Archive for the ‘Jerry McGuire’ 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 941 — Pronouncements and Blither, Part 3
Monday, December 3rd, 2012
An acadumbot had asserted that some poet his very commercially-oriented small press had published was one of the recent NEA grant winners. Countering a post of mine doubting that anyone doing otherstream work would have much chance of winning such a grant, he said her work was “experimental.” When I asked him to say why it was, he told me to use Google to find out. After I snapped back at him about his being satisfied with empty assertions, I got into a more intelligent discussion with Jerry McGuire and Barry Spacks. Barry started it off (yesterday) with a complaint:
“Not to rein on Ms. Mangold’s euphormium-moment (Mangold being the poet described as experimental by the acadumbot I mentioned), but it happens to summon my hobbyhorse, so I mount up again (we each have our own, Bob) — namely to cite poetry’s Gresham’s Law, that impossibly arbitrary stuff that’s passed off — God knows why — as the brave new thing drives out work of actual value such as Wilbur’s and Ashbery’s Great Experiments. Proof? Proof lies in the fact that It’s just so unspeakably easy to mix up a word salad and sit back awaiting the prize. I’d bet there’s not a single person on this list who couldn’t, in 3 minutes, run up a jump-cut piece at least as good (i.e. bad) as the me-me self-indulgencies that often pass for meriting attention in our perverse day. Poor poetry — talk about The Art of Sinking! Or, to put it in a more prize-winning way:
Three Minutes by Clock Driving the Ghost of A. Pope Nuts
man gold gal gold echestamy
warrants the B-cleft glockinspiel —
hath reverence then a zealand smirk
on the upper West side? or in excelsis?
‘Zads, Mary, taunt the tale in creatures, Joyce’s Christ!
Do not impale the rectuary, do not
o-noble me, sly shrubbery,
quontom-phantom heliovort!
I come to bury Ceasar, and in my day,
I maketh the sweats in thirds,
do offer up yon plangent potato
please, please relequate the nose factor
can’t somebody give an ahem?
(no time left, but that’s just because
Google went so slow on the spelling checks
and 3 minutes is really hardtack, Jeb).
“Send the check to the Belize address.
“with a song in my heart, Barry”
Jerry replied to this as follows:
“My teacher, Al Cook, in talking about Koch’s Wishes, Lies, and Dreams (it’s a book about teaching kids to write poetry, for those of you it missed), used to say that if you tell ten-year-olds often enough (rewarding them the while) that “My sister is a rubber moon” is something good for them, they’ll crank out that kind of line by the bushel. But Al never suggested that surrealism was therefore self-evidently bad. You can’t be saying, Barry (can you?) that what you’re calling “jump-cut” pieces can’t be any good because many of them are bad, right? That there’s no difference between Clark Coolidge’s bizarreries and your awkward little sprint? (Or did you have a slight twinge, there, when I called it “awkward”? Maybe some small part of you believes that the skills you’ve developed over the years must make your effort actually worth a second look?)
“I mean, most of us can also crank out a dozen lines of rhymed verse (as John Ciardi pointed out years ago in distinguishing poetry from “poesy”). That doesn’t mean that rhyming or other dimensions of sound-play are a dead end, I think–just that it ordinarily takes years of practice (and don’t get me started on that hack, Rimbaud!) to synchronize the ear and brain to any technical resource: rhyme, enjambment, shape-on-the-page, syntactic disruption, font color, extra-linguistic symbol, multilingual portmanteaux, etc. Really, Barry, I can’t Belize you!”
Then I said, “Jerry, I think the difference between the anybodies writing crappy rhyming verse and the anybodies writing crappy jump-cut verse is that the former aren’t getting published and reviewed in the mainstream, and the latter are—along with the few jump-cut poets who sometimes write good poems (but also get away with pretty bad ones) like Ashbery. I wouldn’t call Coolidge’s stuff jump-cut, by the way, but don’t know his large ouevre well enough to say he doesn’t do it Your hobbyhorse is a secondary hobbyhorse of mine, Barry—some jump-cut stuff is terrific, and even conventional poems can profit by judicious use of the jump-cut, but there seem to be a great many poets just irresponsibly throwing words and asemic texts together with or without graphics and winning attention. Few consider my call for a poem’s having a unifying principle anything but a sort of fascism.
“I think the Mangold poem is reasonably unified, although not as unified as I’d prefer. But there are books full of what Barry calls word salads, published and reviewed by mainstreamers.”
