Archive for the ‘Literary Squabbling’ 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
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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 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 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 808 — Grumman Us&Them, No. 314
Monday, July 23rd, 2012
Recently I quoted a passage of Louis Zukofsky’s “A” here. I then started an Internet search for background material on Zukofsky and came across the following (beautifully-written) notice posted by Paul, Louis’s son:
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| from Paul Zukofsky
TO WHOM IT MAY CONCERN Far too many people, especially perhaps-innocent grad. students, have been misled into thinking that, in terms of quoting LZ or CZ, they may do what they want, and do not have to worry about me. These people are then suddenly faced with the reality of an irascible, recalcitrant MOI, and are confronted with the very real prospect of years of work potentially down the tubes. I therefore wish to post an obvious “do not trespass” sign where LZ aficionados may see it. All Louis and Celia Zukofsky is still copyright, and will remain so for many many years. I own all of these copyrights, and they are my property, and I insist upon deriving income from that property. For those of you convinced that LZ would find my stance abhorrent, the truth is that he kept all copyrights (initially in his name) as he had the rather absurd idea that said copyrights would be sufficient to allow for the economic survival of my mother, and their son. My stance is congruent with that hope. Despite what you may have been told, you may not use LZ’s words as you see fit, as if you owned them, while you hide behind the rubric of “fair use”. “Fair use” is a very-broadly defined doctrine, of which I take a very narrow interpretation, and I expect my views to be respected. We can therefore either more or less amicably work out the fees that I demand; you can remove all quotation; or we can turn the matter over to lawyers, this last solution being the worst of the three, but one which I will use if I need to enforce my rights. In general, as a matter of principle, and for your own well-being, I urge you to not work on Louis Zukofsky, and prefer that you do not. Working on LZ will be far more trouble than it is worth. You will be far more appreciated working on some author whose copyright holder(s) will actually cherish you, and/or your work. I do not, and no one should work under those conditions. However, if you have no choice in the matter, here are the procedures that I insist upon, and what you must do if you wish to spare yourself as much grief as possible. 1– people who want to do their dissertation on LZ, or want to quote from him in their diss., must, if only as a common courtesy, inform me of their desire to use this material, and obtain my permission to do so. If you do that, and if I agree, the permission will be only for the purposes of the diss. and there will be no charge for limited use within the diss. You will not be allowed to distribute the diss. publicly. Distribution via on-line publication is not allowed. I urge you to keep quotation to a minimum, as the more quotation, the less likely I am to grant permission. 2– people who quote Louis Zukofsky in their dissertations without having had the courtesy to request my permission, and who do so without having obtained my permission to quote LZ, do not have permission to use LZ quotations, and will, in the future, be refused all permission to quote any and all LZ in their future publications, and I promise to do my utmost to hamper, hinder, and preferably prevent all such quotation. 3– people who obtain copies of LZ manuscripts, marginalia, etc. etc. such as at UTexas or elsewhere, and who have not first requested and received my permission to have such copies made, will thereafter be refused permission to use any such materials in any of their future publications. Note that fair use is far more restrictive on unpublished material than on already published material. 4– people who wish to perform LZ or CZ (“A-24”; the “Masque” etc) require performance rights from me. A fee will be charged. People who wish to set LZ to music also require permission to do so. 5– I forbid so-called electronic “publication”. People may not quote LZ in their “blogs”. 