Archive for the ‘Seth Abramson’ Category
Entry 1431 — A Visit With Seth
Tuesday, April 22nd, 2014
Here’s something I posted yesterday to New-Poetry:
I just wrote a comment on Seth’s latest and it was immediately deleted! Is it Seth or the magazine or what? Here’s what I wrote: “Seth . . .” Oops, I can’t quote myself because my cut and paste of what I wrote for some reason didn’t take. Basically, I said that the data collected was only from mainstream magazines that knew very little about contemporary American poetry. One set consisted only of Poetry, Boston Review, Kenyon Review Online, Rain Taxi, Bookslut, Coldfront, On the Seawall, The New York Times Sunday Book Review, The Huffington Post, and Publishers Weekly. Their review of poetry collections indicated more such collections by women were reviewed in them. I suggested Seth refute my contention that such publications ignore visual poetry and other forms of otherstream poetry by citing a serious article in any of them on visual poetry. Then I commented on the excellent female otherstream poets I had written serious articles on in publications none of the people running the studies were aware of. I said these poets were having no more success getting recognition than male otherstream poets like me.
Actually, Bookslut, which I’ve heard of but don’t know much about, and On the Seawall, which I’d never heard of before, may have published a serious article on visual poetry, but I suspect not. The others almost certainly have not. Gender ratio is an incredibly trivial matter that I shouldn’t care about, the ratio of poetry that does something interesting to poetry that doesn’t is vastly more important, and that is my main subject most of the time. When writing about poetry–which I should be doing a lot more here.
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Entry 1214 — A Passing Political Thought
Sunday, September 15th, 2013
I wonder when I’ll remember to save everything I type at this wretched blog before typing more than fifty words. I just finished typing a hundred or so–they were not important, but a struggle to get down, and the entry was almost done, when I hit a wrong key an deleted everything except part of a word. This happens to me two or three times a month. I have no idea what causes it. TIME TO SAVE!!
My passing political thought, which was an old, unoriginal one I was posting only because I had nothing else to post, was an observation about Americans’ attitude toward slavery. I guessed that 90% of them believed the government should run every aspect of every American’s life–except theirs. I opined that most Americans didn’t think of themselves as enslaved to the degree that they are because almost all of the things they are forced to do they would do without being forced, and almost none of the things they are prevented from doing, they would never have any inclination of doing.
By the time I’d written my thought, I’d come up with a few other very minor things to increase my word-count with. One was that Seth Abramson never took me up on my invitation to participate in a dialogue with him, or even have the politeness to let me know he wouldn’t. So I will never learn he means by his term, “metamodernist poetry.” I suspect he realized how emptily bogus–and definable–it was. My real regret, though, is that I won’t make his list of One Thousand Important Poetry People on the Internet or whatever his next inane list is, when it comes out.
Okay, three paragraphs, three saves.
I also said something about things on the homefront: that I’ve been feeling more and more to be a non-participant in the world, or–at any rate–the cultural world, but am close to finishing my latest guest blog for Scientific American. Somehow I’ve managed to get one done every four weeks for fifteen months. I feel I’ve made a number of near-approaches to Important Understandings along the way, too. Not that it’s helped me any in the Big World that I know of. . . .
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Entry 1192 — Dialogue Between Two Titans
Saturday, August 24th, 2013
Okay, the title is a sarcastic joke: the dialogue is only between Seth Abramson and me. My part will be Very Serious, though–as is the paragraph from a comment Seth made to my blog of a week or so ago that I’ve made his part of the following, which I sincerely hope will become just the first exchange in a multi-part series (that will become a book that will make both of us rich–okay, no more of my dumb sarcasm . . . I hope).
Seth: “Metamodernism is a tendency that’s still emerging, much like postmodernism was in the mid-1960s.”
1. as far as I’m concerned, postmodernism (considering poetry only) never emerged because it never became significantly different from the kinds of poetry being called “modernist.” The great innovator, Ashbery, just used the jump-cut poetry of “The Waste Land” more in his poetry than Eliot had.
2. “Modernism” is a moronic tag because it is based not on what the poetry it covers is and does but on when it was composed. “Postmodernism” is worse.
3. At around 1910-1920 a true change in the arts finished occurring. It seems to me the change was simple, no more than the acceptance of significant innovation. In poetry perhaps two specific innovations dominated. One was the broadening of allowed linguistic practice that the acceptance of free verse initiated followed by tolerance of all possible registers, and then the loosening of attachment to prose grammar beginning (seriously) with jump-cut poetry. The second was the acceptance of pluraesthetic poetry, or the significant aesthetic use of more expressive modalities than words in poetry, visual poetry being the main example of this but far the only example.
