Hello Reginald,

Thanks for such an articulate and inclusive definition of "post-avant." The idea behind my original label was simply to satirize the idea of a kind of poetry that was beyond avant-garde since the term itself is meant to convey the newest techniques, styles, thinking, etc. What could be newer than new, and what comes after the avant-garde if not the post-avant-garde (or the post-avants)? Then there is the post-POST avant poetry, which I satirized in my 2003 essay "Post-Post Dementia." In an effort to try and define that kind of poetry (T.K.O.P.), I conducted a discussion around the same time called Avant, Post-Avant, and Beyond. But all of this is of bygone days and older frays. I'm now working on post-ellipticial poems to keep ahead of the curve.

Cheers,
Joan

Dear Reginald,

thanks for this sharp and valuable post, one that I plan to keep handy, which sidesteps a lot of muddled thinking and clears some genuine ground for me. Your definition of post-avant makes sense because it actually takes the "post-" part seriously -- which is to say you are moving beyond the avant-garde's traditional (!) belief in simplistic narratives of "progress" in literature (and elsewhere) and its barely hidden instinct for complete, exclusionary world domination, ie. its insistence that it alone knows and should be allowed to determine what the future will look like. These contradictions have, time and time again, led precisely to the failure and implosion of avant-garde movements. So thanks, and I'll be sure to follow up on the fallout of all this on your blog!

I'd like to add one small question, if I may-- the poets you cite, to the best of my knowledge, are all American. It's my belief that any meaningful new movement in should be thinking about how to locate itself in the context of the global, including its relationship to English and other languages, and should be preparing itself to think beyond the nation. That would also be an important "post-post" to consider.

Dear Reginald:

I too found this a very useful post. Thank you. It's a term ("post-avant") that I've seen in print alot recently and so welcomed this.

I had the pleasure of hosting Cynthia Cruz at a reading series in Chicago I co-curate (PALABRA PURA) and a number of us think her work and book (RUIN) is terrific. To her name I would add these, in no particular order, some of whom I had the pleasure of hearing read for the first time last Friday in NYC at an AWP off-site event:

Rodrigo Toscano
Edwin Torres
Roberto Tejada
Roberto Harrison
Rosa Alcalá
Carmen Giménez Smith
John Chavez
Gabriel Gomez
Monica de la Torre
Peter Ramos
Valerie Marínez
María Meléndez
Scott Inguito

FA

Reginald,

With all due respect -- I believe the poets of the "New American Poetries" are turning over in their graves at the suggestion that they spawned most of the poets on your "post" list.

There is no "third way." A third way supposes a compromise of lyric and anti-lyric, but the New Americans largely weren't interested in style: they were committed to visionary politics and noncomformism. Their poetics was an outgrowth of that. There is no comparable movement now, but that doesn't mean we can paper over the differences between poets who were genuinely negative -- who knew the value of negativity -- and poets with great c.v.'s who organize themselves around Mommy anthologies and niche readings at professional conferences. There is no point of overlap whatsoever.

Ange Mlinko

But Ange, the New Americans-- defined as the people in the New American Poetry anthology editd by Don Allen almost fifty years ago-- included people as unlike one another as John Weiners, Gary Snyder and John Ashbery! Some were interested in style, some weren't. Some were committed to visionary politics, some (Kenneth Koch) really weren't. Some were lyric all the time (Creeley, at that time), some were never lyric and didn't want to be.

There is no one "third way" (a phrase I dislike because it comes from Tony Blair, whose lack of faith to his own promises, and to those of his Labor Party, used to depress me whenever I read news from Britain).

But there are plenty of people (Ange, you're one of them!) trying to figure out how to incorporate both lyric and non- (if not anti-) lyric impulses, and trying (not coincidentally) to put modernist fragmentation together with Romantic expectations about voice and form. Most of those people (like most of any large set of writers) don't strike me as very interesting; some (Ange, you're one of them!) strike me as always worth reading, and sometimes wonderful.

Another one of those people (and one of the people in Reginald's Iowa anthology) is Tracy Philpot, who stands alone among them in that she has a very nonacademic social services job in super-rural Alaska. Is she writing these days? Does she read this blog? Anyone seen new poems of hers since her third book, which I just loved?

Dear Joan, Vivek, and Letras Latinas:

Thanks for your comments. I'm glad that my piece has proven useful. It does seem that "post-avant" (and various other "posts") get tossed about with a sense that we all already know what it means. Which leaves a lot of room for confusion.

Dear Ange,

Thanks for your note. It's exactly that kind of either/or, we're good/you're bad exclusionary rhetoric that I think our best poets have gotten over, along with the pretensions to a monopoly on virtue, poetic or otherwise.

I don't think that any of the poets on my list compromise lyric and anti-lyric, what Charles Altieri calls lyricism and lucidity and I would call (after Auden) enchantment and disenchantment. I think that they bring them together into new relationships, new constellations, and even synthesize them.

A wholly negative aesthetic, like a wholly negative politics, produces nothing. Negativity is not a value in and of itself. (As the old Billy Preston song reminds us, nothing from nothing leaves nothing.) People often forget that for all his negativity, critical theorist Theodor Adorno's refusals were in the service of a great hope, that of a more just society, the ever-deferred promise of happiness. Unlike too many today (I won't name names ), he wasn't engaging in negation for its own sake, which is too much like a toddler repeating the word "No" just for the pleasure of refusal (and knowing that, no matter stubborn he or she is right now, he or she can say "Yes" again whenever he or she feels like it).

If you think that the New Americans weren't interested in what you dismiss as "style," that is, in poetry and poetics, then you simply haven't read them properly.

Who are the presumably uncompromised poets you would set against the poets I list, since you do seem so against them? Self-righteousness, derogatory rhetoric like "spawned," and a conviction of one's own superior virtue are no bases for any worthwhile aesthetic.

Reginald

Should the fact that Mr. Shepherd's innovative poetry anthology is already out-of-print tell us anything? Ahem!

To speak briefly to Steve's aside re visionary politics: I've heard several people characterize Kenneth Koch's poem "The Pleasures of Peace" as a visionary political poem. As for Kenneth's personal commitment to political action, you might consider his participation in faculty caucuses at Columbia in the spring of 1968, as well as his having been arrested in at least one demonstration, and the subject of a (mock) assassination attempt at a poetry reading. Or, you might not.

Hello, Reginald—

Thanks for another thought-provoking post. Your touchstone paragraph (beginning "Post-avant writers tend to eschew...") is the best nutshellization I've seen of the procedures these poets share. And the historical context you lay out earlier on is useful, too.

The nub of the issue for me, though, is that reading some (not all, by any means) of these poets gives that prickly, heebie-jeebie feeling of being conned. (Remember when John Lennon described Yoko's "conceptual art" as "con art"?) Your Rebecca Wolff quote is a good example. This writing, she says, "blurs the distinction between 'difficulty' and 'accessibility.'" Unless I'm mistaken, this distinction is made by the reader, not the writer—although, as Ted Kooser would argue, the writer can intentionally choose to shape a poem with one or the other side of that distinction in mind. Of course, this process depends on the poet inventing an ideal reader and writing for the reader, and the aesthetic danger it presents is that the poet's ideal may in fact be an underestimation, even a condescension—which may be at the root of the vitriol that's been directed at Kooser's approach. My point is that Wolff's description also assumes an ideal reader: one with whom the post-avant poet aims not to communicate (Kooser's stated aim is to communicate above all), but to manipulate—to con.

The second half of Wolff's statement exemplifies another aspect of my antipathy. Post-avant poets prefer "to address a continuum of utterance." This is jargon at best, and at worst just vapid writing. What exactly is the "continuum of utterance" these poets address? Assuming she means the flow of everyday speech, from the hubbub on the cross-town bus to the talking-head babble on CNN, one has to ask: what genuine poem does not address that continuum? In other words, Wolff claims a distinction without a difference. As so often happens when we examine the pronouncements of poetic theorists, we find there's no there there—as the queen of no-thereness put it!

