Dear Reginald,

You have quite an endorsement from Marjorie Perloff.

When I was a Stegner at Stanford, Perloff allowed me to audit her literature course on interdisciplinary modernism, and she was without a doubt probably one of the best literature professors I've ever witnessed teach such a course.

All the best,

Robert

Postmodernism is over.

It's time to move on.

The era of the de-centered self, of the self as a function of language, of reality as a product of language, of the poem as an intervention or crossing of language processes, of the poem as a compromise between lyric and alterity, of language as objective material substance, of the poem as language experiment, etc. ....... - all these things are over and done with.

The low-brow opposition to these formations - ie. the movement for poetry as oral expression, the poem as performance, the poem as rebellion & anarchy against language & culture, the poem as joke, scandal, obscenity, debasement, etc ...... - these phenomena will always be with us, among young people who aren't very much interested in learning how to read or write.

The future of poetry is represented by something happening in between these two tendencies. This something occurs wherever poets remove themselves from the grid of 20th-century philoosphy and linguistic theory and poetics. Neither human identity and subjectivity, nor the art of poetry, are simply equatable with language or discourse. The new poetic humanism insists that language is a product of a human creative act - language is a tool invented by human beings. Rather than being mysterious functions of language itself, humans are the makers of language. Language itself is part of the larger realm of gesture and ocmmunication. Art is the mute human gesture toward reality and feeling. Poetry is grounded in mime - muteness - mimesis. This muteness envelops the substance of both human subjectivity and objective actuality. Art and poetry are not a swerve away from identity and actuality, not a confession of language's inability to mean anything; instead poetryand art are a human gesture toward the substance of actuality and meaning and feeling. The best poets are focused very intently on the details of this situation (actuality), rather than eliding and sliding away from it based on deluded 20th-cent. notions of language.

Thank you, Hnery, for announcing this great epochal moment, on a blog no less, the most postmodern discursive arena yet invented. Your grand condescension is so very kind and magnanimous.

Oh, and also, you're not describing a new poetic humanism; you're describing Romantic creativity, which didn't even survive to the end of the Romantic era. There's no new humanism, not in a world where the most popular TV shows are called reality shows, but have no more mimetic relationship to an actual reality than, say, The Marriage of Heaven and Hell; where the most popular musical forms are a combination of appropriation from other music and electronic effects; where the propagation of democracy in conquered nations takes the form of military rule, civil war, and resource exploitation; where any loony with a computer can set himself (almost always himself) up as the arbiter-in-chief of whatever cultural form he has an ill-informed opinion about. There's no humanism left anywhere except in the nostalgic fantasies of those lucky enough to have a little spare time, money, and security to dream their naïve dreams.

Good luck with your project. With any luck you'll make poetry and criticism as irrelevant as the enemies of culture would like it to be.

Henry, is it possible that you believe the Aristotelian tendencies of the Chicago critics might shed some light on these problems?

"among young people who aren't very much interested in learning how to read or write"

With all due respect Mr. Gould, 'cos I may just be misunderstanding you, I think I take a bit of offense at that statement. I'm 23 myself, and some days that doesn't seem young, others it does, but I certainly appreciate both "high" literary aspirations as well as subversion. You're right that like wars & rumors of wars we'll always have youth attempting to subvert, but this doesn't necessarily indicate any failings or an opposition to literacy. One thinks of Catullus.

I do think postmodernism is on the outs, but I'm not sure we're moving toward quite what you describe. Of course, you do lump a great deal of things as "over and done with," perhaps prematurely.

Derek, just because the TV & pop music industries are based on appropriation, mechanization & pseudo-reality, doesn't mean poets have to model themselves on DJs (following Ashbery's paradigmatic example). I don't really shed tears over the pathos of postmodern collage methods or their Dada makers, I don't really admire or sympathize with their deep empathy for the tragic human situation of today.

I'm not knocking Reginald's anthology; I'm taking advantage of its presentation here in order to propose a different perspective. (Reginald is a grown-up, and I think he can probably handle opposing ideas.)