6– if you proceed to the point of publishing articles in journals, books etc, or if you publish a book, you must obtain my permission to quote, and fees will be charged. Once again I urge you to quote as little as possible. That will minimize your cost. Final points. I can perhaps understand your misguided interest in literature, music, art, etc. I would be suspicious of your interest in Louis Zukofsky, but might eventually accept it. I can applaud your desire to obtain a job, any job, although why in your chosen so-called profession is quite beyond me; but one line you may not cross i.e. never never ever tell me that your work is to be valued by me because it promotes my father. Doing that will earn my life-long permanent enmity. Your self-interest(s) I may understand, perhaps even agree with; but beyond that, in the words of e.e.cummings quoting Olaf: “there is some s I will not eat”. Next, other than for the following, I am not trying to censor you. I hardly give a damn what is said about my father (I am far more protective of my mother) as long as the name is spelled properly, and the fees are paid. My interest is almost purely economic. That being said, I do not approve of delving into the personal lives of my parents. If you wish to spend your time worrying if LZ did or did not shtupp alligators, that is your problem, but I will not approve quotation. That is not scholarship. That is gossip, and beneath contempt. Third, do not lie, or try to dissemble. If I ask for something, and you agree, be certain that you do it. If I find out after the fact that you have not, there will be trouble. Finally, when all else fails, and you remain hell-bent on quoting LZ, but you really, really REALLY do not want to deal with me, or you have been stupidly advised to try to circumvent me — remind yourself again and again, and yet once more, what Lyndon Baines Johnson’s said about J. Edgar Hoover i.e.: “I’d rather have him inside the tent pissing out, than outside pissing in”. PZ Hong Kong Sept. 17, 2009 |
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I know nothing about Paul Zukofsky’s motives but I can’t say I have much respect for the academic parasites in an uproar about what he’s doing. The huge majority of them are of the kind who ignore poets while they’re alive but begin swarming over their work when they’re dead. Let them pay huge sums for access and reproduction rights to the poets’ work. True, they can help enlarge the audience for the dead artists’ works, but they also build up the resumes that will eventually get them professorships or tenure, the worst of which pay a lot more a year than the best contemporary artists (at least in my field, poetry) make in a decade (as poets).
Actually, I think academic institutions should be the ones billed since they will eventually be making the most money off the dead poets, by drawing contributions from Philistines eager to show their cultural importance by helping finance work they know nothing about, and building the reputation of their institute in their ongoing competition for students, and the rest of it, which is too complex for me to work out. I’d love to see a book the unravels (if it’s possible) the way universities–did I say “the way?” I mean the MANY ways universities make money off dead artists–while just about totally ignoring contemporary artists who are not repeating the kind of work the dead artists brought into prominence.
Note: what I say above is polemical, hence unfair. The truth is that academics writing about dead art are the necessary curators of everybody’s cultural inheritance; I consider myself one of them–but only partially, and I find it hard to understand why just about all of them do what they do. Why can’t a few more of them write about living artists’ work?
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Entry 803 — Insulting BigName Critics
Wednesday, July 18th, 2012
After Finnegan, sitemaster of New-Poetry, let New-Poetry members know that we could find essays by various critics commenting on the current state of American Poetry at the VQR Symposium yesterday, I visited the site, read some, skimmed some, then posted the following at New-Poetry:
Thanks much for this, Finnegan. All these critics and Perloff (whom I count as part of the VQR Symposium group although she withdrew from it because she has remained an important part of it, anyway) is the only one who mentions visual and performance poetry, and all she does is mention them. The most visible two poetries of the Otherstream. But that’s enough to keep me from judging her thoughts on the contem-porary poetry scene the worst in this collection. The others are too closely worthless to pick out one for worst effort.
I will admit one thing not too hard to admit: a few of these estabniks seem somewhat familiar with what they deem a new sort of poetry—conceptual poetry—a kind of poetry, if it’s poetry (and Perloff questions whether at least some texts called conceptual poetry are poems) with which I was unfamiliar. But I’ve always said in my lists of new and newish poetry that I was sure I’d missed some, and know I’ve fallen behind badly in keeping up with various kinds of cyber poetry, never felt comfortable with my take on sound poetry, and only now believe I’m coming to terms with language poetry (although I arrogantly also feel I’ve known more about it for twenty years than just about anybody writing it, or writing poetry called language poetry, including especially Ron Silliman).
