Archive for the ‘Academia’ Category
Entry 1203 — More Boilerplate About Academics
Wednesday, September 4th, 2013
According to Gary Soto’s bio, his poem, “Oranges,” is the most antho-logized poem in contemporary literature. When Jim Finnegan reported this to New-Poetry, I replied, “Sounds like something an academic would say after checking six or seven mainstream anthologies. I may be wrong, but I doubt anyone can say what poem is more antholo-gized than any other, mainly because I don’t think anyone can know about all the anthologies published.”
Jerry McGuire responded to this and that resulted a little while ago (3 P.M.) in the following:
Bob, does it really take an academic to persuade you that a particular instance doesn’t prove a general claim? Even averaging things out, I suspect, people who write poetry for their own purposes–which are enormously varied and not in dispute–don’t strike me as “more adventurous” though I can’t for the life of me figure out what kind of “adventure” you have in mind) than academics who write poetry, some of whom are conservative, some middle-of-the-road, and some well out there beyond the fringe. If you mean, by the way, that academic writers are more likely to respect more elements of the history of poetry and include a greater historical variety among their preferences, perhaps I’d agree with you, intuitively, but I can’t prove it and I doubt you can either. As for “academics are in charge of poetry, and I include many people not employed by colleges as academics. An academic is, by my definition, by innate temperament, an automatic defender of the status quo,” your definition strikes me as self-serving and petty. What you know about my “innate temperament” (“for instance”?) hardly qualifies you to determine what’s “automatic” in my preferences, loves, hates, and particular decisions. As so often, you seem to be nurturing some sort of long grudge, and using the list to air your brute generalizations. Some of us do read these things, you know. And while crude prejudices don’t hurt my feelings–hardened over the years by the contempt of 18-year-olds for their elders–they sadden and disappoint me.
Jerry
On 9/4/2013 1:01 PM, Bob Grumman wrote:
I would claim that academics are much less adventurous (for good or bad) than non-academics–in general. Compare, for instance, the anthology that I would edit if allowed to the anthology David Graham would. Or, hey, compare the one he did edit (on conversational poetry, if my memory hasn’t completely died) with one I edited (on visual poetry). Ignoring which was better (and believe it or not, I would certainly be willing to say they were equal but different in spite of my preference for the poems in mine), consider only which would be considered more adventurous.
Jerry, I used a particular instance to illustrate a general claim. Maybe if I was able to find everything I’ve written on the subject, I could present a fairly persuasive case for my academic/non-academic division but I’m not, so for now will simply have to leave my opinion as just another Internet unsupporthesis. I’ll not be able to get into what adventurous is, either, except to say that Columbus was more adventurous than Captain Shorehugger because he went where none or almost none went while the cap’n went where many had been. The comparison holds even if the latter had found many things of value that had been overlooked by other shorehuggers (which is what the best academics are good at) and Columbus had sunk a hundred miles west of the Azores.
(Note, I can’t lose this argument because I define those you would call academics who are “well out there beyond the fringe as non-academics” since I believe that one employed by a college isn’t necessarily an academic, John M. Bennett and Mike Basinski, two Ph.D. college librarians [but neither of them with any clout at all in the poetry establishment] being cases in point.)
modestly yours, the World’s SUPREME Poventurerer
* * *
Jerry also wrote:
As for “academics are in charge of poetry, and I include many people not employed by colleges as academics. An academic is, by my definition, by innate temperament, an automatic defender of the status quo,” your definition strikes me as self-serving and petty. What you know about my “innate temperament” (“for instance”?)hardly qualifies you to determine what’s “automatic” in my preferences, loves, hates, and particular decisions. As so often, you seem to be nurturing some sort of long grudge, and using the list to air your brute generalizations. Some of us do read these things, you know. And while crude prejudices don’t hurt my feelings–hardened over the years by the contempt of 18-year-olds for their elders–they sadden and disappoint me.
