Some No Doubt Mainly Personal Refections on The Collected Poems of Charles Olson

 

I’ve read a fair amount of the work of Charles Olson: The Maximus Poems (twice), the Selected Writings, which at one point in time was many people’s introduction to Olson’s work, Call Me Ishmael, some essays in the Collected Prose, but although I’ve looked through The Collected Poems of Charles Olson many times and owned it for decades, I’ve never read it cover to cover like I’m doing now (Rod Smith gave me the idea). The editor George Butterick, claims that the book that contains all Olson’s poems except Maximus, although another, later Olson book, A Nation of Nothing But Poetry, published some poems that as it turned out didn't get into the Collected.

When I first was reading what has often been called The New American Poetry, around 1986-87, first introduced to me through issues of Boundary Two (which would soon introduce me to Language Poetry as well), a journal edited by my then professor William Spanos, it seemed exciting, and very contemporary, something I needed to know RIGHT NOW.

At some point though, the New American Poetry began to seem historical to me, no longer contemporary in that it no longer seemed to be speaking quite to the present and its problems but to the American past. When I started to feel that way, I’m not sure. Maybe after I moved to Southern California and my sense of the culture I was living in had to go through some significant changes.

Just so I’m clear, I LIKE poetry that has the feel of history in it, and that belongs significantly to the past. To say that something no longer feels contemporary to me is not to say that it sucks. But it is to say that it seems to be responding to a reality that feels at a remove from contemporary reality, and that its understanding of literature and of itself speaks to a framework of a world that is gone.

The mythologizing urge of Olson in these poems, not as consistently developed as in Maximus, is fascinating, the mythologizing and psychologizing of gender especially, all the man and woman overarching archetypes (and the sexual mythologizing that would have probably been risky then but maybe seems quaint now–I realize some people might critique this more harshly) that come across as shifting and unstable.

It’s that shifting, the instability, that mark the poems not only as clearly Modernist but also as, I might venture to say, Postmodernist. The poems offer big frameworks but also seem to pull them away. They speak both within and against a world in which grand claims, grand absolutes, were probably norms of U.S. culture that are long gone now, in whatever distorted fashion they might sometimes (even often, lately) cross the U.S. contemporary political and cultural landscape.

If these poems are taking me into the past though, I feel them simultaneously defining a world which I was coming out of (in two senses: I was from there but had to leave it behind). It helps me understand how I got here, how poetry got here, in all the variety of heres that present themselves so relentlessly every day. They’re a crucial part of the American literary landscape in which my thinking and writing developed, as they were also a profound force for his own generation and the generations that more immediately followed him.

The Romantic Dogs by Roberto Bolaño

 

A lot of people find Roberto Bolaño’s poetry less interesting than his fiction. I can see why, in some ways. The poems lack the same scope, and they feel more youthful and more romantic, even as their political concerns seem in line with what he would do later in his fiction. On the other hand, the youthfulness and smaller scope is significantly the result of the poems being the work of a young writer on his way to greater heights. I found the poems in The Romantic Dogs enjoyable and insightful on their own terms, but they also seem like short blueprints for the later, more in-depth writing that he would do (at many thousands of pages of length overall, as his readers know). In some ways, The Romantic Dogs shows a more personal, approachable writer than Bolaño’s novels do, with more of his own personality and desires on display. In the poems I could see more of what was at stake for him personally, what concerns he was wrestling with, than I sometimes can in the novels. The poems show his struggles to break out of the restrained and limiting environments in which he finds himself. The novels are going to be that breakout, an expansive portrayal of many social dynamics that take him far beyond any one individual’s concerns. In the poems though, I could see him working his way towards what would happen next. They feel like they provide a very intimate look at what it might take to find one’s way towards literary greatness.

Nice, the Collected Poems of David Melnick

 

I’m not really writing a review of Nice, the collected poems of David Melnick, because the intro to the book contains all the information anybody would need, including what you need to know about the poems.

The book is a fascinating and tightly constructed package, containing, it seems, all of Melnick’s poetry that’s known to still exist along with a careful scholarly framing that’s full of insight and reminiscence. There’s something satisfying about the completeness of what’s offered between these pages, even as there are ongoing absences of information about some parts of his life and about some of the writing that he must have destroyed. David Melnick didn’t keep a lot of his own poetry, but all of it that got out into the world is essential reading.

