As an adjunct to my Kneejerk Poetry list (and just in time for back to school shopping) I’m now assembling a list of names and phrases that are sure to generate controversy instantly. This list has been empirically tested, and is 100% guaranteed to work as advertised; no batteries required!
It’s all open source, so please add your own! Comment… criticize.. distribute freely!
In no particular order:
Billy Collins
Garrison Keillor
William Logan
Ron Silliman
Ed Dorn
James Wright
Frank O’Hara
Karl Marx
Kenneth Goldsmith
AWP
MLA
post-anything
“School of Quietude”
“Third Way”
flarf
slow poetry
fast poetry
conceptual poetry
New American poetry
avant-garde poetry
Poetry
class
money (too much, or too little for poetry)
poetry contests, aka Faux-etry
academia
theory
criticism
canon
Poet Laureate of the United States
The following do not generate controversy:
Walter Benjamin
Theodor Adorno
I guess my only question is: If I’m moved to build a soap box before I comment on at least forty-two percent of the list, am I truly a poet’s poet?
Posted By: dwayne on September 2, 2008 at 1:49 pmReport this comment
Don,
Posted By: vijay on September 2, 2008 at 2:40 pmfunny stuff. I’m not sure the record bears you out on Adorno, though; their seems, from a cursory survey, to have been quite a bit of haggling about him (c.f. http://poetryfoundation.org/harriet/2008/02/who_you_callin_postavant.html#more as only one example) and “cherry-picking,” using him to justify positions he would have abhorred, whether the autonomy of art is the same as the intentional fallacy, and all that good stuff. So I guess it’s just Benjamin everyone agrees on. And pudding!
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Thank you, Vijay!
Posted By: Don Share on September 2, 2008 at 2:51 pmSo: scratch Adorno, add Intentional Fallacy to the big list, and add pudding to the small one!
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I hate pudding.
Posted By: michael robbins on September 2, 2008 at 4:14 pmDon, this is the funniest post in Harriet history. But what is that gif?
Controversial:
Language poetry
racism
Norton Anthologies
Harold Bloom
formalism
economic determination
popular lyrics as poetry
Noncontroversial:
big red dogs
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Hm. I just read about a correlation between big red dogs and cancer, so I’m not sure about that one! And if you don’t like pudding… well, it just might be the case that Benjamin is the only non-controversial entry we’ll ever have!
Posted By: Don Share on September 2, 2008 at 4:21 pmGood new entries there. I almost had Bloom in from the get-go, but thought maybe he’d morphed into a Facebook friendly force of some kind. (Yes, I know it’s not really him on FB.) Could be we’ll have to add the anxiety of influence, though.
Oh, and that should be: L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E as you well know.
The gif is a knee, of course… as seen by your doctor!
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I’m completing a manuscript of numerous “fait divers” based on U.S. poets (each poet identified by last name, led off with M., Mme. or Mlle, as the case may be). It’s entitled “Fait Divers du Poésie Américain,” and each piece is in spirit of Felix Feneon’s “novellas in three lines,” his marvelous and strange miniature crime reports for 19th century Parisian newspapers. Some of these are soon coming out in a magazine or two, but thought I’d offer one here, since Don mentions William Logan:
Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 2, 2008 at 4:29 pm>“Do you somehow think I am sorry?” screamed the crazed critic M. Logan to the magistrate. Manacled and led away, sentenced to hang, for the murder and cannibalism of seventy-four innocent poets… This in Boussens.
Kent
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Controversial:
Posted By: john on September 2, 2008 at 4:42 pmidentity politics
political poetry
identity poetry
identity property of mathematics poetry
property poetry
property
scansion
condescension
condensation
dew
neo-post-ism
nepotism
who-you-know-ism
flow
traditional prosody
transitional rosary
bohemian rhapsody
queen
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You know, I’m getting talked about (though with incredible confusion) under Stanley Fish’s NY Times column today. So why does someone like Kenneth Goldsmith get to be on the list and I don’t? Huh? C’mon, Don, toss me a freakin’ cracker here…
Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 2, 2008 at 4:44 pmdamn.
Kent
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OK, please consider the following emendations:
Posted By: Don Share on September 2, 2008 at 4:48 pmKent Johnson added to big list.
Crackers added to small one.
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A-ha, the knee! I thought it was Art.
Posted By: Michael Robbins on September 2, 2008 at 8:49 pmAnd I actually do like pudding. And crackers.
Also Checkers. Wikipedia dixit: “Nixon’s dog Checkers died in 1964 and is buried in Wantagh, New York, on Long Island’s Bide-A-Wee Pet Cemetery (3300 Beltagh Avenue, Wantagh, NY). Since Nixon never lived on Long Island, and only buried Checkers there because it was convenient, some locals look upon the dog as an unwelcome outsider. Suffolk County Historical Society President Wallace Broege has been quoted as saying, ‘I think it does Long Island a disservice.’ That doesn’t stop the visitors from coming. And while patriots still plant small American flags next to the dog’s granite tombstone (Plot #5), no one from the former first family has ever visited.”
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Isn’t “cracker” considered a slur?