Jerry: “Yeah, in fact, Bob, I’m not comfortable with the jump-cut terminology. It comes from film, where the continuity of one’s identification with the cinematically-constructed gaze (what the camera “sees,” usually through a perspective borrowed from an onscreen character) is suddenly disrupted in ways that violate ordinary perceptual expectations–we’re precipitated, outside ordinary spatial and/or temporal possibility, into another cinematically-constructed gaze. That’s quite a bit different, cognitively (though film critics like to talk about its operations as part of film’s grammar) from the variety of linguistic operations involved in
“Ashbery’s or Coolidge’s referential, syntactical, or identificatory continuities. (The ancients [as always] had a word for such stuff, by the way: anacoluthon, in which a sentence veers within itself from one grammatical structure to a different one.)
“As for your idea that legions of minor-league Ashbery’s are dominating poetry publication and prizes, I’d say two things: (1) I don’t believe it; I believe that most poetry published and rewarded with prizes is still more middle-diction than Ashberian, Coolidgean, or Rimbaudesque; and (2) to the extent (fairly limited, I think) that more such poetry is being published and rewarded, it’s a sign of a gesture towards a paradigm shift, as what seemed baffling and antipoetic thirty years ago accumulates acolytes until it edges first towards a kind of scruffy respectability and then downright normalcy. Maybe in 2167 everyone will be complaining that the stodgy old math poets are hogging the prizes.
“As for crappy this and crappy that, sour grapes.
“And a confession, of sorts: for about twenty years now I’ve been exploring (“experimenting with,” I’d say) stategies of disrupting diction, syntax, reference, phonology, etc. that, twenty-five years ago, I had only the barest awareness of, and that only slowly and grudgingly became part of my repertoire, and that, when I realized what I was doing, took shape in my work in ways that now seem crabbed, amateurish, and even embarrassing, but that, eventually, began to reveal to me dimensions of my language and experience that I don’t think I could have discovered in any other way–I want to emphasize the “me”s, “my”s, and “I”s in that clause–until I’m at last proud (probably over-proud) of a body of work that I produced under that impulse and that, finally, after scores of submissions, rejections, rewritings, and reorganizations, will be published in the spring. Even if you (or Barry, or anyone else) doesn’t like it (and I realize that that’s beside the point, and so should you), it’s very clear to me that I’ve wrestled with my own limitations, used certain technical resources to expand my capabilities, and been true to the impulse that got me into this stinking difficult art in the first place. So I’m saying that this casual dismissal of mechanical troping–what you’re calling “jump-cut poetry”–seems to me to miss the point entirely: that some people work very hard to get it right, even if some people don’t, or don’t seem to; and far from being easier to master just because it seems easier to approximate, the fact that anyone can scramble semantics or syntax in a casual way (and remember, anyone can put sentences together, too! that doesn’t mean it’s easy to write a novel) may make it _harder_ to see the value in trying to do that in ways that press towards the expression of hard-to-speak parts of our experience.”
Me, again: “Thanks for as-ever thoughtful comment, Jerry. I think you misread me a little, and I disagree with you about some things, but not up, right now, to a full response, just a few quick thoughts, but I hope to return for more.
“I’m uncomfortable with jump-cut terminology, too, but can’t think or or find better. I mean it specifically for poetry that jumps completely out of a train of a developing train of thought into a seemingly entirely different one, not what anacoluthon is a term for, in my understanding of it. It has nothing to do with linguistics but with narrative. Narrative in a wide sense that would include adventures of a concept, perhaps. This is not an area I’ve given what I would call proper scholar attention, just something I needed to know something about to get my taxonomy of poetry right. Anacoluthon seems something pertinent to language poetry, which I consider very different from what I call jump-cut poetry.
“I may have given the impression of speaking of “legions of minor-league Ashberys,” but I’m only speaking of a visible portion of Wilshberia that I’ve been noticing as a reviewer, and here at New-Poetry that’s becoming stronger and stronger. Certainly the ratio of published&reviewed&rewarded Iowa plaintext poetry, which still dominates Wilshberia, to published&reviewed&rewarded Ashbery-influenced poetry is much lower than the ratio of the latter to what I call otherstream poetry.
“I reject the idea that I suffer from sour grapes: resentment is not the same as jealousy. I used “crappy” simply as a tag for “inferior,” and I believe almost everyone would agree that some inferior poetry is being published&reviewed&rewarded.
