I have just returned from my second time attending the AWP conference, which (like last year) was wonderfully exhilarating and utterly overwhelming. Here in Pensacola I lead a life rather thoroughly isolated from any literary community or scene, and so the opportunity to see and talk to so many fellow writers was and is particularly exciting to me. I am pretty poor and the trip has practically bankrupted me, but it was worth it.
I am, as I have written, done with discussing Charles Bernstein’s piece, my critique of which was only a part of a post that engaged considerably larger topics, which were simply ignored by most commenters. But the discussion around my post has brought up some issues I do think worth pursuing, both about the tenor of discourse in the online poetry world and about the question of insiders and outsiders in the poetry world(s).
More follows below the fold.
A commenter on my previous post called my arguments “Orwellian.” I take that as a compliment, since strictly speaking the adjective “Orwellian” means “of, pertaining to, or resembling George Orwell.” (I am well aware that’s not how this person meant it, so no one need write to say so.) I have the greatest respect for George Orwell as a writer who pointed out and diagnosed the abuse and misuse of language, which was one of the topics of my post, though hardly the only one. Orwell was also adept at puncturing posture and pretension, especially pretensions to virtue.
Too many people in the online poetry world take any principled disagreement or reasoned argument as a mode of personal attack. In turn, they know how to argue or to disagree only by means of personal attack. It’s also remarkable that when this is pointed out, as I have done here and on my own blog, many people, lacking all manners, respond in exactly the same manner I have decried, as if by blind reflex or reflexive blindness.
I would again like to make the point that the boundaries of the “inside” and the “outside” of the poetry world, or rather the multiple contemporary American poetry worlds, are very porous and unpredictable, and are constantly being redrawn. For example, whatever some people may think of AWP and the AWP conference as instances or symbols of “official verse culture” or some such shibboleth, almost everyone I met and/or spent time with at both conferences I’ve attended could be considered some variety of a “post-avant” writer. (Kent Johnson made a similar point in his comment on my previous post.)
At this point, I will reiterate some of the things I wrote in the comments section of my previous point, in the hope that what doesn’t seem to have been heard the first time might be heard this time.
Many of those who were once on the outside are now quite thoroughly insiders, and many people now cultivate a sense of outsiderhood who have never been anywhere but in the middle of the in crowd. Paul Hoover asks in a very interesting post on his blog regarding the question of whether the post-avant, “postmodern American poetry” as represented in part by his estimable Norton anthology (the book’s publisher tells volumes about the shifting sands of “mainstream” and “alternative” literatures, as does Norton’s forthcoming publication of the anthology American Hybrid, edited by David St. John and Cole Swensen, two poets on supposedly opposite ends of the aesthetic spectrum), is the new mainstream, “Would it matter if Christian Bök and Kasey Mohammad had tenure-track positions?” Unless I am misreading their bios, both have not just tenure-track but tenured academic positions, as do many Language poets (Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman, for example, are both at the University of Pennsylvania, near the pinnacle of the academic hierarchy) and their very diverse aesthetic progeny. And yes, that does matter. But many people willfully refuse to recognize that the landscape has changed, and that a lot of things that used to be weeds are now treasured flowers.
Many very comfortably ensconced people, older and younger, enjoy complaining about how marginalized and excluded they are. But as the marvelous poet Michael Anania once said to me, if you continue to nurse a sense of grievance and victimization after you’ve become successful, then you just become an asshole.
At the risk of sounding like Rodney King asking “Can’t we all just get along?”, I would like to point out that the enemy, if an enemy is required (as it seems to be), is not other poets, however different their aesthetic and social dispositions, and not even an organization like AWP (which is indeed a legal corporation), but a culture and an economy of scarcity—of money, of resources, of attention, of recognition professional and personal—that pits people in the society as a whole and in any given social endeavor against one another in a zero sum competition for crumbs of a shrinking economic and social pie precisely in order to prevent them from cooperating in changing the reward/withholding/punishment system some profit from, some rail against (some of these are actually suffering and some just don’t want to admit that they’re profiting), and most are actively harmed by.
Those engaged in the virtual turf wars with which the online poetry world is rife might do well to recognize that their battles and mock-battles in tempestuous teapots are the direct result, indeed can accurately be described as symptoms, of the economy of scarcity. The energy expended in those gladiatorial contests might be more productively used elsewhere and to other ends, ends that might obviate the need for such catfights. (Forgive my mixed metaphors.)
Not a mixed metaphor if the gladiators are fighting leopards!
I dunno… haven’t poets in all eras and places always fought bitterly among themselves, haven’t there always been fierce struggles about poetry schools and so forth, even when poetry in theory mattered more to the public and was less “scarce”? Don’t we love to read about these dust-ups in biographies and autobiographies? Don’t we expend energy on this because our very differing views of poetry–what it is and what it should be doing–are important to us? It seems to me the only reason not to argue over poetry is if poetry doesn’t matter. And maybe it doesn’t, in the greater economy, but it matters to you and me–to all of us reading this blog.
I think there is plenty in the way of resources (at least monetary, etc.), more poetry books are published now than ever – it is the critical judgment we lack. Everyone is so busy being ‘outside’ and ‘marginal’ that there is no center. No one is willing to be The Critical Voice of established culture these days. It’s a huge void that affects people’s ability to decide whether and what to read.
