Too much of a good thing

There is, surrounding contemporary poetry, a consistent cloud of anxiety. The specific cause of this anxiety is the flood of published books and poems (i.e. contemporary poetry has no fixed object to which we can relate it). Basically: if everything is publishable, then how will I know what to read? And more insistently: how will readers know to read me? Rather than dismissing this anxiety as a simply a nostalgic conservative response to the information age (while holding open that possibility), Johannes Göransson, over at the multi-authored blog Montevidayo, suggests that this very crisis in discrimination necessitates a renewed engagement with criticism:

Franz Wright and many others bemoan the excess—there is too much poetry being published! ie just being published isn’t enough of a filter anymore. People have to start coming up with interesting readings of texts they like. Or nobody will read them. I can understand why Wright is nervous – he comes out of an MFA tradition that has been dismissive of critical discussions, that often rejects critical discussions as beside the point or even dangerous. This comes from the naive idea that we come naked to the text, that we can just appreciate the text for what it is, without critical frameworks. A suitably status-quo enforcing stance for a system that was for many years very much invested in status quo maintenance. (And in many cases still is.)

Göransson’s argument is elegant: the “status quo” (university presses and the awards system) appears as a neutral filter, and what the flood of publishable work does is not simply swamp us with poetry, but allow us to reveal such a seemingly neutral filter for what it is, an institutional structure. Furthermore, in doing so critics will create new filters, new ways of organizing and reading texts. So, far from being trapped in some sort of relativist hell, the revolution in self-publishing will allow us to frame and experience literature in new ways:

The key is: we have all this poetry being published, but unless people actually discuss what they like and think about why they like things, most people will just fall back on authority and read the U of Whatever books or whatever books win the Poetry Foundation/Establishment/Organization’s big awards. The worst possible filter.