From the few examples of conceptual poetry I’ve seen, I have what I think is Perloff’s view, that it’s too similar to dada to be new, and—as I said—possibly prose (of a kind I’ve named “conceprature” to go with similar taxonomical terms I’ve used for “poetry” that’s really prose, “evocature” for prose poems, and “advocature” for lineated propaganda texts. I also use “informrature” for lineated texts like names and addresses on envelopes that are clearly not poems). Having said all that, I do believe that conceptual poets-or-prosists (note: “prosists” is an ad hoc term; I want something better, preferably already in use) are cutting edge even though working in a variety of literature that’s been around a long time—because (1) they are still finding significantly new things to do in it (new to me, anyway) the same way I believe a few visual poets are still finding significantly new things to do in visual poetry, which—in its modern phase—has now been around a century, give or take a decade or two, its start being still controversial; and (2) only a very few visible critics know about them, and only one, Perloff, has so far written meaningfully about them.
I should be kinder to Perloff than I have been for the past 25 years, and will be from now on, I’m pretty sure. But nothing is harder for someone fighting against the status quo not to blow up at than another fighting against it differently (usually much less differently than its seems to both at the time).
Below is perhaps the best example of anti-Otherstream gatekeeping in the tripe Finnegan linked to, a passage from Willard Spiegelman’s hilariously-titled essay, “Has Poetry Changed? The View From the Editor’s Desk.” Its title is funny because it contains not one word about how American poetry has changed over the past 30 years or so. (Note, by the way, another change in my boilerplate: “30,” not “50” years as I so long contended. I finally realized that Ashbery and his followers were, when breaking into prominence, using techniques not in wide use at the time–although far from revolutionary.)
“Some years ago Helen Vendler said she was giving up reviewing or generally writing about new books of poetry by younger poets. She had not lost her acumen, her interest or her powers of perception; rather, she said that she lacked the right cultural frame of reference to be an appropriate audience, let alone a judge. She knew about gardens and nightingales, Grecian urns and Christian theology, but not about hip-hop or comic books, and these provide the material, or at least the glue, for many of today’s poems. Poetic subjects, voices, diction, and tone change. And forms, like subjects, change as well. She wanted to leave the critical field open to younger people like her colleague Stephen Burt, a polymath who knows the ancients and the moderns, the classics and the contemporary. He listens to indie bands and reads graphic novels. He flourishes amid the hipsters as well as the sonneteers.” Etc.
Why is this especially stupid, in my view? The idea that the main thing a critic needs to be familiar with to write about poetry is subject matter. Oh, and “voices, diction and tone.” Oops, “forms,” too. No mention of what Vendler has been drastically ignorant of since she was first writing about Ashbery: technique. Perhaps I’m wrong to consider it the most important component of poetry, but it most certainly is as important as “voices, diction and tone.”
Then there is her leaving the field open to people like Stephen Burt. A Harvard professor! And no more knowledgeable than Vendler about what’s going on in poetry now. Here’s one thing Wikipoo calls him recognized as a critic for, his definition of what I call jump-cut poetry (but long ago referred to it a few times as “elliptical”): “Elliptical poets try to manifest a person—who speaks the poem and reflects the poet—while using all the verbal gizmos developed over the last few decades to undermine the coherence of speaking selves.” I like his “all the verbal gizmos.” Does he mention even some of those invented way before his time by Cummings. I don’t know his criticism well enough to be sure the answer is no, but I’d be willing to bet ten bucks it is.
I’d be interested to know why what I’ve written here contributes less to the discussion in VQR of the current state of American Poetry than the essays in it. Anyone interested in telling me? Or even in telling me why I’m not worth telling? I’ve issued challenges like this before. No one’s yet answered one. At least one that doesn’t significantly misrepresent me, and escalate into ad hominem arguments and plain insults.
Note: I’m pretty sure that 15 or 20 years ago, one of the two times I was stupid enough to apply for a Guggenheim grant, Willard Spiegelman got one in the field I’d applied for one in. I can’t remember how he described his winning project except that it was lame, even for a mainstreamer. (Richard Kostelanetz, a former winner of a Guggenheim, had recommended me to the Guggenheimers, who then invited me to submit an application, so it wasn’t all my fault.)
