Reginald Shepherd : Harriet the Blog : The Poetry Foundation

Author Archive

Many of the comments in response to my most recent post revolved around the question of authorial intention and its importance or even relevance to the reading and interpretation of a work of verbal art, so I have decided to explore the question in greater depth. This post incorporates some of my prior responses to comments on that earlier post into an extended discussion of the matter of authorial intention.
One of the greatest legacies of the much-maligned (mainly by people who haven’t really read them) New Critics is the separation of the author and the text. When I read a poem, I read the poem. I have neither the desire nor the ability to discern an author’s intentions. I care about what the author wrote, not what the author thought he or she was writing. Even if one thinks of a work in terms of its author, if what mattered most to a writer was what was in his or her head, there’d be no reason to write anything, since one already has access to the contents of one’s own mind. One writes because one wants to produce something separate from oneself. I can’t imagine how I could fathom Shakespeare’s intentions, for example, or how, if I could, that would usefully illuminate his plays. In Keats’s words, the poet is no one.

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03.19.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (49)

Reginald Shepherd

Art, History, Politics: A Short Note

Ironically enough, given the topic of my last post, I have been sidelined from this blog for a while because I’ve been painfully sick wth what my oncologist thinks (but doesn’t know) are new chemotherapy side effects. But I am better now, and I am back. Happy reading.
Politics, history, biography all inform and sometimes even deform art (style can be seen in one sense as the scar history leaves on art, what Adorno calls a hardening against the pressure of suffering), but they enter into art as artistic materials, and are transformed within it. And art speaks back to these things; it is not merely subject to them. To treat art as a social or economic or historical epiphenomenon is to strip it of its identity as art, and of its liberatory potential. This is why I am an adherent of what Adorno calls immanent critique.

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03.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (23)

Reginald Shepherd

Illness and Poetry

My friend the poet and critic Christopher Hennessy, who maintains a fascinating blog on the multiple relationships between identity (particularly gay identity) and creativity at Outside the Lines, recently asked me, after I described to him one of my chemotherapy side effects, that even picking up a piece of cold fruit burns my hands, whether I planned to write about the experience of having cancer and undergoing chemotherapy. Some excellent poetry has come out of that experience, most notably the late L. E. Sissman’s Hello Darkness. The very much alive Marilyn Hacker has a fourteen-poem sequence called “Cancer Winter”? in her book Winter Numbers, dealing with her experience of breast cancer. There is also, in prose, the late cultural critic Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor and, more problematically, AIDS and Its Metaphors, and the late Audre Lorde’s Cancer Journal. I have not encountered the stigmatization of cancer Sontag writes of, though I am very familiar with the stigmatization of HIV, which has absorbed much of the “you brought this on yourself”? discourse that used to surround cancer.

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03.08.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (5)

Reginald Shepherd

White Dopes on Punk: An Analogy*

The dichotomy people in the literary world frequently make between mainstream and experimental poetry, conservative and “progressive”? poetry, is very similar in form and tone (the attribution of sin to one and virtue to the other) to the dichotomy people (some of them the same people) make in the field of popular music between disco and punk. Disco bears the burden of inauthenticity and ideological mystification, complicity and social complacency—bodily pleasure as the opiate of the masses. I find this still-too-common characterization curious, since disco’s main producers and audiences were black people and gay men. Punk, on the other hand, bears the banner of authenticity and critique, transgression and rebellion, a revolt against the body and enjoyment (see the Sex Pistols song “Bodies”). Rebels of all stripes tend to be rather puritanical.

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03.04.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Reginald Shepherd

This Is Just to Say

I have posted a revised and much longer version of my Harriet post on “post-avant-garde” poetry, now titled “Defining Post-Avant-Garde Poetry,” on my own blog, to be found here.
In this extended version of the piece I discuss various writers’ conceptions of the phenomenon I address, including Paul Hoover’s new modernism, Stephen Burt’s ellipticism, and Ron Silliman’s third way. I also further expand on the idea that the mainstream/avant-garde dichotomy is outmoded. I hope that all who are interested in this topic will take a look.

03.01.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (4)

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part Three

That many of the New American Poets were gay (Ashbery, Robin Blaser, James Broughton, Duncan, Edward Field, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Peter Orlovsky, James Schuyler, Spicer, Wieners, Jonathan Williams) is not incidental to their quest to find new ways of saying and, by implication (stronger in some than in others) new ways of moving through the world. But those projects were not necessarily or even often conceived of in political terms.
Whatever the New Americans’ interest in social transformation, and whatever forms that interest took, it doesn’t seem to have extended to gender. Only four of the forty-four poets in The New American Poetry are women, and only two of those, Barbara Guest and Denise Levertov, are even heard of now, though Robert Duncan was quite fond of Helen Adam’s romantic ballads. I’m told that it was only at his insistence that she was included at all. That can be seen as commentary on the book’s gender politics. But I also wonder what other women were writing and publishing in that mode at the time. The only one I can think of is Diane di Prima, whose first book was published in 1958. Joanne Kyger’s first book wasn’t published until 1965, and Anne Waldman’s (who was only fifteen in 1960, when the anthology was published) not until 1968. I don’t think that Allen deliberately excluded women poets. But the paucity of potential female contributors says much about the sexism of the “progressive”? or bohemian countercultures of the Nineteen-Fifties and Nineteen-Sixties, especially the Beats, though Gary Snyder does address gender and sexual equality. (The “conservative”? anthology against which The New American Poetry is often counterposed, Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson’s New Poets of England and America, published in 1957, does a bit better, with seven female contributors out of fifty-one total.)

