Comments on: It’s Always a Bad Time For Poetry

By: john

john — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 15:26:00 +0000

Bill,
Echoes of Rexroth!
“You killed him! You killed him.
In your God damned Brooks Brothers suit,
You son of a bitch.”
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/archive/poem.html?id=171537
Imagine those words bellowed by someone with a voice like W. C. Fields except really pissed off. Someone had left behind an LP of Rexroth reading that poem accompanied by dissonant improvised jazz (with Ferlinghetti reading on the other side) in a house I once lived in. The closing of the poem is one of the great moments in the history of recording.
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By: Boyd Nielson

Boyd Nielson — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:35:24 +0000

Bill, you and I don’t exactly agree, but what I really like about your comment is that it pushes Kenny’s point above to its logical conclusion (which is no easy task). Maybe Kenny should amend the title to read something like this:
“It’s Always a Bad Time For Poetry, or All Societies Exist To Murder Poets.”
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By: Jordan

Jordan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 14:16:33 +0000

All poets exist for one purpose: to persuade other poets to give up.
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By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:58:53 +0000

*
When poets start to break under the torrent of hatred society pours upon them; when they begin to internalize that hatred and to self-generate it in the neurotic hope of propitiating its cruelties, when they snatch the whip from Master and lash themselves;
when they understand how loathed and despised poetry is by all the powers of this world; when they realize how loathed and despised they are by all the authorities of this world; and when, under the endless onslaught of contempt and scorn and persecution which they as poets are condemned to suffer, at last they too loathe and despise themselves,
that is the point they turn internecene.
*
All societies exist for one purpose: to murder poets.
Everything in the world exists in order to end up on the point of a knife entering the poet’s throat.
**
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By: Jordan

Jordan — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 13:58:36 +0000

Solitary, to paraphrase Judd Nelson, but social.
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By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 04:23:56 +0000

In case anyone wasn’t sure, that nutty interlude was brought to you by Franz Wright, who’s known to be a bit testy (see his recent, um, interventions at Digital Emunction). And now back to Harriet’s regularly scheduled backbiting …
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By: FW

FW — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:47:18 +0000

Poetry is not literature. When will you all learn how simple it is to distinguish between real poetry–the voice of the person within you who is more intelligent, powerful and happier than any real person–and “liturature” and all your sad little discussions about it. FPW
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By: FW

FW — Thu, 29 Jan 2009 07:43:12 +0000

You can all talk until you turn blue–you are just avoiding the aloneness in which real poetry is created, and in which is discovered again and again the fact that poetry is the opposite of literature and all your theories–Jesus, why don’t you just set your mind on English Dept, tenure, At least you would get paid for this horseshit. FW
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By: Boyd Nielson

Boyd Nielson — Mon, 26 Jan 2009 14:42:52 +0000

I am joining this discussion really late, having been sidetracked in travels. But I can’t help but note that this comment by Kenneth Goldsmith is not only awesome but also awesomely jaw-dropping:
>Kent sed: “If you go to the poor neighborhoods of El Alto, above La Paz, you will find truly avant-garde and radical young poets.”
>Wow. That sounds amazing. Can you please give us more information about these poets? What are some of the better-known poets’ names? And I’d love you to post a poem or two of theirs and links. Thanks!
Just wow and amazing backatcha. What some poets (especially in the United States) seem to love about lines like “It’s always a bad time for poetry” is not just that the line is true (it is true, but trivially so). What they love about lines like that is also that they provide poets a feeling of simultaneous solidarity and liberation, solidarity in suffering (after all, poets will never make it either) and liberation from market realities (after all, poets can be a source of subversion and resistance because they will never make it): Exculpation and opposition, in one easy pill.
Or maybe I’m totally wrong here—and unfair to boot. Maybe Kenny just wanted to know the links so that he could invite the poets of La Paz to the next Conceptual Poetics conference. Some crappy times, no one needs to be reminded, are crappier than others.
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By: john

john — Thu, 22 Jan 2009 13:31:23 +0000

Hate is an emotion. Not a strategy.
But, whatever makes you happy!
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By: Tom Harr

Tom Harr — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:29:16 +0000

Gotcha. Well, in that case… Cheers!!
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By: jane

jane — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 18:17:53 +0000

Yep, Tom, that’s the strategy. Go for it!
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By: Tom Harr