I offer a contrary analysis of a reigning, prevalent style, which is based on what I believe are misguided philosophical concepts. I'm not harking back to Romanticism (though Wordsworth's model of ordinary speech of real people is appealing) - I don't, in a Romantic mode, oppose "humanism" or "the poetic imagination" to either science or religion. I'm simply presenting an idea of language as a human invention, for which human beings, and especially poets, should take full responsibility - rather than language as a metaphysical/philosophical/post-structural nexus, with which life & literature happen to find themselves erratically entangled (which is the general image projected by "postmodern" style).

Cuitlamitzli, I'm not knocking youth, and I'm sorry if my tone sounded sarcastic, which it is. I'm just bored with hipness, epicurean revolution, sloganeers, Madison Avenue, two-bit poets, self-righteousness, the whole ball of wax.

Reginald, your new book sounds exciting to me, and I'm looking forward to reading it. I love the cover. Congrats!

Henry, I have to agree with you about this: I'm just bored with hipness, epicurean revolution, sloganeers, Madison Avenue, two-bit poets, self-righteousness, the whole ball of wax. But I trust Reginald's taste.

I dunno, I think you have to feel a little...compassion...for poor little postmodernism. It takes a beating from both directions: from the traditional humanists who want some good ol' core values , some emotional resonance and coherent communication; and the traditional leftists who worry that its ceaseless decentering and relativizing eventually erodes a commitment to the real of history and its actually nameable dynamics (let's not forget that the "Sokal affair" came from the rationalist Left). The anti-intellectuals swat at it for offering ineffectual theory and jargon in place of pragmatic activity; many intellectuals in turn mock it for being intellectually empty.

Hemmed in on all sides, postmodernism still manages to loom like a formless bogeyman, far more threatening than such a situation would seem to warrant. That alone should strike one as an interesting fact.

One possible explanation would be that "postmodernism" isn't simply some collection of pseudo-philosophical programs and aesthetic choices, some set of misbegotten prescriptions to prefer or not. What if postmodernism, even (or especially) in its incoherence and etc, was closer to a description of, well, postmodernity? That is, what if the matter at hand was that historical developments had proceeded apace, and we were now inhabiting a world at least somewhat different from that of modernity, and thus wanting from poetics (in our case) a different formal accounting?

This might seem to explain postmdernism's endurance, if it has been called forth not merely by some dumb ideas that we could dismiss as ideas, but by actual conditions still coming into view — actualities which are rather harder to banish via opinion. And it might also begin to explain why postmodernism, so easily and widely despised, remains so threatening — perhaps it has to stand in for the changed world itself, which is a little harder to browbeat?

This is in no way a form of advocacy; I tend to think one can neither advocate for or against "postmodernism" as such. It's merely an attempt to understand art's relation to the stuff dreams aren't made of.

Michael,

As I've already noted in previous comments in response to your questions, I have written some essays about the Chicago Critics' Aristotelian theories of poetic form, which you can find here:

http://hgessrev.blogspot.com

I tried to encapsulate my argument over at HG Poetics, as follows :

"I'd like to replace the ubiquitous 20th-cent. fixation on "language" (as system : as the currency, the substance, the organizing matrix, of poetry) with an emphasis on silence, gesture, mime. Hart Crane's statement should be its motto: the poem is

'a single, new word, never before spoken, and impossible to actually enunciate'.

A poem is, in this sense, the sum of the poet's strategic gestures toward something never-before-said or -sayable. It is absolutely uncategorizable according to any prior linguistic grid, and the poet bears complete responsibility for - is the human agent of - the final & efficient cause of - all its meanings and reverberations."

For the Chicago critics, a poem is an aesthetic SHAPE, organized primarily by plot and dramatic action, for which the language is only one of several contributing factors. I want to transpose this notion to apply to poetry in general, by positing this notion of the poet's mute GESTURE as the organizing principle of the poem's aesthetic form. Everything involved in this gesture works toward the integrity and fulfillment of Crane's "impossible" new word (which again, is not so much a verbal word, as the sum total of the aesthetic-communicative gesture).

I would say that Ashbery is the great American exemplar of the poet as de-centered self offering poetry as unaccountable discourse. This kind of practice fuses seamlessly with postmodern theoretical concepts of the status of the subject, the power of language-as-system (or language-as-differance), etc. It is this whole approach I am calling into question, with these two notions of 1) language as primarily a human invention, a tool of human agency; and 2) poetry as rooted in mime and mute communicative gesture.