4. The chronology is of course much ore complex and difficult to unravel than the above suggests, but I’m speaking of when each new kind of poetry came into prominence, not when it was first known (which in some cases may have been centuries ago).
5. I don’t consider “otherstream poetry,” mine or others’, to be any kind of important advance on anything called modernist. I do take pride in two kinds of it that I may be the inventor of, or at least the first serious proponent of: long division poetry and cryptographic poetry. The first of these, I have to brag, has great potential for poets because of it forces those making it to be multiply metaphoric as well as makes it more open to pluraesthetic adventure than any other kind of poetry I know of. I’m prouder of the second kind because I’m more certain I invented it. Alas, I do not believe it has any future: I may myself, with just ten specimens of it, done all that can be done with it.
Seth: “If you want to understand my own (present) take on it, which of course is just proto-, for it’s entirely fluid and still developing as a concept and a poetics (it was first written of in Europe in 2010), you can read my poems on Ink Node (two poems called ‘from The Metamodernist’).” I found the following two reviews at Ink Node:
from The Metamodernist
from Section I: The Metamodernist
from “a. Against Expression”
from {KOST 99.1 Osterville. The song “We’re An American Band”}
KOST 99.1 Osterville
Provincetown Center: The Fine Artworks
Jerry Sandusky has been performing his live act in the middle of the 600 block of Provincetown’s Main Street for six years. The act’s conceit is a simple one: Stravinsky stands naked on a street corner while painted head to toe in gold paint. The visual effect, given the artist’s meticulously-rendered 1821 “bobby” outfit, is to render Sandusky indistinguishable from a statue of a 1920s London policeman. He can often be seen in the middle of the 600 block of Provincetown’s Main Street waving his nightstick threateningly at passing children and posing playfully for photographs with healthy children. The one wrinkle in his now ten year-old routine is that he looks so convincingly statue-like that those who pose for pictures with him are wont to tell friends and relatives that photographs of Sandusky are in fact snapshots of a popular statute on the outskirts of Provincetown. It gets them every time! But then the joke is never revealed–unless, of course, it wasn’t fallen for in the first instance–meaning that for every enemy or stranger shown a photo of someone they hate or have never met standing with “Jimmy Sardoski” in Truro Center, at least ten hear the story of the famous “Jimmy Stravinsky” statue in Provincetown’s main square. And so it is that the statute has, over the last two decades, become one of Provincetown’s foremost law-themed attractions, though admittedly a difficult one to find. Jerry Sandusky Jr., who’s been performing his live act on the 600 block of Provincetown’s Curtain Street for five years, presently does a brisk trade imitating the statue in the middle of the 500 block of Provincetown’s Main Street; the requested donation per performance is five quid. You can donate to Jerry Sandusky Sr. here.
Seth: “Whether or not it’s something you admire or enjoy it is most definitely not something that’s ‘knownstream’–I have a library of over 2,000 contemporary poetry titles in my apartment right now that tell me so, inasmuch as 99.7% of them militantly exclude all metamodernistic indicia.”
Frankly, I find it hard to believe Seth considers the texts above to be poems. In fact, I think I’m missing something. Note: I vehemently oppose the belief that a poem can be anything anyone wants to call a poem. My definition is simple: a work of art in which meaningful words are centrally significant and a certain percentage of what I call “flow-breaks” (usually lineation, but anything having a comparable effect) are present. So-called “prose-poems” do not qualify. My definition is pretty conventional and probably more acceptable of poetry people than any other. My philosophy is that a definition of anything must distinguish the thing defined from everything that thing is not.
From another example of metamodern poetry I found in an Internet search, I got the impression that for Seth it’s some kind of frenetic pluraesthetic performance art. It didn’t seem to adhere to my definition of poetry though interesting-sounding. can’t say I learned enough about it to reach any even semi-valid conclusion about it, though.
Seth: P.S. The ‘psychoanalysis’ comment was re: your claim I do things to win friends–ever. That concept is foreign to me. But as you won’t believe me just saying so, look at it this way: If I’m merely ambition without courage, tell me, why do I have more enemies than you, and more powerful enemies, at that?”