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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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Entry 797 — A Grumman Coinage Gets Attacked
Thursday, July 12th, 2012
Finnegan, at New-Poetry, reported, “Jake Berry’s piece, and Bob’s terminology, are now in play on Seth Abramson’s blog…” It’s here.
“Are they ever!” replied I. “Unfortunately, Seth is either a poor writer or I’m not bright enough to follow his reasoning too well. When I have time, I’ll respond to what he’s written. Meanwhile, I would love to hear from others how much sense he makes to them, for he mostly doesn’t make sense to me.” I went on to draft a response to what Abramson said about my term, “otherstream.” He made no argument of substance against it, but raised four points against it, all but one technically valid but trivial. However, they helped me tighten my definition. I’ve been feeling particularly crappy, too much so to work further on my draft, or say more here.
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Entry 795 — A Rebuke
Tuesday, July 10th, 2012
Every once in a while some mediocrity rebukes me for some attack of mine on the Poetry Establishment, usually at New-Poetry (and almost always gives me a good laugh, although almost always also annoys me at how little substance the rebuke contains). My latest rebuke was from Barry Alpert, a poet I know nothing about but whose name is familiar to me. (Alpert may not be a mediocrity but I have trouble imagining a non-mediocrity defending the Poetry Establishment, even against such a churl as I.)
Background
Mark Weiss: “It’s really not about poetry so much as academic politics.” He was referring to Seth Abramson’s blog entry here about what Abramson calls “a 125-year-long battle between two opposing forces in American poetry, ‘creative writing’ and ‘the Academy.’”
Me: “Right, and when it’s about poetry, it’s only about academic poetry. The guy seems totally out of it—not at all current with what’s going on in poetry now, and not what I’d call cogent about the poetry he seems to know something about. The real debate is here, where Jake Berry discusses, basically, the Academy vs. the Otherstream, with links to responses to Jake by Anny, me, and a handful of others, including Marjorie Perloff. This was mentioned a week or two at New-Poetry. So far no one, so far as I and Jeff Side, who runs The Argotist Online where everything is, know has written anything further about it (except for a few mentions that were really just announcements of its existence).”
The Rebuke
Nice bit of self-description, Northrop:
(Me: Your evidence for this?)
“The guy seems totally out of it?
(Me: you caught me using maliciously polemical hyperbole, Barry, but–alas–I can’t promise never to do that again: my moon is in Aries.)
not at all current with what?
(Me: what’s going on in poetry now—visual poetry, sound poetry, syntax-centered poetry, infraverbal poetry, mathematical poetry, conceptual poetry, various kinds of cyber poetry—as well as the Wilshberia that, I’m sure, is all you’re aware of—and kinds even I don’t know about. I don’t think he even knows much about what’s going on in Wilshberia.)
s going on in poetry now, and not what I?
(Me: Not sure what you’re questioning, Barry–I was just reminding readers that what I was spouting was just my opinion.)
d call cogent about the poetry he seems to know something about.”
As a critic ranging over literature and all the other arts for fifty years, I’ve rarely encountered such a damaging advocate for that which he promotes.
(Me: Is this guy Seth Abramson’s grandfather? So I don’t think Seth knows much about the poetry scene, so what?)
You’ve convinced me (and, I’m sure, any critics who have sampled your “critical prose”) not to read you as well as, unfortunately, those writers who have the misfortune to have been “promoted” by your contemp-orary embodiment of what may have been an LP coinage: “the small press creep [crank]”. Your embarrassing email backslapping with S. Russell would be a choice example of the absolute nadir of “critical discourse”.
