Hail, Ichneumonid!

Competing, scholarly priorities have prevented me from contributing to these interesting discussions on Harriet, and I fear that my own comments might seem very late in coming. Reginald Shepherd has expressed anxieties about the acid tone in an article by the poet Charles Bernstein, who formulates a sardonic rebuttal to an article by D. F. Fenza (the executive director of the AWP). Fenza has written an absurdly paranoid diatribe against the avant-garde, equating poets of the Language Movement with a species of "ichneumonid," a kind of wasp that can lay its eggs inside the live body of a caterpillar—a victim that then goes on to spin a cocoon, but that, alas, does not live long enough to hatch as a beautiful butterfly, because the horrible parasite devours its host from the inside out and then hatches forth from the cocoon instead, as a wasp. Fenza warns young poets to be wary of this threat that avant-garde theory might pose to their budding talents and their newborn careers….

Fenza uses an apiary trope in order to describe such young poets as "honeybees" at work in the great hives of literature—but Fenza mobilizes this alien image from entomology in a manner that quickly becomes creepy, particularly when he calls upon us to "embrace the swarm" in order to "describe the hive accurately," thereby contributing to its construction by repetitiously "regurgitating" our sips of poetic nectar. Fenza argues that, because the Language Movement abjures this duty, such "theorists sustain a parasitic lifestyle with baffling extremes of sophistication," feeding off the royal jelly of poetry, while behaving like a "government intent upon eradicating…the general reading public." He warns such readers that "the ichneumonids have nested in your shire," and he suggests that, if ever such an intruder were to enter the demesnes of the honeybee, "the intruder would be promptly stung to death and then embalmed in propolis so [that] the corpse's decay would not contaminate the hive."
Fenza cites Bernstein as one of these "ichneumonids," whose dismissal of the laureates constitutes a "morally repugnant" case of "tone-deaf poetics"—so Bernstein replies with a sardonic rebuttal that attempts to unpack some of the Orwellion overtones implicit in this allegory of a honeybee, everywhere threatened with "eradication" by an insectoid parasitism. Shepherd intervenes at the end of this counterstrike in order to demonstrate that, as a critic, he feels so sensitive to the politesse of arguments that he cannot abide the fact that (even though Fenza might use insectoid metaphors to demonize the avant-garde as both degenerate and corruptive), Bernstein has nevertheless trivialized the deaths of millions by even intimating in jest that the likes of both Stalin and Hitler have also deployed the same kind of rhetoric in their own demonization of the arts, doing so by describing the avant-garde as a "parasite" upon the collectivist, totalitarian harmony of the common, social order.
Shepherd even chides me for pointing out that Fenza seems to be arguing that the avant-garde now threatens poetry with a kind of "literary genocide." Shepherd objects to my use of the word "genocide" in this context because Fenza himself never uses it (moreover, my use of it trivializes actual deaths in Darfur)—when in fact I only make explicit the thesis of Fenza, who uses his own metaphors of "eradication" in order to argue that the avant-garde has so poisoned our language that the audience for poetry finds itself in steep decline, if not yet fully extinct. Shepherd finds "upsetting" and "offensive" any intimations of genocidal discourse in the comments by Bernstein and me (even though we are merely citing the use of such discourse by Fenza), whereupon Shepherd goes on to apologize for Fenza by saying that Fenza "has a point," intimating that theory can in fact pose such a threat, and that, despite evidence to the contrary, the rhetoric of Fenza "does not just emerge out of…sheer malice."
Shepherd purports to be sensitive to any hyperbole around the issue of "genocide," but then he sanctions such rhetoric when he remarks that Fenza, "even in his hyperbole…[has] made some good points." Shepherd may object to the collateral sideswipes upon the AWP, but from my Canadian position, a few tonic doses of parody might seem warranted under these circumstances, particularly as a kind of cautionary caricature in a nation that, for years, has verged upon becoming a hyperfascist, surveillance state (not unlike the "hive" so celebrated by Fenza). While I have always enjoyed the conviviality of AWP, history has shown that the kind of rhetoric deployed by Fenza to impugn the avant-garde has never boded well for the arts in times of potential, political repression—and I might suggest that Fenza has, perhaps, fallen victim to the very condescension that he attributes to every postmodernist: "ironically, in trying to affirm the humane understanding of others, theorists…denigrate poets."
(Thanks again, Reginald, for continuing to contribute to such provocative controversy….)