I consider this outside the dialogue I’m trying to get going I want to reply to it, anyway–because I think poets are as interesting to discuss as poetry, and because I’d never thought much about my literary enemies. After thinking it over, I feel that while I have at least one hostile literary opponent, and am disliked by probably more than a handful of people, my only genuine poetry enemy is The Poetry Establishment. In short, I have fewer literary enemies than Seth, but one who is far stronger (and evil) than any of his. Evil: yes, because it has prevented me from making a living, or–actually–from making just about anything as a poet and poetry critic. The fact that it has done this unconsciously via its control of what’s published, critiqued and rewarded is irrelevant: it has done it.
As for Seth, I merely expressed the opinion that in making his list of 200 poetry people as important “advocates” of American poetry, all of them well-known members of the poetry establishment or younger people I strongly suspect (from having seen some of their work) writing and advocating nothing but the kind of poetry the establishment has certified–unless Seth can convince me that metamodern poetry is some kind of un- or anti-establishment poetry. It’s hard for me to think he’d do that unless he wanted the establishment to be his friend, but who knows?
At this point I have a question for Seth: what do you think of the idea of making a thorough list, with definitions, of all the contemporary schools of American poetry? I long ago started such a list. I asked readers to refine an add to it. Almost none did. Most who responded to it were against it. I believe because they want the public to remain ignorant of all the kinds of poetry being composed besides theirs–they want in other words, to maintain their monopoly. I on the other had think nothing could be of more value to poetry.
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Entry 1189 — 10 Important American Othersteam Poets
Wednesday, August 21st, 2013
Ten Important American Othersteam Poets
John E. Bennett
Karl Kempton
Guy Beining
K.S. Ernst
Marilyn Rosenberg
Carol Stetser
John Martone
Scott Helmes
Karl Young
Michael Basinski
My list’s title demonstrates one reason I’m so little-known a commentator on poetry: it doesn’t scream that it’s of the ten best American Otherstream Poets, just a list of a few important ones. What makes them “otherstream?” The fact that you’ll almost certainly not find them on any other list of poets on the Internet.
This entry is a bit of a reply to Set Abramson–not because I want to add these names to his list but because two of the names on it have been doing what he calls metamodern poetry for twenty years or more, as far as I can tell from my hazy understanding of his hazy definition by example of metamodern poetry. Both are extraordinary performance poets mixing all kinds of other stuff besides a single language’s words into their works. I would suggest to Seth that he do a serious study of them, or maybe just Bennett, whose work is more widely available on the Internet, and who frequently uses Spanish along with English in it. It would be most instructive to find out how metamodern Seth takes Bennett to be, and what he thinks of him. Warning: Bennett’s range is so great that it’s quite possible one might encounter five or ten collections of his work that happen to be more or less in the same school, and less unconventional than it is elsewhere, so one might dismiss him as not all that innovatively different.
Which prompts me to e.mail John to suggest that he work up a collection that reveals something of his range by including one poem representative of each of the major kinds of poetry he composes. So, off am I to do just that
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Entry 1183 — Seth Abramson’s Latest List
Thursday, August 15th, 2013
Seth Abramson has posted a new list at the Huffington Review. Basically it’s a list of those poetry people he wants to like him–al the main members of the American Poetry Establishment, and a sprinkling of other knownstreamers hoping t get into the Establishment one day. He calls it “The Top 200 Advocates for American Poetry.” Needless to say, no one who main poetry interest is visual poetry is on it. I was hoping Dan Schneider would be on it, but he wasn’t. It seems of close to no value to me, even from the point of view of knownstreamers. Everybody in the field knows who the bignames Abramson names are, and the no-names will make little impression among so many other names.
I posted a negative comment to Abramson’s blog that never appeared–because he’s a jerk as well as incompetent, or just due to some Internet glitch, possibly due to me? Can’t say.
I didn’t try to post another comment at Abramson’s blog but said a few things about it at New-Poetry, where it got the usual small flurry of attention Abramson’s lists always get there. After wondering what happened to my comment, I said, “Anyway, here’s my final opinion of (the list): a long, boring cheer for the status quo in American poetry that ignores the full range of contemporary poetry.”
As I later wrote at New-Poetry, if I were making a list like Abramson’s, I’d call it a list of people doing . . . a lot for contemporary American Poetry and limit it to ten names or so. Three on it would be Karl Young, Anny Ballardini and James Finnegan (who runs New-Poetry). I later remembered Geof Huth, who should certainly be on it. I thought maybe one or two that are on the other list deserved to be on it, but certainly not most of them–although probably just about all of them are doing good things for their small section of mainstream poetry.
