things, of congregation, community, argument, submission (strange word, with multiple echoes, when taken out of context), solicitation (even stranger word), publication, performance. The more it changes, the more it also finds ways of staying exactly the same.
On separate point–though related to the issue raised by your post and my gloss of it, I want to add to Simon’s list the question, where is the inclusion of writers from Africa, that is from the African continent? I mean, they speak English and French. How many poets from Africa have been included in all the years of the journals analysed here, or –the numbers would not be very different– anthologies of world poetry? I’m not saying the answer would be a simple one, but why is this an issue that never, ever, ever comes up even for debate or discussion? (Outside of Africa, that is). Think about it. Let’s.
Many thanks. I look forward to one day reading the CR essay. I think you all have opened up a big can of fat, juicy worms here. Worms like us.
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There’s a lot to think on and write about here, but I want to address Vivek’s last well-taken point about writers from Africa not appearing much in (presumably North American) journals. I’ve been trying for some time to get good poems in good translations from non-Anglophone Africa for Poetry, and the result is discouraging. Two prominent figures have declined to respond to our inquiries; putting the word out at Iowa’s famous “International Writing Program” failed to produce a single contact or submission, despite the kind assistance of its director; and several well-known poets haven’t (yet, I hope?) responded to invitations to translate work afresh. So the issue has certainly come up for discussion here, and I know it does, also, among our colleagues at other magazines. Now and then, a “special section” appears; but Vivek pointed out some of the problems with assembling a portfolio of poetry from India, and perhaps we’re running into analogous ones relating to poetry from Africa. That said, the search will continue.
Posted By: Don Share on November 4, 2007 at 3:12 pmReport this comment
Two raw thoughts popped to mind as I finished reading your eloquent polemic. Fist I thought. “To hell with avant-garde and post-avant pieties!” Clearly now the poet’s toolkit contains all possible combinations of sounds, schema, sight and meaning. A villanelle and a poem composed of an anagram of that same villanelle can be equally worthwhile. That is certainly not to say that history is somehow dead. Villanelles and anagrams will each carry their own semiotic baggage. That becomes part of the meaning of the poem. I’ve commented on this point more than once recently, but heck.
Posted By: Chris on November 5, 2007 at 12:00 amSillman has set himself up as a mandarin of new poetry, making pronouncements and coining labels, the usefulness of which is limited, to put it generously. I do read Silliman’s blog. It’s often pretty instructive, and he does go to the trouble of deflating some pieties in his turn. I’m thinking here of his 10/23 post in which he skewers Charles Simic and his recent Paris Review essay. No one should let Silliman or Simic get away with imposing their opinions on the world without robust debate.
Which brings me to the second thought. Aren’t women poets involving themselves in these debates with equal vigor? That just seems imperative to me. That is of course what you’re doing here, and it’s a great thing. It’s just wrong that the majority of voices in the discussion of poetics, or the directions poetry is taking, should be male. Poems and Poetry go hand-in-hand. It’s good if everyone gets in there and mixes it up now and again. It’s all part of being passionate about what you do.
I thought of a third point. We’re all trying to nurture greater interest in poetry generally, and increase readership. Vigorous, even heated discussion of all these matters contributes to that.
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Some guidelines for active po-bizzers :
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 5, 2007 at 8:27 am1. Those seeking utopia are usually looking for an excuse to treat others badly.
2. Most people, most of the time, are ignorant, obtuse and misguided.
3. Men usually look to other men as literary role models, women to other women. For this reason, they should give each other some slack when it comes to analyzing each other’s behavior. This is not to say that people of both sexes can’t get beyond such limitations.
4. In most spheres of human activity, in most parts of the world, women are exploited, oppressed, treated as 2nd-class citizens. But they still write very good poetry occasionally. If you’re an editor, and they send good poetry to you, publish it. (Same goes for men.)
.
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Chris said, “Clearly now the poet’s toolkit contains all possible combinations of sounds, schema, sight and meaning.”
Posted By: john on November 5, 2007 at 1:34 pmIt’s possible that new tools and new sounds may come along. Just off the top of my head, English spelling is limited in its communication of English oral communication. How would one spell the sound that happens when someone sticks out their tongue, holds it loosely in their lips, and blows? We call that sound a “raspberry,” and there’s no reason I couldn’t put that sound in a poem — except I can’t spell it! So new orthographic tools might come along.
