Archive for the ‘The Establishment’ Category
Entry 1471 — From an Internet Poetry Discussion
Sunday, June 1st, 2014
Another quickie today–to give me more time on my essay on Beauty, which is starting to come around!
I tend to see Poetry‘s finally getting around to accepting forms of visual poetry because, now that it has been a seriously-pursued variety of poetry for a hundred years in this country, they more or less have to. So some of them have actually given it thoughtful examination–and found to their surprise that they like a portion of it. The portion they like, will–it goes without saying, but I’ll say it, anyway–only be, in most cases, a notch above big and little but with time, and the help of young academics more able to appreciate it, they’ll come to appreciate it the way they now appreciate Pound and Joyce. By then, of course, people like us will be doing who-knowz-wot, and grumbling at the gate-keepers.
I’m in the final analysis an optimist, but it does seem to me that the Establishment now rates the American poetry of the first half of the twentieth-century fairly accurately, albeit still not giving Cummings his due, but writing about all the poets of the time worth writing about, unless there are a few as concealed as Emily was that they’ve overlooked.
With that, I may have said all I have to say on this most interesting topic.
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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 802 — Intelligence, Biology and the Establishment
Tuesday, July 17th, 2012
Every time I write about the way biology works against a society’s best minds, do it differently. But I keep trying to get it right. My latest thinking posits three kinds of intelligence, Vocational Effectiveness Intelligence, Vocational Magnitude Intelligence and Creative Intelligence, all of them genetically-determined. These are all general intelligences. Vocational Effectiveness is approximately what IQ tests measure: the capacity to solve common problems quickly and well. Vocational Magnitude Intelligence might be a synonym for ambition. The higher one’s VMQ is, the larger the contribution to your culture you will try to make. A Ninth Symphony for a composer, say, rather than a sitcom’s theme. As for Creative Intelligence, it’s just what its name indicates, one’s ability to be innovative. Note that I don’t say “effectively” creative. One needs good Vocational Effectiveness Intelligence to be that. Add good Vocational Magnitude Intelligence to those two and you get Beethoven’s symphonies and Wagner’s operas. Subtract Vocational Magnitude from it and you may get Richard Rodgers’ musicals. A person whose VMQ and VEQ are both high, but whose CQ is average or lower, will be someone like most US presidents, or most Forbes 500 CEOs–efficient at doing what others have done before them.
To a good extent the double-high-VQs, as I call them, run most establishments, including the Contemporary Poetry Establishment, fighting for the double-high-VQs in the field with high enough CQs to be superior poets, but not high enough CQs to be otherstream poets. A few poets high in both CQ and VEQ but low in VMQ may break into certification, but only the triple-High-Qs in poetry most clever at concealing genius, or most incredibly lucky, will–less than a century after their births.
Biology is the reason for this. Societies need double-High-VQs to fare well–by forming establishments that oversee the repetition at their most complex of those behaviors that have brought their society to where it is, and defending them. High-VEQs and VMQs make up the establishments lower ranks. High-CQs are valuable for enlivening things–providing slightly unconventional interior decoration for the standard architecture that result from the double-high-VQs’ leadership. Triple-Qs are guarded against because if allowed, they could very well cause damage in one or more of the following ways–(1) propel their society too far in some significant field that not enough others could keep up with them well enough to exploit the resulting advances, so the field would be reduced to chaos, which would harmfully jar related fields and possible spread worrisomely far through a society’s entire culture; (2) simply burden many fields with more new knowledge than anyone can handle–including the triple-High-Qs themselves (each of whom could handle his own field’s otherstream but not ten other fields’ otherstreams); (3) successful triple-High-Qs happening to have opposite world-views could lead to the most damaging of possible wars; (4) the advances wrought by triple-High-Qs might use up too many resources too quickly; (5) the success of even one triple-high-Q in a field would make the leaders of that field’s Establishment feel tenth-rate by comparison (inappropriately, because–ultimately–a society needs them as much as it needs its triple-High-Qs); (6) if Triple-High-Qs were rewarded on the basis of their achievements, they would flourish and tend to have more children than they do now, which would greatly increase the harm they did.
As should be obvious, I’m mostly just throwing together arguments against allowing Triple-High-Qs to become rich and famous. I hope that my main point is nonetheless clear: A society’s second-best must defend it from its best . . . for enough time for the society to get where the best have gotten two or three generations before (which really isn’t that far, although it will seem so to those struggling merely to keep up with the society’s natural slow advance, and all healthy societies will advance, in spite of their Establishments). Ways will be found to keep the Triple-High-Qs from suicide (most of the time) becauwse while their discoveries and inventions must be defended against, the defense must eventually fail for the society involved to avoid stagnation and death.
first draft warning, first draft-warning, first-draft warning
I felt like I was writing mush at times while working on the above, but I didn’t slow down, wanting to get as many of my thoughts in as possible; I ad hocced many terms, like the various Qs, as needed. I think what I’ve written is interesting but when greatly improved, and fit into my over-all view of cultural history and/or the psychology of cultural achievement or whatever, may well bother more than one Establishment enough for them to send a primary jeerer to attack it. I’m too beat now to start fixing it, or even to look at it.
Urp.
Note: it’s quite possible that biology forces even Triple-High-Qs to try to defend their society against them.
