Wednesday, June 24, 2009
American Hybrid is an important book, but also a very curious one. The anthology, edited by Cole Swensen & David St. John, is an attempt at a comprehensive anthology of “Third Way” poetics by poets representing both of the major traditions that feed into the hybridization process. This fact alone ensures the book’s historic importance, not only for the effort at codifying what hybrid poetics might actually be, but also because one of these two traditions has been historically shy about announcing its collective identity in the form of movements, wings, tendencies, whatever you might wish to call the collective formation of like-thinking writers.¹
The last significant instance of a Quietist movement, as such, was New Formalism, which was a lot like the Old Formalism, only younger, rising up about 20 years ago after the Iowists & Leaping Poets had taken the quietist mode of free verse lyric & confessional monolog about as far as they could go. Not unlike the New Coast / Apex of the M uprising at the same time amongst post-avant poetics, New Formalism saw itself as a corrective, a return to core values of a literary tradition that had been abandoned by their elders in a postmodern time. In parallel mode, Apex of the M noted that Language Writing, as such, had neglected Christian mysticism, which was true enough if you ignored the front-and-center-presence of Fanny Howe, the role of religion in the work of poets as diverse as Rae Armantrout & Alan Davies & all these connections that many langpos had to other spiritual traditions, from Zen to Judaism. New Formalism noted that the Old Formalists had come up empty – one anthology of formalism in the 20th century had not a single contributor born in the 1930s, as so many Old Formies had become apostate Quietist rebels, from Bill Merwin to Adrienne Rich to Donald Hall to Robert Bly & James Wright.
Hybrid poetics operates on very different principles. Rather than representing a revolt from within either literary tradition, it seeks to ameliorate the borders betwixt the two, to operate perhaps as if no chasm in aesthetic & cultural values gave rise to these traditions, as if, in fact, they didn’t always already represent something very real.
Cole Swensen admits as much right at the beginning of her very smart introduction:
The notion of a fundamental division in American poetry has become so ingrained that we take it for granted. Robert Lowell famously portrayed it in the 1950s and 1960s as a split between “the cooked and the uncooked,” and Eliot Weinberger updated the assertion over thirty years later in his anthology American Poetry Since 1950 (1993) when he stated that “For decades, American poetry has been divided into two camps.” Were the poetic landscapes of 1960 and 1993 as similar as these two statements might imply? And where are we in relation to them today, at the end of the first decade of the new millennium? This anthology springs from the conviction that the model of binary opposition is no longer the most accurate one and that, while extremes remain, and everywhere we find complex aesthetic and ideological differences, the contemporary moment is dominated by rich writings that cannot be categorized and that hybridize core attributes of previous “camps” in diverse and unprecedented ways.
I don’t know about 2009, but I do know that this is a position very close to the one that Cole Swensen took as my student in 1982 at San Francisco State University. It’s a belief long & deeply held. And she was already an awesomely talented young writer, capable of adapting from one form to the next, regardless of the mode’s origins. Much of what we did in that class was read through the books that would form the core of an anthology I was then in the process of editing, In the American Tree.
American Hybrid is not a take on the Tree, nor even a dissent as such, although it does very much remind me of one of its predecessors, Robert Kelly & Paris Leary’s underappreciated 1967 masterpiece, A Controversy of Poets. Kelly & Leary did not attempt to bandage over the gulf that separated the New American poets of the 1960s with the old school anglophiles of a self-styled mainstream – in fact, they wanted to highlight the differences. Each editor got half the choices in the volume, although both picked Robert Duncan (who in turn refused to participate in any anthology that had quietists in it). It was in a discussion of the Kelly-Leary anthology that I first invoked Edgar Allan Poe’s School of Quietude.
Yet Kelly & Leary didn’t do what might seem obvious: divide the book into two warring sections – 42 years later you would have been able to tell what kind of readers the book had by which pages were more worn. Rather Controversy shuffled them alphabetically, which muted the effect. That organizational principle – editors bringing their own kind to the collection & but then intermingling them A to Z – appears to be exactly what has happened with American Hybrid. One might go so far as to call this A Controversy of Poets, Vol. 2.