Tad Richards (who actually said at New-Poetry that I should be on the list!) wondered if “representing a small section (was) really a reason to be left off the list.” I replied, “Not a list of 200+ names, no. I was speaking of my own list of TEN people doing good work for contemporary American Poetry. Of course, we’re in an Internet discussion, so consisting of comments not necessarily thoroughly thought out, at least from me. I can see the value of promoting just one kind of poetry–IF few others are bothering with it. And, sure, even if someone is writing about Ashbery and able to say something new about him, that’s a contribution. BUT, I say, not enough by itself to put that person on my list.
“While speaking of my list, I would add that it would only be of publishers, editors and critics. They are the ones in positions to really do something for poetry. Of course, many of them can also be poets. And teachers–but only if they also are publishers, editors or critics. What we desperately need, I believe, are visible writers directing people not to poets but to schools of poetry they might enjoy, and not just pointing, but saying what the members of the schools are doing and how to appreciate it. Who on Seth’s list is doing that–for more than one or two schools?
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Entry 853 — Criticism Criticism and Other Stuff
Thursday, September 6th, 2012
Seth Abramson’s latest group of Huffington Post reviews is now up here. It includes a few words about Skip Fox’s Sheer Indefinite. It may be the first time Abramson has reviewed a book I have a copy of. He may have reviewed other poets whose work I liked, though. I learned of the review at New-Poetry, where Skip is a fellow participant. As for Abramson, I not too long ago said some negative things about him here. Here’s what I wrote about Abramson’s column at New-Poetry earlier today:
I don’t think I’ve read a complete review of Abramson’s before today—since so few of the poets he’s interested in interest me. But today I read the one that was half on Skip’s book. Lots of generalities about the two books under review, with no supporting quotations, and blather about the small portion of the poetry scene Abramson is familiar with. Lots of gush, e.g.: “in poetry, as Charles Olson once wrote, every element must be at once a high-energy construct and a high-energy discharge.” This, supposedly, is better than 19th-Century poetry critics’ calls for “beautiful language.” He knows what poetry should and should not be, and spends most of his time telling his readers, with tripe like the Olson quotation. In one of the reviews in his latest entry, he quotes a poet under review, but more for texts that indicate how the poet thinks than how he writes. More typically, he makes statements like, “Nguyen is a master of the poetic line, a distinction considerably rarer in these times than it ought to be,” without telling us just what makes Nguyen that, and why it’s good for a poet to be that.
.One good thing Abramson’s review has is a link at the end to another review of Skip’s book. It’s not much better than Abramson’s but quotes several passages from Sheer Indefinite, including this:.
Neither does the world answer but
in mute response. Cold
wind this morning before
dawn, cold
rock in its eye,
frozen
dream in its mind.
–which is just about exactly the kind of thing I like best in linguexpressive (entirely verbal) poetry..I love the boxes the Huffington has put above Abramson’s tripe for people to click on, by the way. Each has one of the following words in it: “Inspiring,” “Funny”,”Typical,” “Important,” “Outrageous,” “Innovative,” “Beautiful.” Great set of choices.
It is possible, too, that an opposite of mine may share my liking for fresh locutions and be more or less as sensitive to them as I am. Or a truly fine poet may do whatever he does so well that almost anyone must like him.
Other Things: I have to report something of Major Importance that I did a few hours ago. To understand the magnificence of my achievement, you must know that I tend to save things. Not quite everything. I’m able to throw out newspapers as soon as I’ve read them, and some magazines. Clothes I can no longer wear. (Underwear with more than three large rips in them, for example.) Standard food-related garbage. Junk mail. It’s hard to think of anything else, but I’m sure there are other things. My house is cluttered but not ridiculously. And I have gotten rid of a lot of old video equipment I had–an editing something-or-other, stuff like that. I set a few dead bicycles out for pick-up, too, and just a few days ago moved five bicycles I know I could get into running condition again if I only had time from my lanai to my carport. Three of them are now squeezed between the shed at one end of the carport and the defunct car that’s been parked in it for more than twenty years, serving as a storage shed for correspondence (which I have four filling cabinets in the car for). Two are against the house. I sort of hope someone will steal them. But I may learn of someone I can give one or more of them to. Or maybe someone will pay me something for spare parts or salvageable metal. In any case, they are now out of the way, so I have room on the lanai for a few more things.