Jane, I take your point, which rhymes somewhat with Derek's comment. But I am not simply offering another blast against postmodernism per se. I am criticizing a particular & prevalent aspect of contemporary American poetry - that aspect which has to do with the application - indeed the hegemony - of certain 20th-cent. notions of language-as-system - structure, post-structure - in poetic technique & style & orientation. I tried to summarize it in the last paragraph of previous post :

"I would say that Ashbery is the great American exemplar of the poet as de-centered self offering poetry as unaccountable discourse. This kind of practice fuses seamlessly with postmodern theoretical concepts of the status of the subject, the power of language-as-system (or language-as-differance), etc. It is this whole approach I am calling into question, with these two notions of 1) language as primarily a human invention, a tool of human agency; and 2) poetry as rooted in mime and mute communicative gesture."

& I do think that when these two concluding ideas, or something like them, are taken to heart by poets, then the era of "postmodernist" poetry will indeed be over.

Whatever postmodernism is, poetry remains modernist and romantic. Except perhaps for its lack of interest in history, what we call postmodernism has most of the characteristics of modernism, which itself was built over, even when in opposition to, romanticism. Donald Revell, a contributor to Reginald's anthology, is a romantic late modernist and proudly so. Ashbery is of the romantic line, and he's our great poet, right? Much confusion in our world about the difference between the Wordsworthian Sublime, practiced in our day as the free verse poem of personal epiphany, in other words bad poetry, and the high romantic practices of Holderlin, Rimbaud, Stevens.

For me, the real subject of this line of discussion is Reginald's anthology: whom he chose to include, why he calls it Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetry (which makes a claim to innovation even as it seeks to dismantle the "avant"), and why in the first wake of its publication he has acted aggressively to privilege these particular contemporaries, many of whom follow on the trail of New Americans like Ashbery, Guest, Olson, Creeley, and Duncan.

One answer is demographic, the establishment of ties at MFA programs or on the Lower East Side, when that was the way blood lines were drawn. My anthology Postmodern American Poetry is loaded with poets of the Lower East Side type. Of the contributors, only Barrett Watten, Bob Perelman, and Alice Notley attended Iowa, but I have a feeling they didn't complete their degrees. Perhaps ten PAP contributors received the PhD degree, including Barry and Bob. People bond with those they came up with. Friendships and poetics are developed in parallel. It's just common sense. We don't have to be blood brothers with someone to enjoy their poetry. That's why New American Writing has published the work of 18 of Reginald's contributors, while Postmodern American Poetry, of its 103 poets, includes only 5 of the 23 contributors to Lyric Postmodernisms: Marjorie Welish, Nathaniel Mackey, Kathleen Fraser, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, and Ann Lauterbach.

I was at a dinner party at the home of one of Reginald's contributors not long ago, where a younger poet praised the work of Michael Burkard. I have never read Burkard's work; perhaps he's a great poet. I know that he is of another family of poets than my own. And I thought, how interesting, I'm now in the company of people I consider friends whose history and associations are foreign to my own. But when I later attended this year's AWP, Maxine and I made a special trip downtown to have lunch with Kenward Elmslie and Ron and Pat Padgett, who are long and loyal friends, a bond developed over a love for the same poetry. The grain of that relationship is entirely different.

I heard Christian Bok comfortably use the word 'avant-garde.' It's OK for a Canadian, eh? But we want to be innovative.

Paul, I don't think the real subject of this line of discussion is the ins & outs of various coteries. Though that usually IS the main topic around new anthologies, and I apologize to Reginald if I seem to be grinding my own axe at the expense of his publication announcement.

The real subject, at least of the line of discussion which I inaugurated, has to do with the use of the term "postmodernism". If postmodern poets are really just modern romantics, then why use the term? & why use the terms avant-garde & innovative? I think these terms are bandied about because many of the ambitious poets who wear the brand called "innovative" have accepted and disseminated a nexus of assumptions about the nature of language, the nature of language in poetry, and the relation between these things and the nature of contemporary reality. It is their allegiance to this particular nexus, actually, which distinguishes this wave or movement in American poetic style from Modern and Romantic poetics.