Which, I think, is where the curiosities start. For one thing, American Hybrid is a vast collection – although it has 100 fewer pages than Tree, it holds 74 contributors, dwarfing the 40 that appeared in my volume. Hybrid accomplishes this by holding everybody to roughly seven pages (a one-page intro/bionote, followed by six pages of text). No according influential elders, such as Barbara Guest, a broader sweep so as to underscore her enormous impact on women poets (and younger poets generally) over the past 25 years. And then there is the question of having a Barbara Guest, a John Ashbery, Etel Adnan, Charles Wright, Keith & Rosmarie Waldrop or Kathleen Fraser – all poets on the high side of 70 – in a collection of new poetry. Two of these writers were in The New American Poetry, the volume that, more than any other, engaged Quietism openly in 1960, challenging the conservative claim to being “mainstream.” And Fraser, whose first book did not appear until 1968 (when it was published by a follower of Robert Bly), has long insisted that she could have been included in that volume as well.
The inclusion of these older poets is an interesting decision, not only because I can recall coming to the opposite conclusion with Tree, deciding not to include older writers with fixed public identities prior to the rise of language writing – I thought it would blur the distinctness I was trying to highlight – but also because Hybrid’s incorporation of septuagenarian (or older) poets tells us something interesting & new about American poetry. When I was editing Tree in the early 1980s, the likes of Robert Creeley, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Larry Eigner et al were not yet 60. Among the prior generation, the Objectivists, Zukofsky & Niedecker were dead, Bunting & Oppen were slipping back into silence, & Rakosi & Reznikoff were not a part of any discussions of then-contemporary poetry that I ever heard. Poets in their 70s & 80s were not having an important impact on shaping new poetry. Twenty-five years later, this is no longer the case. Hybrid is the first anthology I’m aware of to recognize & acknowledge this shift.
This does, however, have exactly the impact of blurring distinctness that I worried about with Tree, which Hybrid then exacerbates with alphabetical organization, the weakest editing strategy known to humankind. Actually, it’s not an editing strategy at all, but a marker of the abdication of one.² There are influential figures here – Guest, Jorie Graham, C.D. Wright, Robert Hass – but organizing the volume around such power centers would have led to a very different book. And possibly some real contentiousness amongst the editors & contributors, tho that could have been a good thing rather than a bad one if handled right. But it might have made clear that the answer to a typical question about contributors to this volume – say, What do Laura Moriarty or Juliana Spahr have to do with the poetry of Norman Dubie? – is in fact: nothing. But there are poets here presumably for whom Dubie is an important figure, or else his presence & the absence of another adventuresome Quietist (Frank Bidart, say, or Mark Doty) might raise eyebrows.
And it’s at the level – a given for any anthology – of looking at who got included, and who did not, that American Hybrid is perhaps at its quirkiest. If it’s hard to fathom why, for example, Dubie, Arthur Vogelsang or Charles Wright – standard off-the-shelf Quietists – are here; the same is true for Juliana Spahr, Harryette Mullen or Rod Smith, poets who are forever pushing boundaries. If Spahr, Mullen & Smith are here, why not Jena Osman or Kevin Davies? If Dubie, why not Robert Pinsky? Why so few poets out of the New York School (Ashbery, Guest, Alice Notley, John Yau) and so many language poets (Rae Armantrout, Lyn Hejinian, the sisters Howe, Michael Palmer, Stephen Ratcliffe, Mullen, Moriarty)? Why aren’t Maxine Chernoff, Elaine Equi, Leslie Scalapino or Beth Baruch Joselow included? Or many, many younger poets who seem entirely enscribed within hybridism, from Jasper Bernes to Donna Stonecipher to Thalia Field? Why Dean Young & not Kevin Young? And why not Bob Perelman or James Tate, poets who have had a shaping influence on Dean Young’s work, and are certainly not outside whatever circle could include both Spahr & Dubie? Those are exactly the sorts of questions that an actual editing strategy would have raised up & forced the editors to more concretely & explicitly address. (In fact, taking American Hybrid & editing it would be a terrific assignment for a graduate poetry seminar.)