My Major Achievement was throwing out over a hundred packing envelopes, and the like, that things had been mailed to me in and I thought I could re-use. Not completely unreasonable, for I have re-used a number of such things. But it was obvious that I was adding to my supply regardless of how often I used something from it. I also had a bunch of unused packing envelopes I’d bought in large quantity when I thought my press would have mail order customers. Several times I’d thought it might be wise to throw a few envelopes out, but never did. Today, though, I threw all of them out except a box with perhaps twenty of them in it that there was a good place for on the lanai. (I couldn’t possibly throw all of them out! Some of them had interesting stamps on them–or mail art scribbles.)
About a week ago I vowed for the fifteenth or twentieth time to put mine house in order. I was going to spend two hours a day at it. That quickly became one hour a day. Now it’s five minutes a day. The problem is that I got the real clutter taken care of pretty quickly, but couldn’t figure out what to do next. I think I have now: be cruel to a lot of books. I have over a thousand, I’m sure, and I expect to want to read no more than ten of the many I haven’t yet read. It’s emotionally near impossible for me to throw them out, and I doubt the local library would want any of them–or anybody I know locally would. so the plan is to box them. I’m speaking of non-vocation-related books. I have boxed a lot of poetry books, and will try to box a few more, but I can’t be sure I won’t ever again want to look at them, or need to, to check on something, or have a friend interested in one of them.
I’m some kind of data-addict, I think. It’s not a serious affliction, just a bothersome one, particularly for someone as impoverished as I’ve always been. I have over a dozen, maybe over thirty, books on sub-atomic physics, of which I’ve read maybe one entirely, and three or four slightly. I’ve bought books like that always expecting I’ll finally read one and understand it! Math books, too. Many of my large collection of psychology books I have read but doubt I’ll look at again. I’ve read most of my history books, too, and would love to reread just about all of them, but never will. I have a lot of hard-bound plays, too, but stopped reading them when my hopes of becoming a performed playwright sputtered out 25 years or so ago. Some I would enjoy, but I prefer novels for escape reading. It’s absurd how many different subjects I have books about, most of which I never read–never truly realizing that I needed to focus, always wildly trying to expand my circle of knowledge until it enclosed all known data. I always set myself many more goals than I can ever accomplish, too. Ah, but my reading goals are just Enough. Time to fill this five-foot carton I have with more books. A few hours ago, I dumped four books in it. I can probably fill it up. Then I’ll have space to try to re-arrange my unboxed so I’ll know where each of them is for the rest of my life! Well, so that I won’t call myself horrible names as I totter through the house yet against hunting for a book of the highest importance, possibly even one I wrote myself, and not finding it more that once a year instead of once a week.
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Entry 798 — Grumman Versus Abramson
Friday, July 13th, 2012
I had a headache when I went to bed last night that I eventually took an Advil for, which didn’t help, so at 5 A.M. I took a stronger dose of pain-medication that included the pill with an opiate in it that is my equivalent of a steroid. I believe Seth Abramson’s attack on my term, “otherstream,” contributed to my headache. I felt his argument against the term was very weak and ill-stated, but I think I’ve been somewhat stressed out for a long time–years–by my need constantly to throw my little wooden arrows at some Poetry Establishment fortress–undentingly. Now I would have to throw my arrows a goddamned gain, with almost surely no more chance of making a dent in the status quo than ever. I had to take the zoom-dose, as I call the pill with the opiate in it plus two APCs (which have caffeine, which is as important for me steroidally as the opiate) to get myself going, anyway.
Even without pharmaceutical help, I’d gotten some good ideas to use against Abramson, and/or in the larger text I hope to write about the otherstream. They include a new (guess what?) . . . coinage! My best essays as a critic almost always begin with some coinage or other of mine. This time it’s “minorstream,” and not important, at all, except that it allows me to dump “knownstream”–an excellent term that never quite fit into my system for naming the main kinds of contemporary poetry–typologically. It is now about 8 A.M. I’ll finish this entry with either my response to Abramson, or my excuse for not having finished one.
* * * I’m back nine hours later with an essay of almost 3,000 words that I consider a good rough draft
For years I’ve been arguing rather passionately for recognition of what I’ve called “otherstream poetry.” Recently, an essay by Jake Berry in The Argotist Online put me fairly central in a discussion of what I view as the opposition of the poetry establishment to otherstream poetry because of my having coined “otherstream,” and because I was one of the sixteen people who accepted an invitation to respond to what Jake wrote. For over a week the essay and the responses to it got no significant attention. Finally Seth Abramson, who was in the process of writing a series of essays that seemed to have something to do with the establishment/otherstream opposition, was drawn to defend his series against two snipes at it. One was by Jeffrey Side, who, as editor of The Argotist Online, was responsible for the publication of Jake’s essay and the discussion of it, the other by me, neither of any consequence. Abramson writes for The Huffington Review. Who knows how influential he is. All I know is that he’s posted lists of “ten best poems” that I have written contemptuously of, and short essays showing little or no knowledge of the otherstream. An establishment hack, in other words—or perhaps only a sub-establishment hack.
