In the interstices of being horribly sick (this was another chemotherapy week, with the usual panoply of crushing exhaustion, constant diarrhea, intermittent attacks of abdominal pain, continual nausea, and serial vomiting), I have been thinking about Lin Dinh’s fascinating recent Harriet post “Our Bodies, Our Selves,” which begins by juxtaposing my recent litany of my various physical ailments with Kenneth Goldsmith’s claims that an undefined “we” no longer have coherent selves, that “We're infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute.” Lin Dinh’s response to Goldsmith begins with these words: “Could someone with even a single serious illness believe that he can be ‘everyone and no one at all’? That's he’s ‘infinitely adaptable and changeable minute-to-minute’? I don't think so. Hell, even a simple headache brings me back to my senses, reminds me of the limitations of my body and mind.” I think that everyone is at least a somewhat different person in different situations, but I don’t believe that people are wholly malleable. Nor do I think that anything is infinite, not even the universe: the most decentered self still has boundaries. But I can see the truth in both viewpoints.

I’m sure this isn’t a novel observation, but I am often struck by how differently people interact online and in person. Though people are capable of both shocking cruelty and viciousness and amazing generosity and kindness, in general face-to-face interactions are guided and moderated by social norms and mores, some of which are purely arbitrary, but many of which make such interactions go more smoothly and painlessly. While America is in general the land of instant intimacy, this phenomenon seems even more pronounced in the online world.

Now that it's official, I can finally tell the world that I have, on my fifteenth try (yes, I've been applying since 1993), been awarded a 2008 Guggenheim Foundation fellowship. While I would certainly have liked to have received one earlier, this fellowship could not have come at a time when I needed it more, as my medical bills for my cancer treatments and surgeries have been mounting at a frightening rate.

I keep looking at the list of Fellows on the Guggenheim Foundation web site to confirm that my name is still there. Sometimes the world does give one what one needs when one needs it. Just not very often...

Once more illness has kept me away from the blog for a while, this time due to surgery to kill the tumors on my liver. The surgery was successful, or so I'm told, but I ended up in the hospital for several days due to complications.

It recently occurred to me (I’m not sure why it took so long) that there’s a decidedly disproportionate representation of the self-proclaimed avant-garde in the online poetry world. Bloggers in particular are much more likely to be what poet Ron Slate calls avant-gardeners than to be more “mainstream” poets. (When I first started my own blog a little over a year ago, someone wrote to say that she had been waiting for “a mainstream Ron Silliman” as a counter-balance, an indication of his iconic status in the online poetry world.) There seems to be a high degree of technophilia among “post-avant” bloggers. This is in part due to the fact that most of them are relatively young white men, who tend to be aficionados of all things computer-related: blogging, social networking sites like Facebook and MySpace, which I confess to being too old to know much about and too stodgy to care, computer and video games, text messaging, iPods and iPhones and Blackberries and Bluetooths, etc.

Once again illness has kept me away from blogging for a bit. I had surgery on Friday on the tumors on my liver, which the surgeon believes he has gotten (yay!), but I had to go the emergency room on Saturday in intense pain that turned out to be caused by pneumonia in my right lung. As Frank Sinatra sang, everything happens to me. Yeesh.

I’m sure that every writer remembers his or her first review. I’m even more sure that every writer remembers his or her first bad review. To be honest, I don’t remember the first review of my first book, where it appeared or who wrote it, what it said or where I was when I first read it. But I remember exactly where I was when I saw my first bad review, of my second book, Angel, Interrupted. I was at Borders in Chicago, in my old hipster/gayboy/yuppie neighborhood of Lakeview. I haven’t been to that Borders in many years, but ten years ago they had an excellent selection of literary journals. I picked up a copy of Chelsea, in which my work had appeared several times, and there it was.

Many of the comments in response to my most recent post revolved around the question of authorial intention and its importance or even relevance to the reading and interpretation of a work of verbal art, so I have decided to explore the question in greater depth. This post incorporates some of my prior responses to comments on that earlier post into an extended discussion of the matter of authorial intention.

One of the greatest legacies of the much-maligned (mainly by people who haven't really read them) New Critics is the separation of the author and the text. When I read a poem, I read the poem. I have neither the desire nor the ability to discern an author's intentions. I care about what the author wrote, not what the author thought he or she was writing. Even if one thinks of a work in terms of its author, if what mattered most to a writer was what was in his or her head, there’d be no reason to write anything, since one already has access to the contents of one’s own mind. One writes because one wants to produce something separate from oneself. I can't imagine how I could fathom Shakespeare's intentions, for example, or how, if I could, that would usefully illuminate his plays. In Keats's words, the poet is no one.

