AWP Chicago 2012: Where I'll Be

  

 I’ll be participating in the following events at AWP this coming week in Chicago. I hope to see you at any of them, or any of the number of other panels and readings that I’ll be attending.

Route 66 Off-Site Reading
Friday, March 2, 2012
3:30pm until 5:30pm
Buzz Café, 905 S. Lombard Ave., Oak Park, IL. 60304
  
This reading, coordinated with thanks to Grant Matthew Jenkins, features experimental/conceptual poets from states along Route 66. Get your kicks at 3:30pm!

Tentative lineup:
Grant Matthew Jenkins
Claudia Nogueira
K. Lorraine Graham
Mark Wallace
Bob Archambeau
Sloan Davis
Susan Briante
Farid Matuk
Greg Kinzer
Joseph Harrington
Simone Muench
Hadara Bar-Nadav
William J Harris
Dennis Etzel Jr.

To get there by subway:
Take the Blue line to Austin-Blue
Walk to 905 S Lombard Ave, Oak Park, IL 60304
1. Head west on Garfield St toward S Taylor Ave 0.1 mi
2. Turn right onto S Lombard Ave 0.1 mi
905 S Lombard Ave, Oak Park, IL 60304

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Saturday, 9:00 A.M.-10:15 A.M.
S117. Building and Surviving an Innovative Writing Program
(K. Lorraine Graham, John Pluecker, Anna Joy Springer, Janet Sarbanes, Mark Wallace)
Crystal Room, Palmer House Hilton, 3rd Floor

Participating in an interdisciplinary writing program committed to innovative pedagogies is exhilarating and confusing, especially if it’s a new program and you are a professor building the curriculum or a student in the inaugural class. A recent graduate, a current student, two tenured faculty members, and an adjunct professor discuss their experiences with innovative writing programs: the three-year old MFA at UCSD, the established MFA at Cal Arts, and the growing undergraduate BA at CSU San Marcos.

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Stop the Sentence: A Night of (Inter) Active Readings
Saturday, March 3, 2012
7:00pm until 12:00am
at Outer Space Studio
1474 N Milwaukee Ave.

FEATURE READINGS BY:
7:30 Matthew Klane
8:30 Cara Benson
9:30 Michelle Naka Pierce
10:30 Ronaldo Wilson
11:30 Tracie Morris

WITH READINGS, PRESENTATIONS & PERFORMANCES BY:

7:45 AWP SHOW AND TELL
Teresa Carmody, Feng Sun Chen, Gloria Frym, BJ Love, Mark Wallace

8:45 O.P.P./OTHER PEOPLE'S POETRY
Claire Donato, Sueyeun Juliette Lee, Luis Humberto Valadez
Catherine Wagner, Tyrone Williams, Tim Yu
& a tribute to Akliah Oliver with a video by Ed Bowes & Anne Waldman

9:45 TAG TEAM READING
cris cheek, Laura Goldstein, MC Hyland, Tim/Trace Peterson, Michelle Taransky, Edwin Torres, Christine Wertheim

10:45 INSTANT READING
David Emanuel, Jennifer Karmin, Edwin Perry, Jai Arun Ravine,
Adam Roberts, Kenyatta Rogers

+ + PLUS + + AUDIENCE PARTICIPATION
That means you!

Venue logistics --
doors open 6:45pm
in the Wicker Park neighborhood
near CTA Damen blue line
third floor walk up
not wheelchair accessible

Red Rover Series {readings that play with reading} is curated by Laura Goldstein and Jennifer Karmin. Each event is designed as a reading experiment with participation by local, national, and international writers, artists, and performers. The series was founded in 2005 by Amina Cain and Jennifer Karmin.