There are, of course, limitations. But what jumps out at least for this reader is that, with 74 contributors, this collection is much, much shorter than it could have been. Further, there seems to be an overwhelming emphasis on poets who teach creative writing. Over 50 of the poets included currently teach writing, a number that would have been higher had there not been several emeritae faculty and two dead poets in the collection.³ Schools with multiple faculty included are UCLA, UNLV, Berkeley, Mills, San Francisco State, Bard, Brown, U. Mass Amherst, the University of Denver, Princeton and the University of Iowa. Twelve of the poets here either currently teach in the Bay Area, or have done so in the not too distant past. In a world with at least 20,000 English-language poets & some 808 degree-granting writing programs, there simply aren’t enough jobs in colleges for poets for this to be a statistical accident.
This I think points to the problem that underscores this collection. It would have made far greater sense to have focused not on some of the questionable choices here, but on the writing of the next generation – their students. If there truly is an American hybrid poetics, it is not in some mythic place where Lyn Hejinian & Norman Dubie are in any sense “the same thing” or even part of a larger confluence, but in the work of their students, people conceivably influenced by both. This would have left you with a very different book – the average age of the authors would not be, as it seems here, on the high side of 50 – with many more contributors than we find in the Swensen-St. John collection. And you could have done it without shifting the aesthetics of the book one inch.
So is there an American hybrid writing? Surely, although it is not so clear the degree to which it exists as a self-aware literary tendency, the way language poetry or slow poetry (I prefer the rubric “developmentally challenged”) have been. To the degree that we see Quietists actually articulating some sense of a literary movement, it can only be a good thing. To the utopian notion that hybridism will somehow, some day, heal the broader cultural and political rupture between aesthetic conservatives & progressives, I’m much more skeptical. Asking William Logan to write as though the 20th century has begun (let alone the 21st) is like recruiting Rush Limbaugh for your MoveOn group. A more comprehensive (& adequate) set of questions might form around an issue such as what is it that younger writers can take from both traditions, and why is it that so many younger writers are conflict averse in a world in which conflict itself is inherent? What is the attraction to not taking a stand?
¹ It’s not the first anthology to focus specifically on this group of writers. Reginald Shepherd’s Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries covers much the same ground. Sixteen of his 22 contributors are included among the 74 in American Hybrid. One could read American Poets in the 21st Century: The New Poetics, edited by Claudia Rankine & Lisa Sewell, in a like vein, although it has a broader reach , and just four of its 13 contributors show up in Hybrid.
² This abdication is an echo of the worst of the poltical tendencies of the left in the 1970s, groups that protested the misuse of power by major institutions &, so as not to do likewise themselves (as had the New Left in the 1960s, especially where issues of gender were concerned), refused to exercise power themselves, creating organizational vacuums that simply compromised the effectiveness of several different movements while rendering the actual power politics of the group invisible to all but a handful of insiders.
