The Stasguard

December 22, 2006

While browsing (OK, egosurfing, but only because I am curious– and a little frightened– about what Bob might have to say about this under-read mainstreamer’s offhand, rarely-edited blog) I not only discovered Bob Grumman’s coinage stasguard, “defender of the stasis quo” who, among other things, assume “without reflection that the small slice of the arts he was exposed to in school is Culture–permanently unaugmentable Culture” and are a key in keeping Bob and his friends out of “anthologies, classrooms, [and] grants,” but I also found out that I am one of this dangerous and dull crew.

In my defense, I’m not quite as closed-minded as the term might imply. True, I don’t value newness and experimentalism for their intrinsic merits and I continue to believe that there is much gold left in the ground that Bob and others would apparently like to leave far behind. But I don’t believe “Culture” unaugmentable (I barely believe that Culture with a capital C exists at all, a conundrum I find hard to deal with a lot of the time, much like I have a hard time reconciling my anti-foundationalist believes with my feelings of capitalized Beauty and Truth) and I find that a lot of what Bob and other “post-avants” say resonates with me as possessing some level of essential truth.

For example, Bob was kind enough to share his own thoughts (here and here) about Grenier’s poem “JOE” that was praised to the heavens by Silliman and mocked (authors note: I was mocking Silliman at least as much as the poem) by myself. I hadn’t read Bob’s articles about “JOE” before; nor do I want to argue about interpretation. I plead guilty to continuing to believe that “JOE” is not much of a poem and also guilty of representing a dismissive view of minimalism that doesn’t reflect how I really feel given my limited understanding of the whole area.

Here’s another way of putting how I feel, using “JOE” as an example. I understand poetry to a) have a communicative value, an intention on some level of communicating something to the reader, though not necessarily through conventional narrative or imagery and b) to be subject to interpretation by the reader.

To speak in grand generalities that don’t include many specific works from specific practitioners, my problem with minimalism is parallel to– but just the opposite from– my problem with didactic, confessionalist poems. Confessionalists don’t leave enough to the reader– they hyper-emote, over-explain, and interpret everything for the reader. Reading them is like eating pre-chewed food. Minimalists leave too much to the reader and the interpretation. Reading them is like eating raw, uncooked grain. “JOE” is a great poem… when explained by a great reader who has essentially created the (a?) poem themselves in the explanation. “JOE”– to the extent that it has a value as a discrete artistic artifact– is just about worthless. It’s value lies in the expressive power of the reader.

In my conception of poetry, both of these kinds of poetry– the expansive confessionalists and the skeletal minimalists– are missing essential elements. The minimalist parodies that Bob refers to weren’t as far off as he’d like to think. Their errancy depends on believing that those creating such parodies don’t “get” the arguments being made about poems like “JOE” when, in fact, most of them do understand those arguments, but disagree about who is making the most important arguments (the poem or the reader) and of what value that bestows upon the work in question.

Tags: poetics, poetry, Writing