“Seems I’m making a semi-full response, after all, so will keep going. Aside from wishing you luck with your book (and saying I will definitely be looking forward to reading it), I only want to say that I, for one, am not guilty of ‘casual dismissal of mechanical troping—what (I’m) calling jump-cut poetry,’ for I consider it a highly important kind of poetry equal to visual poetry, and more important than Iowa plaintext poetry because that’s just a school, and subclass of free verse (or whatever my taxonomy calls it, which I can’t remember). I’m just expressing resentment of those using it (poorly, in my view) to fast-lane into prominence, because it is definitely the top intellectually fashionable kind of poetry now, however more popular among middle-brow poetry-lovers Iowa plaintext poetry remains.
“And now a small wail at my stronger and stronger realization, after observing how little I’ve said above, that I probably won’t ever put together the book I want to write to clarify all my thinking on the varieties of poetry.”
Nothing new posted to this discussion since then
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Entry 834 — More of My Boilerplate at New-Poetry
Saturday, August 18th, 2012
On 8/15/2012 7:42 AM, bob grumman wrote:
Perhaps it’s wrong of me to be bothered by a mainstream critic’s being ignorant of or indifferent to the only significant thing I believe has happened in American poetry over the past century, the discovery and increasingly interesting use of (relatively) new techniques, but I am.
I still don’t have time for you, Jerry, but I’m going to reply, anyway! (Feel honored.)
An individual can’t avoid indifference about some things (like my indifference to the squabbles of the republicrats), but no field’s establishment (and every field has one) should be indifferent about something like visual poetry that a sizable number of people in its field think is important. It took me a long time to accept language poetry (genuine language poetry such as Clark Coolidge’s) as anything but nonsense (although not as long as it took me earlier to accept free verse—although I instantly accepted Cummings’s visual poetry very early when shown what it was doing), but I finally did, because so many people to me were enthusiastic about it. Not that I can accept every poet’s work that others find terrific, but I try to. I’m still working on Gertrude Stein’s.
Some even do both! At the same time! You’d never know it from reading any of the books of criticism Finnegan tells us about.
Definitely.
Not sure what you mean by “ensembles.”
I suspect you’d have any easier time getting one (from a “real” publisher) than I would for any book of mine. I was just reading about Brad Thor, a thriller writer, who was sitting next to a woman on a plane with whom he got talking literature. Toward the end of the flight, he mentioned he was thinking about writing a novel. She told him she was a salesrepresentative of Simon and Schuster, and she’d like to read his manuscript when he was done with it. He did send it to her and it got published by Simon & Schuster, and now he’s making big bucks. I can just see you or me having a conversation with the sales rep. . . .
Oh, and the book I spoke of hoping to write on the last hundred years or so of American poetry would not be a manifesto. The changes I want are very limited: only that the Poetry Establishment notice my kind of poetry—even if they trash it. And that a poet should do his best to master every kind of poetry he can during a lengthy apprenticeship; then focus on his favorite kind, but keep in touch with as many of the other kinds as he can. Too many “advanced” poets are as foolishly indifferent to traditional poetry, particularly formal verse, as traditional poets are to visual poetry and the like.
I thought I had a third demand of the poetry world, but can’t think of it now.
You have me there, Jerry. But it’s as much a problem with the language as with me. I was bringing up my standard belief in the difference I find between “effective” poems and “important” poems. I need different words. My point is simply that even great poems as the one by Hass you mention may be do not significantly enlarge the field of poetry because they add nothing significantly new to it. They will add a new outlook and style, since every poet has a unique outlook and style, and perhaps new subject matter. But new subject just doesn’t seem significant to me. One painter is the first to depict some new species of butterfly, so what? Or a novelist is first to tell us what the life of an Australian aborigine juggler is like. Ditto.
I think the best examples of what I mean are in classical music: I think a case could be made for the view that Brahms’s symphonies equal in effectiveness to Beethoven’s, but Beethoven’s were far more important than Brahms’s. I prefer Richard Straus’s Der Rosenkavalier to any of Wagner’s operas (I think) but Wagner’s operas are unquestionably more important in the way I’m speaking of than Straus’s. Wagner and Beethoven advance their art, Brahms and Straus did not, they “merely” contributed brilliantly to it.
I’ll let you know when I have the right two words or phrases needed to distinguish the two kinds of artists.
l suspect he made use of haiku, too. But however effective you do a good job of showing he was, he wasn’t “significant” in my special sense.
best, Bob
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