(Me: odd how often these rebukers consider thoughts and opinion informally exchanged on the Internet to be “critical discourse.” How typical of a mediocrity to need to protect his tiny view of his field by staying away from not only my writing but that of those I favor! Not that there was much chance he ever read us–although he shared a billing at a poetry reading with one of them once. As for the others whom my vileness has convinced I should not be read, great! The more I limit what I say to the intelligent, the less chance there is that it will be misquoted all over the place.)
“Visual poetry” would be better served by a professional advertising agency.
(Me: Thank you for reminding me that when mainstreamers do deign to notice the otherstream, they rarely present arguments against it, preferring empty insults of those representing it.)
Entry 785 — the Otherstream and the Universities
Saturday, June 30th, 2012
As I said in another entry, Jake Berry has an article in The Argotist Online, edited by by Jeffrey Side, that’s about the extremely small attention academia pays to Otherstream poetry you can read here. I and these others wrote responses to it: Ivan Arguelles, Anny Ballardini, Michael Basinski, John M. Bennett, John Bradley, Norman Finkelstein, Jack Foley, Bill Freind, Bill Lavender, Alan May, Carter Monroe, Marjorie Perloff, Dale Smith, Sue Brannan Walker, Henry Weinfield. A table of contents of the responses is here. I hope eventually to discuss these responses in an essay I’ve started but lately found too many ways to get side-tracked from. The existence of the article and the responses to it has been fairly widely announced on the Internet. Jeff Side says they’ve drawn a lot of visitors to The Argotist Online, ” 23,000 visitors, 18,000 of which have viewed it for more than an hour.” What puzzles both him and me is that so far as we know, almost no one has responded to either the article or the responses to the article. There’s also a post-article interview of Jake that no one’s said anything about that I know of. Why?
What we’re most interested in is why no academics have defended academia from Jake’s criticism of it. Marjorie Perloff was (I believe) the only pure academic to respond to his article, although Jeff invited others to. And no academic I know of has so much as noted the existence of article and responses. I find this a fascinating example of the way the universities prevent the status quo from significantly changing in the arts, as for some fifty years they’ve prevented the American status quo in poetry from significantly changing. Here’s one possible albeit polemical and no doubt exaggerated (and not especially original) explanation for the situation:
Most academics are conformists simply incapable of significantly exploring beyond what they were taught about poetry as students, so lead an intellectual life almost guaranteed to keep them from finding out how ignorant they are of the Full contemporary poetry continuum–they read only magazines guaranteed rarely to publish any kind of poetry they’re unfamiliar with, and just about never reviewing or even mentioning other kinds of poetry. They only read published collections of poems published by university or commercial (i.e. status quo) presses and visit websites sponsored by their magazines and by universities. Hence, these academics come sincerely to believe that Wilshberia, the current mainstream in poetry, includes every kind of worthwhile poetry.
When they encounter evidence that it isn’t such as The Argotist Online’s discussion of academia and the otherstream, several things may happen:
1. the brave ones, like Marjorie Perloff, may actually contest the brief against academia–albeit not very well, as I have shown in a paper I will eventually post somewhere or other;
2. others drawn in by the participation of Perloff may just skim, find flaws in the assertions and arguments of the otherstreamers, and there certainly are some, and leave, satisfied that they’ve been right all along about the otherstream;
3. a few may give some or all the discussion an honest read and investigate otherstream poetry, and join the others satisfied they’ve been right all along, but with better reason since they will have actually investigated it; the problem here is that they won’t have a sufficient amount of what I call accommodance for the ability to basically turn off the critical (academic) mechanisms of their minds to let new ways of poetry make themselves at home in their minds. In other words, they simply won’t have the ability to deal with the new in poetry.
4. many will stay completely away from such a discussion, realizing from what those written of in 1., 2. and 3 tell them. that it’s not for them.