³ Poets included in American Hybrid & their current or listed teaching affiliations:
Etel Adnan
Ralph Angel, University of Redland
Rae Armantrout, UC San Diego
John Ashbery, Bard
Mary Jo Bang, Washington University (St. Louis)
Joshua Beckman
Cal Bedient, UCLA
Molly Bendall, USC
Mei-mei Berssenbrugge
Michael Burkhard, Syracuse
Killarney Clarey
Norma Cole
Gillian Conoley, Sonoma State
Martin Corless-Smith, Boise State
Stacy Doris, San Francisco State
Norman Dubie, Arizona State
Lynn Emanuel, Univesity of Pittsburgh
Kathleen Fraser, emerita, San Francisco State
Alice Fulton, Cornell
James Galvin, Iowa City
Forrest Gander, Brown
C.S. Giscombe, Berkeley
Peter Gizzi, U Mass Amhest
Albert Goldbarth, Wichita State
Jorie Graham, Harvard
Barbara Guest, deceased
Robert Hass, Berkeley
Lyn Hejinian, Berkeley
Brenda Hillman, St. Mary’s (Moraga)
Paul Hoover, San Francisco State
Fanny Howe, emerita, UC San Diego
Susan Howe, emerita, SUNY Buffalo
Andrew Joron
Claudia Keelan, UNLV
Myung Mi Kim, SUNY Buffalo
Ann Lauterbach, Bard
Mark Levine, Iowa
Nathaniel Mackey, UC Santa Cruz
Stefany Marlis
Mark McMorris, Georgetown
Jane Miller, University of Arizona
Laura Moriarty
Jennifer Moxley, Maine
Harryette Mullen, UCLA
Laura Mullen, LSU
Alice Notley
Michael Palmer
D.A. Powell, USF
Bin Ramke, U of Denver
Claudia Rankine, Pomona
Stephen Ratcliffe, Mills
Donald Revell, UNLV
Elizabeth Robinson
Martha Ronk, Occidental
Mary Ruefle
Reginald Shepherd, deceased
Eleni Sikelianos, U. of Denver
Rod Smith
Carol Snow
Juliana Spahr, Mills
Susan Stewart, Princeton
John Taggart, emeritus, U. of Shippensburg
Arthur Vogelsang
Anne Waldman, Naropa
Keith Waldrop, Brown
Rosmarie Waldrop
Marjorie Welish
Susan Wheeler, Princeton
Dara Wier, U. Mas Amherst
Elizabeth Willis, Wesleyan
C.D. Wright, Brown
Charles Wright, Virginia
John Yau, Visual Arts, Mason Gross School of the Arts, Rutgers
Dean Young, U. Texas, Austin
Labels: Schools of poetry
Very interesting. You seem to both damn with faint praise and via direct dismissiveness. I think that's your take: "important" but "curious" and nowhere do I see you say: "go read this book."
Now, you couldn't have missed it, so I don't get why you didn't mention a -- or maybe THE -- key fact about the book: it's a dang-nab Norton anthology.
Norton and thus designed almost entirely I do believe for one purpose: to sell to college students who need to buy it because it is on reading lists assigned by their college professors. Maybe (maybe!) that's one (one?) reason it includes so many college teachers.
This book ain't about poetry!
It's about money!
It would seem that anything Norton touches with regard to modern and after poetry is a disaster (with the possible exception 1994's Postmodern American Poetry). I know you know it Ron, but for others: see Clayton Eshleman's "The Gospel According to Norton" (1989), a jugular-ripping (yet entirely just)
takedown of the Norton Anthology of Modern Poetry.
word verification = golden
Goodyism
Goodyism, if you think about it, pretty much says it all, the Goodies run the religion show for the most part, the poetry and Art channels are pretty much all Goodyite.
There is a strong Goodyite infrastructure to most things.
But the Goodyites are also
"good and tight"
as in abit stingey
or maybe just stringy
they're strange
fer sure
At this point
there are so many goodyites
that the rest of the species
who are just sort of blase'
are all saying
GOODNIGHT.
At what point does so much infernal
goodyism
just become bad
I mean when exactly IS
that moment?
Has it come and gone?
Seems like there's someone against
and someone for EVERYTHING!
But there's also the sneaking feeling that really
EVERYTHING IS BAD
ALL OF IT.
NOT GOOD.
But don't tell a goodyite that!
That's Gnosticism!
Or
Noise that tis a system..
THANKS FOR MENTIONING MY NEWEST (PUBLISHED) BOOK
HOWEVER
IT IS G OO DNIGHT NOT "Goodnight" as you have it.. not GREAT literature, but what is?
thank Gawd I ain't on one of these endless and boring lists.. I guess misery likes company and a group (a gaggle of "Poets") to validate their "selves"
a cpl or 3hree of those here listed I've read and appreciate or know a "this and/or a that" that they have written..
well as old grouch Ezra said:
"I have never met a poet worth a damn that was not Irascible."
maybe it s just time to flush the toilet?
So it is the case that the difference is discernable only by a few and only from that particular side of the fence.
The difference, if there is one, is purely ideological. Translating that into prose and/or poetry...that's the problem eh? We must employ the close reading, an encyclopeadic knowledge of guest lecturers and above all we should not allow the betrayal of not being included (Ron) to reveal itself when we communicate by innuendo that we ourselves were sort of passed over (Wittgenstein).