Hi Alicia,
Thanks for your comment. I’m not at all against argument and debate–heck, I’ve been known to get a little argumentative myself. (Don’t tell anybody.) But if we’re talking gladiators and leopards, then they’re trying to kill each other, and I am against that, though there are a few of the gladiators and leopards I wouldn’t mind seeing retire…
My point here and elsewhere is very simple: it’s possible and, if such a thing as civil society is to survive, even in our little bitty corner of it, necessary that debate and disagreement be framed in terms of ideas, that it be fair and, yes, that it be civil. I’m a big fan of reason, which I know isn’t very popular these days (has it ever been?). However much you (the generic “you”) might hate someone’s poetry (and there are lots of poets whose work makes me gag), they didn’t kill your mother and aren’t going to. None of them are Nazis, Stalinists, or McCarthyites, nor are they committing or going to commit genocide. And a sonnet has never oppressed anybody, anywhere, at any time. That kind of pseudo-political rhetoric makes my blood boil, because there are such things as politics and oppression and genocide, and they’re real and they matter a whole lot more than any little dust-up in the poetry playground.
Poetry does matter–it matters a hell of a lot to me, it saved my life–but let’s talk about it, argue about it, fight about as poetry, with our brains and not our fists. Let’s also keep it in perspective, and let’s not act as if we have a monopoly on virtue and anyone who disagrees isn’t just the enemy but the devil.
An argument isn’t the same as a food fight. Or a war.
Take good care.
Reginald
Dear Reginald,
I know you’re done talking about Bernstein, but, please forgive us, others aren’t. I agreed with your critique. I also agree that Nazi, Stalinist, and McCarthyite are far more serious and heavy accusations — or even insinuations, which, I agree, amount to the same thing as accusations — than “asshole.”
But “asshole” is still uncivil, despite the efforts of Peter Orlovsky to reclaim that word as a positive celebration of human anatomy. (”Clean Asshole Poems and Smiling Vegetable Songs,” which Ferlinghetti seems to have allowed to have gone out of print.)
I don’t blame you for being angry, but your critique of self-pitying success stories has no need for invective in order to convince the reader.
Dear John,
You’re probably right. “Asshole” is pretty rude. My only defense is that I thought the anecdote I conveyed was pretty funny (and on the money), and “asshole” was the word Michael Anania, whom I adore, used. I suppose I could have used a euphemism like “jerk,” but there’s really no word to use in the anecdote that would not have been insulting, and I did want to use the anecdote. I have never claimed to be perfect–just better.
Thanks for your good words about the critique as a whole. I will try in the future to practice what I preach a little more assiduously.
all best,
Reginald
As a postscript, I should add that I didn’t include the anecdote just to be bitchy. I do enjoy being entertainingly bitchy, and I’m quite good at it, but I reserve that for unofficial contexts.
I thought that the anecdote made a good point about the hyporisy and baseless self-pity rife in some cornes of the poetry world and particularly the online poetry world, which is a really weird place.
Regnald
I guess I’m unclear on why we can’t demand more from other poets, challenge them, curse them out from time to time, raise our voices. And shouldn’t we always challenge every institution, especially academic ones? Poets will, of course, do whatever they want and pick the fights that seem to be worth picking. Maybe someday all poets will hold hands and sing together like smurfs. Until then I say rumble, push each other. Poems are made out of intense emotions not out of napkins folded nicely across laps.
I never said that we can’t and shouldn’t demand more from other poets, challenge them, or raise our voices. In fact, I’ve said just the opposite, repeatedly.
I don’t want to hold hands and sing like Smurfs. I hate the Smurfs, and I don’t know where you people’s hands have been. And if you think I believe that poems are made out of napkins folded nicely across laps, you know nothing either about my poetry or the poets and poems I have praised on this blog.
As I have said before and will undoubtedly have to say again, it would be nice if people would actually read what I wrote before they criticize me for things I never said.
I have noticed that people pay much less attention to things they read online than they do to things they read in print, and seem much more willing to speak up about the things they haven’t bothered to really read. This trend should stop.
More people should take this line from the B-52s to heart: “Before I talk, I should read a book.”
If debates arise as a form of engagement with an economy of scarcity–if it is a symptom of that economy–why should we look elsewhere for generative, community-building expression? How are you suggesting anything other than an evasion of that fact of contemporary USAmerican poetries? Is that scarcity inscrutable? Is it a dead-end to offer it some scrutiny? Or is it a generative textual condition? Ad hom…is, like “poetry,” in the eye of the beholder, no?
I think the enemy is and can certainly be other poets. You might see an indifferent public as the root causes to your problems as a writer: I might see virtual turfwars as an interesting and necessary way to answer back to powers that be minus an academy or even a teapot to tempest in. Whoever this “you people” you don’t feel like holding hands with, why should they wanna hold hands with you? This economy of scarcity is a total misnomer. No one is obliged to read anything that doesn’t speak to them. There are more poets in America than there have ever been. If one can’t connect with them then there you are. Anyone having delusions of some wide appreciative audience in poems is probably being silly. Being argumentative is less of a sin than that.