Ironically enough, given the topic of my last post, I have been sidelined from this blog for a while because I've been painfully sick wth what my oncologist thinks (but doesn't know) are new chemotherapy side effects. But I am better now, and I am back. Happy reading.

Politics, history, biography all inform and sometimes even deform art (style can be seen in one sense as the scar history leaves on art, what Adorno calls a hardening against the pressure of suffering), but they enter into art as artistic materials, and are transformed within it. And art speaks back to these things; it is not merely subject to them. To treat art as a social or economic or historical epiphenomenon is to strip it of its identity as art, and of its liberatory potential. This is why I am an adherent of what Adorno calls immanent critique.

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

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

I have posted a revised and much longer version of my Harriet post on "post-avant-garde" poetry, now titled "Defining Post-Avant-Garde Poetry," on my own blog, to be found here.

In this extended version of the piece I discuss various writers' conceptions of the phenomenon I address, including Paul Hoover's new modernism, Stephen Burt's ellipticism, and Ron Silliman's third way. I also further expand on the idea that the mainstream/avant-garde dichotomy is outmoded. I hope that all who are interested in this topic will take a look.

That many of the New American Poets were gay (Ashbery, Robin Blaser, James Broughton, Duncan, Edward Field, Ginsberg, O’Hara, Peter Orlovsky, James Schuyler, Spicer, Wieners, Jonathan Williams) is not incidental to their quest to find new ways of saying and, by implication (stronger in some than in others) new ways of moving through the world. But those projects were not necessarily or even often conceived of in political terms.

Whatever the New Americans’ interest in social transformation, and whatever forms that interest took, it doesn’t seem to have extended to gender. Only four of the forty-four poets in The New American Poetry are women, and only two of those, Barbara Guest and Denise Levertov, are even heard of now, though Robert Duncan was quite fond of Helen Adam’s romantic ballads. I’m told that it was only at his insistence that she was included at all. That can be seen as commentary on the book's gender politics. But I also wonder what other women were writing and publishing in that mode at the time. The only one I can think of is Diane di Prima, whose first book was published in 1958. Joanne Kyger's first book wasn't published until 1965, and Anne Waldman's (who was only fifteen in 1960, when the anthology was published) not until 1968. I don't think that Allen deliberately excluded women poets. But the paucity of potential female contributors says much about the sexism of the “progressive” or bohemian countercultures of the Nineteen-Fifties and Nineteen-Sixties, especially the Beats, though Gary Snyder does address gender and sexual equality. (The “conservative” anthology against which The New American Poetry is often counterposed, Donald Hall, Robert Pack, and Louis Simpson’s New Poets of England and America, published in 1957, does a bit better, with seven female contributors out of fifty-one total.)

This is the second of three posts devoted to the seminal Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry. This post deals with the question of the "New American Poets"'s political commitments, or lack of same.

Some of the poets gathered by Allen did indeed seek to transform society. Some sought to transform consciousness. Some sought to transform writing as a practice. Most just sought to write poems that felt more genuine to them than the products of the poetic orthodoxies of the 1950s. Robert Creeley, for one example, was almost purely concerned with the lyric notation of the moment-to-moment movements of his mind, emotions, and sensibilities. As he wrote in the preface to For Love: Poems 1950-1960, “Not more, say, to live than what there is, to live. I want the poem as close to this fact as I can bring it; or it me” (cited in M. L. Rosenthal, The New Poets 147). This implies a notion of a life more authentic or at least more awake than the one most people live, but has no necessarily political valence: various religious disciplines of attention have the same goal.

John Ashbery was a Yale Younger Poet (and Frank O’Hara almost was, in the same year), and the revolution which interested him was what Julia Kristeva calls a revolution in poetic language, largely inherited from such forebears as Raymond Roussel and Gertrude Stein, what he calls in the title of his Charles Eliot Norton lectures at Harvard “other traditions” (including Thomas Lovell Beddoes, Laura Riding, John Brooks Wheelwright, and David Schubert). It’s important to note that Ashbery has cited such canonical figures as W.H. Auden and Wallace Stevens as among the poets who most shaped his poetic idiom.

It's taken me a while to post this piece, as I've been beset by chemotherapy side effects of my colon cancer treatment, especially a debilitating bout of chemo fatigue, and a nasty cold on top of this, which just seems unfair. But when has my life ever been fair?