Jerry
in a second post, I wrote:
I skipped the above, mistaking it for just a repeat of what I’d said in my post. I definitely have a long grudge, but when you ask what I know about your innate temperament, I’m afraid a possibly over-sensitive buzzer of yours made you take my words as personal. If you read what I say with care, you will see that I say nothing that would indicate that I consider you an academic, by my definition. I would say offhand that you are surely more of an academic than I. From what I’ve read of what you’ve written, I am sure, too, that you are much less of an academic, by my definition, than the people at the top of the poetry establishment. Just as I am, from some points of view, a terrible academic, since I believe artworks with no words of aesthetic significance cannot be poetry; that a good poem HAS to have some unifying principle (although it may be very difficult to discover and may even be chaos), that what I call otherstream poetry is just a different kind of poetry, not a better kind; that literary criticism is as valuable as poetry; and many other opinions.
Now for a little snarkiness: the belief that academic are not automatic defenders of the status quo is as crude as the belief that they are. And my belief that the majority of those making a living in college English departments are automatic defenders of the status quo is not a prejudice but the result of quite a bit of study and thought, however misguide others may think it. So there. True, an academic study of academics would be helpful if thorough and honest. How about a comparison of all the poetry critics on a list of poetry critics with writings in publications almost everyone would agree are mainstream, like Poetry and The New Yorker and those on a list of those who have written a reasonably large amount of poetry criticism just about never in such publications–like I. You could include the language poetry critics active before 1990, when language poetry became what I called “acadominant,” meaning widely accepted by academics as important, even by the many against–who showed they thought it important by campaigning against it. It proved me right by being confirmed as the right edge of Wilshberia around 1900 with the acceptance of a language poet into the American academy of poets, and mainstream anthologies of language poetry. Something of the sort will eventually be done, but not for several decades, I suspect.
–Bob
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Entry 1167 — Another Null Poetry Discussion
Tuesday, July 30th, 2013
What follows is a response of mine to what some academics are saying about contemporary poetry here.
What I find interesting about the discussion is how representative it is of academics’ discussions of what they take to be the State of Contemporary Poetry–wholly blind, that is, to ninety percent of the various kinds of superior innovative poetry being fashioned outside of university-certified venues–the various kinds of poetry I call “otherstream,” that is. Perloff rather beautifully demonstrates this when she writes, “you can’t very well oppose the Penguin canon by bringing up the names of what are, outside the world of small-press and chapbook publishing, wholly unknown poets.”
Why on earth not?! A competent, responsible critic would be able to find and list whole schools of poets “who are, outside the world of small-press and chapbook publishing, wholly unknown” and show with judicious quotation and commentary why the work of those in them is superior to 95% of the work of living poets in the Penguin. But no, with academics it’s never the superior ignored poets and schools of superior poets that are left out of mainstream anthologies that matter, only certain favored poets already accepted by the academy that have been.
Meanwhile, needless to say, neither Perloff nor her opponent defines her terms nor provides helpful details about the poetry under discussion. In short, one more discussion by people of limited understanding of contemporary poetry, for people with even less knowledge–presented in such a way, alas, as to convince members of the general public that they are actually finding out about the most important poetry of today.
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Entry 484 — Another Exchange with an Academic
Thursday, August 18th, 2011
From New-Poetry yesterday and this morning (slightly revised for clarity):
B.G.: Here’s an easy question, David. Do you think a book by an established critic like Vendler or Logan about 5 poets representing schools of poetry no established critic has every written seriously about, would be more worth writing than one about Levine?
D.G.: Yes, that’s an easy question. The answer is: it depends on what they write.
B.G.: Obviously, I meant if some critic like Vendler wrote a book of criticism at the level of the critic’s other works, which would you rather the critic write about–Five poets as written-about as Levine, or five poets representing schools no well-known critic has seriously written about.
D.G.: I don’t have opinions about work I haven’t read, and I don’t assume anything is automatically “better” based on the criteria that you
B.G.: Whenever anyone poses a question like mine, “better” means “according to the person asked.” Why can’t you meet these simple questions head-on?
=================
D.G.: This’ll be the last from me on this go-round, Bob.
B.G.: To me, it is, David. To me, what I’m asking, to rephrase to meet your weirdly insistent need to avoid answering my question, is which of the two works I mention do you believe you would turn out preferring having read if you were to read both. The question underlying this is do you believe a book by a prominent critic about poetry doing things no prominent critic has written about would be more valuable than a book by the same critic, at the same level of effectiveness, about poetry doing things many prominent critics have discussed.
