[Taxonomies]

I don't know whether Ron linking to this blog so regularly--several times a week now, it seems--is indicative of his interest in the incipient dialogue over new aesthetic taxonomies, or else mere rubbernecking at the scene of what might seem (to him) a tragic taxonomic car-crash. Certainly, his coquettish headlining of my posts (including a link to a rumination on Spicer and Structuralism troublingly mislabeled "Spicer & the law") suggests the latter. But as I keep saying, I like and respect Ron, and believe he's far smarter and better-read than I am, so I actually consider him pretty well entitled to scoff at what he reads here. I'll keep blogging anyway, and hope, one day, to engage sufficiently to receive some response. [NB: That said, you can already find responses to my posts from Adam Fieled (I, II, and perhaps III), Joseph Hutchinson (I, II, III), Francois Luong, Jeff Stumpo, Johannes Goransson (I, II, III), Robert P. Baird, Jack Kimball, and others].

So, what have we learned?

Well, that you don't want so-called "SoQ" poets to have your back in a knife-fight, for one. I mean, if I had any fewer would-be compatriots on my six it'd be an interstellar vacuum.

It seems so-called "post-avant" poets are much more inclined toward these sorts of discussions than non-post-avant poets, and so one should probably expect--if one happens to interrupt (he says, cattily) the sound of one hand clapping that passes for debate in the post-avant community--one will be several clicks ahead of the nearest friendly regiment. So it is here; no surprise, then: I'm taking something of a drubbing. I do hope others see in this the same well-intended attempt to start (or re-start) a discussion that I do, so that even when we lapse into intemperance the highly-contingent good feeling poets who care about poetry ought to have for one another remains.

In the interest of that, a few clarifications:

1. I'm actually not that big on jargon or name-dropping, largely because (especially in the present company this discourse has occasioned) if it comes to that I shall shortly be decimated. I have always believed the study of poetry to be a lifelong proposition; I'm just at the beginning of it, and don't pretend otherwise. That said, I did attempt to clearly define my terms--here (particularly in the comments section) and here--so that when I later used the term "Cognitive-Semantic" to describe a particular aesthetic (as here) it would not seem to be merely an exercise in jargon or esoteric citation. I'd note, too, that the term "Cognitive-Semantic Poetry" bears the startling distinction of meaning precisely what it says, and thus any notion, and certainly any suggestion, that I'm hiding the ball here is doubly unfortunate. Someone tells you they are a "post-avant" writer and you do well to furrow your brow; someone tells you they write poetry that uses semiotics in a "cognitive-semantic" fashion and you need only use Wikipedia to educate yourself on what those words denote. I am, in short, using the term literally (that is to say, definitionally).
2. What I can't do, only because it's too exhausting and the hours of my life too precious to me, is repeat every caveat I've issued during this discussion, such as that the three broad classifications of poetry I've identified (Pragmatic, Cognitive-Semantic, and Syntactic) contain numerous sub-aesthetics and are routinely commingled within even a single poem (let alone the work of a single poet). I've said, too, that none of these has the goods on any other, that none of them are intended as pejorative, and so on. I've also tried to emphasize that these terms apply only to the "contemporary American poetry community," so Francois Luong is quite right in saying I haven't done anything to locate/proffer a phenomenology for Canadian poetries, European poetries, African poetries, and so on; I concede that.
3. I was in Bridgton, Maine, this afternoon, and quite nearly bought Robert Duncan's treatise (yes, that Duncan) on myth; it seemed more than a little apropos of my comments on Spicer (which had nothing to do with my former career as a public defender) but in the end I decided spending $6 just to make a point about the avant-garde's concurrent-to-the-SoQ preoccupation with narrative wasn't really worth it. I hope the fact that I nearly bought this long essay will at least convince Adam that, yes, I'm quite familiar with the idea that a post-avant worldview is compatible with an interest in narrative. Given that the pejoratively-drawn term "SoQ" nominally refers to the narrative-discursive work of the 1980s, however, I think it's the post-avant community which makes too little of this element of the experimental tradition. So: I do not think the term "post-avant" is meaningless in fact. As I've said (repeatedly) it is linguistically--semantically--meaningless. The combination of those two terms/prefixes is a paradox, and is therefore not literally descriptive. A commenter, below, surmises that the term might be taken to mean that there is no "front" anymore; to this sort of intellectual gymnastics I cannot accede. Ron is, with his taxonomy, in no way whatsoever implying that one can no longer distinguish between the "front" and the "rear" of contemporary aesthetics. He has painted SoQ writing as the donkey's ass of American poetry enough times to render obvious his fervent belief in the "forwardness" of the post-avant aesthetic. In an aesthetic field with no "front," SoQ wouldn't be a pejorative term, which is clearly an unacceptable state of affairs to any and all its progenitors. [NB: One must judge for oneself whether Ron's tongue was firmly in cheek when he claimed in a recent interview to be "a straight-forward realist"; having read Ketjak, I'm inclined to believe him, however, and to see his decidedly interesting forays into Pragmatic and Cognitive-Semantic writing to be one of the primary impetuses behind him refusing to acknowledge these terms. I cannot vouch for his safety and security as a self-proclaimed "post-avantist" in a universe of dialogue containing any categories other than "SoQ" and "post-avant." That Ron must preserve these largely artificial distinctions is therefore a matter of the utmost urgency, and I say that as someone who's actually rather fond of much of what the man has written]. In any case: I find Adam's definition of the "post-avant" (at the link above) enlightening, but ultimately unsatisfying, as it by no means seems to be the definition employed by those most ardently pushing the term upon the rest of us. Indeed, you'd be hard-pressed, reading Ron's blog, to see anything that is identifiably "post-LangPo" other than flarf and Conceptual Poetry. The forays into erotica Adam references seem most apropos to what Arielle Greenberg has described as "the gurlesque," which is an offshoot of Elliptical Poetry (nominally a post-avant aesthetic, though neither Ron nor any in his cohort have deigned to explain how or why the Ellipticals are either flarf-influenced or Conceptual). What I mean is, I like Adam's definition a great deal, and hope someone else besides Adam one day adopts it.
4. The primary skill taught in law school is how to draw proper analogies. So I won't take the time to rebut Adam's contention that an analogy can be drawn between SoQ poets and Jim Crow-era African-Americans, or between the term "SoQ" and the N-word. The communities in which the terms arise are differently circumscribed, the sociological mores altogether distinct, the histories completely divergent. A better analogy (though still grievously flawed) would be to say that Ron can just as easily denominate one-third of his domestic poetry-writing community "SoQ" as a group of black sharecroppers in the 1890s could get the term "ghost" (meaning white-skinned Anglo) to stick amongst whites. At best, only the existence and irrelevance of the term is/must be acknowledged under such historical circumstances, and if the power dynamics Ron opines about routinely are indeed in play in contemporary American poetry, it simply won't do to now say SoQ poets are at the taxonomic mercy of a dispossessed class of persons. Adam has simultaneously argued that the post-avants are considered irrelevant and go unnamed by the mainstream (not so; the term "experimental" was likely created and popularized by an SoQer, and it's one I hear frequently in and out of the MFA system to describe post-avants) and that post-avants have significant cultural capital in the so-called SoQ community (enough to popularize and make culturally inviolable a slur against same).
5. Adam's "two histories" meme is absurd (this theory posits that "post-avants" and "SoQ" poets have had, over the past half-century, two categorically separate histories). All such a construction can do is render one particular strand of post-avant thought as palpably provincial as it already is conceptually. When I studied post-war poetries with Tony Hoagland--sometimes referred to by post-avants as the grand poobah of SoQ thought--we spent time on all of the following poetries: Beat, Projective, Black Mountain, New York School, Berkeley Renaissance, Deep Image, Confessionalist, LangPo, others. When I later studied Avant-Garde Poetics at Iowa we covered many of the same poets, though we also stretched further back (to the Imagists, Objectivists, and Vorticists) and further forward (into modern-day post-avant poetries). To say there is not a shared history here is absurd; or (to cut off any quarreling over semantics) to say that these two histories are not substantially the same is absurd. The fact is, the self-conceived-as-rebellious post-avants have found such a cushy home before the warm fire of the Academy that it is no longer possible for a so-called SoQ writer to not be aware of, and more particularly influenced by, many of the same writers as Ron and his peers. What the post-avants really want to see are writers influenced in the same way as they are by these writers. That (incidentally) is a tautology; e.g., how do we know a writer was influenced by Duncan? Because s/he writes in X style now. If s/he does not write like X, s/he must not have been influenced by Duncan. Under this line of thinking, the fact of Duncan's influence is only provable in one way: we know a writer was influenced by Duncan because s/he writes like we say a writer would write if s/he were influenced by Duncan. I take a different route; I believe that Duncan is so powerful a figure that one cannot read him intently and devoutly without subconsciously internalizing some element of his project, and that, therefore, those who have read Duncan must certainly illustrate in their work--even if in infinitesmal ways--that influence. This, in a sense, was the import of my post on Spicer. I was saying that Spicer can be read to inform poststructuralist or structuralist precepts, and thus a structuralist-inclined writer might just as well claim to have received some inspiration from Spicer as a poststructuralist one. This notion that one camp or another can "claim" a poet and all his progeny (easily identifiable, under this theory of influence, by having written only poetry acceptable to the instant camp) is nonsense, and to the extent it is only this series of functions which could ever take us to truly divergent aesthetic "histories" these functions are nonsensical.
   
