Comments on: What Would the Community Think?

By: Jennifer Bartlett

Jennifer Bartlett — Tue, 20 Nov 2007 12:38:59 +0000

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?

By: Laura Carter

Laura Carter — Mon, 12 Nov 2007 02:55:52 +0000

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)).
Best,
Laura

By: john

john — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 17:57:30 +0000

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.
And 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.

By: Brian Salchert

Brian Salchert — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 15:30:58 +0000

I am with Laura Carter, and thus with “Zizek’s thesis in_The Parallax View_:
that 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.

By: Vivek Narayanan

Vivek Narayanan — Sat, 10 Nov 2007 09:48:00 +0000

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.

By: Henry Gould

Henry Gould — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 11:22:11 +0000

Ange & Brent,
I’m feeling really flattered today, too. I don’t know why. Maybe because I’m in Providence Rhode Island, and the sun is shining.

By: Brent Cunningham

Brent Cunningham — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 02:00:59 +0000

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…
But 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

By: Ange

Ange — Fri, 09 Nov 2007 00:55:29 +0000

Oh, Brent. I think you might be manuevering me into the position of those men who are so “flatter[ed] to be argued with!”
Surely 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

By: Brent Cunningham

Brent Cunningham — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 21:12:12 +0000

Hi again A,
I 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

By: Ange

Ange — Thu, 08 Nov 2007 19:28:45 +0000

“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.”
How utterly perfect. I wish I could pare my entire post down to that one quote.