Kent Johnson in the Avant Garde Debate
August 2, 2004
I avoided reading the Boston Comment Avant Garde Debate for various and unimportant reasons. The debate does pose some interesting things to think about when I am in the right mood. I wanted to highlight a quote by Kent Johnson which illustrates my my own feelings at the moment:
One need not be trained in the latest versions of reader response theory to believe that—or to believe that beauty, that weird hermit crab, takes up house in the most disparate of dwellings. The limpid, didactic odes of Horace are beautiful, but so are the dark, gnomic poems of Celan. It’s satisfyingly mysterious that they both are, I think.
My entanglements with poetics always follow a predictable pattern that is probably intimately tied to some kind of psychological cycle of depression and elation:
- I become enthusiastic about poetry and writing following a fallow time of disinterest
- I engage in as much reading and discussion as possible with a wide range of fellow poetry people
- I become deeply frustrated at the schisms and divisions, where what I see as my openness is inevitably cast as a lack of critical rigor or laziness or being in a rut of “comfortability” or all three
- I feel shamed that I am still learning, making me resent even the new poets and poetries I am coming to like through these discussions
- I start to feel a deep, internal yearning for a positive poetics in which plurality is encouraged, one that is not impoverished by a strict attention to just one aspect (the new, lyricism, narrative, image, whatever) of a poem, not solely political, that our own inexplicable love counts for something (this is where I am now)
- I become disheartened, am usually subtly insulted as weak (usually there will be some invocation of how soft my “can’t we all just get along” naivete is), and become turned off of the whole enterprise
I’d like to avoid the last step and just transition smoothly, armed with more knowledge and experience, back to the first, retaining my conviction that in diversity lies strength; that our different tastes in poetry (it is so called because it is not that different from our physical taste, is it, springing from a wealth of sources and influences too vast and complicated to be contained? And who would want to?) with their odd personalized contortions and overlap are good things.
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Poetry and Poetics
All me-stream all the time.
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August 2nd, 2004 at 1:10 pm
In my experience, politics and poetry don’t mix well. Poets inevitably have politics, and write about it, or have their writing informed by it, and that ^does^ work fine. But an enduring poetic which has a political origin? I don’t know one. And it seems to me, and no doubt this betrays myself as positioned in a certain conservative place in the spectral spectrum which American poetry is, that part of the anger/defining you find dismaying is the result of a fairly successful co-option of what was once non-mainstream poetics by the mainstream, with a minimal adoption of the non-mainstream politics. Whether it can last, as Steve Evans says in that essay on ‘Fence Enterprises,’ I don’t know, but I would put my money on yes, that the great beast will move on yet.
That said, there are probably far less ‘haters’ out there than you’d think, and far more people trying their best to understand and come to terms with it all.
I have loads of sympathy for your desire to escape the cycle. As if you needed my advice, I’ll give it: you can’t expect people to be other than they are. Most people involved in this aren’t in it for the money, and are probably good-intentioned, at least as far as their own poetry goes. I’d try to see where they are coming from. Sometimes I’m surprised at the sense I find there, a description of some other part of the giant elephant we all fumble at (& who has their hand on it’s privates???).
But that’s just me.
August 3rd, 2004 at 2:43 am
Ya know, there’s a lot of people out there who want to say what poetry is and what poetry isn’t, and I’m guilty of it myself. Thing I ask of someone who goes in that direction, is, what is your motivation for wanting to define it? Because I don’t think I’m loose on the rigorous front (have a friend here who is into ‘Free-style Jah positive poetry’ that to me just gets flat and quickly…and when asked if I wanted to exchange work with him, I warned him beforehand that my approach to the question is very different from his)–but I don’t think tying the whole thing up too tightly is any kind of answer. More than anything, poetry is meant to surprise–and if you come up with a formula for that, it just stops doing what it’s meant to do.
There’s not a trick out there that hasn’t been tried–and there’s not one that hasn’t worked (even ’serious’ limericks are possible…), nor is there one that hasn’t failed horribly. There’s something to a really good poem that defies the rules of good poetry…but see, I think a lot of the debate between different approaches is entirely after the fact–it’s all an attempt to measure the worth of one set of words over another, and has nothing to do with the creation of an effective set of words. Thus, critical. Which is in no way undervalued by me (hell, I suspect I’m better at ripping poems apart than I am at putting them together…though I try both) –but I think sometimes there are less ‘pure’ motives behind criticism–political agendas, straight up economic considerations (how can I spin this to keep my job), etc. Those same motivations are behind the making of a poem, as well (I don’t think a non-political poem is even possible…but that’s deep down dirty language work that says –language–is intrinsically political, and poetry is a public pronouncement in language that differs from the everyday language we use in that it calls attention to itself, constantly…) but see, that’s a key area where poetry and criticism differ. Part of the poet’s work is to express a particular subjectivity…the critic is supposed to be aiming for a certain objectivity–or, at the very least, any critic who is trying to say that –this– is poetry but –that– is not has to make recourse to some objective valuing system by which to make that judgment. The poet doesn’t have to do this…though in the interests of communication, it sometimes (often) helps.