What comes across powerfully to me is a sense of astonishment at the consistent distinctiveness of Melnick’s poetry, a play of language and sound that feels sparkling with energy and layered with implication. It’s writing on the absolute fringe of possibility.

Some Thoughts on the Essays of William Bronk

 

I’ve loved for many years the poems in William Bronk’s Collected Poems from North Point Press, and I’ve long wanted to read the companion Vectors and Smoothable Curves: Collected Essays (1983). I somehow never found the right time although I’ve carried the book around for about three decades. The prose is beautiful and precise and also requires a lot of close attention, something I rarely have time for but finally found (let’s say “made”) over this last summer.

It’s really as remarkable a book as I hoped it would be, made up of three sets of essays. And worth the wait. These are essays with a long shelf life of relevance.

The book’s first set of essays, from the 1970s and collected under the subtitle “The New World,” reflects on Bronk’s travels to Palenque, Trikal, Machu Picchu, and Copan, and discusses Mayan and Incan culture and artifacts. Different cultures have created different concepts of time and space, Bronk shows in lucid detail, and those concepts change or vanish over time and can be hard to recover.

And it’s crucial to understand that they are in fact concepts, not realities. Bronk is a cultural deconstructionist (is there a better way to put that?). For humans, the so-called “realities” of the world are themselves only graspable through the concepts we have available to us, and we understand ourselves and the world from inside those concepts, but those concepts never represent any kind of metaphysical truth. They are just approaches we develop for experiencing a world that cannot be described except through cultural fictions, all of which are limited and subject to change. Bronk never says that the world doesn’t exist, since it clearly does, although in what way it does is another issue. However, all human descriptions of it are fictions, even when we tell ourselves that they are grounded in physical conditions. And our fictions not only can change, they do change.

The second set of essays in the book, “A Partial Glossary,” consists of two short pieces discussing costume and desire. And again, Bronk shows how human use and descriptions of things and ideas that we tell ourselves are fundamental reveal changing human cultural values, not ideas grounded in transcendent truth.

Whereas some writers would use the limitations Bronk recognizes as focal points for cultural comparison, or ideas about cultural relativity or intersectionality, and Bronk nods in the direction of such approaches, Bronk instead focuses mainly on the limitations of all human knowledge whatever its cultural context. We never know anything from outside our fictions of it. The world and experience of it remain unknowable. That fact brings a kind of intellectual vertigo (even reading this book can bring that on) yet also an awe that has nearly spiritual dimensions. Existence is a mystery, and while humans often hide from acknowledging that mystery, again and again we find ourselves facing it. And ultimately, disappearing into it.

The final set of essays, "The Brother in Elysium: Ideas of Friendship and Society in the United States," is a collection of essays originally written in 1946, about 30 years earlier than the other essays in the book. This final section contains several essays each on Thoreau, Whitman, and Melville, all of which are fascinating, and all which show Bronk’s own developing philosophical perspective.

The essays on Thoreau made Thoreau seem, in some ways, definitively pre-modern, in that he never seems to have been quite able to imagine that the structure of a society might shape the actions of individuals irrevocably. For Thoreau, individual thought and action, whether his or that of others, were the essential components of human experience. The realities of huge interconnected human societies were ones he could see only from the perspective of an individuality that had to struggle for its independence but could do it, even if most people didn’t find it in their interest to try.

Whitman’s engagement with the concept of the oceanic, on the other hand, as Bronk explores it, points to a perspective more like that of Bronk’s of the 1970s. In the ocean, Whitman finds himself in touch with all that is larger than the human and the social, all that is unknowable and mysterious, something that one can encounter but never really understand. It’s possible, Whitman imagines, to meld with that mystery, but it’s not possible to understand it.

Melville’s paradoxes around the subject of justice form a fitting conclusion to the book. Melville understood that the law and any social contract, and human use of those things, are filled with corruption, oppression, and delusion. On the other hand, especially as he got older, Melville did not seem to have believed that there was any absolute system of truth against which those human failings could be accurately measured. Our cultural concepts of morality are all we have. Bronk shows Melville, in his short novel Billy Budd, acknowledging both that justice is often a fantasy and that humans still need a concept of it to live by, even when that concept fails them. And crucially for Melville, they need it even when they know it’s failing them.