Ultimately, although Ange denies it, there is in fact a "third way," and it doesn't suppose a "compromise of lyric and anti-lyric" (her formulation indicates that she's misread you). The third way explores and seeks to maintain a radical openness. It doesn't bow to theories, it doesn't join the club, it doesn't do the high-priest manipulation act, it doesn't ignore the reader, and it doesn't pretend that the writer's self is simply a concatenation of reflections in a fun-house mirror.

But now I'm back to another, final, pet peeve. If all these poets and theorists are so innovative, why don't they come up with an alternative to "post-" this or that? Being "post-" means being defined only in relation to the Man, the Overworld, the anointed Canon. What a failure of imagination!

Hi Reginald,

I think maybe you're confusing Ange Mlinko's plain speaking with derogatory nay-saying. There's no need to scold. As I understand it, she's emphasizing the historical milieu and context, which so easily gets lost in these abstract trend-summaries & general amnesia. The "New Americans" of 50s-70s were, for the most part, also participants in various intentional sub- and counter-cultures, most of which, as she says, no longer exist. Neither the current "post-avantists" nor their supposed "third-way" relatives have much in common anymore with that earlier era, which was marked by open cultural conflicts between Estalblishment and Resistance. Nowadays, supposedly radical culture-crit, poetry school, and organic vegetables are hip market commodities. I appreciate Ange's historical sense - & we should remember that both poetry & history are too messy, complex & ever-changing to settle down into our neat pigeonholes.

I mean, one might think that the world needs a *new* anthology of all of the usual 50ish suspects from all of the Writing Programs around the country. Talk about a negative aesthetic.

Reginald,

My earliest use of "post-avant" was in 2002, the very first month of my blog. I was specifically thinking those poetries that extend out from the New American poetics of the 1950s where the military-metaphor aspect of the avant-garde is largely dropped and writers become more aware of their own work as functioning within a tradition, one that would extend back to Baudelaire & Blake. I've expanded on that definition on numerous occasions since then in my blog.

I'm sympathetic with Ange Mlinko's complaint that there is no "third-way," tho I definitely know many writers who would like one to exist. Your own list here seems a little too scattershot to me.

Ron

Thanks to all for their comments. I am gratified and somehat surprised that this post has already generated such response.

I'm grateful to Steven Burt for pointing out the diversity amongst the "New American" poets (a name that was basicall coined as a marketing tool). Some, like Spicer, were deeply committed to their own version of negation (in Spicer's case, of the individual lyric as opposed to the book and of the romantic/Romantic notion of personal expressivity); some, like John Wieners (not "Weiners") and Robert Duncan, were thoroughgoing Romantics--Duncan chided Denise Levertov for sullying her role as a poet by involving herself in anti-Vietnam war protests.

I also think that Steve's characterization of many contemporary poets as "trying to figure out how to incorporate both lyric and non- (if not anti-) lyric impulses, and trying (not coincidentally) to put modernist fragmentation together with Romantic expectations about voice and form" is very useful and on target. We would doubtless disagree about who is doing so well and interestingly, but we definitely agree that Tracy Philpot (who is indeed in my Iowa anthology and for whose third book I wrote a blurb) is one of them.

Speaking of my Iowa anthology, I don't know what commenter "Jimmy" meant to imply by saying that it's out of print (that I am already over, old-fashioned?), but it is quite emphatically still in print. And Lyric Postmodernisms, far from being already out of print, has just come out this month, although Amazon doesn't seem to have copies yet. It would be nice if facts entered more frequently into these conversations.

I am a little baffled by Ron Silliman's comment regarding the phrase "third way" and his criticism of my "scattershot" list, since the phrase, along with many of the established poets I list, comes from a blog post of his (a generous one about me, as it happens). My piece makes clear that I take the phrase from him. Perhaps he has since changed his mind about the possibility of such a "third way." But I emphasize that such a path is not one of compromise. That notion is still tied to the binary thinking that I and the poets I write about are interested in breaking down and transcending.

My apologies if I misattributed the origin of the phrase "post-avant." I have not been part of the online poetry world very long, and have not tracked down its history. I am greatly in favor of dropping the military metaphor in favor of a sense of history and tradition, very much including what Harold Rosenberg calls the (paradoxical) tradition of the new. Such greater historical awareness might spare people from reinventing the wheel over and over again, and congratulating themselves on each occasion.

While I appreciate Henry Gould's comment regarding the importance of recognizing historical milieu and context, a phrase like "poets with great c.v.'s who organize themselves around Mommy anthologies and niche readings at professional conferences" sounds like derogatory nay-saying to me. It's certainly not meant to be complimentary: it's dismissal, not discussion.

Though Joseph Hutchison and I disagree--cordially--on several points (I, for example, don't think that there are a lot of poets out to con readers, though there are definitely some), I would strongly second (and third) these words of his:

"there is in fact a 'third way,' and it doesn't suppose a 'compromise of lyric and anti-lyric' ([Mlinko's] formulation indicates that she's misread you). The third way explores and seeks to maintain a radical openness. It doesn't bow to theories, it doesn't join the club, it doesn't do the high-priest manipulation act, it doesn't ignore the reader, and it doesn't pretend that the writer's self is simply a concatenation of reflections in a fun-house mirror."

Thanks again to all for reading and commenting.

Reginald

Mr. Shepherd,

The langpo critique of narrative and of the assumption that the poet is transparently represented in the poetic subject is an old one, yes, but I think it is important to keep in mind that the language poets tied this critique to criticisms launched in other disciplines against statism, nationalism, power, and capitalism (whether classical Marxism or Tel Quel textual analysis). This was true, albeit in a more limited sense, of the first avant-gardes (most surrealists were members of the French Communist Party, Gramsci praised Marinetti, the original avant-garde was Soviet, Georg Grosz and the Herzfeld brothers were active involvment in the Communist Party of Germany).

So to say that the "post-avant" amounts to a simple rejection of both narrative and identity is missing something important. And this something important is what draws a continuity between the language poets that are critical of hegemonic imperatives in both the production and consumption of texts, and what might be called the post-avant proper (though, this term is a "sillogism" and is in itself quite mystifying), a group that includes some of the writers listed in Letras Latinas' comment (Toscano, Torres, de la Torre, Tejada) as well as other poets publishing on Atelos, Krupskaya, O Books, New Star, etc. Atelos and Krupskaya are probably the "post-avant" venues par excellence, publishing poetry that mixes the North American avant tradition as conceptualized by langpo with other traditions, specifically minority traditions, and this is because this generation politicizes the distinction that language poetry worked to understand critically, and recuperates in critical dimension narrative and identity *practices*.

While I too question the value of a continuation of langpo's signiture violent subtraction from their work of any and all determinate statement, I also believe in a politically unconscious continuity of writing practices critical of institutions that perpetuate social inequality. If those institutions are constantly changing masks, why shouldn't oppositional writing. If Breton were alive today, he wouldn't be writing like Matthew Rohrer, Mathea Harvey, Matthew Zapruder, Tate, or Simic; he would fall somewhere between Andrew Joron and Steve McCaffery (sure, that's a wide berth, but you get the picture).

What it comes down to is the fact that your position as a critic is totally circumscribed by your position as a writer, and your intellectual discourse never breaches the extensive horizon set down by institutions such as AWP under which you are totally subsumed. This is why you fail to see the radical difference between Rebecca Wolff (and the whole "Fence" aesthetic) and a continuation of the tradition of literary interventions that are specifically poetic. If you'd like to see what that kind of thinking might look like, I'd suggest reading "The Resistible Rise of Fence Enterprises" by Steve Evans (http://www.thirdfactory.net/resistible.html), I believe the article says all this better than I could.

Quite relevant to the topic, there is this forum discussion, with participants Oren Izenberg, Norman Finkelstein, Stephen Burt, H.L. Hix, Alan Golding, Joe Amato, and me, on the meanings or unmeanings of the "post-avant."