6. When Adam says, "those of us on the experimental side discuss mainstreamers more than they discuss us," it reveals only how little of the dialogue of the Academy Adam has internalized. The post-avants have stormed the Academy with great success; those who say the MFA is a bastion of SoQ thought cannot also claim the SoQ camp ignores them, as MFA programs spend as much time offering seminars in experimental and avant-garde poetries as anything else. I'm living proof; I'm at what many consider the most conservative MFA in America, and I've received three times more instruction in the so-called post-avant tradition (which, really, is simply the American tradition now) than in whatever passes for SoQ hagiography in the minds of post-avant pundits. [NB: Needless to say, in the view of those who've spent forty years reading experimental writers I must seem a very poor student of same; please consider: I'm only sixteen months into that education, so have mercy].
   
7. I vividly recall a radical-conservative Boston-area radio program I heard several years back in which the hosts were decrying "sleazy defense attorneys" who "malign good cops." The hosts asked listeners to call in and relay stories of the defense bar that cast all its practitioners in a bad light. The very first caller called in to say that, while he had no stories to tell of incompetent or dishonest defense attorneys, he did have one about a bad cop. The hosts were so enthused by this story of government overreaching that they spent the rest of the program spinning yarns about their own experiences with bad policing--neither seeing the irony in this nor in the fact that (and I say this with professional detachment) it was they and not the police who were in the wrong in every single story they told. I mention this by way of drawing an analogy to the claim, by post-avants, that MFA programs don't provide students with opportunities to receive a grounding in the allegedly-divergent post-avant "tradition"; in fact, every one of these stories seems to end with a confession that, while the instant post-avant did (by dint of luck!) manage to find a post-avant-leaning professor in his/her MFA program, surely no one else did. Newsflash: we all have, or certainly all could have. There is no program I can think of at which not a single faculty member could/would teach a seminar on, or provide students with a reading list geared toward, the post-avant tradition (which, again, would look suspiciously like what is now treated as the "American" tradition; which begs the question: at which MFA, precisely, is Donald Allen's seminal anthology not taught? Sure, LangPo is aesthetically a step or two "beyond" anything that appears in Allen's volume, but unless our aesthetic taxonomy treats post-avantism as sprouting fully-formed from Zeus's balls sometime around 1975, I'm afraid we must concede a common ancestry for most or all contemporary poets. Ginsberg, anyone?). And I grow weary of pointing out that all post-avantist history [somehow I feel each of those words should have quotes around it] is a continuing narrative of talented experimentalists getting jobs in the Academy and then instructing first-hand the next generation of experimental poets. Robert Creeley was Ed Dorn's examiner at Black Mountain, and this isn't any sort of exception to a general rule; the Master-Student relationship is likely more prevelant in the experimental sociological tradition than the mainstream one, if only because (as post-avantists themselves often declaim) to tutor a mainstream writer one need only teach them "craft" and send them on their way. It is yet another fundamental paradox of post-avant thinking to both infantilize the methods by which mainstream poetry is written and claim that MFA programs must invest an ungodly stock of human resources to indoctrinate toay's youth in the arcane ways of the SoQ. So, which is it? Is the SoQ a mystical club whose most secret rituals it requires the entire institutional strength of a university to impart, or is it merely a series of rote methods of composition which can be easily taught with ample time for its most august teachers to be in bed by seven?