 

Against Unity conclusion (part three)

(Part One and Part Two)

In various essays and reviews, Michael Theune has been tracing the problems in Shepherd’s and related notions of third way poetics. As just one example, Theune notes that some of the selections in Shepherd’s anthologies reflect personal aesthetic preferences that have little to do with the dividing line between mainstream and experimental practices. Classical references, and their predominance among the poems Shepherd chooses, seem to have little to do with the issues at stake, unless we imagine that a love of classical gardens is the thing that, before now, most U.S. poets were afraid to recognize that they all shared. And as Johannes Gorannson pointed out in his review of the The American Hybrid, to make the case that the anthology is creating a middle ground between two long warring camps, the editors “caricature a multiplicity of styles as two extremes.” More successful is American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, edited by Claudia Rankine and Juliana Spahr, which selects work by and about a small group of women writers whose approaches might seem on the surface opposed to each other. But that anthology makes no claim to find similarity across the total ground of contemporary U.S. poetry, although Spahr’s introduction addresses problems with seeing “lyric” and “language” as synonyms for two warring groups.

I think it’s safe to say therefore that anthologies attempting to establish middle ground between various U.S. poetry practices have not done so, and certainly could not do so by attempting to create a new middle of American poetry based on combining or overcoming the limitations of what is supposedly only two prior camps.

There have been now about fifteen years of claims that the distinction between so-called “mainstream” and “avant garde” literatures are increasingly irrelevant and/or old-fashioned. And in fact the contemporary poetic landscape shows that to be true. But that’s not because poetry exists in any greater state of unity than before. Just the opposite: probably we have more differing claims than ever regarding the value of contemporary poetry. The American Hybrid and Shepherd’s anthologies represent not a new middle ground but instead posit specific schools of thought that oppose themselves to other schools of thought.

In fact, schools of thought may now appear and disappear more rapidly than ever. The appearance of anthologies supporting the apparent growth of the concepts of third-way poetics and American Hybrid may in fact signal that those concepts have already peaked and may quickly become relics (perhaps even abandoned relics) of a now gone era. I also wonder whether new approaches can genuinely be created by editors. I think terminologies have more staying power when writers self-identify as a group. Nada Gordon for instance considers herself an ongoing member of the flarf group, yet I doubt that Rae Armantrout considers herself a poet of a Hybrid School. Quite literally, there is no such school, although I doubt that Armantrout would consider herself a member of it if it did exist.

U.S. poetry in almost all recent anthologies and in much poetry criticism and discussion still seems based on differing, often competing groups, with various terminologies defining publications, blogs, and websites, although most groups highlight the multiplicity of approaches that can be harbored safely within them. There are now flarf and gurlesque anthologies. The development of the Plumbline School, a poetics of moderation and balance recently named by Henry Gould and compatriots, will despite Gould’s constant mockery of the notion of schools be ultimately measured by the writing that does or does not appear in relationship to the name of the group. There is no such thing as an anti-group poetics that brings together all or even a significant portion of the varying groups that exist. Attempts to do so usually just create further groups.

Certainly we have no anthology of contemporary poetry that successfully critiques the notion of the singular school or highlights the range of differences and disagreements fundamental to contemporary poetry. A recent issue of Poetry Magazine that featured flarf and conceptual writing in one section and more conventional narrative and lyric verse in another was an intriguing, if overly cautious, example of at least a small-scale attempt. Approaches that come closest can still be found more within anthologies that consciously embrace experimental extremes rather than attempting to tame them.

For instance, Wreckage of Reason: An Anthology of Contemporary Experimental Prose by Women Writers, edited by Nava Renek, features more distinctively and outrageously hybrid texts than any recent poetry anthology. It includes works that variously mix poetry, prose, fiction, memoir, criticism, taboo language, self-reflexive commentary, instructional manuals, visual art, processual text, computer-generated and not, as well as much else. Many of the hybrid texts in  that anthology are not designed to smooth over differences between these ways of writing, bur instead show how differences collide with and question each other.

But even if there were poetry anthologies that highlighted, rather than attempting to minimize or avoid, differences across groups, those anthologies would create not a new center but just another way of thinking. Although U.S. poets continue to have difficulty accepting difference or even acknowledging its value, and factionalism creates hostility and furthers existing resource imbalances, I don’t think that trying to end factionalism is a suitable response to the existence of so many approaches. Factionalism isn’t going to end. Any new claim to end it will only be opposed by further factionalism.

And in many ways that’s how it should be. The huge energy of factionalism, of aesthetic and cultural disagreement, shows just how many and different are the people who remain committed to the value of poetry, especially in a country (and perhaps a world) where we’re often told that no one values it at all. Part of that factionalism involves the fear of being unknown or forgotten (right now as well as forever) and the anti-democratic fear that too many points of view equals a chaotic loss of defined value. But it also exists because poets, defying supposed good sense, continue to believe that their poetry and their ideas about it matter.