But despite my cavil, Chris, you’re right. In olden days a glimpse of free verse was looked on as something perverse. Now, heaven knows, anything goes.
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“the AG produces, by now, within itself a mainstream and a periphery. [Is this what you mean by 'scarcity within a scarcity'? I didn't quite understand that.]”
Posted By: Ange on November 5, 2007 at 10:35 pmYes, Vivek, that’s what I meant. I don’t know how to improve on your analysis; it’s right on.
Chris, I do think it’s crucial for women to engage lustily in debate, and yet, there’s always the nagging doubt that this is all blah-blah, that all the talk obfuscates the “real poems.” I think lots of women — and some men — are suspicious of discourse. I can understand that. But it’s a gamble. I’m okay with gambling.
Henry, though — I just can’t agree that women are drawn to women as men are drawn to men. There are just so many more male than female precursors! Much as I love Marianne Moore, I can’t say she’s been more of an influence than Stevens. Or Williams. I’ve spent far more time with Duncan than Levertov (though I intend to correct that). God knows my name has been linked with Frank O’Hara’s more than any female poet. And, by the way, there’s an argument to be made that women and gay male poets are much more of an influence on each other than straight males are on either.
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ange mlinko
Posted By: Lanny Quarles on November 5, 2007 at 11:36 pmhinge of m’linkos or angelus
as if the linking of the copula had become leggo like
meaning links
angelic meaning links
or hinge of meaning links
or leaky meaning boat
if you move the m
mange linko
links between the mange
i think this is probably closest
to the state of affairs
in our ‘hare-works’
that mange being a patchy kind of ruin
somebody is trying to spruce up
graphomange links to itself, ist-elf
yep, names are holograms
sure as choo-choo buggies
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Ange, I knew you were going to say that (in response to my comment abotu role models) – and of course you’re right.
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 6, 2007 at 7:37 amHere’s a comment on this entire discussion which I posted at my blog :
“Much is being made on the Poetry Foundation blog (Harriet) over issues of sexism, fairness, marginalization etc. within both mainstream and “avant-garde” sectors of Poetry World. Lots of articulate braininess and high-octane critical thinking on full display.
As somebody writing on the extreme margins of the Marginal, I am sceptical, perhaps cynical about all this right & righteous thinking. I recognize that cynicism and curmudgeonliness is a self-defeating vicious circle (see Edmund Wilson’s essay on Ben Jonson’s “anal” personality, for a classic diagnosis of this feature of po-biz).
Nevertheless I can’t help thinking that this is one of those areas where the path of good intentions leads straight to, etc. Everything gets over-complicated (like most of our popular technology these days) when sociological analysis or a demand for justice tries to take people’s snobbery & pecking-orders and scheming ambitions & self-interest – as a whole – to the cleaners.
I guess my feeling is that these crummy behaviors will always be with us. And it’s part of the miracle & glory of the aesthetic experience itself to trump them all, without all the well-meant tinkering and interventions. Aesthetic response relies solely on personal and public taste. The art that pleases, informs and enlightens is the art that wins out in the end – because it’s what people are looking for.
This is just another way of saying that I have a great deal of naive faith in aesthetic detachment; the ordinary reader; the unknown interlocutor. Without that primary relationship between artist, art and audience – why bother with all those other games, all that social engineering? We have to have a baseline of trust that editors and publishers also have some dim sense of the basic aesthetic experience and encounter – and know how to capitalize on it, for better & worse.”
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Following absolutely no (as far as i can see) bitching about ‘male oppression’ in poetry from English poet-bloggers, and a never-ending cascade of salivation about it from America, and endless confusion on my part, i’m starting to think either America is one seriously sexist country (and i’ve lived in Ireland…), or the people there are more head-toasted than i thought. . . .
Posted By: Kevin Doran on November 6, 2007 at 9:21 amReport this comment
“Following absolutely no (as far as i can see) bitching about ‘male oppression’ in poetry from English poet-bloggers …”
Posted By: Anonymous on November 6, 2007 at 1:19 pmYou must not have seen this:
http://jacketmagazine.com/34/wagner-forum.shtml
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Thanks for that. They don’t seem to be bitching, or doing so freely through blog, but it’s a start. Interesting read, though came away little the wiser.
