For they have found that which they have sought, but that which they have sought and found is a fragment—
—William Butler Yeats
Dear Typo,
I live with a political scientist. Recently, as I was reading Leigh’s short paper on social revolutions, I was struck by Theda Skocpol’s suggestion that such revolutions can only occur when
a) there is international pressure from a more advanced state or states;
b) there are economic or political elites who have the power to resist the domestic state; and
c) there are organizations that are capable of mobilizing peasants for popular uprisings.
All I know about Skocpol and most of what I know about political science is above, but this particular idea about social revolutions got me thinking.
XO,
Tony
Dear Typo,
Do you ever sit and wonder, when you’ve got poetry on your mind, about who has access to production? Or, what aesthetic has access to money? I do! Poetry, as we both know, got that $87 billion to rebuild itself a year or so ago, and so in conjunction with its impressive history, it will now have an impressive bankroll, and thus will be wielding more influence than its editing deserves. Poetry, if any magazine does, embodies the “official verse culture.” It is officially “poetry.” Most of what Poetry has been publishing since I’ve been paying attention has been nothing less than disheartening, unadventurous and banal – Poetry seems to actually deserve such too-easy, self-congratulatory labels like School of Quietude that some of the insiders of the Outsiders are so eager to attach to anything that reeks of MFA, or that is published in places like the New Yorker, or Atlantic Monthly, etc. (I mean, is there anything more stupid or transparently self-serving than taking potshots at the poetry published in the New Yorker, etc.? It’d be like taking potshots at the poetry read on Frasier if there was poetry read on Frasier—the institution itself isn’t taking the poems seriously, the poems are fairly clearly meant to signify a safe degree of sophistication and not much else). The only good thing I could say about Poetry when I was getting free copies in the mail was that it was giving George Scarbrough an avenue to a larger audience, which is a very good thing. Anyway, Poetry (and my scoring points with people who dislike it) is only an indirect subject of this letter—I’m just trying to let you, Typo Magazine, know the domain I’d label the mainstream domestic state (which is the richest/most powerful): let’s just say that if a poem would get read on NPR in April, then it’s probably a product of the mainstream state. And then there’s the experimental/post-avant domestic state, and I’m rather afraid to say anything about it because someone will quote a French guy on their blog and make me look stupid. But we usually know a poem that is dispatched from this state when we read it (though I’m not sure why William Bronk is sequestered in this tradition, and John Berryman in the mainstream one). And then there’s this mongrel mix, a third, potential state: this mix has been covered before, and better than I can do, but to me this poetry is less anecdotal than the mainstream, not as scary as the experimental, and it seems to merge a lot of the aims of the mainstream with the tactics/surfaces of formerly avant leanings. From here in my chilly room, it appears there’s a whole lot of dudes melding New York School slipperiness and chumminess with the sensibility of either James Tate (these are the younger guys who are most likely smiling or smirking in their author’s photo) or Michael Palmer (these are the younger guys who look very serious), and there’s a whole lot of ladies with a whole lot of books by Jorie Graham, Lucie Brock-Broido and CD Wright. (And of course there’s always gender bending.) This mongrel mix pops up in most of my favorite journals: Fence, jubilat, Slope, 3rd Bed, etc. Is this what the mainstream state is gonna look like? Or is this merely the mainstream consuming the avant state? This future mongrel mainstream actually could be a good thing, because it could be a mainstream or domestic state worth arguing with, worth rebelling against.
More later,
Tony
Dear Typo,
What kind of revolution am I dreaming of? Well sort of a silent revolution. Simply, a shift in how poetry is taught and read, because I don’t think the poets have failed poetry in the last 70 or so years, I think the readers and teachers have. Ronald Johnson and Rosmarie Waldrop and Allen Grossman certainly have not failed poetry, but all the teachers we’ve had who never ever once uttered their names to us have some explaining to do.