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02.28.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (18)

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part Two

This is the second of three posts devoted to the seminal Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry. This post deals with the question of the “New American Poets”’s political commitments, or lack of same.
Some of the poets gathered by Allen did indeed seek to transform society. Some sought to transform consciousness. Some sought to transform writing as a practice. Most just sought to write poems that felt more genuine to them than the products of the poetic orthodoxies of the 1950s. Robert Creeley, for one example, was almost purely concerned with the lyric notation of the moment-to-moment movements of his mind, emotions, and sensibilities. As he wrote in the preface to For Love: Poems 1950-1960, “Not more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it me”? (cited in M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets 147). This implies a notion of a life more authentic or at least more awake than the one most people live, but has no necessarily political valence: various religious disciplines of attention have the same goal.
John Ashbery was a Yale Younger Poet (and Frank O’Hara almost was, in the same year), and the revolution which interested him was what Julia Kristeva calls a revolution in poetic language, largely inherited from such forebears as Raymond Roussel and Gertrude Stein, what he calls in the title of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard “other traditions”? (including Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Laura Riding, John Brooks Wheelwright, and David Schubert). It’s important to note that Ashbery has cited such canonical figures as W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens as among the poets who most shaped his poetic idiom.

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02.25.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (15)

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part One

It’s taken me a while to post this piece, as I’ve been beset by chemotherapy side effects of my colon cancer treatment, especially a debilitating bout of chemo fatigue, and a nasty cold on top of this, which just seems unfair. But when has my life ever been fair?
Much of what poet and critic Joshua Corey understatedly calls the “remarkable storm of controversy”? occasioned (but not caused) by my attempt to describe a phenomenon, “post-avant garde poetry,”? much mentioned but little defined, was aroused by my linking of current “post-avant”? poetry with what has been called “the New American Poetries,”? after the famous Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press in 1960. This observation was purely descriptive, not evaluative. The poets often referred to as “post-avants”? have clearly been influenced by the New American Poetries. But there is much disagreement about who has the right to claim the New Americans as their inheritance, as if their work and its legacy were something to be owned. But no one can lay exclusive claim to an artistic heritage or tradition. Such things are available to all, which is one of the many ways in which literature improves on life.
In turn, this debate derives from how one interprets that work and that legacy. The two main claims that have been made are a) that the very diverse poets gathered under the rubric “New American Poetry”? were political and/or social revolutionaries and b) that they shared a program of total or near-total negation. I will investigate both these claims.
I hope that this series of posts will prompt debate, but I also hope that the debate will maintain a reasoned and reasonable tone. Shouting matches do nothing but make one hoarse, and personal attacks do nothing but make one mean.
This first post discusses the anthology as a whole and its work in producing the grouping we now call “the New American Poetries” out of a number of poets whose work often had very little in common. The second post will focus on the artistic statements of individual contributors. The first post will address broader issues of the relationship between “progressive” art and “progressive” politics. I won’t spoil the ending.

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02.22.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (6)

Reginald Shepherd

My new New Year’s Resolutions

I have almost never made a new year’s resolution, but online events of the past month (I think we all know what I’m referring to) have prompted me, belatedly, to make some for this year, plus a couple more just for good measure. Instead of nine muses, I have nine resolutions. This post is partly humorous, but fundamentally, I’m quite serious.

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02.17.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (2)

Reginald Shepherd

My New Anthology

Lyric%20Postmodernisms.jpg
My new new book (after my recent essay collection, Orpheus in the Bronx), Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, is just out from the new and small but quite excellent Counterpath Press, who have published books by Laynie Browne, Brian Henry, and Andrew Joron, among others.
Marjorie Perloff writes of the book that “Like the best of museum curators, Reginald Shepherd has trusted his own poet’s eye and ear in assembling poems by twenty-three of our best (mostly younger) poets—poets not usually linked, belonging, as they do, to different schools and movements. From Rosmarie Waldrop’s ironic prose poems (’I gave up stress for distress’) to Cole Swensen’s elegant ekphrastic prose, from C. S. Giscombe’s minimalist geographies to Susan Stewart’s resonant mythic landscapes, the dominant impression—rare today—produced by this lyric assemblage is that of quality—the sure hand of those who have mastered their craft and can therefore Make It New. This is a truly exciting and memorable anthology!”
Charles Altieri writes that “All the anthologies of contemporary poetry I know are far too generous. They seem incapable of excluding almost anyone who has gained any reputation, and then they have to compensate for their breadth by such scanty selections there is no possibility of depth. Not so with Reginald Shepherd’s Lyric Postmodernisms. Shepherd had the courage to select 23 poets—spanning two generations—then offer them enough space to provide statements on their aesthetics, display their range (including selections from long poems and uncollected texts). This anthology treats poets not just as makers of objects but as thinkers with visible and engaging projects, who bring lyric consciousness into almost every domain of active life. . . . Here ‘lyric’ can have its fullest meaning only if there are many more than one postmodernism, as Shepherd elaborates in his brilliant and concise introduction.”?
I am grateful to them both for these generous and eloquent endorsements.

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02.14.08 PERMALINK | COMMENTS (49)

Author Archive

Reginald Shepherd

On the Intentional Fallacy

Reginald Shepherd

Art, History, Politics: A Short Note

Reginald Shepherd

Illness and Poetry

Reginald Shepherd

White Dopes on Punk: An Analogy*

Reginald Shepherd

This Is Just to Say

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part Three

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part Two

Reginald Shepherd

All Night, He Was a New American, Part One

Reginald Shepherd

My new New Year’s Resolutions

Reginald Shepherd

My New Anthology

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