Posted By: Kevin Doran on November 6, 2007 at 5:57 pmReport this comment
In many of these comments I hear a kind of vague consensus or presumption I’d like to question. I hear it in Ange’s “The a-g is all about telling you what to do, how to write, and whom to address,” in Simon’s “the programmatic nature of the avant garde,” in Vivek’s “the AG produces, by now, within itself a mainstream and a periphery,” and etc. It might be phrased this way: “if the recent American avant garde (whoever that might be) ever was truly open and experimental and inventive (which it probably wasn’t) it has by now most certainly fallen victim to being as conventionalized, closed and rote as that which it supposedly critiques, if not moreso.”
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on November 7, 2007 at 1:01 pmLeaving aside some of the historical and philosophical assumptions in that position, one thing it seems to imply is that there is now a formal similarity, a conventionality, occurring in the poems the current avant gardists are producing. I’d be curious if people really do feel that way? If so what are the formal qualities that make up an avant garde poem?
I generally use the word “conventional” instead of “mainstream”. When I use that term I have in mind an admittedly hazy notion of a standard “conventional” poem. But I do feel I could tentatively list some of its attributes. It wouldn’t be hard and fast any more than any other formal taxonomy, and it would rely on the word “often” a lot: “Often the conventional poem has a speaker or implied speaker; often the speaker reaches a moment of self-realization or epiphany; often there is a marked preference for latinate terms rather than the anglo saxon except when it is a matter of describing “firm” “foundational” images of the natural world; often there is some formal habit that evinces a heightening in a direction away from daily speech (i.e. no contractions); often the meter becomes iambic at moments of emotional catharsis” and so on. Many of these attributes could be used in non-conventional poetry, but unless irony is at work too many of them begin to add up to conventionality to my ear. Do people here feel that they have an equally structural avant garde poem in mind? What are some of its (tentative) attributes?
For me the avant garde is by definition committed to resisting and questioning conventionality. Certainly it’s possible that particular groups or people claiming to be avant gardists have begun to write conventionally or enforce sorts of conventionality–since thankfully there’s no police in art anything’s possible. But one thing about the avant garde, unlike the mainstream or the conventional, is that it has a body of theory and a history to it. True it’s a very white, very male, and specifically european tradition in most ways (although many of the originary moments of avant garde theories can also be shown to owe a lot to non-white, non-male and non-european cultures as well–nothing springs sui generis, least of all european white men), but nevertheless it exists and has some things to say. There are not one but two books called The Theory of the Avant Garde (Burger, a male german & Poggioli, a male italian), both of which are worth looking at to get a sense of the term’s history. The nice thing about having this body of theory is that when someone claims to be participating in an avant garde tradition it’s possible to question those claims against something (not that Poggioli or Burger get to be final authorities somehow, but at least the claims don’t happen entirely in a vacuum). Thus it is possible to notice (here I’m maybe thinking of Francisco Aragon’s comments to Emily Warn next door on as similar topic) that many of the aesthetic principles of the european avant garde have had a signficant presence in latin american literary culture of the 20th century, i.e. that although the avant garde has been largely flavored rather white, male and european as we now have it, a potentiality to be renewed in other cultures and contexts exists. And to me that’s because highly debatable but distinct principles exist (themselves in dialogue, importantly, with larger social and philosophical positions). While on the other hand the principles that exist for the conventional are by definition impossible to reinvent, mostly because they aren’t specific but entirely formal: whatever is cliched is therefore conventional. Thus the problem with the “mainstream” as I define it is exactly that: they’re writing tired, cliched, hackneyed work, and if they’re not, they’ve left the mainstream.
As with any social grouping, I’m aware that there are deep problems of exclusion/inclusion and power struggles and who gets to speak and ways of feeling mis-characterized related to a particular avant garde or gardes. But if the poems eventually matter, which I hope they do, I’d need some evidence for that claim of formal restrictions and formal conventionality there–it’s not enough to say “because the avant garde critiques cliched conventions it is therefore a program and convention all its own, the program of not being cliched.” Or if it is a program, please sign me up for it, because it sounds like it’s just in favor of renewing and revivifying whatever is dead & empty…
Yrs,
Brent
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This post is better than PhD school. Thank you.
Posted By: Sandra Simonds on November 7, 2007 at 1:10 pmSandra
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Hi Ange,
Posted By: stan apps on November 7, 2007 at 1:15 pmI think you may have some misunderstandings about the strict military-style discipline of the avant-garde. Let me try to clear things up.