We’ll teach them,
Tony
Dear Typo,
Last night, after a rather stressful day at one of my jobs, while flipping through my record collection, I decided to listen to my one John Denver record as I ate dinner. I used to say that taking this one professor’s class about 20th century American poetry would be like taking a class on the history of rock taught by John Denver (my implied point was: “I’m a young Robert Pollard/Lou Reed, so what the heck would I do”, and “Are you going to drink that?”). But last night I just wanted to listen to “Take Me Home Country Roads,” “Sunshine on my Shoulder,” and the song with the most ridiculous punctuation in the long history of song title punctuation, “Leaving, on a Jet Plane.” So I was pretty happy that John Denver wrote those songs. And it’s an equally happy thing that our professor, or (insert name of easy target here) Billy Collins is writing and publishing relatively mellow, easy listening poems, but it’s too bad not enough people seem to recognize that that’s just one end of the dial, right? And it’s also too bad that punks like me have to be so smugly dismissive of friendly little dudes like Mr. Collins to try and signify a dangerous level of sophistication (to whom?).
Sailing alone around the room, I am truly yr friend,
Tony
Dear Typo,
No, I’m not worried about the poetry currently being written—there’s people out there, or in here, writing very necessary, Tostian stuff (We’re both thinking Ben Lerner, yes? Ben Marcus? Brenda Coultas?). But I’m worried about the imaginary little neophyte who just took her first poetry course from one of our peers down the hall, and now she is intrigued, and she’s nosing around our little cultural pocket, and she reads Dana Gioia, and she reads Ron Silliman’s blog, and now she is probably thinking “Holy shit, do I have to pick sides?” And then soon will think, “Holy shit, Billy Collins doesn’t make me feel inferior like these other smug cookie monsters, and he does make it easy for me to just cross my legs and sit down and listen to him sing about fire and rain and sunny days . . .”
Sometimes I am that imaginary neophyte,
Tony
Dear Typo,
I have poetry on my mind. About Skocpol’s first component (international pressure): the first possible corollary would be contemporary poetry in translation – happily, there seems to be a growing surge in writers translating, from Eliot Weinberger and the Waldrops to the work found on-line in Double Change and Balaklava and Jacket. Indeed! This has put a positive pressure on my writing, cajoling it to move beyond becoming a mere correction of the contemporary tendencies I find obnoxious (epiphanies, stylish articulations of how language is oh so insufficient, instructions to “throw in more metaphors and similes”, etc.). For example, Third Wave, a book of contemporary Russian poetry in translation, and Crosscut Universe: Writing on Writing from France, are both friendly companions. In addition to the prevalence of work in translation, it’s not much of a stretch to consider the various traditions as advanced foreign (if just foreign in a temporal sense) states. Right? So, thankfully, it seems that this first Skocpol component is always present, but seems more acutely present now, at least in the Outsider camp, than it probably has since the last big translation wave in the sixties. They were writing poetry in the sixties, right?
Tonight, as I ride alone, the darkness is deep,
Tony
Dear Typo,
Up to just about this summer (now that I have left our Arkansas schoolroom), Modernists and their torch carriers (I’m thinking New Directions, the Objectivists, Conjunctions, much more) had been like correspondents from an exotic foreign locale. In my hours spent in those classrooms, I got the unstated message that Modernism failed. You think? I think it’s still going on, but somehow after Pound, Stevens, et al, the classroom stopped taking it seriously. Oppen, Olson, Duncan, Spicer, Bronk, HD, Gertrude Stein, Zukofsky—these were brilliant runners, as were Berryman and Roethke (I think in Arkansas we all agree on Berryman and Roethke), but only the latter two got into the classroom, and thus the previous eight seem to exert no pressure on the mainstream, and because of this, those currently outside of the mainstream (or at least the insiders of the Outside group) don’t seem to take writers like Berryman and Roethke seriously, or allow them to exert pressure, simply because they did get through the door. Again, why canonize Frost but reject Bronk? Why embrace Bronk and dismiss Frost and Stevens? I think we both saw the books of Ashbery and Creeley next to Levis and Kumin on Whitehead’s shelf.
Maybe we arrived too late?