And my line of discussion has pursued the aim of showing why this trend is finished : because it has been based on illusory notions both of language and of poetic language & composition in particular.

packaging, packaging: put these unpopular poets together with
slogans like
"lyric" "postmodern" "innovative" "contemporary"

and hope some suckers will bite . . .

today's poetry buyers, the readers of Collins/Oliver/Hirshfield/Kooser et al
are not dumb enough to fall for such hype . . .

. . . I just hope they sic Danielle Chapman onto it,
seeing how right she was in her review of Mr. Shepherd's
first crapfest . . .

I wonder what folks might make of this reasonable endnote in Michael Golston's book, Rhythm and Race in Modernist Poetry and Science:

"I am aware of the problematical nature, at this late date, of the term 'postmodernism,' but I wish to retain it as a provisionally useful designation for a fundamental change in attitude toward the issue of poetic measure that occurred in the middle of the [twentieth] century."

... from which he clamly directs the more curious to Charles Bernstein's A Poetics for a discussion of what CB calls there the "dizzying, contradictory, incommensurable thicket of theorizing [which] has recently cropped up on the topic of postmodernism."

Possibly no wheels need be (re)invented.

Heh. That should read calmly - we're all calm as clams here, right?

Don, I don't think anyone has challenged the fact that something called postmodernism, & postmodernist poetry, actually exist. As far as I can see, no one is re-inventing the wheel, though the books you mention certainly sound like valid reference points.

What I'm doing is sketching out - on a very abstract & general level of poetics - a critique of that practice.

I haven't read Michael Golston's book, but I assume, regarding "measure", that he's referring to the turn, in the late 1950s, from New Critical concerns to the free verse of Lowell & others. But please correct me if I'm wrong.

I've sketched out (in previous comments) my own sense of what the "postmodern" means in recent and contemporary practice, & where it seems, from my perspective, to come up short.

Bill Knott said:

>packaging, packaging: put these unpopular poets together with
slogans like "lyric" "postmodern" "innovative" "contemporary" and hope some suckers will bite . . .today's poetry buyers, the readers of Collins/Oliver/Hirshfield/Kooser et al
are not dumb enough to fall for such hype . . . I just hope they sic Danielle Chapman onto it,
seeing how right she was in her review of Mr. Shepherd's first crapfest . . .

Bill, you sound like the Howard Wolfson of the fading and frustrated campaign in the race for the Poetry Executive Branch of the USA.

Kent

But unlike Howard, Bill (and even though you're starting to lose the once-solid New Yorker, Nation, and Poetry demographic....), you've still got a surfeit of unbudging, reliable Super Delegates. So don't worry too much!

Kent

I thought "what the 'postmodern' means" - and the term itself (c.f. Bill Knott's post) - were being challenged, and by wheel I meant the term's definition, which has been haggled over for a long time. As to whether what's meant by "postmodern" comes up short or not - I'll leave that for others to discuss.

About "measure" I think you're right, though Golston must also be referring to William Caros Williams's specific use of that word, deployed to supplant Pound's (and Yeats's) rhythmus, which W.C.W. found objectionable, reactionary, and inadquate to the development of modern American prosody.

"I'm just bored with hipness, epicurean revolution, sloganeers, Madison Avenue, two-bit poets, self-righteousness, the whole ball of wax," says Henry Gould.

Sure, but the opposites are just as bad--squareness, Republican revolution, Mouseketeers, Amsterdam Avenue, Robert Frostbit poets, self-loathing, whole balls of yarn. God I hate yarn.

(Just kidding about yarn. And Amsterdam Avenue.)

Any thoughts on Houston St.?
Kit & kaboodle?

There has to be a happy medium somewhere north of Staten Island.
Or maybe Staten Island is IT.

Yeats thought so, anyway.

"I will arise & go now, & go to Staten Island,
& a small duplex rent there, of aluminum siding made;
Ninth inning, bases loaded, will I have there,
& live alone with a jar of marmalade.

& I shall have some School of Quietude there, for such comes mumbling slow,
stumbling from the bedroom of the morning to where the alarm clock rings...."

Speaking of John Ashbery, Henry's Ur-Pomo Evil Sorcerer, I heard today that the next issue of Chicago Review will carry a letter from him that strongly criticizes the "Numbers Trouble" essay, in CR's previous issue, by Stephanie Young and Juliana Spahr.

So *that* should be interesting...

