Silliman's Blog: 6/21/09

Saturday, June 27, 2009

Matei Călinescu

1934 – 2009

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 20^th 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.

Labels: Schools of poetry