I heard recently that there are plans to translate it for republication in a leading magazine in South America, interestingly enough.

http://www.bostoncomment.com/debate.html

Kent

Reginald,

Can I presume it is your "conviction of one's own superior virtue" that deigns to tell me that our "best" poets have "gotten over" exclusionary rhetoric? Our best poets have certainly not "gotten over" negativity, if Rae Armantrout's poems and Collected Prose are any indication. Her pessimism and skepticism is refreshing to me, if not to everyone -- but then, she is not ashamed to imitate a toddler (see her great poem "Attention.")

I find a great many different kinds of poems pleasing. But I don't insist they are "innovative" when they're not, or that they have some magical relationship to mid-century avant-gardes when they do not. And, by the way, the variousness of the poets in the Allen anthology doesn't negate anything I said. Ashbery's relationship to Riding and Roussel, O'Hara's to Wieners and Jones -- these are part and parcel of their "styles," which is to say, they were imbricated with the oppositional and the outside. Too bad the outside doesn't exist today. You can despise me for that wish all you want, Reginald!

Cheers,
Ange

Ange Mlinko asserted:

>Too bad the outside doesn't exist today.

Now *there's* a proposition upon which to base a sociology of contemporary poetry!

Kent

I dont' consider the important writing trends outlined by Lawrence Giffin, with their substantial critical-historical underpinnings, to be poetry at all. I think of these presses & writers as manufacturers of aesthetic epiphenomena for what is really a set of ideological discourses.

That being said, I think both he & Ange Mlinko are providing a more accurate sense of literary history here, and an antidote to the pervasive, suffocating academic mentality, which exhibits poetry as a kind of effusion or emanation from Official Pedagogy - a place where hopeful would-be poets aim high for the proper Accreditation of nice Magazines and friendly-famous Professors of Poetry Writing.

Kent,

Interesting that my web-based roundtable debate is being considered for publication. I'll look forward to substantial royalties from South America (along with the participants). ;-)

Thanks for providing the link to it. People may also want to see from whence it sprang:

Boston Comment #7

Ok, Ron, if you want it, the term "post-avant" is all yours. No charge.

Cheers,
Joan

I guess "post-avant" would be "after-before" which is the flatline death-hyphen "now." (Which was the poetic biz world of the 1970s.) Acting independent of time and space, a person as a being-in-space-and-time is their message. How history and others treat and interpret that message is an independent act of will. Language itself--nouns in particular become reified and deified as shown by Pinsky with his "thing" bit in Gulf Music--in this kind of argument is the elaborate confidence game we aging children play on ourselves--the addicted mark in the capitalist/materialist grift--whistling in the dark to comfort ourselves as we pass the cemetery. The trouble with being poetic is that is takes up all of your time.

Jordan is right about "The Pleasures of Peace," and Reginald is right about John Wieners' last name; my apologies. I never meant to question (nor to bring up) what Koch did or didn't do in politics when he wasn't writing poems. (I have some problems with the idea of a "visionary politics," since visions are something individuals have and politics is something we do, or try to do, together-- but they are my problems, not yours, and not the poets'; certainly Blake had a visionary politics, without which we could not have had Blake's poems.)

I think Ange is trying to make a point about institutions-- most of today's supposedly post-avant poets, the ones in Reginald's list, the ones with books out, have some institutional support (though some do not), whereas most of the New Americans didn't have much (many, perhaps most, had none). If that's all she meant, then I'll agree. It's the claim about style (about lack of interest in style as such) that raised question marks for me.

Much as I enjoy holding opinions, I can't see my way through clearly enough on most of these issues to have formed a solid opinion. (Thank goodness--I tend here lately to regret opinions as soon as I've brandished them.) Non-opinions notwithstanding, these are the issues I care most about--and struggle the most with--in poetry. So I just wanted to add that I'm very, very grateful for posts like this one. This post, and its thread, are honestly as useful and helpful to me (and my writing) as many books I have read, and many great seminars I have taken when a student. And I would like to be a student--that is to go on learning, and changing--in one form or another, well, forever--and I have come--almost in spite of myself, at first--to count on this blog and its diverse, wicked smart writers as one way to continue my education. Much gratitude.

I had no idea that this post would prove so controversial or so threatening to various people's carefully nurtured sense of being not only outsiders but superiors. It's also interesting the assumptions many people make about me in their responses. But as a black gay man who grew up poor in the Bronx ghetto, I am used to people not actually seeing or hearing me. How's that for playing an identity card? But I do think it important to point out that there is in fact a real outside that has nothing to do with poetry and is invisible to most people in all the assorted poetry worlds. Most people in academia and the literary world who presume to talk about the real world know nothing about that world. This is one reason I have so little patience with all these poetry-world catfights.

With regard to some of the responses, I don't know what you read, but I know I didn't write it.

On which note, thanks, Lawrence Griffin, for explaining my limitations to me. It reminds me of Louis Althusser descending from the mount of Marxist science to enlighten all of us trapped in the total system to which he is miraculously immune. I'm glad that you have no such limitations. By the way, I've read Steve Evans' essay. And I never said that the post-avant amounts to a simple rejection of narrative and identity. If you'd bothered to read what I actually wrote (why must this point be made so often?), you would have seen that.

Ange Mlinko, I don't despise you, and I don't know why you think I do. I am rather taken aback by your vehemence and the personalized form it takes. And I don't understand what you were saying about the Allen anthology, since Riding and Roussel aren't in it. I'd appreciate it if you could clarify those remarks. I have no idea what you mean when you write that "these [relationships] are part and parcel of their 'styles,' which is to say, they were imbricated with the oppositional and the outside." How is style an imbrication with "the oppositional and the outside"? The outside of what? Assertion isn't argument.

Kent, I'm glad that you brought up Joan Houlihan's brilliant online symposium on "Avant, Post-Avant, and Beyond," which can be found here.

Henry, I never said nothing 'bout no "suffocating academic mentality, which exhibits poetry as a kind of effusion or emanation from Official Pedagogy - a place where hopeful would-be poets aim high for the proper Accreditation of nice Magazines and friendly-famous Professors of Poetry Writing." But it sounds purty bad.

Next time, I'm writing about Britney Spears remixes. Fo' real, y'all.

kisses,

Reginald

Really, I had no idea that this post would get folks so riled up. I was just trying to describe a phenomenon much discussed but not much defined. I'm getting a little tired of dealing with people's misreadings, so I wil just maka a few points here.

With regard to Vivek's very cogent comment, I was writng of American poetry, which, like most things American, and even acknowledging the influence of translations, is remarkably insular. Most American poets of all kinds know nothing or almost nothing even about Canadian poetry, though Anne Carson and, to a much lesser extent, Christian Bok and Lisa Robertson have a bit of a vogue these days. I have a Canadian poet friend who''s been very generously sending me books, and it's opened up a new world to me. Interestingly enough, Canadian poet Tim Lilburn, who is now one of my favorite poets, and with whom I've had a bit of correspondence, told me that the Canadian poetry world is sectarian and vicious. I had to tell that the American one is too. As for British and European poetry, their historical and aesthetic contexts are entirely too different to be part of this discussion, at least in my opinion, and I don't know about those contexts to confidently discuss them.

With regard to Ange Mlinko's comment, I never said that I was against negativity. I am pretty damned skeptical and pessimistic myself. What I said was that I was opposed to negation for the sake of negation (or for the sake of being in the negation club, like the Goth kids I went to college with). There are lots of things in this world that need to be negated, like the Bush administration, but there's no point in setting up negation as a graven idol. Or in confusing poetry with politics. Another point that apparently can't be made too often.

When I met Rae Armantrout at AWP last week she seemed quite nice and not negative at all. :-) Her presence at AWP (I met her there last year as well), and her now being published by Wesleyan University Press, not to mention her teaching job at UC San Diego, in themselves say a lot about how these insider/outsider poetry world boundaries so many people want to affirm don't really hold up anymore.