Sentence after careful sentence, the essays in Vectors and Smoothable Curves show Bronk’s development as an essayist in something close to reverse order, with the most recently written essays coming first in the book. After all, linearity and chronology are themselves no more than fictions. Bronk shows that meaning resides in the individual, or in the culture, or both, but that ultimately it’s meaning itself that is the limitation that we have to live with and fail with, since mostly all we know are the ramifications of that limitation.

Still, awe, mystery, and the unknowable are what we also have to live with, no matter how hard we might try to avoid their presence in our lives or call on them only when we think we need them. If Bronk is not really a religious or even a spiritual writer, that’s only because the power (or the presence, or the absence, choose whatever word best fails you) he is trying to acknowledge is much larger than anything we can possibly say about it.

Brief Takes: The Allen Fisher Companion

The Allen Fisher Companion

Edited by Robert Hampson and cris cheek
Shersman Books 2020
301 pgs.

It was fun spending a couple of weeks in the company of these essays. The work of British poet and artist Allen Fisher has often been difficult to get in the U.S.. Because of that and other (insert self-chastisement?) reasons, his work until now had been mostly rumor to me beyond a few pieces here and there.

The essays, by various writers, reveal Fisher as a link, not missing but necessary, across poetic and artistic approaches, including the mythologizing grandeur of Charles Olson, international experimental art practices like Fluxus and related endeavors from the late 60s and 70s and forward, and a documentary poetics of scientific and historical materialism that has become prominent again recently among poets in the last decade and more. Fisher’s use of science and history feel especially illuminated in the writing collected here. Different essays also point out that Fisher’s work has been devoted not just to making links between widely varying practices but to celebrating fissures and gaps and the possibilities of the unknown. If these essays are any evidence, Fisher doesn’t so much bring it all together as show how that can’t be done while at the same time exploring just how much there is to know.

Edited by Robert Hampson and cris cheek, the gathered essays and discussions in The Allen Fisher Companion explore various facets of Fisher’s writing, performance work, and art, including his grounding in philosophy and literary theory. All of the essays are informative even if some of them feel a little insular and overwritten. Insularity, of course, is one risk that a highly intellectual poetry like Fisher’s is always in danger of running. I appreciated the thoroughness of the analysis in this collection and enjoyed the occasional breaks into a more relaxed and poetic prose like that of cheek and Pierre Joris, who has two essays in the collection. The social and intellectual milieu of Fisher’s friends and poetic companions was especially intriguing and useful to learn about. Concluding the book are two long discussions with Fisher and other poets, including a series of letters between Fisher and British-Canadian poet Karen Mac Cormack.

I would say that I doubt this book will broaden the audience for Fisher’s work except that it had exactly that effect in my case. The work collected here establishes Fisher and his productions in various mediums as a central part of British poetry and art from the late 60s until now. Fisher comes across as someone who is always pushing, reaching, experimenting. At the heart of his work and this collection is the insistence that poetry can be a rigorously intellectual endeavor that combines multiple discourses and approaches in a way few other fields of contemporary writing do.

Processes of Attention (1996)

I'm trying to recover a few old essays from my files, and figure a good way to keep a copy, of the ones I want to keep and want other people to read, will be to put some of them on my blog.

Processes of Attention (from 1995 or 1996) originally appeared in Chain 3.

Processes of Attention

Attention is what I can never manage. Despite the bureaucracies of my intentions, there is always too much to register. The relentlessness of what there might be to know, to feel, to see, to understand, lets me break myself beyond any principle of ordering, so that what of me is not bureaucracy comes to recognize its own overflow, its opening. Attention comes to be, in the very marks it makes on my body, the sign of living more intensely than anything that could be brought to control or coherence. There--something has happened, again, and the mere fact that I could not possibly know all that it might be is what tells me I'm real.