More anon. Johannes has said a great deal recently I'd love to speak to. Just to get the ball rolling, though:

1. Johannes has done a brilliant job, I think, of pointing out a fatal flaw in Ron's taxonomy, though I wish he'd foreground it more. It's this: Ron is pretending that there is one central conversation now be had in American poetry, and that his impromptu lingo is best prepared to receive and actuate that conversation; in fact, there are many concurrent [types of] conversations happening at the moment, and among them are at least these three: aesthetic, cultural, sociological. One notices, with some surprise, that Ron never actually uses the term "post-avant" in any utilitarian (or otherwise significant) way when describing aesthetic movements. He may (and does) discuss flarf, or conceptual poetry, but the term "post-avant" is never essential to these readings; it is, at best, a sticker slapped on a product after-the-fact. Yet the fact remains: once you have described what a banana looks and tastes like, and have derived the term "banana" from the ether for that particular series of descriptions/depictons, the term "banana" will suffice for the taxonomic work at hand. "Flarf" is "banana"; "post-avant" is a sticker that says "This Product Available Only at Ron's Supermarket!" It is puffery; it is non-descriptive. It's only purpose is to tell us that the poetics in question is somehow--and here's the crux of the matter--culturally disfavored. In other words, it can only be found at Ron's less-frequented farmer's market, and not at the grocery super-chain down the way. But that doesn't move the ball one inch aesthetically; the term "post-avant" is, at best, a cultural reference-point.
2. To the extent we don't need--and can't use--the term "post-avant" in aesthetic discussions, and can only deploy it in cultural discussions (e.g., those discussions, as Johannes intimates, which touch on the allotment of prizes/awards in the poetry community) it is dangerously reductive. I keep saying that "I'm not discussing aesthetics here," and folks like Adam and others keep drawing me into debates over just that: aesthetics. But when I say that the post-avant/SoQ dichotomy dooms many poets to "premature obscurity," and causes them to "fall through the cracks," this is not a reference to aesthetics, but to the discussion over cultural capital Ron is implicitly pushing every single day (and which I've been criticized for referencing but once every few months). Here's what I mean: in cultural terms, the term "post-avant" means "poets Ron admires"; to the extent "poets Ron admires" are not awarded prizes, they are "post-avant" poets. To the extent "poets Ron does not admire" receive prizes, they are "SoQ" poets. Who's missing in that equation? Answer: any poet not on Ron's radar screen (for better or ill), which is often as much a function of sociology (the third dialogue) as anything else. Joe Massey, for instance, is a very talented poet, but in absolutely no way whatsoever a post-avantist; because he is on Ron's radar screen, however, should Joe win prizes (and more power to him if so) it will be seen as a "victory for post-avantism," when in fact it does nothing more than reify the fact that Ron's preferred dialogue is fundamentally cultural. Ron sees "outsiders" and "insiders" in the field of poetry, and his reliance on such simplistic notions hampers his ability to adequately explain (say) how Joe Massey is a post-avantist while Joshua Beckman is not. What I've tried to do is keep the aesthetic and sociological (the term I prefer for the third, but really second-and-third conversations) separate. Aesthetically, Johannes is right: we ought describe poetries by what and how they are, what and how they operate, and be only minimally reliant on any broad taxonomies (provided we're not, as Stephen Burt may have done with Elliptical Poetry, merely describing a series of surface effects). Culturally or sociologically, we ought be discussing (as again Johannes rightly indicates) questions of cultural capital. There are "post-avantists" with a tremendous amount of it, and non-post-avantists (so-called SoQers) with very little. And vice versa. Who receives awards is as much--here Johannes is right a third time--a function of sociological community-building as it is a simple question of aesthetics. Johannes notes, for instance, how LangPo actually found a very nice home at the Iowa Writers' Workshop; the effect of that has been that certain Iowa-connected post-avantists do well, while others who are not so connected do less well.
3. I don't mean to suggest that who you know is everything, as I don't in any sense believe that. But I also know many poets who, in winning or not winning prizes, could not have their successes or failures assessed using Ron's terminology, because Ron would be unable to apply his fundamentally cultural/sociological terms "post-avant/SoQ" to these poets. Nor can Ron escape the paradox of creating this terminology in the first place: by tarring certain prizes as "SoQ"-dominated, he makes such prizes unpalatable to those who wish to be perceived as "post-avant," makes it less likely these awards will be submitted to by such poets, and so on. The same could be said for so-called "SoQ" journals. Would Ron call The Iowa Review an SoQ journal? Undoubtedly. Yet I'm on the Staff of this journal, and I see how ardently the Staff there is