Tom Harr — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 17:32:03 +0000

Hm, but it is okay to hate the state and hate capital and teach at a state university? In other words: whose wine are you drinking?
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By: jane

jane — Wed, 21 Jan 2009 16:33:51 +0000

Quincy, that is very much so about toilets.
Speaking only for myself, I think there are various kinds of activisms. I agree that having been involved in the relatively familiar kinds of organizing is both a good thing and gives one’s thoughts on the subject an added dimension. But I would wish to avoid a situation where only those who demonstrate some correct level of commitment or even penitence and self-subtraction get to count as activists or radicals — that serves as a kind of scam which always ends with some post-liberal declaiming that such a life is a kind of utopian miserablism detached from pragmatic possibility. In that strategy of the dominant, either you’re complicit or you’re unrealistic; this is the binary whereby the center excludes the margins.
Showing up at 5 am has its real virtues, but it’s okay to hate the state and hate capital and drink the wine. Wine is delicious.
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By: Quincy R. Lehr

Quincy R. Lehr — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 21:45:30 +0000

Well, I’m glad to hear that there is some actual activism in the mix. And as for organizing, I always found knowing where the nearest toilet was quite important.
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By: HSC

HSC — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 16:22:59 +0000

Quincy, you’d be wrong. Though most of my own organizing has been at Hotel and Restaurant Workers Local 2850, Oakland.
Organizing, as I’m sure you know, starts with setting up the chairs, not with leafleting. The time of day changes.
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By: Kenneth Goldsmith

Kenneth Goldsmith — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 13:58:10 +0000

NPR just announced that Aaron Copland is Obama’s favorite composer and that he commissioned John Williams to compose a piece for the inauguration. Oh my…
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By: Arthur Durkee

Arthur Durkee — Tue, 20 Jan 2009 01:43:05 +0000

“Many have commented on the disappearance of a true avant-garde and its replacement by avant-gardism… I see this as a prolongation of experimentation usually leading further on from collage and montage into ever-increasing fragmentation and eventually into a degenerative disease which, adapting an already common usage, I call ‘disjunctivitis.’ The argument, used by some producers who, correctly locating the seats of available power in the academy, have ensconced themselves therein every bit as much as the establishment ‘mainstream,’ to the effect that the disruption of the common linguistic coin is part of a war against ‘late-capitalist’ discourse is singularly inept. I do not see oppressed workers of any kind devouring the products of avant-gardism. The death-of-the-author thematics, as commonly adapted, are another inanity: when society does its very best to homogenize us, what is wrong with a strong, knowledgeable, and responsible ego crying in the darkening wilderness?”
—Octavio Paz
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 23:59:39 +0000

Well said, Mr. Lehr! And welcome to the fight.
It’s good to hear your voice again. However, I can’t believe that anyone would actually voluntarily leave our most beautiful Ireland.
Welcome home, Quincy.
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By: Quincy R. Lehr

Quincy R. Lehr — Mon, 19 Jan 2009 19:03:30 +0000

Having returned to the U.S. a few months ago after an extended absence, the question of what it means to be “avant-garde” in the United States is an increasingly baffling one to me, at least, seeming often to have more to do with product/professional positioning in an overly factionalized American poetry scene. The fact is, any “movement” that those of us who haven’t been initiated into the Inner Mysteries will have heard of is at least thirty years old–which, of course, goes for the “New” Formalism as well. (“Flarf” and “New Sentence” frankly don’t count as movements.) There are clear lines of ancestry, stated and unstated orthodoxies (which of course doesn’t make something NOT avant-garde–see the Surrealists), and, indeed, institutional cubby holes.
Where I get confused isn’t there, though. Rather, it has to do with the “garde,” as it were. If one looks at a regional newspaper from the 1920s, onew will find a great deal of generally metrical, somewhat didactic, easily parsed verse, often produced by writers who had weekly offerings nationally syndicated. At this point, with a few exceptions, newspapers don’t really DO poetry. Nor do most major publishers, or at least not very much of it. Blah blah blah; you all know the drill. But it’s unclear that there’s enough of a stream for there to be a “mainstream” in the way there was in the early twentieth century. Poetry has lost its equivalent of a Celine Dion, Britney Spears, or whoever the flavor of the month might be. And that goes for EVERYBODY, and is not particularly worth lamenting. But American poetic schools sure do seem to enjoy labeling one another as the entrenched enemy. The langpo crowd can (or at least could) point to Dana Gioia at the head of the NEA; the New Formalists can gripe about langpo’s entrenchment in the academy. Whuppedy-do.
And at the risk of sounding a bit naive, it’s hurting American poetry. Each faction (going by what I’ve seen from an admittedly limited perspective) promotes its own makeweights too damn much. There are so many flippant avant-gardists of roughly my age reading around New York City, very cleverly coming up with new ways to say relatively little. There are too many formalists writing lifeless canon retread or steering straight to where archaeology might reveal the middle of the road once lay.
And these weaknesses get exacerbated by the frequent unwillingness to seriously consider the possibility that the other tribes may contain within them individuals who aren’t careerist a$$holes out to grab relatively piddly amounts of grant money by the standards of Western government from the more deserving.
A final note–I might take something calling itself the “Hate Socialist Collective” a bit more seriously if I had any inkling that any of its members had actually ever done a 5 AM leaflet distribution in cold weather to industrial workers, many of whom would strongly disagree with much of what they had to say. I do not get that impression… but one’s supposed to be a political radical, and manifestos are rather the done thing, aren’t they?
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By: Lucas