 

 Inside those public, narrowly ideological structures that may crush but do not contain the unknowability of living, attention has been reduced to little more than the truth that almost everything has been ignored. The language of mass media, of institutions, of political parties, of whatever refuses to think about all it doesn’t know, suggests by its emptiness that almost nothing is being attended, that public structures have tried to make the world their own mirror and have been able to make of it nothing worth seeing. Such public structures see only in terms of their own control, which can kill, administer, and even develop, but can never become open to experience and the world, because such becoming is what they had to forget in order to institute control. 

 

Perhaps it would be useful to think of language as that which has been deemed worthy of receiving attention. Language, that is, is a way of embodying those perceptions considered significant. I use the passive "has been deemed" and "considered" because it's not clear at this time which individuals or contexts, if any, are aware that attention must be understood as active before its ultimate impossibility can help return consciousness not to control but to life. I would like to say that poetry is the most likely place for writing to make attention active. But at best I can say that poetry might be used by writers to make attention active again, to make it not simply the passive acceptance of coercive public definitions of significance. 

 

Each piece of language reveals what it has given attention to, and what has escaped its notice. In general, what escapes a piece of language reveals the inevitable overflow of life. But in the case of a particular piece of writing, the writing as a process of attention can be understood by looking at what the writing has given attention to, and what it has ignored. 

 

Attention is not simply an issue of subject matter. The form of a piece of writing gives a particular act of attention its structure. What has been perceived is always a result of the form of the words--how perception emerges and passes in the language is as important as what perceptions emerge and pass. Does a form hierarchize attention, defining some things as structurally more central than others? Does it treat all perceptions as structurally of equal centrality? Does the form let attention flow evenly from perception to perception, does it let attention develop or scatter or crumble? The tension of attention is not a struggle of form vs. formlessness but a complex response by a variety of possible forms which in specifically differing ways always give attention and fail to give attention to the possibilities of experience.

 
I'm tempted to characterize my own attention, as a human being, as obsessive. I return endlessly to the same scenes. Taken to its absolute limit, such obsession would be insane--who wrote that the mark of the madman is to repeat himself forever? My writing has often been an attempt to disrupt my own tendencies of attention--the language on the page as block against, and dispersal of, the obsessive returns of the language of my mind. My books Complications From Standing In A Circle and Every Day Is Most Of My Time were both attempts to create an active attention through techniques that disrupt what I am otherwise prone to think. In the first I use words extrinsic to my own vocabulary, thus forcing me to use words not already congealed in my consciousness. In the second I used a formal structure demanding frequent shifts in the focus of attention and a conscious undermining of conventional distinctions of attention, such as that between the supposedly trivial and the supposedly serious. 

The processes of attention I am discussing here, and possible disruptions of them, are in no way merely private, personal, individual, or narcissistic activities, although they have elements of all those possibilities. Attention, though primarily located in an individual's mind, is inevitably an external, material, social process. What could my attention possibly attend but impressions of all that exists beyond me? Attention is exactly the language of contact. Which is to say that by definition, attention, when active, opens the boundaries of who I am.

On Blogging and Much Else: Women Who Write Poetry Criticism (Roundtable)

If you’re a student or former student of mine who has asked me about blogging, this discussion, featuring some of my favorite writers currently working in North America, is essential reading. It’s also essential reading for anyone interested in blogging, writing about literature, or gender. And people who think they’re not interested in any of those things would benefit from reading it too.

 http://blog.bestamericanpoetry.com/the_best_american_poetry/2012/08/women-who-write-poetry-criticism-roundtable.html

“Landscape as Activity in The End of America Poems”

 

Here, in several parts, is the talk I gave at the And Now Literary Festival at the University of California, San Diego, on October 13, 2011.

-----------------------------------------------

“Landscape as Activity in The End of America Poems”

Part One

 The conventional narrative assumption about landscape: events happen on it. Landscape, surroundings, environment, milieu–interactions and differences between these terms included—become both background to the foregrounded action and the frame inside which differences between characters play out. Fiction, and poetry with elements of narrative, differ little here: Description of landscape comes first, or at least early, and comes up again, at well-timed intervals, to fill in around the action. Description doesn’t merely set the stage on which the action will occur. Descriptive language is the stage itself.

Given the human ability to assign meaning (or, say, the human determination to impose meaning on whatever exists, human-created or otherwise), frequently it turns out that descriptions of landscape are not only frames on which meaning takes place, but meaningful frames that determine the significance of whatever happens on them.

