noble numbers... and mean girls

I promised on Monday to say more this week about that exchange on poetry, poetry-publishing, and gender in the Chicago Review, and now I'm going to say it: I'll start with some objections to both sides.
Jennifer Ashton, if you'll remember back that far, started a brouhaha about gender and poetry publishing by alleging that folks who still made gender an issue (in, for example, intros to anthologies) were being essentialist. She's still making that allegation, and she's still saying that critics in general, and anthologists in particular, who "insist on the importance of the poems are women's poems transformed the contingent relation between the sex of the authors and the forms of their poems into a necessary one." (That's a quotation from her response to Young and Spahr in the Chicago Review rather than from her original essay in ALH.)
To which I respond (this paragraph and the next two rewritten to avoid mistakes in earlier version): that may be true in the philosophical sense of "necessary," by which my knowing English, for example, and my ability to access the Internet, are necessary but not sufficient conditions for me to write the sentence you are now reading. If Ashton is arguing that even such obviously (to me) gender-marked experimental works as Bernadette Mayer's Midwinter Day could plausibly have been written by men writing as men (by men who grew up in our society aware of their maleness) then Ashton and I just read this set of poets very differently. (The matter of persona-poems, whose speakers have different gender from their implied authors or from the human beings who really wrote them, would be a distraction here, since these are not persona poems we're debating: I'll happily take that up in another post if anyone wants.)
I think, though, that Ashton gets a good deal of force from the overlap between necessary in the philosophical sense and necessary in other vernacular senses-- that she takes feminist anthologists to argue (and she argues against) the proposition that gender causes, in some stronger sense, experimental women writers to write as they do--- against the proposition that gender is almost a sufficient condition, rather than simply a necessary one, for certain writers (given certain other necessary conditions, e.g., perhaps, having read Gertrude Stein) to write as they do.
That's why I had the sense, after reading Ashton's most recent part in this controversy, that she's taking on a straw person. Thinkers and poets such as Elizabeth Treadwell (whom Spahr and Young mention) find the relation between their poems and their gender (and between other "innovative" women poets' poems and those women's gender) interesting enough to talk about, I think, without positing a strong causal connection: without, that is, saying that gender "made them write that way"--- though they may say that no man could have written a particular poem (that gender is a necessary condition, in the philosophical sense, but nowhere near a sufficient condition for the kind of consciousness the poems record).

At times it sounds as if Ashton saw no difference between "contingent" and "random" (or "uninteresting"), and no difference between "necessary" and "interesting." "The female community I dismiss," she writes, "would only be worth hanging onto if you thought there was some necessary connection between the forms that count as 'innovative' and the bodies that count as female." Try replacing "necessary" with "interesting" in that sentence—or try replacing "female" with "Irish" or "Mexican"--- and you'll see what I take to be Ashton's mistake.
The most predictable and most frustrating aspect of Spahr and Young's article, on the other hand, is the way it ends: by reminding us that as bad as sexism is, as much trouble as it continues to cause for ambitious American women, there are worse problems in the world today. "Feminism really only matters," Spahr and Young write, "if it engages with issues in an international arena": really? how many issues must it engage, and which ones? Would they apply that test to other political causes of which they (and I) approve? Does environmentalism—an attempt to reduce carbon emissions or to cut down on river pollution in Portland, say—only really matter if it also engages with issues in Belgium and Bangladesh?
Plumbers shouldn't have to worry about not being carpenters, too, unless they want to take up carpentry. Math teachers shouldn't apologize for not teaching history or public health. And advocates of gender equality within the United States shouldn't have to worry that their activism isn't also reducing violence in Colombia or saving the Arctic ice (unless they think that global climate change is so bad we should stop doing everything else until we've fixed that, which is a defensible position but one that only works, I think, with climate change).
All the causes about which Spahr and Young seem to care (feminism and "resource usage internationally" and "education for all") have something in common in that they all have to do with ethical imperatives, but those same imperatives make the causes valuable independently, too: if you are working for one, you should not have to apologize because you are not working for them all. And if you are working for the arts, and if you think it is worthwhile to work for the arts in general (many people don't), you should not have to go out of your way to come up with rationales as to why working for the arts is really working to clean up the rivers, or reduce oil use, or teach better math skills in schools. If you think the arts are important only insofar as they cause those other things, then you should either stop working in the arts and go to work for those other causes directly, or work only in the arts that have mass audiences right now and can change large numbers of underinformed minds (i.e. not poems).
If you feel guilty about working in the arts, given your strong feelings about various kinds of public good, and have decided to keep working in the arts nevertheless, that's a mixed feeling, not an argument: it's also the basis of Spahr's fasincating memoir-novel, reviewed here.
But Spahr and Young are hardly alone in making this dubious quasi-utilitarian argument. The largest failed project in poetry-criticism is, and has been since the 19th century, the attempt to provide narrowly ethical, more or less utilitarian, justifications for an activity that justifies itself only in nonquantifiable, non-measurable, and ultimately, I think, non-public terms. If you think writing poetry, or writing about poetry, is worthwhile only if by doing so you can help slow down global warming, or bring some economic justice for janitors, you probably shouldn't be writing about poetry at all. And if you think poetry has some non-public, non-utilitarian value—that some poems have value even if almost nobody reads them-- then you shouldn't apologize for saying so. Not even if some of the poems are about—and it's surely a promising subject--- justice for janitors.
Allen Grossman implies as much in the same issue of Chicago Review, in an essay I found more profound, and no less memorable, than the debate over numbers. Grossman--who is both a a poet and a thinker about poetry-- may well be my favorite living commentator on poetry-in-general, my favorite promulgator of fruitful hypotheses about what poetry-in-general might be or do. Rather than summarize his argument, which starts but does not end with Hart Crane's last completed poem, I'll offer a few of Grossman's sentences, which should let you know if you, too, will be moved by his piece:
"Hart Crane (or any poet) reminds us that the death-blocked conversation between the dead and the living is identical to the conversation between the living and the living, which is enabled and blocked in life by our unmingling bodies."
"'Meaning' being construed within the poem as the question of possibility of any common experience… Crane's poem… is put in service of the solution of a 'problem,' brokenness, intimate and general—a problem life-constitutive but insoluble."
"In general, the requirement of thought about poetic texts is precipitated by a characteristic of poems that is commonly called closure… We must stop and think… What does the poem intend to follow after—that can be thought that could not be thought by the reader before the poem was known to the reader?"
Grossman also suggests (following Hesoid) that the Muses are the same thing as mean girls. If I can't get a poem out of that, I hope someone else can.
The last thing I want to say about this solid issue of a good magazine is that the essays aren't the most important things in it, at least not to me.
What is? That would be C. D. Wright's magnificent and overtly political long poem "Rising Falling Hovering," part two of which appears alongside Grossman and Young and Spahr—the first part appeared in the previous issue and as a pdf here. Since I offered snippets of Grossman's essay, I'll end with bits of Wright's long poem, though part two of the poem (much more than part one) depends on a cumulative work of narration not well-served by cut-out bits. (I use, here, this symbol + to indicate what are in the original big midline spaces, since the big midline spaces get turned into regular spaces by the web tools we use.) "He" is the poet's college-aged son, who has been traveling in Mexico:
If you give your fears a shape + her friend suggested
You break free of them + this was before the bad diagnosis
After she is assured he is back + from the sea
she concedes + He is going to be OK + he'll make his way […]
During the time she knew he was on a bus + without a wallet + she knew this much
because he left a message on her machine + hurtling as Mexican buses tend to go
she could only say + Esta comiendo mi coco + He is eating my head