Lucas — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 19:41:46 +0000

The thread so far has brought some questions to my mind:
To what extent does the “avant-garde” want to remain the avant-garde? To what extent does it want to replace, or displace, what it considers as the “mainstream”? To what extent does the “mainstream” control the discourse of whether the “avant-garde” remains the avant-garde through its recognition of, or refusal to recognize, the “avant-garde”? If the “avant-garde” wants to become the new “mainstream” by taking over the means of production and distribution of the old “mainstream,” is it happy or defensive when a newer “avant-garde” critiques it with the same kinds of questions it used against the previous “mainstream”?
Is it better to be “avant-garde” or “mainstream”? Is it more moral to be “avant-garde” or “mainstream”? Is it more efficacious to be “avant-garde” or “mainstream”?
To what extent can the “avant-garde” or the “mainstream” think collectively, and to what extent are their motions and directions the democratic conglomeration of many individuals, whose association with “avant-garde” or “mainstream” may be fraught or tense or comfortable?
To what extent is the outsider in American poetry today defined by the person of the translator, who is often an academic and by definition a gatekeeper?
Lucas
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:50:11 +0000

Thank you, Mr. Robbins. I will re-read your poem more closely.
The only thing I can think of that looks like a “space tree” is the International Space Station.
Was “lick the moon” a reference to Auden?
Just kidding.
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 17:40:14 +0000

I’d like to apologize for my rude comment up-thread. I may have been slightly less than sober at the time, but
rhubarb isn’t really all THAT bad.
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By: michael robbins

michael robbins — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:57:19 +0000

Gary,
I appreciate yr interest in my poem. (Since this does seem to be a space for self-advertisements, perhaps I might mention that the Village Voice will publish an interview with me next week that addresses some of yr questions.) One thing I’ve learned from having a poem in The New Yorker is how little a poem belongs to its author. Since I am in graduate school, this should not have come as a revelation, but believing something theoretically is different from knowing it experientially. (I don’t intend by this to endorse anti-intentionalism.) So many people have discussed the poem on blogs & whatnot (usually reprinting it in the process — does no one respect copyright anymore! I’m kidding), & it’s been humbling & exciting to read so many takes on my poem (my favorite posits the speaker is “an idiopathic super angel” — I’m not sure what that is, but how cool).
More than one person has called it “avant-garde,” although someone called it “avantish,” which I prefer. I reserve the category of avant-garde for the historical avant-garde, & view much of this thread as question-begging. (I do think it can be useful to speak of “experimental” poetry, but that begs its own set of questions.) Regardless, a poem printed in The New Yorker is definitionally excluded from the avant-garde, no?
As for “That elk is such a dick. He’s a space tree / making a ski and a little foam chiropractor” — I suppose I mean by those lines more or less what Tomaz Salamun means when he says “He who brews brandy / pants on screes, incantation. / Boils he who carries the mountain / and this one who unsaddles, supports yuppies.”
I liked FW’s poem (unusual for me), particularly the bitter allusion to his father’s “A Blessing.”
Best,
mr
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By: Kent Johnson

Kent Johnson — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 14:29:19 +0000

John makes an important point that shouldn’t get lost in the disputes here, (which are now spread over three different posts):
Goldsmith has done the international poetry community a tremendous service through his curatorship of UbuWeb, and deserves much credit for it. It is, yes, both a great work of scholarship *and* a kind of installation-in-process.
And hey, Andy, those links are now there.
Kent
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By: Bill Knott