There are some ‘objective’ markers to a well-written poem, and these are what critics and creative writing teachers tend to focus on: they have to do with tradition as it is expressed through the language: how well are the elements of craft tended to? how thoroughly does the poem engage the history of ideas? or–conversely, how are they made effective by working against these things? But that question of effectiveness is important, because it suggests that there is a process of communication going on, and that the real worth of a poem comes down to how well it gets its message (whatever that message may be) across. I know there’s lang-po’s about, and I don’t denegrate that school of thought, but I do think it particularly theory-driven. That’s not wrong, it’s just not how I think, and that makes the question of one’s communicating with me a bit tricky. So…I think…the worth of a poem has something to do with where the reader is coming from as well.
How elitist do you think it needs to be? Me, I don’t particularly want to read another rhyming poem about someone’s dog dying, but I’m thrilled pink that the person who wrote it would go ahead and try out that mode of expression. And for my own creative process, the theory may feed the mind, and provide me with new ground to explore, but the more rarified it gets, the more unworthy I feel to put pen to paper…and that’s the real work behind writing in the first place. So I just go, and write lots of bad poems, and I look at all of them closely based on what –I– want from it, and sometimes something squeaks out that I’m happy with.
To me, the feeling that accompanies a poem I’m happy with is one that I can only call ‘receptive’–deeply receptive, and the closest corrolary I can find to it is when I’m deeply, madly, taken by some girl, and everything just kind of comes alive. It’s the same feeling, only instead of a girl, it’s words. And as I have yet to accept that there’s any greater purpose to all of this activity beyond simply acting, I have to assume, based solely on hedonistic measurements of pain and pleasure, that it’s that ‘receptivity’ that is the real aim of poetry, whether from the reader’s or the writer’s point of view.
I suppose, to cut it short, because I’m not even entirely sure I’m addressing the original post by now…that it seems there would be a case to be made for erring on the side of inclusiveness…that as much as I would argue with either a Formalist or a Language Poet, the argument itself is just one more signal of everyone’s deep interest in the subject. On my front, it falls back to that pleasure I personally feel in that deeply receptive state–they’ve all got something to teach me, and the best tools I have, as a writer, in such a situation, is my ears. Doesn’t work for everyone, though, and sometimes I do have to argue back to keep the stream of words coming.
Closing point, I think: the parenthetical, near the end of your post:
‘it is so called because it is not that different from our physical taste, is it, springing from a wealth of sources and influences too vast and complicated to be contained? And who would want to?’
That closing question gets at the heart of the matter to me–who WOULD want to? And why? The critic’s motivations–and I think establishing a ‘poetic’ is a critical exercise–should be called into question as well…so…if it needs to be limited, if it absolutely must be delineated, then we do well to ask what motivates a person to so limit it. We all do limit it…but we need to ask ourselves what we’re limiting it for.
just thoughts–g
August 3rd, 2004 at 3:56 am
I see my “fuck the lot of them” response is going to be terribly out of place and off tone, what with the extant comments. Still, a certain measure of arrogance for those who are invested in divisive tactics, who gain their self-worth through the promulgation of fiefdoms, a measure of such arrogance is not a bad thing. Cleave to those, however few, who are traveling toward the same goal; do not confuse them with those whom you meet at crossroads, working at cross-purposes.
Closing thought:
August 3rd, 2004 at 8:00 am
Gene: I am with you, particularly when it comes to appreciating that even a bad poem is a sign of engaging in a worthwhile enterprise and a stance of receptivity– in fact, I would maintain that the latter point is my *whole* point in this and many other postings.
As a writer and a reader, I think one should naturally be interested in discovering more about what poetry *is* and how it *works*, and I see this as a different enterprise in spirit– if not always in word and deed– from seeking an exclusionary definition of poetry. It is only in a constant exploration of what poetry is, and a willingness to go beyond the merely comfortable and predictable, that one can make oneself into a finer antennae to really be receptive at all. This is the area where such things are interesting to me, and why I preach (and try to practice) a productive poetics (I often say “positive poetics” but that can be misinterpreted as demanding a positive poetry, which is not my case). So I’m not as interested in making the categories as understanding how poetry works. Langpo may be more theory driven than other poetry, but it also may NOT be, and certainly there are about 7267 other schools and aspects branching from there that aren’t– and let’s not forget how theory driven the construction of mainstream poetry was before it became mainstream, and what do you do with an author like Josh Corey (to choose a name) who is writing a different kind of poetry, very interested in theory, but whose poems can’t be written off that easily, and… you get the picture (and incidentally, by “do with” an author, I just mean, how do we understand him).
There will always be those who seek division and boxes for reasons I don’t agree with. And ultimately, if I inhabited a small enough planet to have to choose, I would discard all the theory for all the poems (though I suspect that a great many of the good poems wouldn’t exist were it not for the sincere contemplation of the stuff of theory).