In much of western culture’s pastoral literature, description creates a rural, natural, supposedly timeless source of virtue in which humans find solace and steadfast grounding among the flux and chaos of human societies with all their circulations and interactions and cage-like enclosures, a flux and chaos which becomes the essence of the urban landscape (the urban stage). While characters are supposedly the crux of the action, in fact in the pastoral and its permutations, the primary struggle often occurs between the rural and urban stages themselves, with the characters becoming examples (if sometimes nuanced ones) of those stages.

Or consider the post-apocalyptic landscape: that stage on which human life has come close to destroying itself because of its power, corruption and contradictions, a stage on which all social contracts have been demolished and people are attempting to re-create them or exploit their absence. Oddly enough, the post-apocalyptic is still pastoral in its implications, though post-social rather than pre-, with the natural world polluted by layers of human-created (urban-created) debris.

While pastoral narratives might seem to imply that landscape shapes character, it is not landscape in these narratives so much as human assumptions about the meaning of landscape that shapes character. The idea that nature brings virtue, or that urban life breeds corruption and immorality, doesn’t question and explore the effect that landscape might have on character, but assigns that value in advance, limiting itself to playing out the interaction of pre-determined values, though admittedly often with intriguing turns.

Whatever the power of landscape in pastoral narratives and the meaning assigned to it, the action focuses primarily on the characters and their interactions with each other. The landscape, often inert and passive, occasionally disrupting or impeding through thunderstorms or nuclear fallout, remains background to what the key characters do and realize about what they do.

I don’t feel the need to rehearse here a long history of cultural and literary theory, Marxist and much else, that questions the centrality of character and subjectivity over environment and history, and shows how history and cultural and the physical opportunities available in specific geographical environments (the focus for instance of Jared Diamond’s Guns, Germs, and Steel) shape people’s behavior, possibilities, thoughts and feelings. Instead I want to ask, what might a work of literature look like if, instead of keeping landscape as background, or pre-determining its value, one thought of both landscape and character/subjectivity as questions and mutual interactions, person-in-flux and landscape-in-flux, that dynamically dissolve, or reassert, or otherwise unsettle distinctions so that there is no stable ground or clear center of action, but only multiple shifting points of contact?

End of Part One

Postmoot: Barrett Watten Reports

(Pictured above: Barrett Watten presenting selections from The Grand Piano at Postmoot, and K. Lorraine Graham's Postmoot performance of "White Girl.")


Barrett Watten's excellent report on what happened at the Postmoot Literary Convocation is well worth reading, so I hope you'll check it out.

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry

 

Here’s an excerpt from my essay in this recently released collection:

What to make of the fact that some crucial early practitioners of prose poems, Baudelaire and Rimbaud especially, are obsessed with death and decay? The link isn’t accidental. Of course the connection between a subject matter that defies bourgeois norms and a form that challenges conventional literary distinctions has often been discussed relative to the prose poem’s creation. It comes into being at the axis of writing about things powerful people don’t want to hear in a way they don’t want to understand. But its social and political condition also connects to my sense of the crampedness of the prose poem and its proximity to originary divisions. If for human beings the most crucial division may be between life and death, and the original genre division is that between poetry and prose, then matters of life and death must lie very near to what makes the prose poem. Anyone taking up the violation of the prose poem comes quickly upon the materiality of the body and peoples’ ability to destroy each other and everything else. The prose poem sits close to the rot.

The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry contains short essays about prose poetry by 34 writers along with some examples of prose poetry by those same writers. It’s quite a different group of writers than I usually find my work in the company of, and I’m glad to be featured in it.

For more details and more excerpts, check out their webpage on the Rose Metal Press website.