Your contention that you don’t have opinions about books that you haven’t read, by the way, seems unlikely. How is it, for example, that you haven’t bought and read a book of my criticism but have bought and read many books by certified critics and read them if you started off having no opinion about any of those books? Do you have to read every book you read through to the end to develop an opinion of it, on the grounds that you can’t have an opinion of any part you don’t read, and that you need to in order to have an opinion of the book as a whole? Do you read every email sent you including spam all the way through? You must if you read any of them since you can’t have an opinion of them without doing so.
I tend to think your outlook is based on a fear of expressing an opinion that most people will consider wrong. I don’t have that fear, so am quite able to form and express opinions without full knowledge of every fact having to do with the subject my opinion is about. I’m confident that if I’m wrong, I’ll be able to change my mind. I’m also confident that this way I’ll be able to say many more interesting things than a person who fears looking bad.
D.G.: Nor do I think, as you evidently do, that it’s automatically “better” to pay attention to a given poet just because that style hasn’t been paid as much attention as, well, as the styles of poetry that most people actually enjoy reading.
But how will you know that you won’t prefer the undiscussed style to the received style if all the commentators you’re willing to read won’t discuss it? Isn’t that really having an opinion of something you haven’t read, the opinion being that it’s not at all a bad thing that only your sort of poetry be discussed by prominent critics?
D.G.: Plenty of great music to be written in C major, and all that. There could be a great book on Levine being written right now, for all I know.
B.G.: There’s nothing wrong with having an opinion before reading it that a book that has a 1% chance of saying something interesting about a much-discussed poet will be better than one that covers an unfamiliar kind of poetry, but why can’t you openly admit that you do? I have no trouble stating that I think another book on Levine by some prominent critic will have no chance at all of being as valuable as a book by the same critic about the kind of poets you consider the equivalent of cowboys kicking moose skulls and calling it baseball (or something close to that).
Entry 447 — Me Versus Academia, Again
Monday, May 23rd, 2011
David Graham made one of his always reasonable, never alarming posts to a thread on a 1993 book of Heather McHugh’s about the use of fragments in poetry, Broken English. He couldn’t keep from making what I took to be a crack at me, and was unable not to reply to.
. . . I think McHugh’s right–if I understand her point, what she’s talking about is not a particular technique but an effect reachable by various means at various times, one of those first principles that I referred to before. The high modernists, who were crazy about collage, were in this light not inventing anything entirely new so much as finding a fresh path to an age-old destination.
(All worthy destinations are age-old?)
This principle of disjunction, then, is visible in Whitman’s whip-saw juxtapositions, Stein’s fracturing of syntax, Eliot’s fragments shored against the ruins, the electric leap in a haiku, surrealist imagery, and so forth, right up through more recent instances such as Ginsberg’s “hydrogen jukebox” and Ashbery’s ruminative ramblings.
I’m just thinking aloud here, and no doubt overgeneralizing, but it occurs to me that there is at least a kinship between poetry such as Dean Young’s and a lot of language-centered poetry with which it wouldn’t normally be compared. Rather like Ashbery, Young employs utterly conventional syntax, image, and figure; but the results are most slippery and unparaphraseable. He doesn’t fracture language itself, but there is plenty of disjunction and fragmentation at the conceptual level.
If you focus mostly on the easy binaries (style/theme; free verse/meter; traditional/experimental) you would naturally miss recognizing this sort of kinship. If, for example, all your definitions of poetry focused relentlessly on
purely technical matters such as the handling of syntax.
My response: “I suppose if you focused all your consideration of poetry on the techniques objectively distinguishing each kind from all others, you’d possibly miss as much as ten percent of the things you’d miss if you focused it only on the trivial kinships that can be found between any two kinds of poems. (Note: there is more to appreciating poetry than defining it, although that’s the most important part of intelligently appreciating it.)”
In a second post, I opined that “all worthy destinations are much more age-old than new, but never not-new in some significant way.”
Entry 433 — Graham vs. Grumman, Part 99999
Monday, April 25th, 2011
It started with David Graham posting the following poem to New-Poetry:
. Mingus at The Showplace
.