If there is anything I have learned by opening my mind to many new poets and poetries over the last few years and trying to see what they are doing, it is that there is a paradoxical effect to it all: I value even more, perhaps because it is sometimes written off, the mainstream/school of quietude/whatever poems that I have always loved, but also that there are other insistent, exciting, and compelling ways to be a poet and conceptions of what poetry can do besides make one feel happy inside about a well-turned phrase or the click of the well-made box.
Which, incidentally, brings us squarely back to the role of the editor. Only in the past 18-24 months have I finally started doing the job that I should have been doing in the first place as an editor and– most importantly– as one who loves words and language. Not in the heavy analysis or the dissection, but in being willing to grasp some new ideas at least partly on their own terms.
I don’t think we are that far apart. What I know of you suggests that you are not averse to different ways to understand an artistic enterprise, and what I see of your publication fits in with that assumption. I’m assuming that anyone who bothers to read my poetics blogging is not one who closes their eyes to thinking about how things work, afraid to taint their mystical approach. At the same time, I don’t want to devalue or dissect. When I sit down to write at night, I’m not writing theory– nor am I writing FROM theory. I let all of that inform my writing in the way that it shapes my approach aeshetically. My blog entries are only the visual residual output of my investigation and reading, and the smaller part of my written output at that. My real purpose when I write the “real” stuff is to express what I can in the best way I can, and my happiest realization has been that the foreign, sometimes hostile, schools actually aren’t. They are foundries, forging new tools and new ideas that I can USE… and I am selfishly, gratefully, doing so.
August 3rd, 2004 at 8:02 am
Beau: Right on! I don’t think I have draught so deeply of the Kool Aid that I can’t distinguish friend from foe, and I think there are more friends out there than I first suspected. I chose Kent Johnson because a) I agree with what he said and b) because, though you might not suspect it from the larger discussion on that site, he is quite the rabble rouser. Read some of the poems of “Araki Yasusada” for example…
August 3rd, 2004 at 8:08 am
A better way to look at this is through the poems I read, and I will take care of doing some of that in a later post…
August 3rd, 2004 at 11:36 pm
Chris…
Naah, I don’t get the sense that we’re very far apart, either, and my comments are not offered in any antagonistic sense…mostly, that when it comes down to it, when I myself hit that last point in the cycle and want to say ‘fuck ‘em all’ and walk away from the endeavor altogether…which happens on precisely the regular basis you’re talking about in the original post, I’ve kinda come to shrug and smile and say ‘nobody knows, so stop taking this so seriously.’ Theory does inform the whole thing, of course…why would I read–and respond–in this manner if it didn’t? It just isn’t the end-all be-all that is sometimes suggested by theory itself. It’s there, when you’re doing the scut work, but it’s in the background, sort of like our knowledge of the alphabet is in the background…it’s not something one thinks about too much when you’re actually creating.
I think this is mostly because, for myself at least, the writing process is decidedly non-linear (though I can force it into that format when I have to)–much more accumulative. And when it comes down to it, the whole of the process is not that far off from more empirical approaches–it differs, in ways I’ve yet to explicitly define for myself, from the scientific method, but it is still a method of inquiry–a way into knowledge of the world around me. That goes for both editing and writing processes.
Perhaps it differs most in the fact that the subject part of subject/object takes a much more central role in the inquiry. I’m sure I’ll roll with that theory for a while–at least until I find something I like better (read ‘find more beautiful’–heh.) In any case, openness is central, at least for me.
I don’t see my approach as particularly mystical, BTW…I think it’s more a matter of a certain willingness to compartmentalize the analytical and the instinctual (a process that is analytical at the onset, I know…)–both are processes that are important to approaching poetics, but important in different areas: craft and sensibility are both more easily measured than, say, the effectiveness or beauty of a given poem. I think that especially true because I think both effectiveness in communication and notions of beauty are largely social constructions, and tend to shift along with shifts in collective experience. There’s a context involved: a poet, in these times, perhaps especially an American poet, has hard work ahead if they propose to, say, write about collapsing buildings without conjuring certain very powerful events in recent history. That social context informs notions of beauty, so it’s not like beauty is a fixed thing (though of course, there are certain grounding themes that do recur…). Ultimately, for me, it’s a matter of what I like…much like the post you linked to on wine and poetry, at some point someone needs say, ‘Shut up and drink.’
Anyway, lots of that is just the final shrug of the shoulders, the one that moves me, at least, from the last step of your cycle back to the first, the acknowledgement that there are certain elements of poetry that I can–and should–try to define, but which will ultimately defy definition. And the further acknowledgment that I’m kinda happy that they DO defy definition.
(the latter point suggesting that I’m not perhaps the best person to formulate an explicit ‘poetics,’ as I have a strong bias against its being too effective–if I stumbled upon an answer, I’d probably take great pains to hide that answer, especially from myself…heh.)
–g
August 16th, 2004 at 10:26 am
I wrote a ’serious limerick’ once or twice, e.g.:
I’m trying to learn not to need you;
Auditioning some who’d succeed you,
But tears won’t fashion it:
Sorrow so passionate
Lengthens your run at the Bijoux.