I hope that my conviction that we should resist trying to make the multiple into a singular will not be confused with lacking direction. My commitment remains to poetic innovation and extremes and to their connection to other forms of cultural awareness and action both on local and global levels. There are histories to borrow from and remember but there are no models sufficient to guide the present or future of poems. Poems that attempt simply to reflect poetry’s past, or to see in it a bedrock source of value, will never be sufficient to deal with the always changing present. It’s difficult to feel optimistic about global political conditions and the role of the U.S. in them. Even if one is optimistic, that can only be on the grounds of the continued possibility of change.

What we need are poems that understand and challenge the present while being aware that the present itself is both a function of the past and an inevitable rewriting of it, for better or worse, since history hardly involves pure progress. We need poems that take aesthetic risks and explore new techniques and provide new cultural insights. The writers I’m most interested in are ones who I feel do that: I’ll save the list of names for another time. Still, I doubt that poems of that kind are going to arise solely within the work of one poetic school or from one or two poets of greatness. We need a more eclectic—and yes, monstrously hybrid—understanding of the profound mismatchedness of contemporary poetry, without a liberal flattening that suggests that all poems meet the challenge of the present with similar types of significance.

Against Unity (part two)

(part one here)

I first began thinking in the early 90s about the disruptive, impure, and nightmarish possibilities of hybrid aesthetics. It has influenced a great deal of my writing and, perhaps more importantly for this forum, played a hidden but nonetheless essential role in the essays gathered in the anthology I edited with Steven Marks, Telling It Slant: Avant Garde Poetics of the 1990s (University of Alabama Press 2002), a text that has been insufficiently mentioned in recent discussions of hybrid aesthetics.

To my thinking during the 90s, the hybrid was valuable because it challenged ideas of singularity and purity that I saw as much among writers invested in avant garde, experimental, or non-traditional approaches to literature (feel free to pick your own singular term and its own singular problems) as among writers who denied that those alternatives had value or that they themselves were part of a specific tradition (if there are no alternatives, a tradition isn’t a tradition, it’s simply “all there is”). I noted then something that remains true today: the need to define poetry by the singular, and the fear of the inchoate chaos that might result if one does not, remains a guiding principle of many poetics discussions.

The fear is related to fears about loss of identity, loss of a public profile, and finally loss of all attention. It is related to the fear of democracy both in politics and in poetry, or at least to the fear that democracy might actually be the same as chaos (or its more passive version, an “everything goes” liberalism). I don’t intend simply to criticize such fears, to suggest that the world of poetry will be healed (is it sick, and if it was, mightn’t one want that?) by getting over them. There are worthwhile concerns nestled within the often troubling ways these fears manifest themselves, a point I’ll return to.

My own essay in Telling It Slant, “Towards A Free Multiplicity of Form,” focused on the relation between literary technique, historical context, and social group dynamics among poets. I suggested that it was increasingly unlikely that poets would know only, or work only within, one literary tradition. Instead, many poets now work with an awareness of multiple and global poetic traditions. Insistence on the primacy of any single literary tradition seems more than ever like narrow-minded provincialism. I also raised questions about the relation between innovative literary technique and political/cultural radicalism; historically, those two don’t always match, although manifestos about radical literary techniques frequently align themselves with the desire for large scale social revolution. At the time of the essay’s writing in the mid-90s, there were at least five different, broadly successful schools of thought in U.S. poetry: traditional formalist poetry; MFA narrative and lyrical free verse poetry; a more overtly political poetry of identity raising issues of race, gender, and class; New American poetry; and the New American offshoot of language poetry and other radical aesthetic, often politicized approaches.

At the time, describing U.S. poetry production that way was already overly schematic (something I acknowledged) even as the world of poetry was further changing and splintering. But if there was in the mid-90s a minimum of five major schools of poetic thought in the U.S., the idea of a two party-system (for instance, Ron Silliman’s split between School of Quietude and New American poetries, which has more significance historically than currently), or the notion of a “third way” (which was, at best, in the late 90s no more than a sixth way) was even then an oversimplification. And if trying to isolate U.S. poetic production from the larger global contexts with which it interacts is closer to troubling nationalism than accurate description, the idea of there being only two or three approaches quickly becomes ludicrous.