Now, I take my orders directly from Nada Gordon. If Nada Gordon has no orders to give, or is unavailable, then I take my orders from Vanessa Place. Now if Vanessa Place is incommunicado, or indisposed, then I take my orders from Juliana Spahr. Now if Juliana Spahr is on a trip around the world, or too busy to answer email, then I take my orders from Jane Sprague. Now if Jane Sprague doesn’t want to talk to me or doesn’t have anything to say to me, then I take my orders from Anne Boyer.
Goddess forbid any of these people ever disagree about anything! If they did though, I’d probably have to ask Katie Degentesh, or Christine Wertheim, or Stephanie Young to mediate between them.
Now, just because the “top brass” don’t involve themselves in the petty arguments of the foot soldiers, (i.e. the kinds of neurotic argumentative blog discourse you condemn) don’t get too confused. The top brass don’t like to be seen as “sweating it” in public. Staying out of pointless arguments is an important characteristic of an effective management style.
Yrs,
Stan “PFC” Apps
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Fuel for the fire, as if any might be needed, may be found in the remarks by Octavio Paz reproduced at the Verse blog, e.g.:
Posted By: Don Share on November 7, 2007 at 1:31 pm“Many have commented on the disappearance of a true avant-garde and its replacement by avant-gardism… I see this as a prolongation of experimentation usually leading further on from collage and montage into ever-increasing fragmentation and eventually into a degenerative disease which, adapting an already common usage, I call ‘disjunctivitis.’ The argument, used by some producers who, correctly locating the seats of available power in the academy, have ensconced themselves therein every bit as much as the establishment ‘mainstream,’ to the effect that the disruption of the common linguistic coin is part of a war against ‘late-capitalist’ discourse is singularly inept. I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wildnerness?”
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Brent, would you mind providing a list of five poems written in the last five years that satisfy your definition of conventional poetry? Backchannel preferred.
Posted By: Jordan on November 7, 2007 at 1:35 pmReport this comment
Brent,
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 7, 2007 at 2:23 pmYou asked about formal similarity or conventionality within the avant-garde. I suppose there are at least two factors which would push the a-v in that direction, both of which you mentioned yourself. The first is the idea that the a-v is “by definition” commited to resisting what it sees as convention. This commitment places its practitioners in a certain plotted adversarial role. The second is that, unlike the conventional poets, a-v poets have a defined THEORY, promulgated by not one but TWO authoritative works. Now whenever you have a doctrine instantiated in sacred books, you are going to have certain rituals and priestly orders of inclusion/exclusion, based on the dogma of the sacred texts. This would seemingly also tend to channel a-v writing into certain shared techniques and characteristics bearing the official theoretical imprimature.
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“But one thing about the avant garde, unlike the mainstream or the conventional, is that it has a body of theory and a history to it.”
Posted By: Anonymous on November 7, 2007 at 7:12 pmHi Brent. I emailed this sentence to Steve Burt with a plea along the lines of, “Am I going crazy?” Because if there’s one thing the “mainstream” has, it’s history. It also has had its theorists, from Sir Philip Sidney to Coleridge, to Arnold to Eliot, to Jarrell to Longenbach to Kinzie to Stewart to Grossman … should I reach for my Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics, or is this a sufficient sample?
Have you even seen the Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry & Poetics? It’s 1,383 pages long and its history didn’t begin with the French Revolution.
“But if the poems eventually matter, which I hope they do, I’d need some evidence for that claim of formal restrictions and formal conventionality there–it’s not enough to say ‘because the avant garde critiques cliched conventions it is therefore a program and convention all its own, the program of not being cliched.’”
Agreed. But that’s not what I’m saying. Formal restrictions/conventions of the a-g might include “Disjunctivitis” (see the Don Share comment & the Paz quote) Steinian repetition, and, my favorite, the “hybrid” text! Are you really suggesting that there are no conventions with regard to those styles, or the Frankfurt School, post-structuralist theory, and left wing politics? Isn’t it true that repeating decades-old Oulipian experiments is okay, whereas writing in quatrains ain’t?
My point is not that I don’t enjoy some disjunctive texts or Oulipian experiments; my point is that they constitute conventions.
(Even the phrase “I enjoy some x or y” indicates a less-than-a-g criterion for judgment — taste; enjoyment itself carries a distinctly bourgeois taint.)
I suppose I’m a little annoyed at your assumptions because it’s so easy to mislabel good poets as “conventional” when they’re not. I’m going to post in the near future on Tom Pickard’s new book from Flood Editions. My last review for the Poetry Project Newsletter was on Anne Porter. Those are two poets who might be misread as the bad kind of conventional. I think too of Mark McMorris, and Christopher Middleton. Was the Yale Younger Poet Joan Murray (d. 1947) conventional? Doesn’t James Schuyler look a tad conventional?