Tony
Dear Typo,
Poetry. In terms of Skocpol’s second component, economic or political (since we are friends, I think we can also use “aesthetic”) elites in positions of power (accessing means of production/instruction): a shift seems to be slowly but surely taking place. Many of the Language-type people are teaching now, and there are places all over the country (Buffalo, Denver, all over California) for people who swing like that. Cole Swensen, one of four or five most interesting poets in mid-career (the avant state is rightfully proud to claim her), is teaching at Iowa, the Astrodome of the MFA world. Every few years someone like Susan Howe will judge the Whitman, or Robert Creeley will edit Best American Poetry, and each time this happens, more and more young progressives (I don’t know what else to call them/us/them/you) get access to the production machine and the awards and publicities that grease it. American Poetry Review now publishes many of the same poets as Conjunctions, New American Writing, Crowd, Denver Quarterly. But you know this already. This trend should only increase as more money and influence accrues, opening the door for more young avant-leaning writers, and even Dana Gioia can’t stop it. The mainstream always wants the prestige and edginess associated with the avant-garde—U2 starts going techno, advertisers get surreal, mainstream writers (Pinsky) hand out awards to edgy young writers (Josh Corey) who display no resemblance to them, and so on (or maybe the mongrels will jump in and take the prestige?) (I’m not sure if I can tell the difference between young avants or young mongrels). One way or another, the former and future avant-garde will be assimilated by the mainstream (or at least the surface qualities and the terms of the avant will), but the question is whether young writers, if they get pulled into academia (on a personal note: I, for one, hope to—health insurance and a tweed jacket sound awfully nice after once again counting pedestrian and bicycle traffic from seven in the morning to seven at night on a chilly, damp November day) (I weep multitudes) . . . will these now-young writers just exist as angsty little ineffectual and inoffensive ornaments of the mainstream state? Or mere true believers/followers of the avant state? Or will they try to transform the state in some way? As much as I like to play the fool-on-the-hill creative type, I’m truly not all that theoretical, and will not seek nor find solace in whatever considers itself avant-garde, but: I’d like to find some little sphere. And: as long as there’s power around to wield, I’m going to see if I can get some of it and see if I can do anything interesting with it (there’s more power in the mainstream state, and entry is less rigidly guarded than the avant-state [with its fear of being assimilated]). And: according to Skocpol, some of us are going to have to get into power so American poetry isn’t read and taught as if it went from Walt and Emily to EA Robinson to Frost to Bishop to Pinsky and Dove and nothing else of substance happened, and nothing else is going to happen. And: some of us are going to have to get into power so American poetry isn’t read and taught as if it went from Walt and Emily to Pound to Zukofsky to Duncan to the Howes and Bernstein and nothing else of substance happened, and nothing else is going to happen.
I’ve been soaking and poking,
Tony
Dear Typo,
Sometimes I just write poems. But our moms and dads aren’t rich enough for us to think “career” is a dirty word.
Give me three steps,
Tony
Dear Typo,
While I was there in Fayetteville, I had my own little epiphany: the most adventurous readers I knew weren’t (there’s always exceptions, of course) our friends in the MFA program, they were our friends in bands and bars. The first group seemed to read to wield authority, or just read to fulfill minimal expectations. The second group read to find cool shit to read. A melding of the two seems to be a good route. Adventurous erudition! Bill James, Philip Larkin, Frank Stanford, Barbara Guest and Fernando Pessoa all seem to me as possible coordinates to a healthier mainstream than either the current mainstream, or the post-avant world, seem to offer. The mongrel mix I still have hope for, but I think we’re going to have to do more than join Dean Young in writing all the poems Ashbery didn’t have the time to.
It’s like a book you read in reverse,
Tony
Dear Typo,
That last letter was probably unfair. I like Dean Young, especially two or three poems at a time in magazines. But I’m always disappointed over the full-length—a collection of gestures and shifts of tone and brilliant throw-away lines somehow doesn’t do for me what, for example, Rosmarie Waldrop’s The Reproduction of Profiles or Ronald Johnson’s ARK or Robert Penn Warren’s Audubon or Allen Grossman’s How to Do Things with Tears do: make me believe that poetry is the necessary art of our time (in general) and my life (in particular).
These are books that receive and exert pressure from points beyond the surface, from the WHOLE HOG OF POETRY.
(Dean Young, if you can hear me: I don’t blame you. I usually can’t surf past the surface tensions either. At least you’re friendly about it. The singer in one of my bands used one of your poems for lyrics, I’ve read your poems to schoolchildren, etc. But it looks like I have to take shots at someone to get to the next income level . . .) (I bet William Logan has a nice house and car, and it can’t be because of his poems . . .)
Two birds with one stone. Hello, tenure.