Although unfortunately I won’t be able to be there, upcoming launch parties for the book are taking place in Kalamazoo, Portland, and Chicago:

Tuesday, May 4
Nancy Eimers, Gary L. McDowell, Kathleen McGookey, William Olsen, and F. Daniel Rzicznek reading from The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry at Kalamazoo Books, Kalamazoo, MI, 6:30 pm.
Free and open to the public.
Kalamazoo Books
2413 Parkview
Kalamazoo, MI 49008

Sunday, May 23
Andrew Michael Roberts and Carol Guess reading from The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry at Powell’s Books, Portland, OR, at 4:00 pm
Free and open to the public.
Powell’s Books
3723 SE Hawthorne Blvd.
Portland, OR 97214

Thursday, May 27
Launch Party for The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry at The Book Cellar, Chicago, IL, at 7:00 pm
Featuring Joe Bonomo, John Bradley, Maurice Kilwein Guevara, David Lazar, Gary L. McDowell, Amy Newman, F. Daniel Rzicznek, Michael Robins, and Kathleen Rooney
Free and open to the public.
The Book Cellar
4736 North Lincoln Ave.
Chicago, IL 60625


The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry:
Contemporary Poets in Discussion and Practice
Edited by Gary L. McDowell and F. Daniel Rzicznek
April 2010
ISBN 978-0-9789848-8-5
224 pages
$16.95

FEATURING ESSAYS FROM:
Nin Andrews • Joe Bonomo • John Bradley • Brigitte Byrd • Maxine Chernoff • David Daniel • Denise Duhamel • Nancy Eimers • Beckian Fritz Goldberg • Ray Gonzalez • Arielle Greenberg • Kevin Griffith • Carol Guess • Maurice Kilwein Guevara • James Harms • Bob Hicok • Tung-Hui Hu • Christopher Kennedy • David Keplinger • Gerry LaFemina • David Lazar • Alexander Long • Kathleen McGookey • Robert Miltner • Amy Newman • William Olsen • Andrew Michael Roberts • Michael Robins • Mary Ann Samyn • Maureen Seaton • David Shumate • Jeffrey Skinner • Mark Wallace • Gary Young

A wide-ranging gathering of 34 brief essays and 66 prose poems by distinguished practitioners, The Rose Metal Press Field Guide to Prose Poetry is as personal and provocative, accessible and idiosyncratic as the genre itself. The essayists discuss their craft, influences, and experiences, all while pondering larger questions: What is prose poetry? Why write prose poems? With its pioneering introduction, this collection provides a history of the development of the prose poem up to its current widespread appeal. Half critical study and half anthology, The Field Guide to Prose Poetry is a not-to-be-missed companion for readers and writers of poetry, as well as students and teachers of creative writing.

See you this weekend at Postmoot?

Here's the schedule.

And if you want to see a set of photos from the first Postmoot, in 2006, go here.

The photo above is from my performance of "The Poetry of the Noble Voice" from the first Postmoot.

James Sherry on Environmental Poetics (interview by Stan Apps)

I was intrigued to read this interview, up at Jacket, of James Sherry by Stan Apps on the subject of Environmental Poetics.

Some brief thoughts on a few complexities it raises:

I was pleased to see Sherry try to avoid the politics of guilt-tripping and blame laying. Plenty of blame lies all over the place, as he points out, but guilt is rarely effective as a large scale political tool because of its tendency to lead to resentment and (often passive) resistance. The issue according to Sherry is not to tell people how bad they are and make them say “Sorry” but to make them clearer about ways in which environmental consciousness is in their interest (although only by shifting the nature of what is meant by self-interest).

It’s fascinating to see the way that terms that to some extent I associate with corporate capitalism, like “risk management,” come into play in the interview. Admittedly, poetry and environmentalism are more closely related to businesses than many people are comfortable acknowledging, and certainly part of Sherry’s point is that conventional leftist oppositional language isn’t sufficient for the task at hand. But will such terminology really help more conventional environmental practices become more effective or might it not instead co-opt and ultimately misuse them? Still, Sherry definitely acknowledges this risk. He’s careful to insist that predicting what will happen is difficult.

Sherry also makes the point that significant change in environmental practices on a large social is unlikely to come until people really find themselves in disastrous circumstances. While suggesting the importance of an environmental poetics, he’s also a bit of a fatalist (or at least skeptical) regarding its ultimate use value. But like him, I like the idea of making the attempt anyway, despite necessary skepticism.

How Sherry connects environmental issues with aesthetic practice seems to me more tenuous. He tends to assert a fairly well-known lineage of consciously avant garde writers as figures helping lead towards his ideas, but I’m not sure how the details regarding these writers’ work really supports his position.