Much of what poet and critic Joshua Corey understatedly calls the “remarkable storm of controversy” occasioned (but not caused) by my attempt to describe a phenomenon, “post-avant garde poetry,” much mentioned but little defined, was aroused by my linking of current “post-avant” poetry with what has been called “the New American Poetries,” after the famous Donald M. Allen anthology The New American Poetry, published by Grove Press in 1960. This observation was purely descriptive, not evaluative. The poets often referred to as “post-avants” have clearly been influenced by the New American Poetries. But there is much disagreement about who has the right to claim the New Americans as their inheritance, as if their work and its legacy were something to be owned. But no one can lay exclusive claim to an artistic heritage or tradition. Such things are available to all, which is one of the many ways in which literature improves on life.

In turn, this debate derives from how one interprets that work and that legacy. The two main claims that have been made are a) that the very diverse poets gathered under the rubric “New American Poetry” were political and/or social revolutionaries and b) that they shared a program of total or near-total negation. I will investigate both these claims.

I hope that this series of posts will prompt debate, but I also hope that the debate will maintain a reasoned and reasonable tone. Shouting matches do nothing but make one hoarse, and personal attacks do nothing but make one mean.

This first post discusses the anthology as a whole and its work in producing the grouping we now call "the New American Poetries" out of a number of poets whose work often had very little in common. The second post will focus on the artistic statements of individual contributors. The first post will address broader issues of the relationship between "progressive" art and "progressive" politics. I won't spoil the ending.

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

My new new book (after my recent essay collection, Orpheus in the Bronx), Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries, is just out from the new and small but quite excellent Counterpath Press, who have published books by Laynie Browne, Brian Henry, and Andrew Joron, among others.

Marjorie Perloff writes of the book that "Like the best of museum curators, Reginald Shepherd has trusted his own poet’s eye and ear in assembling poems by twenty-three of our best (mostly younger) poets—poets not usually linked, belonging, as they do, to different schools and movements. From Rosmarie Waldrop’s ironic prose poems ('I gave up stress for distress') to Cole Swensen’s elegant ekphrastic prose, from C. S. Giscombe’s minimalist geographies to Susan Stewart’s resonant mythic landscapes, the dominant impression—rare today—produced by this lyric assemblage is that of quality—the sure hand of those who have mastered their craft and can therefore Make It New. This is a truly exciting and memorable anthology!"

Charles Altieri writes that “All the anthologies of contemporary poetry I know are far too generous. They seem incapable of excluding almost anyone who has gained any reputation, and then they have to compensate for their breadth by such scanty selections there is no possibility of depth. Not so with Reginald Shepherd’s Lyric Postmodernisms. Shepherd had the courage to select 23 poets—spanning two generations—then offer them enough space to provide statements on their aesthetics, display their range (including selections from long poems and uncollected texts). This anthology treats poets not just as makers of objects but as thinkers with visible and engaging projects, who bring lyric consciousness into almost every domain of active life. . . . Here 'lyric' can have its fullest meaning only if there are many more than one postmodernism, as Shepherd elaborates in his brilliant and concise introduction.”

I am grateful to them both for these generous and eloquent endorsements.

In my younger and thinner days, I used to go out dancing all the time. In Boston, in Providence (whenever I could get a ride), in Buffalo, in Chicago, I had what might be called “every night fever.” In Boston, where last call was at two, I rarely got to bed before two or three; in Buffalo and Chicago, where last call was at four, I rarely got to bed before four or five.

I went out all the time because I love to dance and I love music, as the O’Jays sang oh so long ago, though unlike them I don’t like just any kind of music, even if it is groovin’. I also went out because I was bored and lonely and I wanted to get laid, or at least to feel wanted. Though I had more sex than I felt that I was having (does anyone ever have “enough” sex?), I rarely got to have the sex I wanted with the men I wanted to have it with. But I had the music, and I could spend a good night in a musical trance, almost forgetting that I wanted to have sex. Almost. There were also the nights when I felt so lonely that a sad song would make me sit on the edge of the dance floor and cry. At first I accidentally typed “fly.” That works too.