Bill Knott — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 12:57:56 +0000

Kenneth G. confessed here not long ago his ideal readers
would be machines, AIs, robots . . .
robots . . . and then consider how indistinguishable the
works of these A-Gs are, how their “poems” all look
and read the same, how hard it is to tell them apart,
how the individual Avanti Aunties all blur together
behind their groupthink Theoryprose, an impenetrable wall of
defensive attitudes and poses—
how massed, how amorphous—
as if, as if they were clones—
robots, clones . . . : how clear it then becomes when you
realize that in actual fact they are
Cylons—
langpos flarfs post-avants no-tells:
they’re all frakkin’ skinjobs.
And they have a Plan—
to annihilate humanity, starting of course with human
poets—
It’s no wonder these toasters own the internet, they ARE
the internet, wired in sync
to control total websitical forces . . . Their victory is inevitable!
We few remaining human poets cower terrified in our wastebaskets
muttering the old gospel: traveling through the dark I found a deer dead on the edge of Wilson canyon road . . . or is it Wilson River Road? . . . Wilson . . . river . . . dark . . . dark . . .
—but it’s no use: we’re doomed. One by one we fall
(this site should have a little tab window down in the corner
to show the numbers of our demise, clicking the countdown
as we decrease—)
overwhelmed by the sheer weight of their might their ubiquitude
(My name is Sillimandias, King of blogs: look at my stats, ye SOQlings, and despair!)—
. . .
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By: David Krump

David Krump — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 04:46:27 +0000

I’m still confused.
At what point did the a-garde suddenly require representation in mainstream magazines?
Isn’t inclusion in such publications an absolute and obvious destruction of all that might be (and has been for more years than I’ve been alive) the a-garde?
I’m trying to understand this. So, you don’t want an audience, yet you demand one?
You are cutting edge, yet you are dull at the point of incision and communication?
Like each angle, you are either obtuse or acute.
All observation at this point clears you completely of the acute. You behave like a blunt instrument, banging your dull blade loudly above the friendly conversations that could be taking place.
Look, I received the Lilly Fellowship in 2006, and four times since then the editors have rejected my work. Good. I am willing to acknowledge that the poems I sent them might have sucked. Can you do the same without submitting work? Can you acknowledge that your argument of exclusiveness holds no water if but a drought you base your labor on? Can the a-g still be a-g when it holds academic posts and whines about lack of inclusion in Poetry and The New Yorker, I wonder.
When obtuseness becomes an art which demands not only a status of “general” but of renowned trencher” it should be clear to all why it is easy to understand the dismay of folks attempting to understand poetry as the recycling of Gooooooogle searches, which are no more fresh than the nasal revisitation of expired milk.
Please, BE THE FORWARD GUARD and stop arguing for its institutional relevance.
Let our grandchildren squabble over the value of our work, lest we be caught one hundred years in the past, signing documents no longer blank of signatures.
“We fight first on one side, then on the other, but always for the SAME cause, which is neither side or both sides and ours.”
The wonderful woman who cuts my hair three times each year is named Kitty. How shocked I was to hear the snip of scissors as she recited her favorite stanza from the last issue of Poetry. I did not know she subscribed, but she later told me she did so because I recommended it. That was three years ago, before I won the fellowship, and she still subscribes and is more than willing to discuss the poems found in each issue.
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By: john

john — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 03:44:56 +0000

I wanna get back to the notion of museums that Kent brought up up-thread.
It makes sense that the museum has recuperated the anti-museum gestures and works of Duchamp, Marinetti, and the rest, because the avant-garde has — I shouldn’t say “always,” but I really really want to — usually staged its works in the theater of art history (to borrow a trope from David Antin); hence, art history — a/k/a “the museum” — has had no trouble in bringing the dissidents in.
I love museums; was delighted to see all those Duchamps during a high school trip to Philadelphia.
Some artists have ignored art history and its theater — graffiti artists come to mind; velvet painters less so but still probably; and fewer poets.
I bring this up because I want to say that one of the most enterprising, indefatigable, and valuable museum curators and keepers that poetry (and esoteric music) has is Kenny G.
So, Mr. G — Thank You.
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By: Gary B. Fitzgerald

Gary B. Fitzgerald — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 02:12:11 +0000

Wright vs. Robbins
Dear Mr. Robbins:
I just printed out and read, back to back, your poem and Mr. Wright’s, both featured currently in the New Yorker. His was quite clear; yours, not so much. I actually enjoyed your poem much more, though. The first stanza I got. Beautiful! The last three lines of stanza two are brilliant. After that, I got a little lost. Perhaps it’s only because I don’t get the references. What is a “space tree”? Why is that elk a dick? What is a “foam chiropractor”? It gets even more confusing from there.
It might be helpful to the current discussion if you could tell us if your poem qualifies as ‘avant-garde’ (as now defined). Was it supposed to be unclear? Are there really rickshaws in Scranton?
I know that my posts tend to be somewhat facetious and even sarcastic, but this is an honest query. Please forgive an old Taoist Nature poet his ignorance, but what exactly is your poem attempting to say?
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By: Andy Gricevich

Andy Gricevich — Sat, 17 Jan 2009 00:20:07 +0000

Hey, Kent–
You didn’t include the links! I wanna read the stuff…
all the best,
Andy
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