Comments on: “Good Bad Poetry”: A Conversation

By: Mike C.

Mike C. — Wed, 10 Dec 2008 14:26:26 +0000

I appreciate the increased historicity that Huerta provides for “good bad poetry” — pushing the term back twelve years from Orwell (1942) to Lewis and Charles Lee’s anthology (1930). Given that Orwell began reading Lewis as early as 1931 (the two would write about each other into the 1950s) it’s a provocative relationship to think about. As John notes above, however, it’s important to consider how each man’s use of the term was inflected by different literary proclivities and prejudices (Lewis was a generation older than Orwell).
What has gone unsaid to this point is the extent to which the term — in the hands of either Orwell or Lewis — appears (so far) to be a product of the 20th century and especially (thanks Lewis) of literary modernism with its push toward discrimination and a revolution of taste. While good bad poetry may have been written in earlier eras, the urge to critically diagnosis it as such seems at this point to be a relatively modern(ist) one, though I’d happily stand corrected. I have to say I’m intrigued by Orwell’s use of the date 1790 as a beginning point for the WRITING of good bad poetry. As Raymond Williams argues in “The Romantic Artist,” that is the time period in which British Romantic poets, in the wake of industrial capitalism, began formulating the notion of unrecognized artistic genius as a way of explaining why their writing wasn’t gaining the attention of a public apparently more interested in stuff of lesser quality (including good bad poetry?). Maybe Huerta’s 3rd field/”Aesthetics of Bad Poetry” reading list for his PhD qualifying exams can shed some more light on the related but not necessarily concurrent histories of writing and diagnosing good bad verse.
Mind you, it doesn’t surprise me that good bad poetry is a mid 20th-century term. As Lawrence Levine has shown in Highbrow/Lowbrow, 19th century audiences didn’t necessarily operate under the evaluatory burden of good and bad, high and low, that we — in the wake of modernism — take (or for a long time took) as foundational categories, at least in the field of poetry studies. Joan Shelley Rubin has said as much about American readers in the early 20th century as well. “While scholars have segregated ‘high’ and ‘popular’ modernists from nineteenth-century romantics and authors of sentimental verse,” she writes, readers themselves felt free to range widely “across intellectual levels” and in the process “became, over time, repositories of both the high and the popular — aware of, but not constrained by, a shifting boundary between them.”
There’s no doubt that distinguishing between good and bad was an early project of Poetry Magazine authors like Ezra Pound — no stranger to Wyndham Lewis — who called for a “harder and saner” poetry as an antidote to the “emotional slither” and “poppycock” of verse that “Aunt Hepsy liked.” In his citation of Aunt Hepsy, Pound derides the type of sentimental verse that John above claims Orwell had in mind when he used the term good bad poetry; perhaps Lewis and Orwell had more in common than it first seems. Of course, the grumblings of EP meant little to actual American readers of the time who, as Rubin argues, didn’t acknowledge his distinctions — or acknowledged them but didn’t get their panties in a twist over it. Nor, in fact, did other American writers. As Cary Nelson has written of political verse in his 1989 Repression & Recovery:
“one of the striking things about the gradual emergence of modernist forms in American protest poetry … is the lack of a sense of a radical break with the past. The thematic continuities in this hundred-year-old American tradition are so strong that a sense of opening out and diversification, of thematic conservation and formal variation, overrides the adversarial model of modernism wholly rejecting the more formal traditions in American poetry…. And the rhetoric of the genteel tradition and the rhetoric of modernism were oftentimes counterpointed in the work of individual poets.”
Other literary critics — see Mark Van Wienen’s work on WWI poetry in “Partisans & Poets” or Maria Damon’s work on micropoetries, for example, or some of the newer work on the intersections of high and low in canonical modernist authors — are in the process of recovering the diverse and eclectic landscape of American poetry from the 20th century that modernist categories of “good” and “bad” have obscured. I’d also mention a journal issue I was involved with at one point; the Spring & Fall 2006 “poetries” issue of the Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies takes up these topics with full-length essays by Daniel Tiffany, Nelson, Edward Brunner, Alan Ramon Clinton, Susan Somers-Willett and Maria Damon — plus shorter contributions by Paula Bernat Bennett, Michael Davidson, Heather Dubrow, Rachel Blau Duplessis, William J. Harris, Meta DuEwa Jones, Warren Liu, Jerome McGann, Phil Metres, Aldon Nielsen, Carrie Noland, Marjorie Perloff, Joan Rubin, Juliana Spahr, Van Wienen and Barrett Watten.
When we use the term “good bad poetry” today, it’s not — at least not in my case — an attempt to resurrect Orwell or Lewis or Pound or their critical perspectives. Rather, it’s an attempt to reclaim or re-appropriate the range of poetries that the term was originally meant to demean, dismiss, contain, or disparage (poems like “Jenny Kissed Me” included). Insofar as our contemporary understanding of the term goes, it’s one inflected by (and, admittedly, catching up to) postmodern American culture and its renewed (with a difference) interest and pleasure in the mixing or crossing of brow lines — or perhaps even the creation of “no-brow” literature. What would it mean to write good bad poetries today — post modernism and post postmodernism — and to do so intentionally in a different set of historical circumstances? What would it mean to begin our thinking about poetry not with the question “Is It Good?” but “What is it good for?” What would those poetries look like, where would they appear, and how would they be used? My sense is that, if we look in the right places, we might find the answers to these questions closer than we’d expect.