On a side note, I’m very curious indeed as to why lyric, in particular, gets such a beating from the avant-garde, or why lyric has to be continually ousted then slowly reincorporated. I suspect that’s the secret mechanism by which a-g calls itself into existence, and to face it head on would actually destroy it.
The one thing you said that I agree with is that a-g practitioners are in dialog “with larger social and philosophical positions.” True. But if a poetry is in dialog with other arts, sciences, and philosophies than Marxian ones, does it count?
Thanks. And thanks to everyone who comments here; I’d like to shout out to everyone, but I’m getting fried. Where’s the Scotch?
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Oops. “Anonymous” is moi.
Posted By: Ange on November 7, 2007 at 9:57 pmReport this comment
“But if a poetry is in dialog with other arts, sciences, and philosophies than Marxian ones, does it count?”
Posted By: Kristen on November 7, 2007 at 11:44 pmLet’s hope. And in the meantime, pass the Scotch!
cheers
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Oops. “Anonymous” is moi.
Posted By: Alicia (A.E.) on November 8, 2007 at 12:00 amWhat a nifty little (anagrammatic) poem in its own right!
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I’ve read the exchange now between Ashton, Spahr and Young now, and I have a very different set of thoughts on that– but elsewhere.
Now the question is, once the avant garde is forced to do away with imposing a particular lineage or enthroning a particular clique, what is it left with?
Posted By: Vivek Narayanan on November 8, 2007 at 1:22 amI just want to add a couple of things to Anonymous Ange’s responses to Brent.
One, very simply, if it is possible to tell an avant garde poem at a distance of say, five feet away from the page, without actually having to read the words, absorb them, and see if they do in fact unsettle the status quo or merely adorn it with quaint, self-important and deeply redundant disjunctive play… well, there’s a problem.
Two, it’s not really a question of form so much of lineage and network. To insist that you must buy into a particular lineage (eg. black mountain) if you want to be part of the club would certainly help to make it (for instance) a “white male” lineage. As for network, I mean clique. Is there really any difference between “school of poetry” and “clique of poetry”? Being outside the scene and far away, I have often struggled to understand why someone is included in one club or another only to discover, much later, that it has more to do with the hidden histories of personal friendships or enmities than with that long history of theoretical justification and theoretical self-promotion that you speak of. Well, if you’re considered avant garde or not based on who your friends are, that’s would also be something that might restrict the demographic. Don’t get me wrong– I have nothing at all against white men, I read a lot of them and some of my very best friends are white men.
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I’m on my sixth scotch here, but I can still distinguish between “schools” & “cliques”.
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 8, 2007 at 9:26 amGenuine schools or literary movements have to do with a certain shared enthusiasm (usually youthful) for a literary style or technique, or a sense of the world & history (a philosophy), or the dynamic confluence of all these elements. French Symbolism, clustered around Baudelaire & Mallarme (& exploded by Rimbaud); Russian Acmeism, forwarded by Gumilev, Akhmatova, Mandelstam; the NY School (wherein both style & worldview were kept self-consciously informal, ironic & playful); etc. etc.
Such movements seem natural & inheently interesting – they provide supportive context or launch-pads for individual poets. That, it seems to me, is their main purpose : they should be viewed as “facilitators” rather than as ends in themselves.
I suppose when a school becomes an end in itself, it starts to take on more of the features of a clique.
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This is so stupid. When is the last time any publication printed any masculist poetry? Where are the men’s groups allowed to go? Nowhere, nowhere. But certain people demand feminist this, feminist that, as if it were a belief we were all required to take part in. Bah.
Posted By: James Reston on November 8, 2007 at 11:41 amReport this comment
But wait, Ange: who does Steve Burt email to check that he’s not crazy? What if he emails you to check just as you’re emailing him? Where then shall we build our shining City of Sanity?