Posted By: john on September 3, 2008 at 12:10 amReport this comment
(just in case: my last comment was a jest.)
Posted By: john on September 3, 2008 at 12:29 am(people can be touchy — me included!)
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Sexist list! What, NO controversial females?
Posted By: Daisy on September 3, 2008 at 9:03 amDaisy
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Added to the long list:
Posted By: Don Share on September 3, 2008 at 9:10 amWOM-PO
Daisy Fried
Alicia Stallings
Ange Mlinko
Marilyn Chin
Joan Houlihan
Jorie Graham
Alice Quinn
Now, having done that, I feel that I’ve been rather patronizing and paternalistic.
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Since the topic is poetic controversies, thought I’d share the letter I just sent to NY Times, in the comments stream under Stanley Fish’s latest column:
Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 3, 2008 at 9:58 amA brief comment in reply to Alison S’s letter of September 1 (#20) concerning the Araki Yasusada controversy. There are some things she seems confused about.
No one, that I’m aware of, “insists” the writings contained in Doubled Flowering: From the Notebooks of Araki Yasusada are by a poet of that name. It’s been well-known for twelve or thirteen years that the work is a fiction and Yasusada a poetic heteronym–something openly acknowledged on the cover and in the appendix of Doubled Flowering, which appeared over ten years ago.
The attributional case, rather, is this: The author or authors (presented under the pseudonym “Tosa Motokiyu,” one of the fictional translators of the work) imagined the found poems, letters, drafts, English assignments, and other writings of a Hiroshima survivor and published this work with a decision to not take conventional credit for it. The choice to preserve an ongoing space of anonymity was seen as coextensive, at least from the authorial perspective, with the aesthetic and ethical nature of the creation.
A number of years ago, The Nation magazine called Doubled Flowering “the most controversial work of poetry since Allen Ginsberg’s “Howl.” In the years since, various dozens of articles, essays, presentations, and graduate theses have appeared on the issue, here and abroad. Some, like Alison S. and Charles Bernstein, have seen the Yasusada work as a manipulative transgression of literary and cultural principles with motive of personal gain; others, like Eliot Weinberger and Forrest Gander, have seen the work as a radical, moving expression of tribute and empathy. There have been emotional polemics, and there have been thoughtful studies–pro and con.
Given that the background subject of the writing is one of the most contended and troubling events of the 20th century, the continuing debate seems entirely apt.
Kent Johnson
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Ron Silliman is mentioned above, in Don’s list. Here is his fait divers:
Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 3, 2008 at 10:40 am“Yes, it is true, Your Honor, that I am obsessed with Project Runway, but it was only part of a performance project,” said M. Silliman, with earnest sincerity. Three months in jail and suspended blogging license for shoplifting at Victoria’s Secret.
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And since Flarf is mentioned:
Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 3, 2008 at 10:53 amThe little urchins Gordon and Mohammad, of Nangis, hid behind a curtain, making loud farting sounds with the pits of their arms. Just as Mme. Lauterbach was beginning to read! The Vice-Chancellor of the Sorbonne led them out by the ears.
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And since Language Poetry is mentioned:
Posted By: Kent Johnson on September 3, 2008 at 11:01 amComing from an all-night soiree in celebration of some group-written memoir, Mme. Hejinian was most fortunate to escape with but a broken pelvis and a hefty fine: Trainspotting on the BART.
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controversial:
Posted By: Doodle on September 3, 2008 at 2:22 pmZizek & Lacan (sounds like Siskel & Ebert!)
non-con:
Lana Turner (get up, we love you!)
mimeographed journals
ekphrasis
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Gordon? Mohammad? Little?
Posted By: Travis Nichols on September 3, 2008 at 2:25 pmReport this comment
Amiri Baraka
Posted By: Daisy on September 4, 2008 at 12:09 pmReport this comment
Wait, is Lacan controversial around here? Have their been Lacan debates that I’ve missed? Gyp! (No offense to my Magyar friends).
Posted By: Vijay Chaudhoury on September 4, 2008 at 12:55 pmReport this comment
I think the idea is that just mentioning Lacan automatically makes him controversial – which just happened.
Posted By: Don Share on September 4, 2008 at 1:32 pmOn the list he goes!
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If Lacan is controversially non-controversial, well, this sounds very much like a Lacanian impasse, comme on dit. Alors, je pense que c’est necessaire d’ecrire une liste seulement pour Lacan, une liste des bouleversements Lacaniens tout-seule, comme on dit. Le noude integrale d’un “petit a”, comme on dit, ou “petit oeuil”, ou possiblement un “petit oeuf” – voici certainement la faiblesse des problemes psycho-litteraire, comme on dit, ou tous les hommes et un nombre innumerable des femmes trouvent leurs “identities pseudo-ecrives”, comme on dit.
Posted By: Henry Gould on September 4, 2008 at 1:56 pmEh?
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Personally, I find big red dogs a sentimental gimmick to get someone’s pet on a poetry blog. I would add them to the list.
Posted By: Lucia on September 6, 2008 at 3:32 pmReport this comment