On the matter of institutional affiliations, several people in both of my anthologies are not affiliated with academia. Nor am I. At the moment, writing for the Harriet blog is pretty much my living. As for Steve's point about people having published books, I'm not sure how we'd know about their work otherwise. I don't see any transgressive subversives refusing to publish. Writers want to be read, as well they should. It would be odd to write if one didn't want to be read. But if Ange Mlinko objects so much to people being co-opted by "official verse culture" or "the hegemonic institution of bourgeois literature" or some such shibboleth (these are not phrases she has used, but they are consistent with the her comments and with Steve's elucidation of those comments), then perhaps she should not have entered and won the National Poetry Series, which is as about as inside and official as the poetry world gets. As I've said before, it's kind of ugly to join the club and then complain about what a terrible club it is.

Hi Steve - Yes! It's good to be reminded of the lack of institutional support for these poets, although it seems harder and harder (for some) to imagine how important that was, and how it abetted the fierce tribalism that is so reviled now. Like you, I have trouble with "visionary politics." I don't think it was all good; some of it was troubling. But it can't be denied. One simply can't read, say, Duncan or Spicer or Blaser without recourse to their holistic views on life and art. And so, it's hard to imagine a "third way" vis-a-vis these poets.

Well, what about Ashbery, O'Hara et al.? They were not programmatic and didn't create overarching visions of society. But they kept company with people who did, and they "discriminated. Well/ who doesn't?" O'Hara remarked. There are underlying affinities: Duncan and Ashbery's mutual indebtedness to Stein reveals a deep affinity, for instance. Ditto for Riding. Reginald, those people -- Stein, Riding, Roussel -- didn't have to be in the anthology; they were the forebears. To dismiss the "New American" thing as "marketing" is wrong because it denies these affinities and influences, which were far from the mainstream.

Reginald, if I've misread the tone of contempt I detected in your response to me, you've in turn misread my responses as "personalized." What do you imagine I have at stake? I merely don't want to see the political and social ideas that animated most avant-gardes totally erased from the discussion. Friendships, alliances, were forged -- and broken -- over this stuff. Many would never have accepted your Radical Openness. Lots of great poets at one time or another did all of these things: "bow to theories ... join the club ... do the high-priest manipulation act ... ignore the reader ... pretend that the writer's self is simply a concatenation of reflections in a fun-house mirror." They did. And we got some great poetry out of all of these things, at times.

Speaking of personalizing -- Reginald, your attempt to get some moral high ground by reiterating your background doesn't impress me. I am the child of uneducated immigrants, English wasn't my first language, and I fought for my right to cultural capital, too. You trivialize the ideological differences between serious poets because it's not as meaningful, somehow, as the real "difference" of growing up poor and black. That's as anti-intellectual as it gets.

Ange

"But if Ange Mlinko objects so much to people being co-opted by "official verse culture" or "the hegemonic institution of bourgeois literature" or some such shibboleth (these are not phrases she has used, but they are consistent with the her comments and with Steve's elucidation of those comments), then perhaps she should not have entered and won the National Poetry Series, which is as about as inside and official as the poetry world gets. As I've said before, it's kind of ugly to join the club and then complain about what a terrible club it is."

Okay, you should stop now before you really embarrass yourself. In addition to winning the National Poetry Series, my book was also a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, was mentioned favorably in The New Yorker, and was nominated for a Pushcart by 2 different poets that year. I've appeared in Poetry magazine 5 times (6 as of next month), blogged for Harriet -- was, in fact, one of the first bloggers on its earlier incarnation; I've been nominated for the Rome Prize and the Whiting. It would be pretty funny if I were to complain, wouldn't it?

Which is why your putting words in my mouth is so obnoxious.

Ange,

Your comments seem pretty angry and personalized to me, each one more than the last. I don't know what somebody told you I said about your mama, but it ain't true.

I'm sorry that mentioning my background doesn't "impress" you. As we used to say, whatever. But ideological differences among poets are not (repeat, not) as important as real (no quotes) differences like race and poverty. Anybody, whatever their background, who thinks they are is living in some scary fantasy world. But then, all too many academics and literary types do live in that world, where they play around at politics to make themselves feel virtuous and superior. Which I guess is why you want to dismiss those realities.

Poetry matters a great deal to me--in many ways it saved my life, or at least my sanity--but, as Edna St. Vincent Millay wrote, it is not meat or drink, and whatever William Carlos Williams said, I'm pretty sure that no one ever died for want of what was found there.

Again, this pseudo-politicization of poetry is both silly and offensive. There's a real world out there, and it ain't about poetry and stupid poetry-world feuds.

Oh, and thanks for reciting your vita. I'm sure we all appreciated it.

Honestly, I don't know what your damage is. But I no longer want to be involved in it. This is obviously an unproductive interchange. I do plan to stop, but I'm not in the slightest bit embarrassed.

Reginald

If there's one tihng we can agree on — unlikely, I know — it's that the antagonism between those who think there should be an antagonism between social-aesthetic positions and those who wonder why we can't all get along remains fresh and fervid.

I'm uncomfortable with "third way" rhetoric not because mean ol' Tony Blair said it, but because its "way" is neoliberalism's endlessly deregulated and endlessly opening world market — which is to say that the "third way" the first way with a new public relations pitch. And that would be my concern here: that this proposed "third way" in poetry is more-or-less the collection of poetries that compose, aggregately, without planning any great conspiracy, a dominant style. It's the style, to choose one vocabulary, on bourgeois individual subjectivity, updated for period developments.

This is another way of returning to the irreducible kernel of truth in Ange's first post here. It's actually not such a complicated line of reasoning, and has been made many times before (for a current example, see here). To wit: If you have two "ways," and one of them is dominant, and has historically proceeded by synthetic recuperation of challenges to its dominance, in turn recycling these challenges as stylistic markers that don't disturb its own way/worldview; and the other way has historically proceeded via opposition to, or negation of, the first way/worldview...then a synthesis of these two "ways" isn't a "third way" at all — it's the first way updating itself.

Lastly (we can hear god laughing every time we say this), the accusation of "negation for negation's sake" may have some truth content, as least conceptually — but historically, it's been hurled at every oppositional movement without fail until the very phrase is as vacant as it is stale. It was a popular imprecation for royalists in France; the czar made the same accusation even as the Winter Palace was under siege. And Lenin in turn turned it on the anarchists as he consolidated the revolution. Spiro Agnew had his own famous version of the claim. It was said about Malevich too; I'll take "Black Square" over period style.

Damn, y'all. It's like Knots Landing in here. Somebody, call Wallace Stevens!

Reginald writ:

"Henry, I never said nothing 'bout no "suffocating academic mentality, which exhibits poetry as a kind of effusion or emanation from Official Pedagogy - a place where hopeful would-be poets aim high for the proper Accreditation of nice Magazines and friendly-famous Professors of Poetry Writing." But it sounds purty bad."

Hey, Reginald - from my perspective up here on Mt. Helicon, it IS pretty bad.

Ange Mlinko was exactly right to contrast the different atmospheres of poetry culture, Now vs. circa 30 yrs ago. In them days, poetry was not a career option in Academia. In them days, English class (elementary to college) taught these particular skills :

1) basic literacy
2) literary criticism, interpretation and appreciation
3) literary history (great poems, great books)

- this was the extent of their offering. Poets and creative writers were left pretty much on their own. To be a poet or a writer was an independent step - a step OUTSIDE the realms of pedagogy per se. And this is important, because the role of independent writer, thinker & poet - the mission of independent art in its own right - is still supremely meaningful in our culture.

The tangled issue of creative writing pedagogy is not clear cut. & you & I have had this debate before (over on your blog). I'm not prepared to issue some ridiculous blanket condemnations of all the beautiful people & activities which go on in academic writing programs. But neither am I prepared to go quietly along with the "professionalization" of poetry, the creeping herd atmosphere & careerism - which is a consequence, in my view, of the decision to extract & separate "creative writing" from ordinary English programs, to make "academic poet" a viable career option.

Poetry is the ultimate wild thing. Let's not forget that....

Thanks, Henry, for the support. From my early years in Boston among non-academic poet mentors, I know it is difficult to feel dignified as an unaffiliated poet in a company town.