Which gives me an excuse to give my definition of “the Poetry Establishment.” Make that “the current American Poetry Establishment,” which I will hereafter refer to as simply, “the Establishment.” There most assuredly is one, but its members and supporters scoff at references to it because it is not a formal institution. It is also difficult to define with precision. Moreover, to speak of any powerful “establishment” paints one a probable conspiracy nut.
To start with, the Establishment consists of (1) a great many junior college, college and university English departments. I’m tempted to say it consists of all such departments, but there may be some, in junior colleges or very small colleges, that are too uninfluential to qualify as part of the Establishment. Add to this (2) all trade publications publishing poetry and/or commentary on poetry, plus all junior college, college and university presses’ staffs, again with the proviso that some may be too minor to count—those with a circulation of little over a hundred, say. One must also include (3) the few visible commentators on poetry such as Helen Vendler and Harold Bloom—those whose readership is a thousand or more. There are also (4) the members of formal establishment institutions such as the American Academy of Poets, and (5) whoever it is at significant grants- and awards-bestowing formal establishment institutions such as the Pulitzer Prize Committee; the MacArthur Foundation, the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Book Foundation, and so on, that pick the recipients of their prizes. That few or none of these groups are formally affiliated with each other is irrelevant: together they act in unison (instinctively, I believe) to favor the status quo over what I call “the Otherstream.” (I’d be surprised if I haven’t overlooked any others, so would welcome additions to my list.)
In the eighties, when I coined the term, “the Otherstream,” I only intended it to apply to poetry. Later, because I believe it covers all the arts (all the sciences, too), I replaced “poetry” with “arts,” as it is in the version I wrote for Jake’s essay, without really thinking about it. It was a bad move, because complicating the issue and because I don’t know enough about any art but poetry to be able to argue for the validity of my term’s application to it. Ergo, from now on. consider the term to apply only to contemporary American poetry.
Note well, that my term refers to kinds of poetry, not to individual poets. In other words, just because John Blank and Samantha Wicker have published collections of standard free verse that the Establishment has ignored does not make them “otherstream.” Nor does the Establishment’s brief, accidental or token recognition of a poet whose specialty is a kind of otherstream poetry such as sound poetry, make him suddenly “mainstream”—“mainstream” being those kinds of poetry recognized (more than tokenly or accidentally) by the Establishment as having value.
Defining major generalities like whatever I mean by “otherstream poetry,” is not easy. Hence, over the past twenty-five years, I’ve re-defined it many times. My attempt to get it right for Jake’s essay was the following:
‘Otherstream’ is my adjective for works of art the great majority of arts academics, well-known critics, commercial publishers and commercial magazine editors know little more than the names of, if that. A brief definition: art of a kind that’s not taught in college courses. For me, it means approximately, but only approximately, the opposite of ‘mainstream.’ What it’s the exact opposite of is ‘knownstream.’ That’s because some art is knownstream, like certain kinds of very formal verse–the sestina, say, is well known to most literature professors but is not what you’d call a kind of ‘mainstream’ poetry.”
It is this definition that Seth Abramson takes on, with the claim that “we need to point out from the outset that it’s not at all functional, for five reasons.” Three of his reasons concern terms not of hardly importance to what my definition is about. He finds genuine faults in them, but not faults that would keep anyone but a ridiculously literal-minded reader from know what I meant. He then claims my main definition is a tautology, which is preposterous, as I will show. He then has trouble with my term, “knownstream,” due to his excessive literal-mindedness. He never addresses what my term is centrally about, the difference between certified poetry and the poetry otherstream. My definition definitely had a few slight flaws, but it was still definitely functional.
I will soon get to Abramson’s objections. First, though, I would like to thank him sincerely for taking up Jake’s, Jeff’s, and my issue, and taking it up at some length (although I fear he could use an editor specializing in cutting). I may finally get my definition of the otherstream completely right, and take care of the problem I’ve always had with poetry which, in my view, is neither otherstream nor mainstream, thanks to what he wrote.