I note for instance that the contemporary writers he mentions are heavily weighted towards contemporary poetry in New York City, with an emphasis on Roof Books authors. That doesn’t surprise me, given where he lives and his role as the publisher of Roof, but it doesn’t seem to me necessarily the best way to develop a list of writers whose aesthetic practices support the kind of philosophy of environmental poetics that Sherry is urging.

Where for instance are the west coast poets, in Canada or the U.S., who have specifically engaged with Pacific Rim cultural development issues? What about poetic practices beyond the U.S.? In the case of the poets he mentions, Sherry seems to be falling back more on the writers he specifically promotes and lives near than he is making an entirely convincing case for where his kind of environmental poetics might be found among writers. That’s interesting given his remarks about how easy it is to fall back into individualized self-promotion even when one is highly aware the problems of such self-promotion (and I have no intention of playing holier than thou relative to this).

With all due respect to my flarf and conceptual writing friends, I didn’t see how his repeated mentioning of them was really tying into his argument. He is making the case that it’s not subject matter, but structural developments in poetics, that most closely tie into his concept of environmental poetics. Citing Kenny Goldsmith as an instance environmental poetics struck me as off, especially given some of Goldsmith’s takes regarding poetry and politics, and I didn’t see the specifics to back it up: does it come from the way Goldsmith recycles text, rather than attempting to create new works of individual human genius to clog up our air? That seems a stretch to me, a metaphorical resonance perhaps but not much more. And while I think I can see a connection between environmentalism and some of Nada Gordon’s work, I’m not sure exactly how to tie most of the other writers of flarf into this situation, except again along the rather tenuous line of re-use of materials.

Minor note: I wonder if my friend Cathy Eisenhower will like her appearance in this essay as an example of a new generation of language poet.

Sherry himself says that he doesn’t wish to unsettle too far the relevance of earlier generations of writers relevant to “avant garde” practice, a term he uses only once though he insists on its significance, which I actually appreciate while seeing the pitfalls. He wants to rock the poetic boat but not to rock it too much, and he’s probably overly cautious here and ends up dishing out a few extra kudos to the usual suspects.

Lastly, I wondered about the degree to which Sherry insists on the rejection of most emotional, affective practices re the environment, that is, those practices that draw on emotional human responses. Sherry definitely does not favor the “we need to feel sad/mad about the dying animals” approach; he just isn’t sentimental about penguins. He notes, rightly I think, that putting individual human emotion and experience at the center of all things is part of why human beings find themselves in such a physically endangered world.

Yet the degree to which Sherry resists any return to a language involving emotion (so much so that he deconstructs Apps’ questions when Apps tries to draw him out on this and related subjects like that of individual responses) strikes me as overkill, simply too much careful theoretical and managerial distance. His attempt to refuse the value of emotion is something of a return to the blame-laying Sherry wishes to avoid, as if emotion’s frequent refusal to understand structural conditions is in fact still too much to blame for environmental problems. I’d suggest that we need a rethinking of how to consider emotion and structural understanding in relation to each other without rejecting emotional response so thoroughly.

These are very off-the-cuff (and quickly typed) thoughts, not all final versions of what I ultimately might think about all this.

“Most of the great poets today are women.”

In response to a Harriet post by Craig Santos Perez, who is responding to a blog post by Jessica Smth (both pictured above).

Dear Jessica and Craig:

Thanks for raising this issue, one that comes up every so often in poetics.

I always find myself fascinated when I hear the claim “Most of the great (or best) poets writing today are women,” but also startled.

The first thing that startles me about such a claim is its use of quantifying logic. In order to know what most of any group is doing, one needs to have looked at all (or at least a sample large enough to imply all) of the group. The statement contains the implication that the person making it has read so much of the world’s poetry that the total quantity of good poets is apparent. Yet unless the person is truly encyclopedic, it’s likely that the person means “most of the poets among the group of poets I read,” a smaller group from which to take the sample, at which point it’s important to wonder how the sample was selected.

The second thing that startles me is the claim to objectivity. “Great” and “best” means not simply the poets I like, or the poets whose ideology I prefer, but the poets that are superior according to objective standards that should be clear to all who have good sense and reason.