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on November 8, 2007 at 1:13 pmhow-ever I didn’t intend to say the avant garde is simply free of conventions: it’s not like “originality” is the point, it’s subtler & more difficult than that and involves seeking approaches that subvert conventions, reuse them strangely, revive them, turn them upside-down, or otherwise do things with them I can’t or wouldn’t want to try to determine beforehand (but all of which, to be what I’m desirous of, would manifest as something more than the robotic acceptance of the convention). Indeed these are hard & actually impossible things to pin down in general terms and reach agreement: one person’s cliche is another’s mind-altering revelation, etc. But I do think what you’re encountering as an avant garde “program” is, to me, just a very loose and internally divided group of people, not so different from Gould’s definition of a school, who yet would probably have some similar senses as to what is cliched and conventional in poetry if they sat down in a room with 1,000 new books and went through them.
In any case what I was more interested in was just whether you who think of the avant garde as restrictively programmatic (rather than generatively so) have a single set of formal characteristics in mind for the avant poem. It’s a straightforward question, driven by real curiosity. It sounds like you have various formal characteristics in mind, not one paradigmatic poem, which is itself interesting tho I don’t know exactly what that means at the moment. I’m not sure I’d consider “oulipo procedures” a formal characteristic though. An n plus 7 procedure performed on the bible is markedly different from n plus 7 performed on a script from Who’s The Boss, isn’t it? Of course there’s the counter argument that one “mainstream” poem where the speaker has a self-realization of their place in the cosmos when faced with sublime nature is markedly different than another. Still, while you can argue that if you want, when I read those poems I just don’t feel that difference (”anymore” that is–I did once, maybe I’m now jaded or an avant-snob).
But I do think oulipian formal markers, or the other avant approaches you named, could become deadeningly conventional–certainly they could, that’s part of my point. They would then stop being, for that particular time in their use, avant garde, even if historically they operated differently. Quatrains could also become radically surprising, even a rallying point for all kinds of changes. Right now I don’t feel that way about oulipo procedures nor quatrains, I find the opposite, but I’m interested & open to thinking about it since you seem to disagree. I wonder how two people could come to some consensus as to what is “really” tired and overdone: counting the published books using oulipo procedures seems really not worth it or to the point, I must say.
Anyways I suppose I’m indicating that my notion of the avant garde is much larger than you seem to be picturing: it doesn’t preclude, for instance, the lyric, and what’s really interesting is that here YOU are the only one making the list of who is avant garde and who isn’t. I mean, who are these vague forces are doing all this denigration of writers you value? To whom do you grant the authority to consider x writer conventional? Whose power is greater than yours? Did Ron Silliman say something disparaging about Mark McMorris or Barbara Guest recently that I missed?
So really your list of names confuses me: I don’t think any of them would be inclined to embrace the idea that they were or are conventional or mainstream in the way I’m talking about it. You’ll have to point me to someone who is theorizing the value of an aesthetic “mainstream”. Meanwhile I really I have no idea what you’re talking about when you connect the lyric to anti-avant-gardism: to me the lyric is a formal technique, such that used one way it could be conventional, while used another it could be a radical illumination of lived conditions. If the lyric is music, Zukofsky’s musical to me and also writing an avant garde poetry, same with Guest or Rodrigo Toscano. If the lyric is the singularly constituted self, I think Mina Loy, say, or more recently Bhanu Kapil or Renee Gladman or many another do many an avant garde thing with that convention. I could list a lot more names closer to the Now. But in each case, for me, the vital question would probably be whether the lyric surface is presented as natural or unproblematic, i.e .whether the poem believes it possible or acceptable to be seduced by sound or a singular speaking self into a kind of unengaged reverie or uncritical bonding, rather than, in contrast, whether it’s used as a surface productive of engagement, to produce tensions & illumine the living picture behind the pretty picture. Again: hard to agree when and where that’s happening versus when and where it’s not. Once again we’ve gotta sit in a room with a 1,000 books together I guess.
The marxist question you ask depends, I suppose, on what one means by marxism. Is it *possible* to write out of a different intellectual tradition than the marxist and neo-marxist tradition/s? Of course it’s possible, and of course there’s lots of legitimate avant garde poetic traditions, even still staunchly “political” poetry (say, American Buddhist-influenced poetry in someone like anne waldman) that aren’t in a particularly overt line back to marx. But if you’re asking “Am I allowed to both consider myself an ethical person but also write poetry that’s detached from consciousness of the unequal distribution of resources in this country and the world, or which can simply ignore the way language is used every day to support, obscure or justify that unequal distribution?” then I’d probably first say I don’t really have the right to give you that permission or withhold it. But if you insisted I magically had that permission somehow, I’d probably choose to say no, you can’t.
yrs,
Brent
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Brent,
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 8, 2007 at 1:54 pmthe kind of self-conscious, creative revision of available “conventions”, which you describe quite well, is what every good poet has done since the days of Euripides, if not before.