Abramson’s first reason for considering “otherstream” non-functional is that my term,
“Arts academics” (his emphasis) is not restricted to (and definitionally cannot be restricted to) English departments, so it could include a lot of people Grumman couldn’t possibly be speaking of. Yet there are also many within English departments who we wouldn’t term “arts” academics, so it doesn’t include them either. Then there are those outside “the academy” who consciously and consistently and conspicuously “academicize” discourse on and surrounding poetry (particularly avant-garde poetries) through the use of specialized terminology (often misuse, like the avant-garde’s bastardization of the term “parataxis”). Like Grumman himself. Are these folks “arts academics” also? No one knows.
I admit that my term is a muddy one, but quite innocent and of little account. (Nonetheless, it won’t be in my revised definition.) I contend that just about any of my readers will have an idea of what an arts academic is that’s reasonably close to mine. It’s basically professors and professor-types, to be no less vague—because there’s no need for great clarity in a definition the aim of which is merely to convey gists.
Next Abramson cites my “great majority” as a weasel word. Sure, it’s a weasel word, but I contend that it’s an appropriate, necessary one. I suppose I could have used “90% or more,” but it seems to me someone less ridiculously exacting than Abramson would know I meant that, or something near that. Remember, the context is a paper arguing that a great portion of the contemporary American poetry continuum has been slighted. Would “great majority” mean 51% in such a paper?
He cites “well-known” as a similar weasel word. Baloney. I’m willing to let each individual reader use his own definition of “well-known,” for I’m pretty sure he won’t use it to mean someone like me, whose blog may have a hundred readers—especially, again, in the context of an essay arguing what Jake’s argues.
Later Abramson has trouble with what I mean by “commercial publisher.” He himself answers the question with “trade press,” which is what I meant, but which “commercial publisher,” a near-synonym, got into my head first. In my improved definition I will more carefully describe which kind of publisher I mean, although I don’t think it’s possible to pin it down exactly. Again, though, almost anyone reading me would know that I mean publisher of the kinds of books that you’ll find in places like Books-a-Million.
Abramson has trouble with “knownstream,” too:
The term “knownstream,” like the term “otherstream,” depends entirely for its definition upon a term Grumman does not define–the “mainstream.” The “mainstream” is defined in a you-all-know-what-I-mean kind of way, yet that’s hardly good enough — as if we look at high-school level instruction (at least up until the mid-1990s) we’d probably say that received forms like sonnets are exactly what high school teachers teach. So when did the sonnet become non-mainstream, if it’s still the form of poetry most Americans are familiar with (I’d frankly speculate) as compared to any other? Whose mainstream are we speaking of?
I feel I don’t have to define “mainstream” in my definition of “otherstream.” If the reader has no good idea what I mean, it’s his responsibility to look it up, which he could in any standard dictionary, or he could consult other works of mine. But I do define it: it’s the approximate opposite of “otherstream.” That makes it what is taught in colleges. And I repeat that it isn’t important for the reader to know precisely what’s mainstream, otherstream or knownstream, only have a rough idea that there are three important kinds of poetry extant, and one of them is being unfairly ignored by the Establishment.
Abramson’s silliest argument against my term was calling my short definition of it a tautology:
The “brief definition” of “otherstream” art is “art that’s not taught in college courses”? Isn’t that a tautology? (Q: What’s the “otherstream”? A: Art that’s not taught in college courses. Q: How do you know it’s not taught in college courses? A: Because it’s the “otherstream,” dummy!).
This seems outright insane to me. If someone asked me what the otherstream was, and I told him it’s art that’s not taught in college courses, and he asked me how I knew it wasn’t, I would never tell him it wasn’t because it was the otherstream. After stating that I was really speaking only of poetry, which I knew something about, admitting that I really meant that less than one percent of all college courses devoted to literature had to do with otherstream poetry. I would go one to tell him I knew this because of my amazing able to infer it from: (1) the near-total absence of otherstream poetry in the books used in college classes such as the various Norton anthologies; (2) the near-total absence of otherstream poetry appearing in the books and magazines published by college and university presses; (3) the near-total absence of any mention in books about poetry written by English professors that I’d read, or read reviews of, or browsed the table of contents of; (4) my never having heard from any of the many poets I know who produce otherstream poetry that they’d been invited to read at any college; (5) my having written many times in Internet discussion groups about the Establishment’s ignorance of the otherstream without anyone’s ever denying my argument (who had the slightest idea what kind of poetry otherstream poetry is); and much else of the same sort, such as Abramson’s own long dissertation-in-progress that seems to posit a war between opposing college and university faculties as having had something of consequence to do with the state of American poetry, but says just about nothing concerning otherstream poetry, which has grown and flourished in spite of its having been ignored by both faculty-groups Abramson seems to be talking about.