As for the goodyite, religious right and unsustainable fight...well. Truth has only one side and falsehood is multifaceted.
All the same I have to agree...this book must be about something other than poetry.
Not money Steven but guilt by association.
"What is the attraction to not taking a stand?" A darn good question! Yet taking a stand and inventing rubrics for things (hybrid poetry, SoQ) are not the same thing.
A couple of things:
Echoing Steven Fama's comment: right, you wrap up your essay with the question "so is there an American hybrid writing?" Fair enough to ask. But the question that really needs to be not only asked (as you do in the paragraph in which you ask why certain poets are included in the anthology and not others) but also answered is: so, why were these particular poets included? As Steven points suggests: the answer to that question likely will not be pretty, or at least have little to do with really careful, thoughtful editing that somehow really "gets" what all this hybrid stuff is.
The exclusions ARE fascinating... I've recently written an extended review of some of Kent Johnson's more recent work (forthcoming from Pleiades in January), arguing that Johnson could be considered a hybrid poet (indeed, if Johnson is Yasusada, Johnson was one of the first great hybrid poets, combining through the figure of Yasusada lyricism with avant-garde technique and interests), though a very different kind of hybrid poet: one who is very critical of the hybrid.
In fact, the exclusions of poets such as Johnson from the volumes of hybrid anthologies points to the fairly conservative nature of hybrid poetics (as it appears in its anthologies), or, rather, editing--a conservatism admitted to in Swensen's introduction: Swensen writes: "It [the hybrid] shares affinities with what Ron Silliman has termed 'third wave poetic' and with what is increasingly known as 'post-avant' work, though its range is broader, particularly more at the conservative end of its continuum."
Professor Peter Barry (University of Wales at Aberystwyth)
Dr Caroline Bergvall (University of Southampton)
Professor Charles Bernstein (University of Pennsylvania)
Dr Andrea Brady (Queen Mary College, University of London)
Dr Ian Davidson (University of Wales at Bangor)
Professor Alex Davis (University College Cork)
Professor Allen Fisher (Manchester Metropolitan University)
Dr John Hall (University College Falmouth, incorporating Dartington College of Arts)
Professor Robert Hampson (Royal Bedford and Holloway College, University of London)
Professor Romana Huk (University of Notre Dame)
Elizabeth James (Victoria and Albert Museum)
Professor Tony Lopez (University of Plymouth)
Dr Anthony Mellors (Birmingham City University)
Professor Peter Middleton (University of Southampton)
Dr Ian Patterson (Queens' College, University of Cambridge)
Professor Emerita Marjorie Perloff (Stanford University)
Professor William Rowe (Birkbeck College, University of London)
Professor Keith Tuma (Miami University, Ohio)
Professor Tim Woods (University of Wales at Aberystwyth)
http://www.gylphi.co.uk/poetry/index.php
One thing about anthologies, especially those dealing with new millennium poets - after looking through numerous library catalogs it seems they're just plain more available than works by the same authors individually.
Money, always a factor!
In lending libraries and certainly when it comes to the generally empty pockets of a budding lover of the word like me. Hey, not complaining - less money but more time, not a bad bargain.
For someone who doesn't buy much, aside from food, shelter and raggings, these modern anthologies made available are a godsend when it comes to getting a slight sense of direction on that long and winding, you know.
Nice cover, and maybe a nice companion to American Women Poets in the 21st Century? I don't know, but'll find out without going homeless.
I also don't quite know why there's so much fuss about money from some where these collections are concerned. Anything that expands the readership base of poetry, especially the newer, less accessible (there's that scary word) will naturally heighten interest in the individual authors and lead to more actual purchases, no?
And this is a bad thing how?
Man, a good whore ain't afraid of doing the odd group.
It's good for business.
Thanks for permitting me this opportunity to maybe minimize, on this particular matter, someone's confusion about what I wrote about!
I must note that one difference between Langpo and Slopo is that the latter is an open source network and is therefore available to anyone as a way to further conversation about poetics, its production, and reception with an eye toward the contexts and environments we inhabit.