The new thing since the advent of modernity (as we understand that term) has been the programmatic – nay, automatic – “mainstreaming” and prestige of change for its own sake. The term “avant-garde” is one of the brand names of this (mostly market) phenomenon; the assumption of team formations (”conventional” and “experimental”) – & all their clubby maneuvering – is one of its consequences.
I agree pretty much with the comments of Tarn & Paz posted by Don Share : we inhabit a sort of mirror-world, in which “post-avant” generations have so completely absorbed the hoary lessons of early 20th-century experimenters, that they regurgitate them through their pores : “experiment” as a self-conscious artistic technique has become utterly conventional.
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What I value: my friendships with poets from both “mainstream” and “avant-garde” communities here in Atlanta. I spent last weekend with friends from my MFA program (which is notably conservative) and then this weekend I am going to be writing a semiotic-tinged polyphon for the experimental community’s poetry night at an artist’s gallery/collective space. Last week I had lunch with Kate Greenstreet (was sorry to miss Kate and Sandra’s reading though) and next week I’m having lunch with Joshua Clover and going to his reading in Athens. What I wish: that the extremes of community’s disparity would not exclude each other. I hear poets speak of “mainstream” poetry disparagingly, and alternately “language” poetry as something to be avoided…. I think there just needs to be a little bit more historical understanding on both sides. I do think there are sides, at least I see them. I don’t want that they should exist, but I try to participate in what feels helpful to me and to my poetry. I understand that there are many things taken for granted in workshop discussions, but these workshop discussions (cliques? groups?) are perhaps the best hope for finding good readers of poems. I like Zizek’s thesis in _The Parallax View_: that the wandering artist cuts across the chasms of community, perhaps by belonging (not merely being included in, though this is always a possibility) to more than one.
Posted By: Laura Carter on November 8, 2007 at 3:16 pmReport this comment
Brent, first you ask me to get specific and then you use my words to accuse me of “making the list of who is avant garde and who isn’t?”
Posted By: Ange on November 8, 2007 at 3:25 pmWhat to do? It’s too early for scotch.
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“the wandering artist cuts across the chasms of community, perhaps by belonging (not merely being included in, though this is always a possibility) to more than one.”
Posted By: Ange on November 8, 2007 at 3:28 pmHow utterly perfect. I wish I could pare my entire post down to that one quote.
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Hi again A,
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on November 8, 2007 at 5:12 pmI think I was asking for specifics in terms of formal markers for the avant garde poem, & it was great to hear a few of them & I would be interested to discuss them further. But do you not see how when you say “those are two poets who might be misread as the bad kind of conventional” that you’re the only one speaking the division there, that it’s your own anxiety about some supposed mislabeling that is being expressed, not an objection to something some avant gardist (and avant garde by what license?) has done or said? Who has put forward Tom Pickard or Anne Porter as the bad kind of conventional? This is the first I’ve heard of it: where are these line-drawing enemies? To me it just sounds like your own sense of something in those poets doesn’t jive with your own sense of the avant garde. So I wonder whose idea of the avant garde’s borders is in your head, and more importantly why you don’t redefine the a-g instead of accepting those borders on some hazy authority, then imagine this authority critiquing you and the writers you care about, and then being left with the rather depressing position that the conventional must be gold…
yrs,
Brent
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Oh, Brent. I think you might be manuevering me into the position of those men who are so “flatter[ed] to be argued with!”
Posted By: Ange on November 8, 2007 at 8:55 pmSurely this is not the first post of mine you’ve read. Surely if you look at my archives (found here) you’ll see that I’ve discussed or reviewed a variety of, dare I say it, poets of “other traditions” (Carter Ratcliffe, John Wieners, Peter Gizzi, WC Williams, Jasper Bernes, Cathy Park Hong, Oskar Pastior…). And maybe you’ve also seen this review or this. So your saying that I am promulgating “the rather depressing position that the conventional must be gold” is either a rhetorical tactic or complete blindness to my rhetorical tactics.