Not unexpectedly, while the published reviews of Telling It Slant were on the whole positive, the work in that anthology, and of the writers associated with it, was often criticized for lacking direction, or some similar problem that can simply be put as lacking an obvious singularity of poetics. It was conveniently ignored that the introduction that Steven and I wrote highlighted that the anthology purposefully intended to refuse singular answers while pointing to shared questions and the essential importance of disagreement, or that many of the essays were critical of traditions that defined themselves as singular or pure. The anthology did not highlight a singular poetics and therefore, for some people, did not create a recognizable identity. Did not do, that is, what an anthology of contemporary writing is supposed to do.

That anthology did not appear in a vacuum, of course. Many writers shared some of my ideas about the values of disunity (see for instance Steve Evans’ introduction to the Writing From The New Coast anthology, although I disagreed with Evans’ assertion that the writing which similarly interested us was in any shared sense anti-identity). Many others felt that what was needed were new movements, new schools that could be identified as such. Attempts to forge new group identities emerged in the 90s around the magazine Apex of the M, with its editorial insistence that American experimental poetries had neglected spirituality, or in the now long forgotten New Synthesis proposed by John Noto and others. There were also pseudo-groups created to make fun of the group identity impulse (The Bay Area’s New Brutalism, which came several years later, seems primarily to have been a joke). Nowhere is the group impulse and anti-group impulse more connected than in the currently both popular and reviled Flarf group, in which a group in-joke about writing bad poetry turned into a real school of poetics with a now widely recognized name. Flarf is definitely a group but it also makes fun of the group tendency through such practices as ironic, consciously collapsing manifestos.

In circles which had closer connection than I did to the production mechanisms of the 1990s MFA industry, similar responses to poetry group formation were at work. One manifested itself in the anthologies Lyrical Postmodernisms and The Iowa Anthology of New Poetries edited by the late Reginald Shepherd and another, after lurking for years, emerged more clearly in the 2009 anthology The American Hybrid edited by Cole Swenson and David St. John. In these anthologies, a different notion of hybrid emerged. This notion of hybrid tries to find similarity across divergent practices. It breaks down the idea of singular schools by looking for things different poetic groups have in common. It tries to find middle ground. It imagines itself, perhaps, as a new center, one from which the most extreme and divisive elements of divergent practices have been tempered or simply removed. In this imagining, it asserts a power relationship between and over various practices, one in which this new center masters the flaws and excesses of divergent schools of thought, in theory taking the best of each and disregarding the rest.

In rejecting excess and extremes, this notion of hybrid recalls Hegel’s concept of synthesis, which at least the no longer discussed approach of John Noto was willing to name directly. Without dwelling too long on the details of Hegel’s dialectic, which many of us probably already know, a prior set of competing claims in any given discourse is resolved by a synthesis of those claims, one which forms a new central idea. Of course that synthesis, when successful, is according to Hegel again soon opposed, an issue that most attempts at synthesizing contemporary poetry fail to recognize.

The notion of hybrid as synthesis seeks to undermine older competing unities but does so in the name of creating a new, inclusive (but also exclusive), non-competing unity. It’s fascinating that a concept of hybridity, of disrupting the singular, should become a way of creating a new singular. As if one might use a new concept of transgression in order to tame old transgressions. As if the notion of hybridity can become a normative new that can keep monstrous hybrids from being born.

(Part three)

Friday, April 9: Panel on Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents

Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents
Arielle Greenberg, Craig Santos Perez, Michael Theune, Megan Volpert, Mark Wallace
Friday, April 9
9 - 10:15 a.m.
Colorado Convention Center, Street Level, Room 201
700 14th Street
Denver, CO

Recent years in poetry and poetics have seem numerous attempts to break out of, blur, or undermine distinctions between ideas of “mainstream” and “avant garde” poetics, a distinction that from the 1950s well into the 90s often dominated discussions about new directions in contemporary poetry. Yet after as much as fifteen years of attempts to move beyond this often unnecessarily limited distinction, it’s important also to move beyond assertions that the distinction has collapsed or is irrelevant. Instead, it now seems time to evaluate the specific attempts that writers and anthologists have made to create a hybrid poetics.