One good lesson from all this: never underestimate the backlash against the linkage of poetry and politics. I have never been criticized for championing a poet's autonomy, but the second "political vision" enters into it, the tide's unloosed.

I'm afraid I can't see the use of lumping such disparate poets as, say, Peter Gizzi, Susan Stewart, Matthea Harvey and Malinda Markham in one category called the "third way." Though I certainly see the use, or, may I say, rather, the pleasure, of reading them. Ok, on the one hand, categories like this are a way of promoting people--which is good. On the other hand, it makes them easier to dismiss--which is not good. Talking too much externally to the words on the page is a way of dismissing the work itself. And is a hell of a lot easier than talking about the work itself.

Daisy

Ange Mlinko said:

>In addition to winning the National Poetry Series, my book was also a finalist for the James Laughlin Award, was mentioned favorably in The New Yorker, and was nominated for a Pushcart by 2 different poets that year. I've appeared in Poetry magazine 5 times (6 as of next month), blogged for Harriet -- was, in fact, one of the first bloggers on its earlier incarnation; I've been nominated for the Rome Prize and the Whiting. It would be pretty funny if I were to complain, wouldn't it?

Well, with all due respect, I'd say this does shed some poignant light on the sentence "Too bad the outside doesn't exist today."

Kent

Daisy, well put.

Kent, what's your point? I never claimed to be an outsider; I don't think there's an outside because there's no appreciable inside: just hundreds of overlapping circles. If you have something to say, say it; if not, stop sniping.

Dear Ange,

Whatever our obvious differences, we do share one thing in common. I too spent several years in Boston aspiring to be a poet and being snubbed at every turn, while I was doing a succession of humiliating, poorly paid menial jobs. I was definitely "an unaffiliated poet in a company town," and could find no mentors of any kind, academic or otherwise. The only support I got at all was in the gay literary scene, from the folks at Gay Community News and Fag Rag. But, nice as they were, they were more interested in the politics (and the sex!) of poetry than in the poetry of poetry, which was pretty much beside the point.

Part of my reaction against that is the prevailing dismissal of literature as a social symptom (or mere social documnt) or an ideological mystification, especially among academics, theory-heads, and those who think of themselves as leftists. If you've not encountered this, you're lucky, because it's pretty pervasive.

Reginald

There is an outside. Which means, there is an inside. It may be that one does not appreciate one's inside status, and it may be that there are several insides that overlap circularly and without appreciating each other. But some poetry circles are far outside any sort of the political and economic power signified by Professorships, Publishers, or Prizes.

Access to any of the 3 P's = inside. Lots of poets lack that access; lots are so far outside that it never occurs to them to seek them.

The first P, Professorship, has been a going and widespread option for insider poets (of whatever aesthetic ilk) for 35 or 40 years. The other 2 P's have been happening for much longer. E. Weinberger, whom I mostly adore, was tripping when he put E. Pound in an anthology of "Outsiders." Pound, who was feted by festivals and prestigious prizes from the '20s through the '60s; Pound, who had a good friend and supporter very high up in the State Department. (A. MacLeish.) Can't get too much more inside than that.

I don't know why people romanticize the outside. But it's had an intense romantic attraction for a couple of centuries now.

Thanks to all for the entertaining vituperation.

Dear Ange,

I hope that we will be able to continue our dialogue on a more civil and reasoned level.

Another reason that I object to the politicization of literature is that it tends to replace real political action: it becomes a knd of virtual politics, in which literature bears all the sins and burdens of the real world that's too overwhelming to confront directly, let alone try to change, which is hard, slow, painful and inevitably compromised work.

That's one of the reasons I was so upset by your dismissal of the realities (again, no quotes) of race and poverty. Besides inexcusably trivializing my experience and the experience of millions of poor people, of black people, of gay people, of people who are not white and financially comfortable, and of people who are white but aren't financially comfortable, it also seems to be saying that the proper realm for politics isn't the real world but the world of poetry, which to me puts things exactly backwards.

sincerely,

Reginald

Ange said:

>Kent, what's your point? I never claimed to be an outsider; I don't think there's an outside because there's no appreciable inside: just hundreds of overlapping circles. If you have something to say, say it; if not, stop sniping.

Ange,

I'm fully aware you didn't say you were an outsider. Insofar as you clearly believe there is no longer an "outside" to the poetic field, you could hardly think of yourself as representative of the category!

As for "sniping," well... I hardly know what to say.

But I will say, in response to your request that I say whatever I have to say, that I have, in fact, said quite a bit on the issue under discussion, and in various venues. (The forum discussion Reginald and I linked to is one example--there are quite a few other things I could point you to, as well, if you're interested.)

No, I'm afraid your comment above is as revealing as your previous one. And in an ironic sense you are right: the "inside" we are inside has become so pervasive it is now not "appreciable." Kind of like ideology in that sense... And "oppositional poetries" are like business cards, flashed around by purpoted poetic radicals at the company picnic.

Kent

Reginald, if you think Ange is promoting politics in poetry, you must have missed her anti-political-poetry post a few months ago, for which she got yelled at by many people.

Reginald,

Thanks for extending the olive branch. I didn't intend for the discussion to devolve into "Knots Landing." :-) And "New Guy" is absolutely right -- I'm usually the one taking heat for the position you hold.

So let me explain. At the moment, I'm researching Robert Duncan and Denise Levertov's relationship, which flowered through a voluminous, intimate correspondence that explored craft and "political vision" simultaneously. As did other relationships in the loose network of mid-century avant-gardes. It's hard to overstate how imbricated the two -- craft and political vision -- were for many of them. And the break-ups over these issues were equally traumatic.

They didn't meet one another in school, or at conferences. Whatever -- we live in a different historical moment. But I think it's important to keep alive the possibility that affinities grow between persons not bound by merely professional or collegial obligations ... protocols ... good manners. And whatever you think of the ferality, the negativity, of those old guys (and some women), it produced some genuinely new and thrilling poetry. Same for some poets we don't think of as feral exactly, but who performed refusals with a stamina that had to come from some great negative depth: Niedecker, Oppen, Ashbery, O'Hara.

So to claim these people as influences demands that one takes their ideas seriously; their ideas were inseparable from their poetry. In other words, young poets can't simply pick and choose stylistic tics: field composition, syntactic disruption, etc. and then be "post-avant." I suppose you could pick and choose their stylistic tics and be something else, but it wouldn't be a particularly informed response to these poets, nor would it honor them.

I have indeed encountered the kind of people who use poets and poems as a social symptom, as you put it, Reginald. I've spoken out against it on Harriet. And I've rejected the Marxism of the incredibly privileged academics I've known. But to equate all political visions with the loopy left of the present day is really to miss out on the beauty of someone like Duncan's anarchic, quasi-Dantean holism.

I don't wish to dismiss your background, your knowledge, your experience. I also agree that direct action is the answer to political problems, not protest poems. But there have been larger, deeper, more comprehensive ideas of political poetry than the ones we're currently stuck with. Duncan tried for a vision as large as Blake's or Milton's or Dante's -- I'm trying to think of what that might be for us, without turning my own poetry into a bloated idea-driven thing, or retreating into a pure formalism/autotelism.

Hope this helps clarify my position.

All best,
Ange

*

And just for the record (once again) to all and sundry: I am not complaining about "official verse culture" or bemoaning my status or positioning myself as an outsider. Plenty of poets with prizes, professorships, and publishers publicly or secretly steer clear of conferences, poetry buses and hokey anthologies. Some people are temperamentally as well as ideologically unfit for them. Conflict and art have a long history. Its not all kumbaya, as a commenter on another thread reminds us...

"So to claim these people as influences demands that one takes their ideas seriously; their ideas were inseparable from their poetry. In other words, young poets can't simply pick and choose stylistic tics: field composition, syntactic disruption, etc. and then be "post-avant." I suppose you could pick and choose their stylistic tics and be something else, but it wouldn't be a particularly informed response to these poets, nor would it honor them."