Oh, one last thing: the CQ depends (entirely) on accommodance, the cerebral mechanism I’ve mentioned here before; the VEQ has (most) to do with accelerance, another of my hypothetical brain mechanisms; VMQ depends (most) on charactration, or the cerebrum’s basal metabolism, the third mechanism of general intelligence I have posited for many years. These all have to do with the body’s use of energy, so should be no more implausible than the body’s (mostly glandular) mechanisms’ role in physical activity.
Personal, possibly related, note: my attempt to get a museum interested in my mathematical poetry work seems to have failed to get even a thank you, not interested, letter; my earlier attempt to involve Charles Murray in a correspondence the kind of thing I write about above seems to have failed, too–no response; but I wrote him in care of The New Criterion, so some cretin there may have thought it not important enough to pass on to Murray, or may have simply lost it as things get lost in busy companies. Let’s see, I also have a letter-to-the-editor of Free Inquiry I haven’t heard back about; it still could appear in the next issue, not yet out, though–or the one after it. I do sympathize with the kind of people I send such material to, for cranks can be a nuisance and they can’t know for sure that if I’m a crank, I’m not the kind who makes a nuisance of himself. I give up quickly. I think my final attempt to be accepted through the servants’ entrance to an Establishment is a summary of my theory of general intelligence that I made as an Internet comment to a peer-review-level text at a Scientific American site that I haven’t had the gumption to put into final form and post. So it goes. But the activities of The Argotist against the poetry establishment in which I’ve become a main participant seem to be having some small effect. . . .
One last note: I’m involved, as I almost always am, in a round of the Computer strategy game, Civilization. It’s not the undumbest pastime I can think of, but it should certainly seem less important to me than my psychological theorizing or my poetry. I can’t swear it doesn’t, though.
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Entry 799 — The Contemporary American Poetry Establishment
Saturday, July 14th, 2012
This is the latest version of my definition of the contemporary American poetry establishment (the only arts establishment I feel qualified to define):
The Contemporary American Poetry 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–and, of course, the involvement of many members of even Ivy League English departments in the establishment is too slight for them to contribute anything more to it than applause for its decisions. Add to this (2) the staffs of all trade, university or small presses publishing poetry collections in editions of a thousand or more, and the staffs of all periodicals with a circulation of a thousand or more that publish poetry and/or commentary on poetry. 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 institutions such as the American Academy of Poets, and (5) whoever it is at significant grants- and awards-bestowing formal 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: (2) through (5) together act in unison (instinctively, I believe, when not consciously copying each other’s choices as much as possible) to favor the status quo over what I call “the Otherstream” and (1) simply follows their lead. (I’d be surprised if I haven’t overlooked any other members of this establishment, so would welcome additions to my list.)
I’m eager for feedback, negative or positive–as a comment to this entry or to me privately at [email protected].
My next, much more difficult definition, will be of who most counts in the establishment just defined. I have no inside knowledge or and have done little real research of the matter, but my impression is that it’s possible that only a few of the “major” critics truly count: the academics in the most prestigious universities who are also are best-known and acclaimed critics. My guess is that the establishment has an inner establishment with Vendler, Bloom and a few others at the top, and their acolytes acting like executive secretaries for them–or like the young lawyers who assist supreme court justices–with acolytes of the acolytes the link to promising new mainstream poets.
Having written what I just have, I perceive I have no more to say on the subject.
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Entry 676 — A Reaction to a Post to New-Poetry
Tuesday, March 6th, 2012
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Stephen Russell had some interesting posts concerning thoughts of Donald Hall at New-Poetry yesterday, one of which included the following “defining sentence of Hall’s”:
Although in theory workshops serve a useful purpose in gathering young artists together, workshop practices enforce the McPoem.
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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 444 — My Latest Pop-Off
Friday, May 20th, 2011
In case the morons at Poetry don’t post my pop-off, and they haven’t yet, here is approximately what I said (unfortunately, I failed to keep a copy):
Why should anyone care what one third-rate knownstream critic has to say in praise of poetry that has been acadominant for over twenty years now (although only recently noticed by Poetry Magazine), so-called “language poetry” (which is just collections of non sequiturs with none of the significant focus on the aesthetic uses of grammar that real language poetry has) compared with what another third-rate knownstream critic has to say in praise of the kinds of poetry established long before that when there’s innovative poetry extant to explore far from the tired interests of such critics–and Poetry Magazine.
Hmmm, I think I improved it. I definitely made it nastier, out of annoyance for Poetry’s not posting it. I now think it would have been interesting to have added a challenge to Poetry and its readers to visit my infraverbal mathematical poems at Tip of the Knife or my mathematical poems at the Otherstream Unlimited Blog and tell me why they, and poems like them, don’t deserve recognition. My poems rather than anyone else’s because I feel I can argue more knowledgeably for them against the Philistines than I can for any others. But also because of my growing egocentric need to yowl for me!
Later note: my comment was posted. It was followed by a comment consisting almost entirely of a quotation of Adorno which seemed to me nothing but meaningless subjective gush.
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.
Bob, You should give us a link to your post
Sorry. I didn’t think any of my readers would be interested in anything posted at Poetry Magazine’s blog. aside, possibly, from my reaction to it. But here it is http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poetrymagazine/article/241856.
–Bob