Kent

Is Amsterdam Avenue really the opposite of Madison Avenue? I would have thought maybe 9th Avenue below Port Authority, Tho I'm just a tourist when I'm in NY.
Daisy

Daisy, I was going purely on geography, but of course I meant Columbus Avenue, as Columbus and Madison are both one block from Central Park on opposite sides. I apologize for the error.

Such "comment-box interventions" as mine, here on Reginald's patient long-suffering Harriet post, are easy to dismiss.

Nevertheless I hope some poets will consider the implications of what I'm saying.

The big trends in 20th-century linguistic theory and philosophy have assumed as axiomatic that language is not only a system (either a system of order, as with the structuralists, or, as with the post-structuralists, a system of chaos or "difference"), but a system (either a logos or an a-logos) which is the actual substance & ratio of reality, identity, and literature.

And the prevailing currents in what is known as postmodernist, innovative, post-avant, and language poetries have taken up these theories and assumptions, and have made their literary consequences a hallmark of their style - that which differntiates them from the common herd of traditional poets.

Now if it's possible to think of language in a completely different way - as primarily a human creation, a tool of communication which we invented - akin to other forms of non-verbal (& non-human) gesture, signals and communication - then we have a problem with the theoretical obsession with language as self-regulating system. And we have a problem with a trend in poetics which emphasizes the dispossession of human invention, will & intent, in favor of the aleatory workings of socially- or internally-generated verbal materials.

It also strikes me as curious that 50 years ago, a group of influential literary scholars, poets & critics - the so-called Chicago School (R.S. Crane, Elder Olson & others) - had already analyzed the basic problems involved with the 20th-century fixation on language, and the concomitant notion of the poem as primarily a verbal artifact. And they outlined an Aristotelian counter-proposal to this dominant New Critical trend (which was, in effect, turned inside-out & re-applied by the Language Poets) - one which focuses on the poem as an aesthetic whole, an intellectual-emotional gesture or form, which is not reducible to its literal text, but is primarily an (aesthetic) ACTION, for which the text provides a kind of score.

I see the contemporary state of affairs (when poets & groups of poets glibly gather up such identifying markers at "postmodernist", "innovative", etc.) as somewhat similar to the situation which existed at the turn of the previous century, when Pound surveyed the landscape of versifying post-Victorians, and commented something to the effect that "they have no ground under 'em".

Matt--
Me, I was thinking personality-wise...
Cheers,
Daisy

Henry,

It strikes me as curious that 50 postings ago, you made your point about language. Don't you think it's made now? If it's going to gather any support or accolytes, it has probably done so already. I'll say here what I said on your blog: knowing that language was invented by humans tells us no more about poetry (or pretty much any other post-neolithic use of language) than knowing that humans invented jumping tells us about basketball. Follow the analogy: basketball IS a self-regulating system. It is more confined and has less historical weight behind it than poetry, but poetry and culture generally, have long ago moved past the circumstances dictated by the invention of their tools and generated limitless new systems, self-regulating or otherwise. I don't see that this point of mine will register with you at all, but I will also remind you that you wrote in another posting: “we should remember that both poetry & history are too messy, complex & ever-changing to settle down into our neat pigeonholes.” It might be time to take your own advice. Maybe your new way of thinking about language could be useful in analyzing poems about cavemen, or some other prehistoric topic, but you're just being rude by repeatedly throwing this very slight thesis of yours into a discussion that ought to be celebrating Reginald's success, not berating it.

Well, OK Derek, let's explore your analogy. I know that in Canada, for example, Basketball - the game, the activity - is considered to be a kind of virtual projection, a phantasmic illusion, the visual or haptic trace of what is actually a textual situation, ruled by the aleatory movement (much like free-rolling basketballs) or shifting of binary markers within a TEXT called "basketball". In fact it is well understood north of Lake of the Woods that not only basketball "players", but all perrson & events, are suspended in a stream or solution of language-about-basketball, since language itself is the origin and end of our notions of That-Which-Exists. Hence the notion that "humans invented basketball", someplace in Massachusetts in the 19th century, is really no longer relevant, in a situation where Basketball Rules actually rule whatever notions humans have about it or anything else. Moreover, at least in Canada anyway, it was long ago recognized that literary works exhibit no signs of agency outside the game of Basketball, understood as a noetic response to textual signs, and thus "art" and "lyric poetry" have essentially been folded into the general mode of language-processing which we call the "basketball game".