Greetings, Ange,

I have been following this discussion off and on and I am especially interested in your statement above about needing to take the ideas of (some? all?) poets seriously in order to claim them (the poets) as influences. I can hardly think of a poet whose work I admire enough to count as an influence whose ideas I respect as highly or even know much about (though I'll be driven to research poets whose work affects me, simply out of interest). I've often cringed on hearing a poet in the throes of an idea, especially some grandiose political one, but can be engaged completely in that poet's poetry. Unfortunately, poets, like other artists, and other people, are sometimes full of bad ideas, or stupid beliefs. There's no automatic connection whereby a poet's genius at writing poetry extends to other activities of the brain. Yes, the poet's ideas are inseparable from the poem, but only insofar as both arise from the same place--that poet. One hopes, for the poet's sake, that the poem always trumps any idea of it, or any idea in it. As for the trying on of "stylistic tics"--copying a poet's style seems to be a much more fruitful activity for a young poet than poring over the poet's ideas. In fact, style itself is nothing if not an embodiment of idea if you think (as I do) that there is no such thing as mere surface in a poem, that style is more often an indicator of depth (thinking of Vendler's "Breaking Style" here) or a way of entering a depth in the poem. Imitating style, like assuming an emotion or behavior one doesn't have, will often bring about a knowledge of its origin and a deeper understanding of the "idea" or emotion behind it. In fact, assuming the style of a poet in order to learn from that, is a good way to honor them, don't you think? Perhaps what's truly inseparable is the poem and the way it is written (style) rather than the poem and the ideas of the poet.

Cheers,
Joan

Ange,

Your observation about Duncan's aspiration to a scope comparable to Blake, Milton, or Dante recalls to mind the dictum (from Northrop Frye? don't remember with certainty) that the traditional range of the epic poet reaches from Heaven, across the earth, and into Hell. A contemporary (non-religious, or quasi-non-religious) substitute for Heaven could be Utopia, and, at least since Blake (and Goya), earth has often been (understandably) conflated with Hell in poetic (and political) vision.

How vividly your comment sheds light on the radicalism of Pound's revisionary dictum, that the epic is a long poem containing history!

"Bloated, idea-driven thing" is a funny image. Maybe "bloated" is exactly the type of poetry that would suit these times!

Cheers --

John

p.s. My truculent comment about "outside" stems from years of social work with homeless people. Yes! Social work! The only profession despised by Rexroth as much as he despised literature professors! I've known a lot of homeless poets, many of them published (not in literary journals), with exactly zero remuneration.

"Outside" is a loaded term, as any admirer of Edward Thomas's "The Owl" should understand.

Anyway, thanks for the suggestive observation about Duncan.

Hi Joan,

I simply can't agree with you.

Also, I never said a young poet should pore over a poet's ideas rather than imitating their style. And of course a poet's ideas can be wrong, or dumb. But I object to bracketing poems off from their time, place, and climate. I object with every fiber of my being.

Thanks,
Ange

O'Hara's "refusal" emerges in his (ironcially famous & wonderful) manifesto on "Personism."

I’m not saying that I don’t have practically the most lofty ideas of anyone writing today, but what difference does that make? they’re just ideas. The only good thing about it is that when I get lofty enough I’ve stopped thinking and that’s when refreshment arrives.

Discuss?

Reginald,

This has certainly been an interesting read.

There does seem to be a different sensibility, a different idea of what makes for a poem’s unity, in some poets writing now, versus most of the poetry previously written. That’s purely descriptive, not evaluative. Think what you want of the poetry itself, it is different.

Henry Gould, writes, “Neither the current "post-avantists" nor their supposed "third-way" relatives have much in common anymore with that earlier era, which was marked by open cultural conflicts between Establishment and Resistance. Nowadays, supposedly radical culture-crit, poetry school, and organic vegetables are hip market commodities.�

This position makes it obvious to me that there is, indeed, a real and open cultural conflict here. For whatever that’s worth. The tone and stance against these poets and the act of attempting to name their poetic tendencies reveals the value in attempting to define this way of being in language these poets (or most of them—or some similar formulation of names) exemplify.

Or something like that.

Joan writes: "In fact, style itself is nothing if not an embodiment of idea if you think (as I do) that there is no such thing as mere surface in a poem, that style is more often an indicator of depth."

This seems at once reasonable, and not at all a counter to Ange's claim. Certainly poems have some kind of depth — idea, concept, emotion, worldview, dynamic — of which the style is its expression, or visible face, or etc. Form is never more than the expression of content, I'm told.

But that in no way suggests anything other than that there is a tether between depth and surface, idea* and style — a tether which can be broken. I take poets quite seriously — as seriously as, say, "theorists," who I can't say I find any more threatening to my consciousness than I find poets (the bad ones numb and annoy; the good ones help me be more in the world). If I were to choose a pretty phrase of Adorno (e.g. "Sunday fails to satisfy, not because it is a day off work, but because its own promise is felt directly as unfulfilled; like the English one, every Sunday is too little Sunday") to defend the autonomy of the individual under capitalism, I would merely have misunderstood his idea and be guilty of "cherrypicking" or a convenient usury. I would have broken the tether of idea and style, and lost the force of both. It would not just be vapid, but politically disingenuous to say the least — as well as being a violence to Adorno's commitments. We try not to force the dead to testify against themselves, even if their borrowed breath puffs up our chests.

I take poets just as seriously. Imagine just adopting Brecht's "style"! Or Creeley's or Stein's, Hughes' or Notley's! Their styles have intimate relations with worldviews, and while one certainly doesn't have to agree with them to enjoy the poetry — thankfully — it would be the peak of crudity to cherrypick the style without having a curiosity about the ideas from which it springs. One would merely be like that kind of boy who wishes the pretty girl would just shut up already.

* I don't understand people who claim to distinguish thoughts and feelings, and by "idea" here I mean both.

Paradoxically, the avant-garde seem obsessed with lineage. Perhaps they fear illegitimacy, so they must constantly reach back to claim forbears . One would think their claims would center on originality: Their works as offspring, Athena like, springing fully-formed from their own heads.

Two things:

IMO avant-guard, whatever, is not simply an act of negativity, ie flouting major tenets of some central poetics or praxis, dominant tradition etc. . . ( like, we can't use linear narrative) but rather finding and working out of formerly uninhabited interstices of the genre. I mean discovering wholly new conceptual frameworks is great (ala Duchamp). But if someone affixes an OUT OF ORDER sign to PEES in or ATTACKS the URINAL (all except one of these acts has been attempted) I'd consider that a good artistic advancement --- a matter of filling in the cracks. This is the typical nature of change isn't it. Everyone do what little part you can.

Too. Poetry does not need the influence of another political paradigm. This argument ignited by Reginald's article evidences the conflicting "visionary politics" of poetry itself.

Jane, I'm always interested in what you have to say. I wondered what you meant when you said you fail to undesrtand people who distinguish between thought and feeling. Maybe I haven't read enough theory (that's not a jab by the way--I do read--it just seems I am always playing catch-up)--but I didn't understand your comment. Do you mean that when I have the feeling of being angry or sad, my anger or sadness is also a thought? Or are we using different connotations of these words? It's interesting to me. If I was saying to someone, "Well, I was just sad," I might also say "Well, I just felt sad," but I don't think it would ever occur to me to say (or think) "I had the thought that I was sad." "I thought I was sad."................Hey! Now that I've typed that, for some reason I feel like I've read a poem that has the line "I thought I was sad." Anyway. Just wondering.

Capps, my take on it would be that as soon as you become aware of having a feeling, it's also a thought. The question is, can you have a feeling and not be aware of it?

And yet, divorcing the artistic product from the ideology that produced it—viewing all things as value-free and therefore able to be equally sampled—is exactly what artistic post-modernism is all about. The idea of the global village being a level playing field, and all of it equally available, is one of the core values of "post-avant" poetry, it seems to me, be it the LangPo camp or Ashbery's randomized stream of consciousness. That Minnie Mouse and the Mona Lisa have the same cultural value, or lack thereof, is central to the postmodern viewpoint.