. I was miserable, of course, for I was seventeen,
. and so I swung into action and wrote a poem,
. and it was miserable, for that was how I thought
. poetry worked: you digested experience and shat
. literature. It was 1960 at The Showplace, long since
. defunct, on West 4th St., and I sat at the bar,
. casting beer money from a thin reel of ones,
. the kid in the city, big ears like a puppy.
. And I knew Mingus was a genius. I knew two
. other things, but as it happened they were wrong.
. So I made him look at the poem.
. “There’s a lot of that going around,” he said,
. and Sweet Baby Jesus he was right. He glowered
. at me but he didn’t look as if he thought
. bad poems were dangerous, the way some poets do.
. If they were baseball executives they’d plot
. to destroy sandlots everywhere so that the game
. could be saved from children. Of course later
. that night he fired his pianist in mid-number
. and flurried him from the stand.
. “We’ve suffered a diminuendo in personnel,”
. he explained, and the band played on.
.
. William Matthews
. Time & Money
. Houghton Mifflin Company
.
I Liked it for the same reasons I like many of Charles Bukowski’s poems, so I said, “Good poem. Makes me wonder if he was influenced or influenced Bukowski. Seems like something by Bukowski, Wilshberianized.”
Mike Snider responded that “Matthews was a far better poet than Bukowski thought himself to be, and he did indeed know his jazz. At the other end of some cultural curve, I love his translations of Horace and Martial.
“And I love your work, Bob, but ‘Wilshberia’ is getting quite a bit past annoying.”
I may be unique among Internetters in that when I post something and someone (other than a troll) responds to it, I almost always carry on the discussion. I did that here: “I think Bukowski at his rawest best was equal to Matthews, but extremely uneven. One of his poems about a poetry reading has the same charge for me that this one of Matthews’s has. I haven’t read enough Mattews to know, but suspect he wrote more good poems than Bukowski did.
“(As for my use of ‘Wilshberia,” I’m sorry, Mike, but it can’t be more annoying to you than Finnegan’s constant announcements of prizes to those who never work outside Wilshberia are to those of us who do our best work outside of it, prizelessly. Also, I contend that it is a useful, accurate term. And descriptive, not derogatory.”
At this point David Graham took over for Mike with some one of his charateristics attempts at wit: “Sorry, Mike, but I have to agree with Bob here. Just as he says, ‘Wilshberia’ is a useful, accurate term, in that it allows someone to see little important difference between the work of Charles Bukowski and William Matthews.
“Think how handy to have such a term in your critical vocabulary. Consider the time saved. Sandburg and Auden: pretty much the same. Shakespeare and Marlowe: no big diff. Frost and Stevens: who could ever tell them apart?
“It’s like you were an entomologist, and classified all insects into a) Dryococelus australis (The Lord Howe Stick Insect) and b) other bugs.”
Professor Graham is always most wittily condescending when he’s sure he has ninety percent of the audience behind him, which was sure to be the case here.
Needless to say, I fired back: “Seeing a similarity between those two is different from seeing “little important difference between” them, as even an academic should be able to understand.
“Wilshberia, for those who can read, describes a continuum of poetry ranging from very formal poetry to the kind of jump-cut free association of the poetry of Ashbery. The sole thing the poets producing the poetry on it have in common is certification by academics.
“No, David, (it’s not like being an entomologist who “classified all insects into a} Dryococelus australis [The Lord Howe Stick Insect] and b} other bugs). Because visual poetry, sound poetry, performance poetry, cyber poetry, mathematical poetry, cryptographic poetry, infraverbal poetry, light verse, contragenteel poetry, haiku (except when a side-product of a certified poet) and no doubt others I’m not aware of or that have slipped my mind are meaninglessly unimportant to academics as dead to what poems can do that wasn’t widely done fifty or more years ago as you does not mean they are the equivalent on a continuum of possible poetries to a Lord Howe Stick Insect in a continuum of possible insects.” Then I thanked the professor for “another demonstration of the academic position.”