Actually, when it comes to this theoretical situation which we have up in Canada, I'd rather be with Cratylus & the cave people, pointing to things and mumbling incomprehensible sounds. This seems to me to be much closer to what art & poetry-making are all about.

He just doesn't let up. Let's explore a couple more implications of the humans-invented-language rule for poetry: 1. We'll have to assume that language was invented in the form of speech, rather than writing, so then any kind of written verse must be an abomination against first principles. 2. Whatever language was invented for, I think we can assume it was not poetry, and hence poetry itself must be an abomination against first principles. The new Henry Gould solution: all poetry must end. You know what? whether my logical derivations are fallacious and disingenuous or not, the Henry Gould solution really does start to seem like the end of all poetry.

Reginald,

Congrats on the book!

See, Henry, I knew you wouldn't read my question as sarcastic. Have you heard the one about the two rabbis who fell off the whaler?

You've been saying exactly the same thing in about forty different comment streams. If you haven't managed to convert the masses by now, I doubt your seventeen-hundredth post will change anyone's mind. I'm sure most people find your tendentiousness and self-importance much more offensive than your actual views.

By the way, not that it has any bearing on whatever inane argument is being conducted within these little boxes that I can't be bothered to read in their entirety, but humans did not invent jumping.

I think you're probably right about that, Michael, which would suggest that basketball is not so much a human sport as a manifestation of thanato-scatological drives that fold in on themselves so the basket is always already the orifice of an occluded skin that s(m)others the subject in her indeterminate uninscribability. Don't you think?

Michael Robbins said, addressing Henry Gould:

>I'm sure most people find your tendentiousness and self-importance much more offensive than your actual views.

For what it's worth, I also often disagree with Henry Gould, and we've had our share of arguments, but I most often find his contrarian commentary (when he's in serious mood) to be perfectly thought-provoking, elegantly caustic, and refreshingly "tendentious."

And one thing he almost never resorts to is the banal ad hominem.

Michael.

In fact, I think he'd be an excellent choice as regular commentator for Harriet!

Kent

I don't know about "banal," but I certainly intended "tendentious" & "self-important" to refer to HG's argumentum ad nauseum, not the man himself, who I am sure loves puppies & votes for smiling progressives. Kthx.

Dear Reginald,

I just wanted to tell you how grateful I am for your new anthology. It came in the mail 3 days ago and I've barely put it down. To that end: some weeks back I had to prepare an artist statement which I'll excerpt here:

"I have always struggled with the question of self in poetry, but lately I find it sending me in new directions; it’s a question I’m pondering in conversation with the larger question of self in American poetry, as I’ve seen it articulated across the poetic (aesthetic and theoretical) spectrum.
In part, what I want from my writing has changed. What to do with an impulse for storytelling if I’ve grown tired of my own stories? Or if I am bored with the conventional means of telling? I’m very connected to the Southern tradition in which I was first steeped, at the same time that my own aesthetic demands find me consistently trying to disrupt that tradition’s hold over my poems, especially my notions of what a poem can/should be/do. I feel invested in keeping something of the regional or colloquial in my work—the South is an ugly, beautiful and richly complex place—you needn’t dig very deep to discover that its language is all of those things as well. But I’ve fought not to fall into what feel like limitations of a strain of poetry sometimes identified with the South—mainly the predictability of the meditative, anecdotal, linear narrative joined to insight/epiphany, with a good shake of local flavor added in.
So: May I speak through other voices and modes? May I redefine what "narrative" can mean and do? I’ve run into these questions in my writing in the last two years and I’ve felt stuck—almost intractably—all this time. What’s come to help me immeasurably has been the example of other poets, grappling in their own ways with similar tensions. I know that they can’t answer my questions, but their methods of interrogation can—and have—suggested new directions for my own conflicting impulses."

I wish I had had your anthology with me for some part of this stalled-out time. I had my books, I always have my books. But the selections in this anthology, the enlightening craft essays by contributors, your insightful introductory essay--in addition to providing a wealth of invigorating, charged writing-- are all enormously instructive, generative, and best of all, for me at least, help me feel that my range-y aesthetic investments, and my jackdaw approaches--not from cluelessness, but from belief in the usefulness of (parts of) all modes of writing--that that tentative position is not only okay, but legitimate. I find out that other poets whose work I've really admired are actually writing from a very similar place. This anthology helps me clarify and situate a lot of what I've been feeling and doing, without knowing exactly how to articulate it. I'm very grateful for all your effort, and for the generous gesture it represents.