Are we really living in an era when the mainstream/avant garde distinction no longer has value and significant common ground has been found among poetic approaches long considered opposites? Or has this new era simply adjusted, replaced, or perhaps only re-named this older boundary? Do the terms “avant garde” and “mainstream” still have any contemporary value or have they become the marks of a bygone age? If, as Hegel suggested, any synthesis of earlier ideas is always followed by a new antithesis that challenges it, what future poetic ideas will challenge any common ground that actually has been achieved or has been claimed as achieved?

This panel will feature diverse answers to these and related questions that have intrigued writers, editors, and anthologists involved in the issue. Are boundary-crossing, hybrid aesthetics a moderate, moderating force that smooths distinctions in a homogenizing and perhaps bland way, or one that allows for radical conjunctions not dreamed of in earlier generations of the “poetry wars”? Have anthologies promoting the collapse of the mainstream/avant garde distinction created genuine bridges across aesthetics or simply new poetic coteries? Do we now have no camps, new camps, more camps than ever? Have a variety of aesthetics really been included in the hybrid approach or have they instead been offered only  token inclusion? Is the attempt to eliminate or downplay coterie inevitably a good idea, or is the often intense argument and difference between coteries a crucial source of vitality in new directions for poetry? What fringes and margins remain, if any?

To what extent has the debate been framed too often as simply a problem within American poetry and thus remains wedded to a nationalist vision? What role do poetries in different languages, multiple languages, and translation play in complicating the notions of what it means to cross boundaries, whether aesthetic, linguistic, or cultural? What roles do race, class, or gender issues play in this new environment? When if ever are there reasons to assert the importance of maintaining or recognizing boundaries? What aesthetic, cultural, or ideological boundaries remain most relevant?


For the opening portion of my paper, see my previous blog post.

Also, you don't want to miss the following two AWP offsite readings.

“Against Unity,” for the AWP Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents Panel

The paper I’ll be giving next week, at AWP, “Against Unity,” is too long for the time allotted, so I’ll be reading only (hopefully well-chosen) portions. I’m going to have to cut most of the introductory paragraphs, so I thought I’d post the opening of the paper here, since people at the conference will not be hearing most of this part. I may post the rest of the essay later, after I get back from Denver.

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“And the followers of Namirrha were the dead of strange kingdoms, the demons of sky and earth and the abyss, and the mad, impious, hybrid things that the sorcerer himself created from forbidden unions.”

Clark Ashton Smith, “The Dark Eidolon”


In one of his many overwrought, Modernist art deco (and finally morally conventional) horror fantasies, “The Dark Eidolon,” Clark Ashton Smith, a compatriot of H.P. Lovecraft, describes a notion of the hybrid helpful for thinking about the term in contemporary poetics. Smith’s definition provides a worthwhile vantage point for considering the shortcomings of hybrid literature as it has been defined in The American Hybrid anthology as well as in a related series of anthologies and terminologies, including Lyrical Postmodernisms, The Iowa Anthology of New Poetries and the notion of “third way poetics.”

Hybrid things, in Smith’s formulation, are the opposite of pious ones. The deformed births of taboo sexual contact, these hybrids were never supposed to exist, although the issue of who supposes so is crucial. The host of hybrids that should not be, but are, are linked not simply to what has existed and been forgotten but to what has been rightly forgotten by all right-thinking people.

Smith was primarily a playfully grim aesthete. Anyone who knows anything about Lovecraft however, who was perhaps the most important writer to publish in Weird Tales in the 20s and 30s, knows that for Lovecraft the essential impure hybrid was racial miscegenation. Yet Lovecraft’s virulent racism masks an even deeper fear of any sexual contact whatsoever. In Lovecraft’s fiction, almost all sexual unions seem forbidden. It’s not so much that some creatures shouldn’t touch but that touching itself is disgusting.