My opponent wasn’t through: “A rather nice nutshell of my oft-expressed reservation about Bob’s critical habits above. Note how in his definition of Wilshberia above, ‘the sole thing’ that characterizes such poetry is ‘certification by academics.’ I think we all know what ‘sole’ means. OK, then, it has nothing whatsoever to do, say, with technical concerns. There is no meaningful aesthetic distinction involved. And thus it is obviously not definable according to whether it is breaking new technical ground, because “the sole thing” that defines it is whether academics ‘certify’ it, whatever that means. And as we well know, academics tend to appreciate a spectrum of verse, from the traditional forms and themes of a Wilbur to the fragmentation and opacity of various poets in the language-centered realm.
“But look at the second paragraph above. What are academics being accused of? Oh, it seems we don’t appreciate poetry that breaks new technical ground or challenges our aesthetics. We don’t like poetry of various aesthetic stripes recognized as important by Bob.
“Whether or not that accusation is even true (another argument), does anyone else see a certain logical problem here?”
I didn’t say much. Only that he was wrong that “There is no meaningful aesthetic distinction involved” involved in my characterization of Wilshberia because aesthetic distinctions are involved to the degree that they affect academic certifiability, which they must–as must whether the poetry of Wilshberia is breaking new technical ground.
I proceeded to say, “The meaning of academic certification should be self-evident. It is anything professors do to indicate to the media and commercial publishers and grants-bestowers that certain poems are of cultural value. Certification is awarded (indirectly) by teaching certain poems and poets–and not others; writing essays and books on certain poems and poets–and not others; paying certain poets and not others to give readings or presentations at their universities; and so forth. What (the great majority of) academics have been certifying in this way for fifty years or more is the poetry of Wilshberia.” “Only,” I would now add.
I also noted that I had I previously defined Wilshberia solely as academically certified poetry. “Implicitly, though,” I claimed, “I also defined it as poetry ranging in technique from Wilbur’s to Ashbery’s. Since that apparently wasn’t clear, let me redefine Wilshberia as “a continuum of that poetry ranging from very formal poetry to the kind of jump-cut free association of the poetry of Ashbery which the academy has certified (in the many ways the academy does that, i.e., by exclusively teaching it, exclusively writing about it, etc.)”
Oh, and I disagreed that ” . . . as we well know, academics tend to appreciate a spectrum of verse, from the traditional forms and themes of a Wilbur to the fragmentation and opacity of various poets in the language-centered realm.”
“My claim,” said I, “remains that the vast majority of them think when they say they like all kinds of poets from Wilbur to Ashbery that they appreciate all significant forms of poetry. I have previously named many of the kinds they are barely aware of, if that.”
That was enough for the professor. He retired to an exchange with New-Poetry’s nullospher, Halvard Johnson, about not having a certificate indicating he was a poet in good standing.
Entry 357 — The Smugness of Wilshberians
Monday, January 24th, 2011
To keep posting a daily entry, here’s a post I wrote a month-and-a-half ago in response to David Graham, who near-perfectly personifies the Wilshberian:
Let’s run a bit with the sports analogy. Wilshberia as Bob tends to define it would not just include the major & minor leagues of pro baseball, but every single college, high school, middle school, and community league. Plus sandlot games, softball at company picnics & family reunions. Fathers playing catch with kids in the back yard, too, of course. Oh, and naturally all games overseas, not to mention computer baseball games & fantasy leagues.
What wouldn’t the label encompass?
Well, such things as two guys in Havre, Montana who like to kick a deer skull back & forth and call it “baseball.” Sure, there’s no bat, ball, gloves, diamond, fans, pitcher, or catcher– but they do call it baseball, and wonder why the mainstream media consistently fails to mention their game.
Our minds seem to be running in parallel, David. I was just thinking that the reason no academics have or can come up with a (better) term for Wilshberia (which they consider derogatory although I consider it descriptive) is that they think it the whole of poetry, so not needing a name. In other words, for them the range of poetry from Wilbur’s to Ashbery’s is the complete range of poetry. And people like me, who compose things we think are poems but which are considerably different from anything Wilshberian poets are composing should not mind being considered no more poets than “two guys in Havre, Montana who like to kick a deer skull back & forth” are baseball players.