Dear Capps,

Thank you so much for your generous words about my anthology. It was a lot of work to put it together, and even more work to get it published, so the fact that it has meant something to you is very affirming.

I completely concur with you when you write about the importance of feeling that "my range-y aesthetic investments, and my jackdaw approaches--not from cluelessness, but from belief in the usefulness of (parts of) all modes of writing--that that tentative position is not only okay, but legitimate." There is so much fence-building and turf-guarding in the poetry world, and I really feel that people limit themselves and cut themselves off from possibilities that way. When I was an aspiring poet I was reading Bob Perelman's Primer and Geoffrey Hill's Tenebrae, Louise Gluck's Descending Figure and Michael Palmer's Notes for Echo Lake, Linda Gregg's Too Bright to See and Jack Spicer's One Night Stand and Other Poems, and finding no contradiction or conflict. I just responded to things that spoke to me and enriched my reading and writing lives. That's still the way that I read, and that experience is part of what I was trying to convey with this anthology, and with my previous one, The Iowa Anthology of New American Poetries.

Again, I'm so glad that this book has meant something to you. As a writer, as an editor, that's my fondest wish: that something I did would matter to someone else. Thank you again for your wonderfully heartening words.

all best,

Reginald

Michael, you & Derek seem full of certainties : about who I am, who I vote for, where I fit into the literary pecking order, how much self-importance I have, etc. etc.

What seems clear to me is that neither of you have any idea what I've been talking about, or any interest in finding out. You're playing the hatchet-man in defense of Reginald Shepherd, who doesn't need your help. You deal in slogans and put-downs.

I am a little perplexed as to how my announcement of the publication of my new anthology became the occasion for such an imbroglio. I also cannot help but wonder if anyone involved in this rather extended and heated argument has actually read the book the post was about.

That is all.

Well, Henry, as someone well versed in R. S. Crane & Elder Olson, who attends & teaches at the very institution in question and on whose dissertation committee one of their former colleagues serves, I'd like to think I have a very clear idea what you're talking about. Out here on Cottage Grove it matters. And I haven't said a word in defense of Reginald, who certainly doesn't need my help. If he's interested in responding to you, he'll respond. As I've said, it is not your ideas but your obsessive rehearsal of them in every single comment stream you haunt that I find a bit obnoxious. But my hat, for this conversation, it up I hang.

Dear Reginald,

it became an imbroglio because the publication announcement appeared in a popular semi-collective blog-space - the kind of space which, in case you hadn't noticed, lends itself to rather free-flowing & often contentious (& often ridiculous) dialogue & debate. Somethimes these debates raise substantive issues - but I don't want to rock the postmodernism boat.

Nevertheless, clearly, it's still possible to maintain the rituals of ceremonial display, obsequious praise, effusive flattery, and so on, which attach to the Poetry-Biz we have come to know & love, in these late post-modern days.

All it takes is a few ignorant attack-dogs.

That is all.

Michael,

apparently your presitigous institutional credentials over there in Cottage Grove certify you for arrogance and complacency. You've managed to dismiss the bizarre notion of actually getting into a debate about the substance of my comments here - in other words participating in these blog comment spaces in a productive way - in favor of the simple sarcastic put-down. And you boast about it. Congratulations, and thanks for the conversation.

Henry,

The rituals of celebration are human rituals. They enact social uses of language in pleasant ways. They embody your theoretical ideas in pleasant ways.

There has been very little, if any, "obsequious praise, effusive flattery, and so on" going on here. Some people read the book and dig it and say so (and I say THANK YOU to anybody who shares their enthusiasm for just about any art whatsoever); some people admire Reginald's endorsers and have congratulated him; some people are simply happy for him to have completed a project he worked hard on. If you think this is all bullshit, I pity you. If you are bound and determined to upset rituals of CELEBRATION -- which are NOT those nasty things you imply -- why are you surprised that people resist?

Or maybe you aren't surprised, and are only enacting a false outrage to continue the unpleasantness.