SP's stresses context, not form or method, though conversations around these elements are welcome. The cult of progress, however, is strenuously challenged: and that's probably where we part ways. The models and metaphors of global progression that we've all grown up with are under radical assault. Slow Poetry is merely a first step toward accepting this and trying to find other roles, other options. Slow Poetry hopes to make community available to diverse people: not make boxes with labels for the museum shelves.
Those figures don't include Molly Bendall, the wife of editor David St. John. Others studied under St John and his friends, or were useful as elders that legitimize the list (Ashbery, Waldman, Hoover, Howe, Howe, Guest, Palmer) or to increase the numbers of minorities by a half dozen. It would appear that Rod Smith is the only US-born poet under 60 in the anthology that does not hold a graduate degree.
This would be acceptable in no other field of endeavor. As I've said, St. John's editorial life's work has been to filter out the aspects of poetry that make it relevant to people and transform it into a self-referential bureaucracy of no interest to anyone not trying to join it.
Also interesting is the total shutout of NYC poets in keeping with the previous snubs of Ginsberg, O'Hara, Koch, Berrigan and Guest (no Jean Valentine, Rodrigo Toscano, Nada Gordon, Lisa Jarnot, Eileen Myles, Jordan Davis, Charles Bernstein, and Bernadette Mayer) or, for that matter, Philadelphia (omitting Osman, du Plessis, you, Perelman, Linh Dinh, Daisy Fried, Goldsmith, Conrad). Editors can react to an author's work in many different ways, but that's quite a run of negative reactions to poets in cities where poetry is not controlled by enrollment lists.
Norton should issue a public apology and give refunds to any students who had to buy this piece of crap for a class, as well as the two non-poets that actually bought it on their own (other members of the St. John family).
In the above post ("I should add..") ignore the phrase "in keeping with the previous snubs of Ginberg.. Guest." My apologies for any confusion this error caused.
Statistics cited above are accurate.
now that you've reached 'darling status' I can tell you, the irionese
you speke are legion!
You have to know, that when Ezra says irascible he means
erasable!
and that when you speak of the toilets, you can mean no other than
the analog signal!
which comes out the
gol aka ana (see rough japanese slang)
for twat
or rather
tuat
or duat
the egyptian underworld
or lacanina yali
hoedown
turkey man.
Ed, you are darling!
and fill all our ana's
with jouiissence!
wv: fillykee
wv is god.
went to Hopkins Eliott Coleman Writing Seminars 1971 rather than Iowa
Iowa then too "corn-pone" and restrictive they were building just another academic program
just what Poerty than as now doesn't need. more Credentialists
But he is currently enrolled in George Mason's MFA, and teaches there, according to bios online.
"In 1960 only four out of forty four contributors to Donald M. Allen's *The New American Poets* [sic] had held full or part-time academic employment...but when Allen reissued his anthology...twenty years later the status of the contributors had changed. More than half of the writers, including Allen Ginsberg, John Ashbery, Robert Creeley, and William Everson, held posts as university faculty."
I'm not sure what is gained by critiquing an anthology for including a lot of people whose day-job is teaching. Would we rather they had trust funds, or jobs they hated? Of course there are other options, but not many for writers, especially poets. Most poets need an income so that they can keep on writing and publishing other writers. Such is our economy. Most have gone to college and appreciate their education. Most would rather that young people read poetry and do so with some sense of context and history. So... I understand the squeamishness around the MFA system. But many who teach teach literature as well, or teach writing in interesting ways. The old division between the academic and nonacademic doesn't apply very well to our economy.
On the other hand, Ian's point about the heavy weight toward Iowa is an interesting one. And I miss those NY poets too.
Julie
The only adjustment Kelly-Leary did was in restricting the number of names, which they'd have had to do in any case, no matter how large the book could be.
The growth and influence of workshops is and is not relevant to the issue of market-placement. The fact that so many aspiring poets end up on the academic (career) track is not a consequence of workshops pushing their agenda (it seems they now have Mr. Abramson to do that for them), but that almost any survey of the influencial figures of various "movements" (and I'm NOT a movement guy) results in a healthy percentage of Shoppies.