A major question remains: why don’t those described in 2. and 3. comment on their experiences, letting us know why they think they’ve been right all along. That they do not suggests they unconsciously realize how wrong they may be and don’t want to take a chance of revealing it; or, to be fair, that they consider the otherstream too bereft of value for them to waste time critiquing. This is stupid; pointing out what’s wrong with bad art is as valuable as pointing out what’s right with good art. Of course, there are financial reasons to consider: a critique of art the Establishment is uninterested in will not be anywhere near as likely to get published, or count much toward tenure or post-tenure repute if published as another treatise on Milton or Keats. Or Ashbery, one of the few slightly innovative contemporary poets of Wilshberia.
But I think, too, that there are academics who unconsciously or even consciously fear giving any publicity at all to visual or sound or performance and any other kind of otherstream poetry because it might overcome Wilshberia and cost them students, invitations to lecture and the like–and/or just make them feel uncomfortably ignorant because incapable of assimilating it. Even more, it would cost them stature: it would become obvious to all but their closest admirers that they did not know all there is to know about poetry.
Note: I consider this a first draft and almost certainly incomplete. Comments are nonetheless welcome.
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Entry 775 — The Otherstream, Part Two
Wednesday, June 20th, 2012
I’ll be jumping around for a while, responding to others’ responses to Jake Berry’s essay. I found most of those others seem not get what I mean by “the otherstream.” Here, for instance is an excerpt of Alan May’s response:
Walt Whitman, Emily Dickinson, William Carlos Williams, e.e. cummings, Wallace Stevens, Elizabeth Bishop, Robert Lowell, Silvia Plath, (some of) The Beats, Charles Bukowski, and The New York School, (well, Ashbery and O’hara), Maya Angelou. These are American poets I can mention to college graduates and/or people who are “well read” and hope, for f^#k’s sake, I won’t get a blank stare for at least some of the list. . . . most wouldn’t fit into either school Berry mentions. Okay, maybe Lowell, Bishop, and O’Hara would fit into The Iowa School, but to be honest, I included them (Lowell and Bishop), as an afterthought and Frank O’Hara gets a pass because he ran with some famous people, and Don Draper, a character from the HBO series Madmen, reads one of O’Hara’s poems aloud in Episode 1 of Season 2 (?). See how objective/informed decisions are made?”
“Otherstream” seems broad enough that the term, by its very advent, if not by its definition, should include about 70% of poets in academia. (Perhaps Jake Berry means to include them in the Otherstream? I’m not sure.) If an academic poet (one who teaches at a college or university) hasn’t won prizes or published books with an academically accepted press, or if the books are only collected in a handful of libraries, his status is about the same as those outside of academia.
Yes, but the hypothetical academic would have written the same kind of poetry that those winning prizes and getting published by academically accepted presses are. That’s what makes him mainstream. Here’s my definition of “otherstream,” again. It’s slightly changed from what Jake had it to emphasize the point that it is not a definition of poets but of the kind of poetry they write.
“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 classes. For me, it means approximately, but only approximately, the opposite of “mainstream.” What it’s the exact opposite of is “known-stream.” That’s because some art is knownstream, like certain kinds of very formal verse–the sestina, say–which are well known to most literature professors but are not what you’d call kinds of mainstream poetry.
Ergo, I define the work of poet X mainstream even if poet X is only published by his best friend’s micropress in editions of fifty if he write Iowa Workshop poetry, and poet Y remains an otherstream poet if he composes visual, sound, cryptographic, cyber, mathematical, chemistry-centered poetry or the like, even if he wins a Nobel Prize. In such a case, though, his poetry would soon have to be labeled “mainstream,” because it and poetry like it would then get in the schools, onto the pages of university poetry publications and commercial poetry books, and so forth, which would by definition make it “Mainstream,” a term meaning the widely-known poetry of a certain time, so referring to different poetry depending on the time it has to do with. Ditto otherstream poetry. There will always be exceptions–that is, the mainstream will always accept some small bit of otherstream poetry. I don’t think it possible for the otherstream to ever contain mainstream poetry, though–a given poet’s mainstream output may be as ignored as just about all otherstream poets’ output is, but that won’t make him otherstream. To repeat my point.
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