By: Don Share

Don Share — Tue, 09 Dec 2008 16:15:14 +0000

This is from a 1999 interview with Harriet alum D.A. Powell; the interviewers were Sam Witt and Sean Durkin.
DPA: I stopped writing bad poetry after a while because what happened was I wrote bad poetry so well that eventually it became a lot like the bad good poetry that I would see in anthologies and magazines. And it didn’t interest me anymore, because suddenly, it wasn’t itself anymore, it was just a lot like regular old poetry.
Question: So the line between parody and what was being parodied was suddenly blurred, and all of a sudden you were just like everybody else.
DAP: Right. And I couldn’t have that.
Full interview here.

By: martin hickel

martin hickel — Sun, 07 Dec 2008 18:55:04 +0000

good bad poetry
we know it afterward by the traces it leaves on paper
but if no one reads it “the history of the phrase in question”
remains more meaningless than most
like the story of the cat watching the dog all day
silent in its second-story window
the way certain flowers bloom on a heath near the arctic circle
far from the songs of bees
or the man in the bar whose mother died
never hearing from him again
each a part of history but in of themselves only
trees falling in forests beyond hearing
good poets borrow and the best steal
the rest sail over and over the same sargasso sea
proudly stressing this wheel invented here
although now in the age of google all it takes
is a pair of quote marks and an internet connection
to find out how trite you really are
no — what this poet feels and has written
not so that anyone has read — is as the good doctor johnson has it
defining poetry is more a measure of the narrowness of the man
if indeed it is poetry it can never ever be bad
with thanks to you and “A Man of Fetters” by Adam Gopnik, in The New Yorker, 12/8/08

By: Mike C.

Mike C. — Fri, 05 Dec 2008 05:50:46 +0000

Well slap me down and call me shorty -
Huerta knows his stuff!
Good-bad and bad-good:
Starting with Orwell’s not enough.
I’m humbled and chastened by this exchange;
I don’t know where to begin.
Huerta’s no Hatfield and I’m not a McCoy:
It turns out we are kin!

By: john

john — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 16:39:11 +0000

Orwell and Wyndham Lewis were pointing at different qualities and calling them bad. Orwell objected to sentimental poems and begrudgingly allowed that some of them still gave pleasure. To which I say, poor Orwell, that he disdains the sentimental — how macho, how 20th century, how modernistic, how . . . fashionable. (Down with Guilty-Pleasure-ism! A pleasure’s a pleasure. I suppose Orwell derives pleasure from scolding me for loving “Jenny Kissed Me” [which I do]; I know I derive pleasure from scolding him in return — ain’t life grand!)
Wyndham Lewis and Lee (editors of “The Stuffed Owl”), by contrast, were laughing at rhetorical mismatches, as when a poet, for example, described the circulation of blood in a tone and style that earlier poets had used to praise a possible sex partner. An anti-sentimentalist might say that it’s equally rhetoricall mismatched to wax exuberant about a friend’s wife leaping from her chair to give him a kiss (the purport of Leigh Hunt’s “Jenny Kissed Me”), but not me. It’s a charming and delightful piece of flattery.
The “goodness” that Wyndham Lewis and Lee see might be described as the energy and vitality of rhetorical excess.
The use of concept like good badness eludes me. You like something or you don’t. Or, you like it AND you don’t. (Some Beatles songs strike me that way — delightful music, off-putting words.) Abstracting aesthetic rank is a job for rankers. Nice work if you can get it, I suppose. (And if you get it, oh won’t you tell me how?)

By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 14:04:51 +0000

Ah, yes … Chasar has fallen under the delusion that ideas originate with an individual. A typically American delusion. The history of any idea reveals group genius at work. So fair warning: memes are abroad and belong to no one….

By: Don Share

Don Share — Thu, 04 Dec 2008 13:53:00 +0000

Dunno if anyone’s doing end-of-year favorite blog lists this season, but I’d like to say that Mick Chasar’s blog is terrific!