Rather than a "Third Way" I'd prefer to think that fewer poets these days feel the need to subscribe narrowly to one kind of perspective vis-a-vis formality. Ronald Johnson clearly was neither Allen nor Hall-Pack, which is one reason his work sounds so much fresher, and genuinely different and original, than most of the major figures of either camp. One could do worse than follow his lead: A kind of obscurity surrounds the most interesting writers early in their careers; they tend to be ignored and forgotten, until enough people finally recognize "the genuine."
When I was at Iowa (1969-1972), my dilemma was in trying to reconcile what the Workshop (Starbuck, Bell, Justice) thought acceptable, and all the different writing styles which interested me. No one was interested in helping people find their own voices; it was all about imitation and channeling and kissing up and favors. Period. But I'm not bitter about that in the least--best education you could get about how everything worked (circa 1970). I'm totally grateful.
Poets need a little time. It was ten years after his first book that Ashbery published Tennis Court. When I first read that book in 1967, no one I ran into had heard of him (or it). The big successes in the workshop system produce interesting work by age 22--that's kind of young, unless you believe that poets (like mathematicians) do their best work in their youth. At 22, the horizon seemed limitless to me. But to Norman Dubie--who'd already mastered a style and a subject--everything made perfect sense. The rest is history.
I would add that not only is the New York Crew strangely shut out, but, perhaps worse, the selection of Alice Notley is absolutely atrocious, as it picks up a few highly unrepresentative lyrics from Descent of Alette.
Johannes
For the record, I posted that note about Rod Smith not to indict him in some way, but to show that even someone very much interested in an innovative approach, as well as supporting writers in a community other than that of the academy (DC area), can have degrees, teaching positions, etc. Johannes is another great example. We shouldn't choose our favorite poets by their affiliation or non-affiliation with this or that graduate program.
verification: donact
like a poem should not mean but be
erasable like erase every 6 th word of Finnegan's Wake and you got a new form of literature which I think that there are people who at university do this for extra credit.
Pound meant Irasible and he actually used an upper case "eye"
actually he knew a bit of Latin .. got the word via "irasibilis" from the Late Latin or Middle French
or possibly via your every-day Latin: "irasci"
of course it is a "stretch" to say that he got it from Fernando Lamas, who was merely a Latin Lover
There are eight carryovers from Morrow to Hybrid, seven with Iowa affiliations including the presumed theorist of Hybrid, Jorie Graham. These other MFA programs disappear in Hybrid, in which an increased percentage of Iowa poets (near half) select other poets they want to associate with. The developent of synergy with Brown emerged in recent decades, and the seven Brown poets I cited before is a strong list that many are familiar with. I know that Morrow has no political poems in it but I didn't know that about Hybrid until you said so, although it includes poets that both write poltical poetry well and express, as with Notley, one of the Iowa grads, extremes of emotions well as you indicate.
Another way of looking at Hybrid is that it presents the MFA programs that outwardly indicate awareness that there's more to poetry than the Morrow circuit, a distinction that the editors seek to make. Also, there's the messy business of whether the anthology represents of School of Hybridism, and therefore the institutional clannishness is a function of presenting poets that came together around Hybrid Theory. That's a pretty ridiculous case to make, but it's one of the lines of defense here: 1. there's 30 poets here you like; 2. there's a theory we share, so it doesn't purport to be a survey of all styles and schools of poetry.
Also, to respond to Julie and the anonymous 'dce,' there is a difference between an anthology where predictibly a lot of poets teach and have MFAs, and one in which every poet has an MFA. Group psychology often indicates that people must all do one thing or no one does it, but an anthology that excludes poets that either do or don't have MFAs has not made a credible attempt to evaluate who is writing the best poetry.