For most of my life I have felt very awkward and uncomfortable in my body and in my social presence. I feel better about both now, but still hardly at ease. But when I dance, which is rarely these days, I feel at one with my body. I was a great dancer (no boast, just fact—I rocked the dance floor, and still can) and, a little heavier and out of practice, I’m still damned good. When I’m dancing my movements are graceful and smooth. When I’m dancing I feel attractive, I experience my body as admirable, even masterful, just like Madonna sang in "Vogue." In the days of my constant clubbing, men who would never have slept with me would compliment me on my dancing, buy me drinks (I always chose soda or orange juice), befriend me, even. Sometimes a man would sleep with me because I danced well (as the old saying goes, if a man can dance that well, imagine how well he can fuck), though the dance floor brought me more friends than lovers.

I'm very gratified by the strong response my recent posts, especially "AWP, Communazis, and Me" and "Who You Callin' 'Post-Avant'," have received. It's wonderful to know that people are reading and that they care enough to comment.

However, I have been disturbed by the tenor of many (by no means all) of the responses, which have been hostile and sometimes vitriolic, even descending to the level of personal attack, either direct or implied, including all kinds of baseless negative assumptions about me (including insinuations that I am some kind of conservative or even reactionary). Many of them have also engaged in what felt to me like willful misreadings of what I had actually written.

I shouldn't have been surprised that my post on AWP and its discontents should have received some rather negative responses, since in that post I criticized Charles Bernstein's hyperbolic parody of AWP as Nazi, Stalinist, and MCarthyite. I would remind everyone, though, that criticism is not attack. But I was shocked that my post on post-avant poetry received so many such responses, as I considered it an innocuous description of a phenomenon that is much mentioned but not much defined.

More below the virtual fold.

I was prompted to write this entry by the citation of my blog entry "Orwellian Me" in article called "Blogging the AWP, Part Two," on the Chronicle of Higher Education's "*Footnoted from Academic Blogs" page. Author Jennifer Howard cited me discussing the shifting boundaries of "inside" and "outside" in the poetry worlds; noting my use of the phrase "post-avant," she asked for a definition, which I provided on the site. It occurred to me that it might be useful to do so in more expanded form here, especially since Don Share's most recent Harriet post notes that "Harriet readers frequently see calls for a definition of what, precisely, 'post-modern' and 'avant garde' poetry is." (And no, Peter Campion's uninformed dismissal doesn't cut it.)

The phrase "post-avant poetry," to my knowledge first coined by Joan Houlihan in a jocular mood, is bandied about quite a bit in the online poetry world (I’ve never seen it in print, an indication of how separate the two realms often are, though many people participate in both). It’s used with the assumption that "we all know what that is" but, like the phrases Don mentions in his post, the term is rarely defined. Here follows my attempt to do so, for whatever use it may be.

I have just returned from my second time attending the AWP conference, which (like last year) was wonderfully exhilarating and utterly overwhelming. Here in Pensacola I lead a life rather thoroughly isolated from any literary community or scene, and so the opportunity to see and talk to so many fellow writers was and is particularly exciting to me. I am pretty poor and the trip has practically bankrupted me, but it was worth it.

I am, as I have written, done with discussing Charles Bernstein's piece, my critique of which was only a part of a post that engaged considerably larger topics, which were simply ignored by most commenters. But the discussion around my post has brought up some issues I do think worth pursuing, both about the tenor of discourse in the online poetry world and about the question of insiders and outsiders in the poetry world(s).

More follows below the fold.

This post is in two parts. The first is a simple announcement of my participation in the upcoming AWP Conference in New York City.

I am chairing a panel on Saturday, February 2 at from noon to one fifteen on Gay Male Poetry Post Identity Politics, featuring “emerging” poets Christopher Hennessy (whose wonderful blog Outside the Lines focuses on the relationship of identity and creativity), Brad Richard, Aaron Smith (whose entertaining blog focuses on anything but poetry), and Brian Teare. Here is the description of the panel from the conference schedule, written by moi:

What does it mean to be a gay male poet today, after gay liberation, the somewhat domesticated gay rights movement, the revived radicalism of Queer Nation, the AIDS epidemic and ACT UP, and intellectual interrogations of “queerness” and identity itself? Contemporary gay male poets can take their gayness for granted on several levels. They also can explore, question, and even explode that identity. On this panel, four emerging gay male poets discuss what the words gay male poetry mean to them.

I hope that all interested parties will try to make it. Let’s make this panel a party!

The second part of this post is about my impression of the role that some phantasmatic nightmare image of AWP plays in the imaginations of many participants in the various online poetry worlds. To read more, look below the fold.

