Column068 –September/October 2004
Hurricane Charley
Volume 36, Numbers 9/10, September/October 2004
Handbook of Literary Terms.
X.J. Kennedy, Dana Gioia and Mark Bauerlein, Editors.
165 pp; 2004; Pa; Pearson Longman,
www.ablongman.com. $21.20.
It looked like it’d hit further north, and just give us standard tropical storm winds. At the last minute, though, it swerved into Charlotte Harbor and whipped up the Peace River. Port Charlotte, where I live, is the first town on the north bank of the Peace River. Punta Gorda, where I substitute teach, is on the opposite bank. Both got hit pretty hard. Winds near 140 mph at times, the report was.
I came out of it okay, I guess. Twenty minutes or so of more than a little apprehension, with my cat in the bathroom. A quite tall pine and a sprawling huge oak within five or six feet of my house were my main worry. I didn’t hear anything slam into the house, though. Then of the light the eye of the storm let into my living room, particularly dazzling because so many backyard branches that would have been screening it, and two orange trees were gone. More wind followed after a short while, but less than I was expecting.
I lost enough shingles to need a new roof, and most of my lanai (which is what we in Florida call a screened-in back porch). Almost all my trees but the orange trees survived, although my yard was covered with branches, some tree-sized.
My neighborhood was without electricity for around ten days–with temperatures around 90, and the usual Florida humidity. No gas for hot water, and no cable tv. The mail stopped, but only for a couple of days. No phone, either, for me. That was what bothered me the most, for I couldn’t get on the Internet, even after power was restored. I still can’t, after over two weeks as I write this. MCI had a trailer in one of the shopping centers where you could phone or use the Internet free, though, so I was able to let friends and family know I was all right. (Corporate Capitalism has some heart–many other businesses helped out, giving away plywood, tarps, water, ice! The Salvation Army and Red Cross were there from day one with free meals and other help, too. The government also pitched in quickly: I got a sizable check for my uninsured roof from FEMA just a week after I applied for assistance. And mine and all my local friends’ neighbors were terrific, volunteering chain saw services, running errands, just checking to make sure all was okay. . . .)
Needless to day, I got further behind than ever with my writing. Who can write with just a pencil or pen? I really wasn’t in a state to do much Serious Writing, anyway. I’m still not, although I have the use of my computer again. I’m always able to gripe about the American Poetry Establishment, though, and I have to get this column done, so that’s what I’m going to do for the rest of it.
To do that, I s’pose I have to define what I mean by “the American Poetry Establishment.” No easy task, that. There’s the Harvard/New Yorker axis with its Iowa University satellite-turned-equal. This axis, or something like it, does not overtly dictate what kind of poetry is in, what kind out, so much as very influentially take it for granted that no poetry exists except its kind–which ranges from the “experimental poetry” of John Ashbery to the traditional poetry (most of the time) of Richard Wilbur. Or, 90% or more of the reasonably significant poetry currently being composed–but less than 10% of the kinds of significant poetry being composed. Consequently, few college English departments teach anything but knownstream poetry; no reputable publisher publishes anything but knownstream poetry; no anthologist whose product will have a print run of a thousand or more copies includes more than one or two token burstnorm poems in it; no critic in any periodical reaching more than a few hundred readers does more than mention one or two uncertified poets–at most; no prize of any significance goes to anyone seriously trying to advance the possibilities of poetry (unless he’s so old the stasguards in charge no longer feel threatened by what he’s doing, or he represents some victim group).
And reference books like Handbook of Literary Terms, which could easily slip in a few burstnorm terms such as “visual poetry,” “sound poetry,” “mathematical poetry” (if not “mathemaku”), “performance poetry,” “infraverbal poetry,” “computer poetry,” “jump-cut poetry,” “hypertext,” among its definitions of “cowboy poetry,” “clerihew,” “new formalism,” “play review,” “projective verse,” “print culture,” “rap,” don’t. To be fair, I must report that this book has an entry on “minimalism” that quotes a poem by Karl Kempton that my Runaway Spoon Press published–though with nothing in the entry to indicate the editors have any idea what the poem is doing (they suggest it attains “blankness” by being “pared back to near-pure description”).
It also has an entry on “concrete poetry” to make up somewhat for the absence of one on visual poetry. It quotes the same falling leaf poem by E. E. Cummings that the 1974 edition of The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics used in its definition of concrete poetry. But that was one of the examples of visual poetry I used in my Of Manywhere-at-Once, so I shouldn’t complain. Amusingly, Handbook of Literary Terms has a fairly substantial entry on language poetry–one more indication of that poetry’s acadominance (my term for that which the advanced few in academia most admire, and their slower peers have to denigrate, being unable to oppose it with obliviousness, their preferred tactic against superior art). The absorption of language poetry into the axis previously mentioned is clearly under way, and accelerating.
I had a number of disagreements with definitions in Handbook of Literary Terms. For instance, I consider “doggerel” to be rhymed unmetrical poetry rather than poetry that superior people consider bad, the uselessly subjective definition the handbook has. But most of its definitions are sound. I really don’t have that much against it. It’s competent, and intended only for “undergraduates getting their first taste of serious literary study,” according to its introduction, so one can’t expect it to be too advanced. Still, I wish books like it would present a larger, truer idea of what’s going on in American poetry at present.