I speak in monotone,
Tony
Dear Typo,
Let’s jump right in: Skocpol’s third component, organizations capable of organizing peasant uprisings, is what gets me excited. First of all, by peasants I take it Skocpol means citizens that seem, as individuals at least, to possess no power at all, but in mass can possess power (this is why the domestic poetic states are always recruiting). In the world of poetry, nobody possesses less power than the fledgling reader/writer. I hear that! So does our imaginary neophyte! She has the domestic states barking at her. She has her professor (ex-peasant, delirious, anxious) barking at her. She has journals barking at her. How is she going to bite? Usually, it means joining some pre-existing group. Usually, it means going to grad school somewhere, mingling, publishing, then joining the rank and file. Right? That’s what my plan was! I didn’t know anything really when I applied to MFA programs—I knew I wanted to make poems, and an MFA seemed to be the next step. Luckily, I went to a tiny tiny Christian college so removed from any domestic poetic states that I was surrounded by these benevolent professors who were just glad that I was reading and writing and didn’t try to steer me towards any sort of publishable mode or school. We only went up to Stevens and Williams in class, so I explored our little library on my own, and discovered many of my still-favorite writers (Roethke, Penn Warren, Ashbery, Michael Palmer, Frank O’Hara, the Charles Wright of Bloodlines and China Trace), free of prejudice. Great for Tost, but so what? Well, as we know, grad school is not the benign little pasture of my undergrad world—many teachers not only expect you to write in a certain manner, but seem to consider it a measure of his or her power within the program whether or not certain students follow the prescribed path.
Two guiding voices. The first was Michael Heffernan, my thesis director and our teacher, who encouraged reading and writing as exploratory acts. But that’s a different letter. The second was the tiny amount of authority I could wield as a defense mechanism, an authority which resulted from my having more or less familiarized myself with most of contemporary poetry from Pound up to the late sixties (for some reason, my undergrad library must have stopped buying individual books of poetry around 1970, and just purchased anthologies, where I found Ashbery, Tate, Palmer, Wright, Tom Raworth, others). As we’ve seen, many young poets come into the Arkansas classroom with no sense at all of the last fifty to seventy years of poetry, and are thus more-or-less powerless in the face of subtle and not-so-subtle suggestions of their teachers, who, as human beings, have agendas of their own.
So if the beginning reader/writer is the peasant, then the uprising is simply this: helping the peasants approach the vast, intimidating world of poetry in an autonomous, adventurous manner. And by autonomous I don’t mean a happy-go-lucky world where everyone gets to express themselves and poetry-is-just-expression and who-are-you-to-judge-how-I-express-myself sort of nonsense. What I mean is engaging with the WHOLE HOG OF POETRY without resorting to choosing sides, without having to get with a program. Because when I heard the professor tell our class that Ashbery and the other stuff that’s published in the New Yorker and American Poetry Review was what is called Obscurist poetry, what I heard was “that’s what they write, we can dismiss that”, and I also heard “get with the program, my program.” And when I read blogs that label a whole range of poems School of Quietude and that automatically dismiss the poems to be found in the New Yorker and American Poetry Review as such, what I read is “that’s what they write, we can dismiss that”, what I read is “I got with a program!”
And I’m serious about the New Yorker and APR being referred to as both Obscurist and School of Quietude.
If you have five seconds to spare I’ll tell you the story of my life,
Tony
Dear Typo,
A fairy tale: at first I thought it was extreme jealousy that caused William Carlos Williams to claim (more or less) that The Waste Land was (more or less) a disaster for American poetry. But now I think WCW was right, not because of anything inherently wrong with the poem itself, which I still think is stunning, but because in the wake of Eliot’s influence the New Critics came to power, and soon poetry entered academia with gusto, and soon we would have creative writing programs, which meant we were going to have a power vacuum that someone was going to fill. And soon we had New Critics directly dictating to students not only how to read, but how to write poetry, and the workshop was created to produce more poems the New Critics could wield mastery and authority over. And this was a disaster for how American poetry was read, but not necessarily how it was written, for while a whole generation of unadventurous readers eager to cling to their small conception of poetry was created, people still wrote poems without getting with the program. And after a long time there were enough people that didn’t get with the program that a new program had formed as a protest, a program that insisted on neglected and continental and theoretical models as alternatives to the New Critical one, and many of these protesters eventually also entered academia, and soon we had an alternative program completely separate from the earlier one, which meant we had a power vacuum that someone was going to fill. And now we have poems that these protesters use neglected and continental and theoretical models to wield master and authority over. And this is a disaster for how American poetry is read, but not how it is written, for while we have even more unadventurous readers willing to dismiss entire worlds of poetry, people are still writing poems without getting with a program.