On this point, the anonymous 'dce's response to the claim that one poet under 60 in the whole anthology didn't have an MFA was to deny that anyone could get away with such an infraction, instead of saying 'yeah, they picked him because he was one of the best poets.' A person using their real name would be less likely to enforce the 'all-MFA' rule, a machinery which I'm told governs hiring decisions but no one sticks their neck out to actually defend. I have been more preoccupied with the inevitable tendency to match degree qualifications with judgements of literary value, which both Morrow and Hybrid are doing, or the institutional encouragement of literary criticism that doesn't seek to demystify, as Johannes effectively does, the intentions behind the book being reviewed.
As to "What is the attraction of not taking a stand?": freedom, particularly the freedom to make whatever/ however. Such is my stand. If it seems psychotic, it definitely is not. Lately I have come to see my writer self as a conversationalist who mostly converses with himself and the objects he is making. Which reminds me of the poem ascribed to me in Issue One. It was interesting in two ways: its content and the page it was on. I took it as both a capsule view of me and a gentle spoof. That it was on page 2244 was so in line with my number obsession/ I wondered if that was intentional or simply a mystical occurrence.
Poems come out of the play between the unconscious and the conscious, and while an author can hew to a style or a theory, the life force in words and ??? cannot safely be ignored. Now where was I?
I've spent three years, and hundreds upon hundreds of hours of my life, counseling young writers who come to me asking about MFA programs to only attend one if it's free. I've also done a great deal to advocate (and successfully, at that) for better funding at various programs. For you to suggest that I'm trying to "pressure" or "push" young writers into doing an MFA is itself an insult; for you to say that I'm trying to convince them to pay for it, too, is doubly so. Please don't use my name to score rhetorical points unless you have any idea whatsoever what you're talking about. My views on MFA programs are habitually misrepresented by those who want me to be some sort of bogeyman for reactionary post-avantists, and frankly it grates. It's simply too boring--and too obvious--to point out that nearly all the post-avantists who regularly give interviews decrying the formal teaching of creative writing are themselves teachers of creative writing (and thus either hypocritical or self-loathing, neither of which any of them have ever admitted to so far). That Ron hints at that fact here is a credit to him. That you miss the boat on this suggests you need to read up on the subject more before commenting on it.
Seth Abramson
Did Pound write anything about Casanova? I don't have my books with me. Or what about Venice?
Did Pound get 'into' 18th Century Italy at all. I never thought about that before. 18th Century Venice is pretty interesting. Kind of a hybrid in itself, a sort of Islamic hangover of social mores coupled with a total decadence of a kind mixed with a state enforced
stylistic 'blase'' which was still over the top compared to our dungaree century.. These 1000+ yr civilisations get pretty cool.
I only saw Ezra once in dungarees he had the cuffs rolled up
the dungarees were Roebucks.. and a baggy fit..
as for "getting into 18 th century Italy"
Pound was yet to be born I think in Idaho
where he didn't found that "writers" program
in Iowa but went east! to NYC and Yorerope
it was that other womanizer, Ben Franklin, who went to "check-out" the girls in Venice in the 170O's
though EP in around 1930 made his visit... lived over a bakery at 861 Ponte San Vio for 3 months
this bakery had terrific scones and the baker had a cute daughter , it (they) were very close to Thr Grand Canal, on the way to the Accademia Bridge to Santa Maria della Salute.. He had only a little money, so he cld not re a gondola ride to take the cute girl for a "spin"
he wrote some poems while there... I forget the name of the book that was eventually published.... as I recall ho
A LUME SPENTO was included
one of the poems from this "venice" trip
I will never forget! it (and Venice( and the baker's daughter) was a turning point for Pound. The poem: 'Alma Sol Veneziae' (Alma, I betcha, was the gals name). the poem/incident) that "changed Poetry forever opens:
Thou that has given me back
Strength for the journey
Thou that has given me
Heart for the journey,
O sun venezian,
Thou that through my veins
Hast bid the life-blood run....
WOW! some "point" to step out-from, eh?
check out more on this via Okeanos Rhoos
you really don't need to know very much Italian, or Greek, or Latin
to go to a library in Venice
and filch say some esoteric stuff in an obscure manuscript!
put it in a "poetic" form and act intelligent!
all of this bull-shit phoniness is what drove Ez nuts!
he was in "it" for the fun it gave him!
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