In this context, the hybrid rejects the belief that something is best when unified in and of itself, untouched (that is, uncorrupted) by things outside it. The value of the untouched thing remains an assumed good in many contemporary discourses, including political, cultural and literary ones. Any use of the word “object” for instance is usually marked by singularity: an object holds together, is distinct. Artistic objects have often been discussed in terms of their structural or thematic unity. The same is true for concepts of tradition, school, or movement: if those are distinguished by similarity rather than untouched purity, they are still marked by a unity that defines itself through what it rejects. A tradition whose values have changed beyond recognition is no longer a tradition. A school that has no unity, whether of theme or technique, is simply not a school. Denying that your particular group of similarly-inclined artists has anything in common is the same as denying that they even are a group.

In literature, the hybrid distorts the normal unifying marks of many literary concepts. Genre, technique, tradition, the identifying marks of a movement or school: in the hybrid, all these things are subject to mismatching and deformation. Yet in many recent poetry anthologies, a seeming belief in the hybrid’s impure multiplicity ends up being used as a way of reinforcing a pure singularity. Belief in unity seems to hang on tenaciously even when invoking a hybridity that on the surface seems meant to displace it. Like too many readings of Lovecraft, we can be too quick to celebrate that we are not racists while simultaneously remaining unaware of how many ways we continue to live with the fear of being touched.

Perhaps no concept better represents confusion between desire for the multiple and for the pure singular as the political notion of The People. Is it singular or plural? Of course the word means more than one person. Add a definite article though and the phrase, “The People” is also singular, one of those tricky group entity singular nouns. When “The people speak with one voice,” as during the French Revolution when the concept of The People was a highly efficient tool for killing people, are they many or are they one?

The literary question is, how has the tension between the singular and the plural, the pure and impure, people and The People, the solid object and the melted one, the traditional and anti-traditional, the (singular and multiple) school or group and the (also singular and sometimes multiple) individual writer manifested itself in recent poetics discussions about the value of hybridity? And how much of the problem depends on the definition of hybridity that one works with?

still thinking about AWP?

Rodney Koeneke is thinking again, and then some, about AWP over at his blog. Check it out, and add your own thoughts too, either there or here.

AWP is where it's at!

“Are you going to AWP?”

Rod Smith tells me that Kevin Thurston tells him that for writers, this question has become “the new hello.”

I’ve certainly been asked it somewhere between ten and twenty times in the last two weeks.

Actually I’ve never been to AWP, maybe partly because I’ve been to MLA a dozen times, peddling what scant resources I can offer in as many directions as I can and being so worn out afterwards that the idea of going to another professional conference is about as fascinating as dental surgery. Maybe someday I will go, but not this year.

Among those writers going to AWP, and among those not going, there turn out to be many concerns about AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the standards of the profession at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the quality of the official AWP panels.

Some writers are concerned about the ideology of the official AWP panels.

Some writers are concerned about how the problem of professionalism, as evidenced by AWP, changes what writing is, who writers are and what they do.

Some writers are concerned about the relationship between “experimental” or “avant garde” writers and AWP.

Some writers are concerned about who’s more “inside” and “outside” at AWP and they’re concerned about what “inside” and “outside” mean.

Some writers are concerned about who gets the opportunities that AWP has to offer and who does not get those opportunities.

Some writers are concerned about the relationship of the writers at AWP to the academic world.

Some writers are concerned about the relationship between AWP and larger U.S. institutional systems of power.

Some writers are concerned about whether enough of their friends will be there to make AWP fun.

Some writers are concerned about whether there will be enough interesting writers there to balance out the dull, pompous stuffed-shirts who are legendary at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the importance of being seen at AWP.

Some writers, if they are also publishers, are concerned about getting word out that their books are available at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about letting others know that they have a reading or panel event scheduled at AWP.

Some writers are concerned about letting others know that they have a reading or other event scheduled not at AWP but at the time and in the proximity of AWP.

Some writers are concerned about the distinction between “I’m going to AWP” and “I thought I’d go to AWP this year because it’s in New York.”

Some writers are concerned that other writers care about AWP too much.

Some writers are concerned that other writers don’t understand how much power AWP really has.

All of these, in greater or lesser degree perhaps, are legitimate concerns.

Are you concerned about AWP and what are those concerns? I mean, since so many writers are concerned about it anyway, we might as well discuss what we’re concerned about.