(I completely agree with the comments that "post-" is a label that indicates that whatever one is being "post-" to has still not been dealt with, or "gotten over," or the "post-" wouldn't need to be on the label. I've said similar things for years.)

I enjoy reading comment streams like this, because one can pick out some useful perspectives. At the same time, I completely agree with Reginald's comments about the real world vs. the (intellectual/academic/insular) world of literary criticism (in which I am also obviously complicit). As another poet friend of mine once quipped, "The reason arguments about poetry get so incredibly vicious is precisely there is so very little at stake."

• actually I don't have any big theoretical apparatus around the claim that I don't experience thoughts and feelings as different in kind. Just a report on how it seems to me. They happen in my head, they have great or weak intensity, they seem both abstract and sensual, they keep me up at night, they seem often to be the point(s) of consciousness, they want a language and a form of language to be made account of.

• Arthur, that's certainly a relevant note. The irony then being that Joan Houlihan, often so busy taking the soi disant post-avant to task for such postmodernisms, turns out to have endorsed such procedures rather aggressively (though we should be leery of suggesting there is any one "postmodernism"; there certainly isn't any one modernism!)

• Re all this finding "post-" to be a marker of an incomplete aesthetic: Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Redon, Signac and all the other Post-Impressionists are going to be sad to hear about this.

Hi all -

Ange, since, as you know, my respect for you & yr work is on record, I won't dilute my remarks. I think you have a legitimate point regarding the ideological affiliations & oppositions of the soi-disant avant-garde, but I think you idealize them as well, & underestimate the extent to which such constructions were often ex-post-facto justifications of stylistic operations. I won't recite Peter Bürger to you, but I'm sure you know how historically determined these conceptions of literature are, & how trivial they rightly seem to just about everyone else on the planet.

The differences between Jack Spicer & John Berryman just ARE stylistic, & everything else comes later. Likewise, Jennifer Moxley has as much in common with Paul Muldoon as with Rae Armantrout, & a good thing too. There is no "third way" because there is no first or second way. There are only people who see poetry as divided into two camps & people who don't. Is Frederick Seidel not "innovate" or "experimental"? If not, why not? Because he writes in complete sentences or because of his confessional subject matter or because he's fabulously wealthy or publishes in the "wrong" magazines? These arguments are sadly ridiculous, & too often keep young writers from reading as widely as they otherwise might.

- Michael Robbins

Arthur,

I used to work for a former sociology professor, also former SDS, who left the academy to work in social services. Skilled rhetorician, well-informed, and hot-tempered (unapologetically mean, really), and a very talented administrator though terrible personnel manager, he once, in a mellow mood, said to me, "There's an old saying: Why are academic politics so vicious? Because the stakes are so low."

But the viciousness is entertaining (from the, ahem, outside) -- better than Big Time Wrestling! (As it used to be called when I was a kid.)

And it's sweet when the combatants kiss and make up at the end too. Yea! Happy ending!

By the way, that quip about academic politics is probably the most famous bon mot in the academy. It's often misattributed to Kissinger, though Wallace Sayre seems to have said it first.

Sorry, I should always proofread a third time before posting. I left a word out before:

"The reason arguments about poetry get so incredibly vicious is precisely BECAUSE there is so very little at stake."

Jane commented: Re all this finding "post-" to be a marker of an incomplete aesthetic: Cezanne, Gauguin, Van Gogh, Redon, Signac and all the other Post-Impressionists are going to be sad to hear about this.

To my mind, your thought mostly underlines my own thought about how silly the use of "post-" really can be, how unrevealing it is. How meaningless the term can be—which of course means one can also turn it towards whatever jargon one wishes to apply it to. Are we all post-print poets yet? or merely post-poets?

I suppose technically that I too am a post-avant poet, and so are we all, because although I'm not writing in any known avant-garde style or group, I'm living after the Modernist great lights have all burned out—although I have nothing in common with most poetry that is labelled post-avant. So does the label mean a particular school or "style" of poetry, or does it refer to a historical moment? or neither. Thus we go 'round the mulberry bush.

In the case of the Post-Impressionists, from my years studying art history I was always left with the impression (ahem) that that was a catch-all term for a period in art history that no-one had a better label for. Basically, they were the wave of painters who alll strongly influenced the Modernists, but didn't fit comfortably into the Impressionist mold. It's a meaningless label, ultimately. Cezanne and van Gogh had little in common except extreme eccentricity, after all.

It's hard being an "in-betweener." Maybe that's why everyone is fighting so hard to identify themselves these days. Maybe all that post-Modernism and post-avant alike really mean is that they're in-betweeners.

Arthur, as to whether Cezanne and Van Gogh had nothing in common, I'd really disagree, and suggest a (re)visit to Gallery 203 at the Art Institute of Chicago; it may persuade you otherwise. But that is a genial debate. And indeed, I take your point that "post-whatever" isn't a very effective description of aesthetic precepts. However, that wasn't my point; my point was that, the descriptor "post-whatever" doesn't necessarily indicate an incomplete or unfinished or unconsolidated aesthetic on the part of individual artists so grouped, and thus that it can only be a nomenclatural matter. It certainly can't be used an an evaluative fact regarding any given poet, or even serve as suggestion of belatedness, failure to get over whatever, and etc.

Hi, Michael --

The very last thing I want to do here is encourage young writers to be less curious. I want them to be more curious, about poetry and also about its history. But firstly, poetry: I would recommend Muldoon to anyone, any day. As for Seidel -- your review of Ooga-Booga is evidence that real oppositional force resides not in a set of recognizable styistic gestures, but that same negativity I've been talking about -- the negativity that you identified in his book. I thought to myself at the time: Aha, Robbins (and other men I know) love FS because he makes most Langpos look like Robert Pinsky.

So to be perfectly clear: I want more of all the good poets you mention, because they're good poets and not because they fall into the right camp. Complete sentences in poems: I'm for it.

I'm really sort of surprised that my remarks are being read as an attempt re-reify the notion of "two camps." As I tried to make operatically clear, my own work wouldn't fit the hardcore mold (and never has). Now that everyone knows I read Muldoon, well, my cover's really blown!

Best,
Ange

P.S. Michael ...

"... you idealize them as well, & underestimate the extent to which such constructions were often ex-post-facto justifications of stylistic operations."

I just want to add that it's hard not to idealize a moment that situated poetry closer to a vocation than a career, which is evident in essays, correspondences, "magic workshops" and tribal allegiances. What we have now are careers and hobbies. Is that all there is? I hear Peggy Lee singing...

Are you suggesting this is incompatible with wanting poems to matter on their own terms and for their own sake?

Ange,

Fair enough - I suppose I think of subject matter & even attitude as stylistic in nature, which I realize undermines my earlier position. (Damn you for using my own review against me!) But I do believe that much of the content of tribalism arises from a felt need to differentiate one's style from that of others, & tends to hypostasize what is really an affectation of opposition & negativity.

I agree it's tempting to idealize a moment that seemed to grant poetry a now-unobtainable prominence (& yes, I think that careers & hobbies are all there is - I don't think poetry matters much; it matters to me, obviously, to us, but I don't think it "matters" in a sense I'm too bummed out at the moment to elucidate further). But I worry that idealization can lead to fetishization (I'm not suggesting this applies to you). I've had students (maybe we all have) - promising young poets who publish in the hip journals du jour - who not only don't read Donne or Wyatt but don't even see the point of reading Lowell or Bishop, because they know they're the "wrong" poets. Their reading rarely extends past the New Americans, & when it includes Pound or Stein, you can be sure it won't include Housman or even Yeats. I find this much more depressing than the monopoly certain "establishment" poets & publishers hold.

So I come across as a bit of a reactionary, partly because it seems to me beyond question that much of "official verse culture" is very bad (if there's a worse well-known poet than Edward Hirsch, I don't want to know his or her name), & partly because people like Ron Silliman & his coterie strike me as simply stupid & uninformed about their own practices. I appreciate someone like you all the more, so I felt I should respond to what seemed to me a strain of tribalism in yr own earlier comments. Apologies if I misunderstood, & best wishes.

