Comments on: Hail, Ichneumonid!

By: John

John — Mon, 01 Jun 2009 12:29:38 +0000

Paul,
just what was the question?

By: Paul Hoover

Paul Hoover — Tue, 12 Feb 2008 21:18:30 +0000

The idea that an avant-garde practice is a parasite sapping the energies of the noble body of poetry reminds me of Ezra Pound’s theory that the male brain stem/pan contains erotic substance, something like semen, that distinguishes the male poetic potency from the female. Absurd. It’s true that avant-gardes are perceived as invading bodies. The advanced guard takes the greatest risk in battle–many are slaughtered–but those that survive are heroes (we would say “historicized.”). An avant-garde offers practices so offensive as to be frightening, but twenty years later everyone employs some form of it, now suitably humbled. See the imagist poem, the modernist fragment, surrealism, abstract expressionism, the list goes on and on. But despite all of its influence and the fact that major presses publish some of its authors, language poetry retains its Outside status. No one ever mentions Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman, or Leslie Scalapino as a “third way” or “lyric postmodernism.” They resist assimilation. Yet you can read Lyn’s book SLOWLY as meditative lyric; lyric, that is, that doesn’t try to slather the reader in the greasepaint of feeling. The avant-garde practice that has proved least assimilable is, strangely enough, performance poetry. There’s something within the body of poetry that resists its invasion. It never quite makes the mainstream, and by the mainstream I mean those of us, regardless of aesthetic, who make up poetry’s central economy: the Caroyn Forches, Charles Bernsteins, and Christian Wimans. Edwin Torres is fabulous, but why has language poetry, despite its difficulties, had so much more impact?
All of humanity wants to be considered innovative. It’s disconcerting.
A student of mine in Chicago, a female Hispanic, first-generation college student, was accepted to an MFA program in the East through an ethnic scholarship. So far, so good. But her work was rejected in the workshops as inaccessible. She could engage the meditative mode, the ‘abstract,’ but her poems were lyrical and so firmly framed as to be narrative. Beautiful poetry, but her workshop instructors claimed not to understand them. They asked her if she wouldn’t like to write some nice poems about being Hispanic. But she already was! The experience was a torture for her. She was perceived to be a carrier of these parasites D. W. Fenza imagines to exist. One of her professors took a summer vacation in San Francisco and returned with startling news. “There’s something called language poetry there,” she declared to her class, “Do you think it will come here?”
Why was Holderlin such a great poet? He failed at power.

By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 16:24:34 +0000

And yet the thing about Fenza’s scary body-snatcher trope is that it’s much more allegorically accurate when the figures are reversed. Certainly, if any poetic party has been colonized and had eggs laid within it over the past fifteen years, or so, it’s the poetic party that used to be known as the “avant-garde.”
I mean, is this not obvious yet? Is the entomological irony, dare I ask, of debating the interaction of parasites and hosts within the micro-biome of the poetry field not uncomfortably sticky to our agonistic avant-gardistes writ(h)ing in their freshly spun cocoons at the humid Big Tobacco Shack of the Poetry Foundation?
Sorry if that’s an overly long question.
And not that this off-site Museum of Jurassic Technology exhibit featuring the talented Christian and Ange is a *major* symptom of “post-avant” devolution (and not that such devolution is in any way historically novel or surprising), but gee whiz, is it just me, or is it kind of hot at the silk farm here?
Anyway, forgive me for “sniping” again, but I’ve been re-reading that book by Peter Burger, and there seems to be a kind of wasp in my bonnet.
Kent

By: Jordan

Jordan — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 13:28:43 +0000

Say, isn’t the ichneumonid the subject of a long lyric/critical essay by Juliana Spahr? I believe it’s in the American parenthetical anthology, you know the one I mean.

By: Reginald Shepherd

Reginald Shepherd — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 11:42:33 +0000

Dear Christian,
Thank you for your late but welcome contribution to a discussion that had frankly degenerated into a free for all. While I don’t agree with your piece, I appreciate its articulate, thought-out manner. We are definitely both interested in a close reading that draws out the implications of rhetorical and tropological strategies in discourse.
I would say that at one point you make an illegitimate conflation of two senses or two instances of hyperbole. I don’t believe that I used the word “hyperbole” in relation to Bernstein’s imputations of Nazism, Stalinism, and McCarthyism to AWP (and Bernstein’s reply that he never used the names “Hitler” or “Stalin” was disingenuous as to seem a deliberate joke, as if he had never heard of allusion, implication, innuendo, or insinuation). But whether I used the word or not in that context, what I objected to was the content of that hyperbole, the utterly incommensurate comparison and reduction of real historical suffering to feuds in the poetry world, which unless I am mistaken are pretty non-lethal for all involved.
I objected to your use of the word “genocide” for similar reasons, and am rather surprised and disturbed that you seem to be saying that my approval or lack of condemnation of all hyperbole means that I “sanction” (your word–I have no power to sanction anyone or anything) the use of such rhetoric (which I must have missed) on the part of David Fenza. Fenza’s description of theory was exaggerated, yes, but, from the perspective of someone who’s read a lot of theory (I repeat, a lot, and learned a great deal from it for my own writing, but has also seen theory over-used, misused, abused, and over-applied time and time again, I know that much of what Fenza says is true in relation to the practice of theory in academia, where texts are often seen as either social symptoms, social documents, or sheer ideological mystifications, and authors are reduced to author-functions, discursive automatons on the grid of specification.
Adorno, Barthes, Benjamin, Deleuze and Guattari, Derrida, Foucault, Lyotard, are all richer, more complex, more nuanced than this, but they have many epigones in the American academia who have flattened out “theory” to a set of cookie cutter propositions that can be applied to, or imposed upon, any text, including the world read as a text. So, no, Fenza’s position does not emerge out thin air or sheer malice, and many theorists do denigrate poets (I’ve seen it), especially because poetry doesn’t lend itself well to the prevailing critical/theoretical modes, since everyone these days is some kind of New Historicist (though New Historicism is pretty old by now) or some variety of cultural materialist.
On the topic of incommensurable if not unjustifiable hyperbole, your description of the United States as “a nation that, for years, has verged upon becoming a hyperfascist, surveillance state.” There are many things wrong with the United States, and it has definitely become more repressive, and more monitored, especially for some groups (immigrants most of all, legal and illegal), but to call the United States not only “fascist” but “hyperfascist” (as if it has outdone Nazi Germany in totalitarianism and repression) is to rule out having what you say be taken seriously. If we were in a fascist surveillance state, let alone a hyperfascist (I don’t know what “hyperfascism” is or would be: monitoring chips in our brains?) surveillance state, you and I would not the freedom to have this debate. You certainly wouldn’t have the freedom to publicly make the assertion with which this paragraph begins. Rhetoric, especially political rhetoric, must have some reasonable relationship to fact. I am old-fashioned, but I believe that words mean things, and should be used to clarify meaning rather than obscure it., at least when they’re used in discursive prose.
Thanks for participating in the conversation. Though we clearly disagree on many matters, I appreciate the reasoned and thought-through nature of your response, which distinguishes it from several other responses I have received.
all best,
Reginald

By: Daisy

Daisy — Sat, 09 Feb 2008 11:05:29 +0000

If anyone could e-mail me the text of the Fenza article, I’d appreciate it. (daisyfried at hotmail dot com). I’m not an AWP member so don’t get the Chronicle; I thought the Bernstein parody was quite funny–Bernstein is, very funny, in general–but I would like to see what he was attacking. Thanks !
Daisy