I find your commentary on language and poetry worthwhile and intriguing and relevant to my own concerns, and I thank you for it, but you have been rude. Rudeness embodies your theory too, but not in a way designed to win converts -- that's pretty much all Michael said. You are simply wrong that that makes him an ignorant, arrogant, complacent attack dog.

John,

Regarding my comment about praise, flattery etc. - I wasn't referring to the offers of congratulations & thanks to Reginald in this comment stream, but to the blurb advertisements which Reginald quoted. I should have made that clear. Yes, I was being irascible - which was wrong. But I get tired of the legitimizing function of blurbage - especially when one has doubts about the whole premise of the period style itself.

As for being rude - I apologized more than once to Reginald for the intrusion of my polemic on his announcement post. But perhaps you're right, maybe it was all a mistake. You're the first one to respond, without sarcasm, to the actual issues I raised.

As far as Michael Robbins & Derek Catermole - I disagree. Robbins makes a point of trying to bait me with false questions, which of course I tried to answer, only to be told by him that he was only kidding. Then he explains how well-versed he is in the Chicago School (which I suppose means I should not have posted anything?) . Catermole simply engaged in sarcastic put-downs. Both of them exaggerate the number & repetitiveness of my posts (Catermole : "50 posts". Robbins: "obsessive rehearsal" - what does he mean by this? I posted a number of times because I was responding to different people - Paul Hoover, "Jane", etc., as well as to Robbins's repeated fake questions).

Thanks for your note -

I should probably stay out of this brawl (and out of brawls in general), but Henry Gould's comment raises a legitimate question I would like to respond to.

Marjorie Perloff and Charles Altieri are two critics of poetry whose work I have admired for many years. Altieri, in particular, has been crucial to my writing and my thinking about writing. It means a lot to me personally that they admire a project on which, as John points out, I worked very hard for a long time. It is easy to take pot shots at such work, but not so easy actually to do it.

Do Perloff's and Altieri's endorsements also mean something professionally? I certainly hope so. Having done the work on this anthology, I want it to be read. Any writer or editor wants his or her work to be read, and if their endorsements make someone pick up the book, including someone reading this blog, who might not otherwise have done so, I am happy. Given the huge number of books that are published each year and simply fall into oblivion, it would be foolish to refuse any legitimate and honest opportunity (I emphasize legitimate and honest) that might draw attention to one's work. I assume that Perloff and Altieri wrote their endorsements because they genuinely admired the book. They have no reason to obsequiously praise or effusively flatter me.

Though I am hardly without my own bitternesses and resentments, I don't have such a cynical view of the world. And I would caution that just as one doesn't want others turning assumptions about one into certainties, one should be careful not to let one's own assumptions about others turn into such certainties either.

Along the lines of not being led by one's assumptions, if one is going to discuss a book, certainly if one is going to publicly criticize it, it would be best to read it first.

peace and poetry,

Reginald

Dear Reginald,

please forgive me if my comments about the cover endorsements implied anything other than "legitimacy and honesty" on your part. I meant no such thing. My cynicism about blurbs in general may be unfair and misguided - you may be right about that. But there it is. I will have to refuse all blurbs myself, if any are ever offered.....

John's comments above have some truth in them. & perhaps my attack deserved the "attack dogs" who dogged it in turn.

I certainly plan to read your anthology, and see if my speculative analysis, about the general trends it represents, holds any water.

In the meantime, I hope you will accept my very clumsy congratulations on the completion of this difficult project.

p.s. & I would also like to remind you, Reginald, of something I just now remembered myself - that you also made a dismissive remark, in a comment stream on this blog, about a book of poetry you hadn't read.

It was my book, Stubborn Grew (Spuyten Duyvil, 2000).

Dear Henry,

Thank you for your apology and your congratulations, which I very much appreciate. And you are correct regarding my earlier comment. What I wrote, or at least what I meant to write, was that from what you yourself wrote about it, it sounded as if the book was another in a long line engaging in the exoticization of black people by white authors. I did not mean to imply that I knew this for a fact, having not read the book. I apologize if it came across that way.

peace and poetry,

Reginald

Actually, Bluejay (the exotic character in question) is the bastard child (engendered, like Athena, from the head) of Herman Melville. But my sister Cara (who is African-American) thought the book was was OK, anyway...