Can I just point out where you contradict yourself? You say:
“To me it just sounds like your own sense of something in those poets doesn’t jive with your own sense of the avant garde. So I wonder whose idea of the avant garde’s borders is in your head, and more importantly why you don’t redefine the a-g instead of accepting those borders on some hazy authority, then imagine this authority critiquing you and the writers you care about…”
but before, you said:
“But one thing about the avant garde, unlike the mainstream or the conventional, is that it has a body of theory and a history to it. … There are not one but two books called The Theory of the Avant Garde (Burger, a male german & Poggioli, a male italian), both of which are worth looking at to get a sense of the term’s history. The nice thing about having this body of theory is that when someone claims to be participating in an avant garde tradition it’s possible to question those claims against something (not that Poggioli or Burger get to be final authorities somehow, but at least the claims don’t happen entirely in a vacuum).”
I mean, which is it? Do I, and you, and anyone, get to have their own avant-garde (Alicia Stallings, my metrical, Hardy- and Housman-lovin’ blogmate, agrees with Stevens that “All poetry is experimental;” does she get to be avant-garde?)?
My original post (one strays so far from one’s carefully-worded initial post in these comment threads!) suggested that women — and, well, of course men — who want to be great poets — don’t have to seek the approval of oppressive little communities (and I do name names. You want me to name more? Aren’t I already in trouble with Christian Bok and “the insular temple of Small Press Traffic?” Did I not dismiss an important anthology?). Brent, I’m happy you have an expansive view of the unconventional. So do I. I won’t call it “avant-garde” though. I’ll stick with the Ashberian “other traditions” and I’ll be happy to discuss it in the far-reaching pages of Poetry magazine, and this blog, sans internecine turf battles.
Cheers,
Ange
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well, obviously I don’t see it as a contradiction: why can’t it both be important to have a set of principles, some texts & contexts to measure and think against, some ideas, theories and a history, AND ALSO be important to redefine and reinterpret and thus maybe even keep actually living for another time that history and those principles in new editions? It’s at least a true contradiction as I see it: we’re somehow both determined & free…
Posted By: Brent Cunningham on November 8, 2007 at 10:00 pmBut I sense & agree this exchange has gone on overlong. I admire & appreciate your responsiveness, tenacity, and esp. the liveliness of your mind, so thanks, & flattered of course, always, to be answered…
yrs,
brent
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Ange & Brent,
Posted By: Henry Gould on November 9, 2007 at 7:22 amI’m feeling really flattered today, too. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m in Providence Rhode Island, and the sun is shining.
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Simply: I think it makes much more sense to ally with other poets on the basis of a shared or overlapping politics than the subscription to one or another particular aesthetic agenda.
Posted By: Vivek Narayanan on November 10, 2007 at 5:48 amReport this comment
I am with Laura Carter, and thus with “Zizek’s thesis in_The Parallax View_:
Posted By: Brian Salchert on November 10, 2007 at 11:30 amthat the wandering artist cuts across the chasms of community, perhaps by belonging
(not merely included in, though this is always a possibility) to more than one.” –
and with Ange’s agreement with it/// because that is exactly where I am.
The making of a poem does not need to be true to a particular agenda
other than the DNA of its own being. One never knows/ what/ one’s/
subconscious will birth, but one should be wary of trashing/ what it births.
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Yesterday I read a remininiscence about T. S. Eliot by John Malcolm Brinnin. Brinnin does the common thing of writing about himself as if he were a very different person than the one doing the writing: Namely, Brinnin-the-character is someone who is discreet and slightly judgmental about gossip, and Brinnin-the-writer LOVES gossip.
Posted By: john on November 10, 2007 at 1:57 pmAnd I-the-reader love gossip too.
Brinnin knew Eliot in the ’50s. Eliot comes across as someone who is interested in and willing to lend support to *poets* regardless of his aesthetic affinity with them.
Some of my best friends don’t like my music. And you know what? That’s OK.
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Brian, In all fairness I should mention that I borrowed Zizek’s idea of cutting across (the diagonal of the Jew was his point, I think) but added the bit about belonging to more than one community (that’s the best I can come up with for nomadic responses to what often feels as if it (community) is tethered to one or other platform of poetics)).
Posted By: Laura Carter on November 11, 2007 at 10:55 pmBest,
Laura
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I wrote just a bit about this on my blog. I think it’s important to level the playing field for men and women in academia and publishing. However, I do think we need to look at other numbers too. Aff. actition exists for women and different races. But, what about people with disabilities. I wish people would give it a thought. How many women do you would with? How many people with a disability? How many female poets can you name? How many disabled ones?
Posted By: Jennifer Bartlett on November 20, 2007 at 8:38 amReport this comment