- Michael

Jane, perhaps I overstated the case about Cezanne and van Gogh to make a rhetorical point (gee, that never happens around here!), but I'll stand by my overall assessment, since it's based on several visits to the van Gogh museum in Amsterdam, several visits to the Chicago Art Institute, reading and studying a great deal about both painters, and also having read Rilke's illuminating "Letters on Cezanne" that he wrote to his wife Clara, a sculptor who was a student of Rodin. The methods and aims of both painters were quite different, I feel. Their means were different, and the way they set about changing the art and act of painting—their methodologies of vision, if you will—were also quite different. But that's just one artist's interpretation of what he sees in other artists. Don't take my word for it.

As for Post-Modernism: Sorry, still not convinced to change my opinion. There may be some merit to the idea that as a movement PM is itself complete and self-contained—although that's impossible to judge, because PM is by its very worldview and its own theories de-centered, or rather multiply-centered, discourse-based in response to Modernism, and politically aware of the privilege given by status-positioning between those who have (or had) the power, and those who don't (or didn't). So PM is unlikely to ever present itself as a monolithic -ism or movement, or want to. There is no sergeant-at-arms to enforce who is a PM and who isn't, the way the Surrealists had Breton as their manifesto-wielding strongarm man. That sort of tactic is actually rather anti-PM, it seems to me. So, the "incompleteness" of PM is built right into the theories that support the PM wordlview. One might cite Godel's incompleteness theorem at this point; but I'll let it stand.

My point was that PM still hasn't finished dealing with M. If they really had done so, they'd start callling themselves something else entirely. Many PM artists seem to be still reacting very strongly against the -isms of the Modernists; that seems to be in part what "post-avant" is all about, at least some of the time. Maybe that's why the "post-avant" label was attractive at first, but in the end it's still just another responsorial "post-something else" label. I'd be happy to entertain suggestions for other labels. It's probably time for that to happen, anyway.

God knows when, or if, my last post will appear - I submitted it four hours ago. But I wanted to clarify that of course I think poetry is more than a career or hobby: it is, at least for me, equipment for living. I trust that my larger point about poetry's cultural relevance is clear. I don't think it has any, unless we count hip-hop (as we probably should - I know that Clipse & Ghostface & Lil Wayne & Jay-Z are at least as important to me as Muldoon & Ashbery & Moxley & Seidel). But I don't think that's necessarily a bad thing.

Dear Ange,

I have deliberately stayed away from commenting for a while, as the level of vitriol and vituperation was upsetting me to the point at which I was losing sleep. I just don’t have the shoulder-pads or the big hair to engage in pool fights on Knots Landing: nor these days (especially with my chemotherapy regimen, which starts again on Monday), do I have the energy. I'm relieved that now the conversation has steered away from me--Reginald Shepherd has left the building! There are a lot of things I could say in response to various comments, positive and negative, but I need to put this whole brouhaha behind me, especially since, though much of it was directed at me, I don't feel has much to do with me or what I actually wrote.

Though we have been communicating privately, I did want to publicly thank you for accepting the olive branch. I don’t know how things escalated between us, but I was very unhappy about it. I felt that we were writing past one another, but now I think (I hope) that we are actually communicating with one another. The conflict was especially dismaying to me since when I read your old posts (I haven't been a Harriet reader for very long), I agreed with pretty much everything you wrote.

I have gone back to the Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry (interesting how we've pluralized it--for him it was a single and singular entity), to see just what those folks were doing and saying. That will be the subject of a future post, in anticipation of the reception of which I am already stocking up on Klonopin and Ativan.

Take good care, and I'm happy not to be enemies or even adversaries.

peace and poetry (especially, at the moment, peace),

Reginald

Dear Reginald,

I'm rather sorry to hear you're preparing a new post on this subject rather than Britney Spears remixes! Or covers -- I remember, in another lifetime, sitting in a "tea bar" in Brooklyn when a I felt a little prickle on the back of my neck. Some acoustic guitar hovering subliminally in the background had begun the slow inevitable chord progression toward "Hit me baby one more time," and all around me I saw hipsters looking up, eyes shifting in nervous confusion. It was hard not to laugh..

Anyway, if you do post on the Allen anthology, I am going to butt out. I didn't mean to direct any hostility toward you in my first post, but it did look that way to some. My fault. As it is, a minor point I wanted to make about historical differences has blossomed into much misunderstanding, and I'd better go back to the non-controversial work of changing diapers and finishing a manuscript. Good luck with your treatment this week; I'll be thinking of you.

Michael, I'm relieved we're in agreement. Your description of students who only read the "right" poets is just depressing: no artist worth her salt is anything less than a voracious consumer of everything. Besides, someone in Spicer's circle told me one of his favorite poems was "The Rape of the Lock." Whoever thinks they know exactly who the right & wrong poets are is full of it. Even those terms -- right & wrong -- whoa! I mean woe.

Best,
Ange

As Robert Bringhurst points out, thinking, if it gets to be a habit, turns insiders into outsiders. The idea of separate camps, poetries, and schools gets reified in some parts of this discussion - but aren't things actually more fluid than such nomenclature reflects?

I'm coming a bit late to the discussion that has resulted from Reginald's comments regarding AWP and a post-avant world of poetry, but here goes.

(1) There is no post-avant poetry culture, but there may soon be a pan-avant one. Large numbers of poets are writing under the influence of established avant-garde practice, from the Ashbery-Guest aspect of the New York School, to language and post-language poetry, Newlipo, and Flarf. What we have called the outside is increasingly dominant. Reginald himself has edited an anthology, Postmodern Lyricisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries (Counterpath Press, 2008) , that includes many poets who would self-identify as "postmodern" or "innovative." Of the 23 poets included, only 5 were included in my anthology Postmodern American Poetry (W. W. Norton, 1994), but 18 have appeared in New American Writing, which I edit with Maxine Chernoff. Why only the five, Nathaniel Mackey, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, Kathleen Fraser, Rosmarie Waldrop, and Marjorie Welish? Why the eighteen? And how many of those eighteen were published in NAW before 1994? Two forces are at work: (a) Many poets of an "Iowa School" history have moved from the mainstream to the innovative (b) The innovative camp has been swept into the larger general economy of the university system, where the standard of legitimation is quite different from the bohemianism and urbanity of the New American era. In answer to my question at the end of part two of this post, Kasey Mohammad and Christian Bök DO have tenured academic positions, and there is no doubt whatever of their avant standing. Fearful outcries about innovative practice largely conceren the "Will it come here?" question--the recognition that one's mainstream work be marginalized or transformed when the innovative mainsteam is installed.

Finally, there's no point in attacking AWP from the perspective of MLA. English Departments and MFA programs are equally part of academic professionalism.

(2) As head of AWP, D.W. Fenza should be representing the interests of all of its members and participants, not one quadrant. But AWP has had controversies of this kind before. I'm pasting in below an excerpt from my blog that relates to being inside or outside generally, but especially in the AWP context.

"For much of our lives as editors, the inside in American poetry was utterly distinct from the outside. You were "experimental" or you were not. At my first AWP meeting, in San Antonio, in the 80s, I heard Donald Justice stir up a roomful of Iowa School poets by attacking the "charlatan" Beats, "juvenile" New York School, and the "fascist" Black Mountain poets. Before he began to speak, he asked that the ballroom doors of the hotel be closed and guarded. I had known there were oppositions, but I hadn't realized how keenly the insiders felt the threat of change. At that time, outsiders had no role in the academy, so they congregated at places like St. Mark's Church, Beyond Baroque, The Poetry Center at SFSU, and Chicago's Body Politic. This was true throughout the 70s, 80s, and much of the 90s. Everyone knew what it meant to cross the boundary into academic territory, which unfailingly relied on the received mainstream dominant--for example, the free verse poem of personal epiphany. Those differences have been blurred by the tremendous growth of creative writing programs, the desire for many of the