Surely many people know by now that terms like “great” and “best” often come from personal standards, or cultural ones, or ideological ones, and that rarely if ever is there a ground of objective superiority against which people can make no reasonable objections.

I myself then see the claim “Most of the great/best poets writing today are women” as an ideological claim rather than objective or quantifiable. I’m not saying that one could counter the point with some more objective claim, but rather that we’re talking about an ideological question here rather than a factual one.

I don’t say all this to suggest that either of you do not mean the point sincerely. I’m not doubting for a second that you believe what you believe. But it’s out of the sincerity of competing claims that many ideological struggles (especially those regarding art) develop.

Whenever claims regarding gender and “best” poets come up, I look for how they function relative to ideology and power, that is, how they become power moves in a field of power, even when meant sincerely. And here’s a basic ideological map of how I often see that working.

1) A man says, “The best poets writing today are men.” Or, more likely, a man says, “The claim that the best poets writing today are women is ridiculous.” Here, a man defends the value of the writing of men or attacks the value of the writing of women. A significant number of male writers will side with him, and these men will often gather ranks against what they perceive as an unfair assault. Not all male writers however will side with them, and the man who makes such a statement is likely to find very few women writer allies, although he may discover some among those women writers who dislike feminism.

2) A man says, “The best poets writing today are women.” This man is ideologically siding with women, and is likely to receive positive feedback from women writers. He will seem to be allying himself with an understanding of women’s social conditions and an awareness of male oppression. But his statement also has an effect on men. It puts him in a position of critical superiority to the writing of other men; he has seen through its weakness and has in effect become master of it. He thus manages to present himself simultaneously as a successful male judge of men and a supporter of women. This will anger the men fond of statement 1, but will make him allies not only among women writers but also among male writers who believe that there are advantages to being aligned with a similar position.

3) A woman says, “The best poets writing today are women.” She will be seen as supporting and understanding the cause of women, and will have many women writers as allies as a result. Some women writers (I can’t begin to say how many) may be skeptical of the quantifying and objective nature of the claim and may think it’s not be the best way to approach the problem, while simultaneously appreciating and sympathizing with the goals of the claim, that is, with the attempt to create more and better attention to women’s writing. And obviously, men of group one will refuse the claim, while men of group two will side with it.

4) A woman says, “The best poets writing today are men.” I imagine women writers believing such a claim would be very few, if they exist at all. Such a claim certainly can’t help women’s writing in any broad way. Even women who are anti-feminists may not be likely to say such a thing. It would be seen favorably by some men, and so a woman making such a claim may receive more positive attention from those men, but those men would be the ones (in various degrees) least likely to be understanding or supportive of women’s writing (that is, men of group 1). And obviously such a claim would be highly unpopular with other women writers, although I can’t rule out that one or two might grant the woman making such a claim a degree of courage or iconoclasm.

I’m sure it will be taken by some that in saying all this, I am slyly siding with group 1, but I myself don’t see it that way. For me, the flaws regarding quantifiability and supposed objectivity mean that I believe that there are other more preferable ways of approaching gender problems than through assertions of whose writing is “great” or “best.”

It’s arguable I suppose that given the situation of the world, women writers and writers from cultural contexts who have historically had less power to control others through claims about an objective and quantifiable “best” need to seize such terminology for themselves, to take the rights that come from quantifying and objectifying and make them their own. That reminds me though of the infamous Ron Silliman claim, so given who I am, I think such a claim should come from others. But I think also that self-awareness about what’s involved in that power move would be crucial.

Finally, the other argument you make, that it’s “experience” that leads to the best writing, seems uncertain to me. The history of writing contains writers with all sorts of relationships to their own experiences. I think it’s likely that readers will often (though not always) gravitate towards writers whose understanding of experience they share and whose relation to the world feels more powerful and convincing to them, although I have to admit that I’m one of those readers who often likes reading work from or about people very much not like me. I fully believe in and would support your ideological position regarding what writers you like and why. I just wonder whether using terms like “great” or “best” actually causes more difficulties than it solves.

Sorry for the longwindedness. I had to say the whole thing or not at all.

Mark