My first book of prose, Orpheus in the Bronx: Essays on Identity, Politics, and the Freedom of Poetry, is just out in the University of Michigan Press Poets on Poetry series, and I have to share the news. This is a project on which I’ve been working for several years, and I’m incredibly excited that it’s finally come to fruition. I got my advance copies about a week ago and have been cradling the book in my arms as if it were my baby. Which it is.

Noted poet and critic James Longenbach generously writes on the back of the book that “Orpheus in the Bronx not only extols the freedom language affords us; it embodies that freedom, enacting poetry's greatest gift—the power to recognize ourselves as something other than what we are. These bracing arguments were written by a poet who sings.” I’m grateful to him for the wonderful endorsement.

Howard Nemerov (1920-1991) is almost forgotten today, but he was an excellent poet (in the post World War II formalist mode so scorned today, especially by those who know nothing about it) and a brilliant thinker about poetry. (He was also photographer Diane Arbus's older brother.) His witty and formally exquisite poetry deserves to be better known.

The question of difficulty in poetry, what it is and why it is, is one that quite occupies me. From what I can tell, I'm not alone in this preoccupation. These excerpts from Nemerov's essay “The Difficulty of Difficult Poetry” (included in his long-out-of-print collection Reflexions on Poetry & Poetics, published by Rutgers University Press in 1972) eloquently and insightfully address that question.

At the end of my previous post, in which I listed and briefly discussed some of my favorite books of poetry published in 2007, I promised or threatened that there were more lists to come. I truly do love lists, and once I started making them I found it hard to stop. So here are a couple of other lists pertaining to books of poetry published in 2007, this time sans commentary, for reasons that will become obvious if you look beneath the fold.

I had planned to post this as a reply in the comments section to Vivek Narayanan’s eloquent response to my posts on translation and my post on Paul Celan in particular, but I’ve decided that both the topic and my reply are substantive enough to warrant a new post. (One of the advantages of blogging is a much greater level of response than one usually receives to printed pieces, allowing a very timely opportunity to hone and refine one's thought.) The question of the nature, value, limits, and possibilities of translation is one that touches on the heart of what it means to read and write, indeed, what it means to communicate at all, since different individuals are at least as incommensurable as different languages are. For those who are interested in pursuing such matters further, I recommend George Steiner’s After Babel: Aspects of Language and Translation. This post will not be quite so ambitious.

I almost titled this post “Everybody’s Doing It, Why Can’t I?” (after the Cranberries' first album), since it seems de rigueur to compile year-end lists of various kinds (ten best Britney Spears meltdowns, ten worst George W. Bush malapropisms, etc.). I actually love lists but, as usual, I decided to jump on the bandwagon after it had not only already left for another town but probably already left that town in turn. (What is a bandwagon, anyway?)

I was very distracted last year by travel and especially illness (including illness while traveling), which culminated in my recent colon cancer surgery and my starting chemotherapy. So there was a lot of reading and writing that I meant to do but didn’t get to. I also live very far from any literary scene (which I sometimes think is a good thing), and so I just miss a lot. And I’m poor, so I don’t have a lot of money to buy books of poetry.

All that said, what follows is a list of some of the poetry books published in 2007 I did read that mattered the most to me. It’s not a “best poetry books of 2007” list (I’ve hardly read enough of last year’s poetry books to make such a judgment). It’s not even a list of all the poetry books published last year that I enjoyed.

I’m sure there are other books published last year that I would have enjoyed or even been impressed by that I just didn’t hear about. For that matter, I have a lot of poetry books, from last year and before, and from a wide range of writers, that I haven’t had the chance to read yet, and might well love when I finally do.

But enough preliminaries. Let’s get this party started.

Even across the gap between German and English, Paul Celan is one of my favorite poets. I’m not sure if one can really be “influenced” by a writer as singular as Celan, but his work has been an important presence for me for many years. I have written about him twice on my blog, here and here. His intensity of vision, diction, and rhythm, and the inseparability of these things, trying to find new ways of saying to accommodate the previously unsaid or unsayable (especially what can be spoken in the face of the unspeakable enormity of the Holocaust), have made a deep impression on me.

In my previous post, I wrote about some of the losses and gains of translating poetry in general. But, because I believe that generalities only have meaning when grounded in specifics, I wanted to talk about a few particular examples. Thus, for my next few posts I will be listing some poetic translations that have meant a lot to me.

I don’t read much poetry in translation; in fact, I tend to actively avoid it. As Robert Frost famously said, “Poetry is what is lost in translation.”