And then someone discovered the Internet, which means we have a power vacuum that people are filling as we speak.
Remind me to research if the above actually happened,
Tony
Dear Typo,
One of my goals co-editing Octopus is to provide an entry point into contemporary poetry for my imaginary neophyte reader/writer. And this brings me to our big opportunity right now: the WWW. Just what WCW ordered? We don’t have access to university or federal funding, but we do have a chance to exert some pressure upon the poetry world. This means we can cut out the middle-man (getting with a program/state). This is the best opportunity I can imagine for altering the infrastructure of how the programs are constructed and maintained. I’m not talking about some commercial utopia where everyone gets to get published—nothing would be more boring and ineffectual than that. And my idea is not that the web and poetry published there should create yet another, completely separate world that is in no way conversant with or related to the poetry worlds that exist on paper (pages and dollars). Why? Because this separate world will, if it already hasn’t, create its own brand new petty tyrants, same as the old ones. And it’ll just get used as a marketing tool anyway—Dana Gioia’s already got a homepage with pictures of himself and his cat (Egbert). So it’s just a matter of time that Poetry starts using some of its hard-earned money towards completely dominating the on-line poetry world.
The real opportunity the web offers isn’t a cheap way for us, as future poetry tastemakers, to try and create our own cults of poetic personality, or to endear ourselves to those in power in one of the already established programs by taking easy shots at obvious targets (like Dana and Egbert). No! The web offers us a cheap and direct means of arming the peasants.
Excitedly yrs,
Tony
Dear Typo,
I live with a political scientist! While reading one of Leigh’s summaries, I came across a hypothesis: that having opposing factions without clear leaders encourages extremism, because if an authority within (lets just play make-believe again), say, the School of Quietude makes any concessions or compromises with the Obscurists, then he or she opens him or herself up to criticism from his or her own side for being weak and giving in to the other side, so the best way to retain authority is to give no quarter to the opposition.
I’m shaking my thing at both states, but I wonder if I’m just hoping one state will whistle? I’ve got to stop taking potshots at poets.
Seriously,
Tony
Dear Typo,
Yo, William Logan suxxx!
But seriously, if there really is to be a revolution in how poetry is read and taught, as I feel there needs to be, we won’t hear the results for years. Because the revolution cannot, in my opinion, take place among the elites. Instead of aiming at impressing the elites, let us use the elites to free the peasants. Because the revolution must take place among the peasants, those who are just starting to get published, those who are just now taking poetry courses, those who are just now applying to grad schools—the revolution will occur when enough students and beginners don’t feel pushed into joining one program or the other to be heard, when enough young poets don’t have to resort to dismissing an entire tradition in order to endear him or herself to the authorities of a different tradition. The mongrel mix makes an aesthetic case for a dialogue between the different worlds, but doesn’t go beyond surface issues often enough.
From my experiences as a young poet just out of the classroom, what we past and future peasants need are more magazines, anthologies and teachers that can find and demonstrate shared aesthetic concerns between the different schools, that take a discriminating look, that celebrate poets who do not subscribe to any domestic state: not so we can create some middling hybrid aesthetic or to show that we’re all “in the same gang”, but to show beginning readers and writers that they don’t have to get with either arbitrary, self-perpetuating program. Or at least to keep beginners from getting shoved into a program too soon, before they have had a chance to learn how to defend themselves against teachers and poets and editors who shrink the world until it can be micro-managed. Because the classroom and the workshop table are two places where knowledge actually is power—an awareness of traditions, and theories, can and often is used to bully others (teachers do it all the time), but it can also be a means of defending your work, of forcing others to take your work or your objections seriously. (For instance, I’d recommend to anyone applying to an MFA right now to read all the back issues of Jacket before the first day of class next fall.) (Imagine a generation that came out of grad school more adventurous than it went in—the books, the magazines, the mixers we’d see.)
Typo, you and I (just to use us as examples) are not extremists or with a program, but we can still exert pressure and we can present an alternative means of exerting pressure. So let us consider our motivations, our options. We can use the web as a means of kissing the ass of a domestic state, and we can take predictable jabs at Fence or Ploughshares or Egbert or whomever (there will be people with capital cheering us on), and we can champion the same writers as everyone else, and we can totally get with a program. But! Maybe not!
Okay!
Tony