Column 114 — November/December 2012
The Otherstream Versus Wilshberia
Small Press Review,
Volume 44, Numbers 11/12 November/December 2012
“Poetry Wide Open: the Otherstream (Fragments in Motion)”
by Jake Berry http://www.argotistonline.co.uk/Berry20%203.htm
As my regular readers know, I use the term, “Wilshberia,” to stand for that part of the American poetry continuum devoted to mainstream (i.e., conventional) poetry from around 1960 till now. Hence, it covers the kind of formal poetry that Richard Wilbur is (deservedly) well-known for across the continuum to the random, abruptly non-sequential, conversational sort of poetry John Ashbery is (deservedly) well-known for (and which was new at the time “The Waste Land” was first published). I call it “jump-cut poetry” (albeit that’s not one of my own coinages); another good name that’s been used for it is “paratactical poetry.”
Just about exactly halfway between these two on the continuum is the country’s most popular kind of poetry for the past forty years or so, Iowa Workshop poetry. Just before, and perhaps a little after, John Ashbery on the right of the continuum are poets often incorrectly called “language poets,” like Michael Palmer, and–sometimes, Ashbery himself–who compose slightly varying kinds of jump-cut poetry. A few genuine language poets–those who have significantly focused over the years on conjuring poetic effects out of syntax, inflection or spelling–such as Lyn Hejinian–have become mainstream, or are about to. Which means that Wilshberia no longer, or will soon no longer, represent the contemporary poetry mainstream. For the purposes of discussion here, though, Wilshberia as it is now represents American mainstream poetry as it is well enough.
In his essay at Jeffrey Side’s Argotist Online (for which Side provides a deft introduction) Jake Berry does a nice job of laying out the basic problem for adventurous poets (i.e., poets taking some not-yet-certified pathway to achieve their poetic ends. He begins with the way the availability of (serious) poetry has changed from 1900 till now, from its being generally easy to find in commercially-published books and magazines to its being all over the place, particularly on the Internet, in greatly increased quantities, much of it “very current—perhaps as current as the same day!” And there we have the poetry problem, according to Berry. How, he asks, does one with an interest in poetry deal with so much of it, of such a wide diversity?
Answer: consult authorities (almost entirely academics) and read what they direct you to. This makes sense, or would if these people were guides rather than gatekeepers. But they are gatekeepers of the worst sort, not opening gates to the most conventional poetry extant only, but just about never so much as mentioning that there are gates to anything else.
Berry goes on to say that “Poetry in the early 21st century is presented to young poets and anyone interested in understanding contemporary poetry as (for the most part) an uncomfortable, dissociated co-existence of . . . two very different approaches to poetry,” one aiming for clarity and accessibility, the other celebrating polysemantic density and difficulty: Iowa Workshop Poetry and Language Poetry. Or: Wilshberia, if you add a few other currently minor schools of poetry like the neo-formalists to the mix.
It is at this juncture that Berry’s essay wobbles a bit, for he claims that otherstream poetry is basically unlabelable because too widely varying and unknown. Only here do I disagree significantly with him, for I think most of otherstream poetry is suffiently known to be labeled. I have myself listed many of its main schools: visual, sound, conceptual, mathematical, performance, cyber, infraverbal, syntax-centered, inflection-centered and cryptographic poetry. We in the otherstream must find names for our work and force those names on the academy. Only then can we prevent someone like Marjorie Perloff from ignorantly asking, as she did in a reply to Berry’s essay, “What, then, is Berry’s complaint? Where are those important experimentalisms that the ‘university presses’ are missing out on? Where are the neglected bards of the present? Publishing today is extremely eclectic and—with exceptions like New Directions, which has a certain trademark–one can never tell who will publish what, where, and when. It’s a pretty open and fluid situation. Just when you label Princeton as quite conservative, they publish Andre Codrescu.” Andre Codrescu? As familiar with the otherstream as I am, I’ve never come across his name as a prominent contributor to it. Which isn’t to say he is not, but . . .
To be fair to Perloff, she was the only widely-known academic of the several Slide asked to respond to Berry’s essay, prior to its publication who did so–although three or four little-known academics joined her. Her response was pretty much as I expected it would be, but she did surprise me by bringing up a poet I would agree is otherstream, Craig Dworkin, to prove she isn’t entirely devoid of knowledge of poetry outside Wilshberia. But she also surprised me by failing to comprehend (as many academics amazingly do) that Iowa workshop poetry is not something only written at Iowa, or by people with who have studied or taught there, but a kind of very standard poetry written by many poets, most of them with no connection to Iowa. Her view of Iowa Workshop Poets is like a belief that an Italian sonnet can only be written by Italians.
As far as I’m concerned, she and the other respondents on academia’s side proved Jake’s point that academia is are seriously out of touch with poetry not using techniques in wide use for at least forty years or more is concerned. I certainly understand the difficulty in keeping up with the current state of poetry in America. However, even academics should be able to spend a few days a decade exploring otherstream websites. Or, once a semester, giving the following assignment to their students: find and describe in 250 words some American poet who is composing a kind of poetry this class is not teaching. Do you really think more than two or three would ever consider doing such a thing? (Post-publication note: actually, a fair number probably would, but only because so ignorant of the Otherstream as to be unaware of the danger of the assignment.
None of the prominent poets and/or critics known as “language poets” whom Side also asked, including Ron Silliman, accepted his invitation, by the way. Altogether, sixteen responded: Ivan Arguelles, Anny Ballardini, Michael Basinski, John M. Bennett, Norman Finkelstein, Jack Foley, Bill Freind (and that is how he spells his last name), Alan May, myself, Bill Lavender, Alan May, Carter Monroe, Marjorie Perloff, Dale Smith, Sue Brennan Walker and Henry Weinfield.
I wrote a response to the responses, too, as did Berry. Side and I also took on a fifth-rate critic who writes for the Internet tabloid, The Huffington Report, Seth Abramson, who well be more ignorant of the existence of otherstream poetry than anyone else writing about poetry in the U.S. He wrote something ignorant about one small aspect of Jake’s essay, which we swiftly ripped apart, whereupon he dropped out of the discussion. It’s almost always assertion followed by retreat for these sort of people. At that point, the controversy we hoped to turn into a Serious Discussion of the State of Contemporary American Poetry with many participants blinked out.
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