My final and greatest annoyance with Abramson is with his suggestion that “quite possibly Grumman designed his terms that way (“poorly”) –and with that intention (assuring that “no one can ever quantify which poets or poetries or poems are ‘otherstream,’ so all cultural capital accruing to that term stays with Grumman”). Now it happens that I am fanatically in favor of total freedom of speech, so I would never take poor Seth to court for his allegation. I have to say, however, that statements like it are about the only verbal abuse that offends me. In this case, if Abramson had read my response to Jake’s essay, he would have seen that I state with more than reasonable clarity pretty precisely what kinds of poetry my term refers to (i.e., a list of them “would include . . . visual poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry, contragenteel poetry, mathematical poetry, infra-verbal and grammar-centered poetry (the two main schools of genuine language poetry, cruptographic poetry, cyber poetry, and others I’ve forgotten about or missed”). But even in my general definition I define what I mean with enough objectivity for anyone likely to read my writings or Abramson’s to know what poets or poetries or poems are “otherstream.” I say otherstream poetries are poetries “of a kind that are not taught in college courses.” How can anyone not know from this what I mean? Go to a few colleges and list what kinds of poetry are taught there. Compare it to a list of all the varieties of poetry currently composed in America. If you find anything on your second list that is not on your first list, it is probably otherstream. True, you would have to get samples of kinds of poetry taught from a great many colleges to be sure any particular kind of poetry was indeed otherstream.
Otherstream poets are poets who compose poetry “of a kind that are not taught in college courses”; and otherstream poems are “of a kind that are not taught in college courses.” But, as previously stated, my definition is of kinds of poetries only.
Your biggest problem (and Abramson’s) is that the Establishment will keep you ignorant of all the varieties of poetry being composed so your list of all extant kinds of poetry will be defective.
Needless to say, I should not have said otherstream poetry is what’s “not taught in college courses,” but in my hurry to knock out my definition committed the common error of all-or-nothing. I should have said otherstream poetry is what’s very rarely taught in colleges. No, what I should have said is what I’ll be saying in my final definition, “To put it in brief, it is poetry that not more than twenty of our country’s junior college, college and university literature teachers devotes any significant attention to (i.e., as much as five minutes of an entire course).” I claim that almost any reasonable reader would have understood what I wrote to mean not what I said but what I must have meant if sane—since it wouldn’t be sane to claim no college taught any kind poetry however arcane.
It is now time to unveil my Final Definition of Otherstream Poetry:
“Otherstream” is my adjective for kinds of poetries that no more than twenty or thirty members of the contemporary American Poetry Establishment, as previous defined, have any significant knowledge of. To put it in brief, it is poetry that not more than twenty of our country’s junior college, college and university literature teachers devotes any significant attention to (i.e., as much as five minutes of an entire course). To specifically list the current kinds of otherstream literature is difficult because of their lack of recognition, but my best list at the moment is visual poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry, contragenteel poetry, mathematical poetry, cyber poetry, infra-verbal and grammar-centered poetry (the two main schools of genuine language poetry), polylingual poetry almost certainly other I can’t think of at the moment or don’t know about. I might add that there are a number of varieties of some of these, particularly of visual poetry.
It is the opposite of “Mainstream,” which is mine and many others’ adjective for all the kinds of poetry sanctioned by the Establishment—in the words of Charles, Bernstein, it is our country’s “Official Verse Culture.” The mainstream, to go on, is the kind poetry that takes up 99% of the time devoted to the teaching of poetry at 99% of the junior colleges, colleges and universities in the U.S. It is the kind of poetry poetry critics more than 500 Americans have heard of write about 99.9% of the time. It is the kind of poetry 101%–ooops, I mean 99.99% of the money cultural foundations award poets. It is the kind of poetry that takes up 99.67% of the pages of every poetry anthology or poetry collection that is published in America that reaches more than 500 people.
Because there are kinds of poetry well-known to, or at least somewhat known to, but pretty much ignored by members of the establishment such as the haiku, I distinguish it from both the mainstream and the otherstream as the “minorstream.” I suspect, though that more American poets compose, and more people love, minorstream poetry, which includes narrative poetry in the tradition of Robert W. Service, than mainstream poetry.
One last bit of news: Jeffrey Side is also taking on Abramson, who attacked his introduction of the Berry essay. His thrashing of Abramson is here.
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