yearning for just the sort of surprise and sense of discovery in poetry that Ron favors. But will post-avantists submit to The Iowa Review? I don't know; is publishing there the same sort of bona fide for a post-avantist as publishing in, say, Jacket or Denver Quarterly? My own experiences as a publishing poet (which I reference only so as not to embarrass others by using them as exemplars) give some of the lie to Ron's cultural assumptions: If I wanted to appear to be post-avant-leaning, I might produce a bio indicating I've published in Verse, jubilat, Columbia Poetry Review, Boston Review, Denver Quarterly, Conjunctions, New American Writing, Colorado Review, CutBank, Forklift, Ohio, and similar venues (once twice even writing a poem that appeared on the annual "best of" list of the poetry editor of The Hat); if, however, I wanted to seem to Ron to be in the SoQ camp I'd note prior publications in The Southern Review, The Iowa Review, Gettysburg Review, Harvard Review, Antioch Review, Alaska Quarterly Review, and so on. But all these journals published the same poet; what gives? What gives (in part, and I say this without bitterness) is that as much as my prose is obviously not beneath Ron's notice, my poetry is--which is fine--and thus he needn't explain why post-avant-friendly journals are publishing an SoQ writer, or (alternatively) SoQ journals an experimentalist. Nor must he explain how, in a publishing climate that now leans heavily toward the creation of small presses, the fact that experimentalists more easily find homes for their work in their mecca--small presses--than any SoQ poet ever could in his/her culturally-favored venue (trade presses) complicates what it means to be "successful" as a poet in America. K. Silem Mohammed has so many books to his name I've lost count; there are graduates of the Iowa Writers' Workshop from ten years back who are just publishing their first books (and with the less-favored-by-SoQ small presses) because the chances for "breaking out" in the so-called SoQ community are nearly non-existent. Consider this: If Adam's right, and there are two separate histories being created right now--post-avant and SoQ--isn't it a damn sight easier to get your work "into the history" as a post-avantist than as an SoQer? Is Mark Doty damming the river for post-avants, really, or his fellow SoQers? God forbid we should wade into that morass, and Ron's terminology ensures we never, ever will.
4. In Ron's mythical/mystical po-biz Neverland, the young post-avantist a) desperately wants to win the Walt Whitman award; b) cannot survive as a poet without winning a MacArthur grant; c) watches helplessly as scores of young SoQers win prize after prize, vaulting easily into the ranks of the nation's "canonical" poets; and d) despairs as the canon is "filled up" with SoQers and palpably closed off to everyone else. Can I please call "bullshit" on this? Here's the reality: the young post-avantist a) wouldn't be caught dead even submitting to the Walt Whitman Award, let alone pining for it, as to do so would be embarrassing to such a poet within his/her sub-community of post-avantists; b) has a substantially better chance of winning a post-avant-respected award like the Omnidawn First Book Award than any SoQer has of ever winning the Whitman; c) is competing with (as Ron concedes) a minority-of-field percentage of writers for the top post-avantist prizes, as compared to the thousands of as-Ron-calls-them SoQ writers seeking SoQ prizes in vain (and, too, a smaller cadre of SoQ poets win most of the big SoQ-dominated awards than is the case with post-avantist quasi-canonical/canonical poets and "their" prizes); d) no one ever stopped writing poetry for the want of a MacArthur grant, and so few poets get these awards that to say they move the ball sociologically one way or another is preposterous; and e) the post-avant aesthetic is powerful enough in the Academic sphere that they do better canonically speaking (i.e. as a matter of canon-creation)--given the size of their community--than their numbers would suggest they should (I'd wager Creeley and Duncan and Ashbery are taught far more than Bly and Strand and Merwin in today's MFA programs). This is why I called the term "post-avant" a straw-man in my last post, and said that the use of that straw-man by Ron is just the sort of misusage of a term that is most befitting in a legal setting. That is, it's strategic. How that was taken as a compliment--or as some kind of statement on Jack Spicer's poetics--I don't rightly know.
5. The one way in which I'd like to distinguish a "cultural" discussion from a "sociological" one is with brief reference to my earlier comment that "we're all in this together." Aesthetically, as I've said before, we're not all in this together. And, to use the term "culture" as Johannes is, I guess I'd say that, no, we're not all in this together "culturally," either. But sociologically, I see substantial similarities between any young, as-yet unknown poet struggling to find their identity as a writer and any other--aesthetics be damned. If we have to wait until a youngster becomes a Mark Doty or, alternately, a horrifically-talented but criminally-underread post-avantist, to start saying "well, I guess we're really not in this together," then I'd say we're playing with semantics. Most poets (to the extent most poets are obscure and wish it were otherwise, if only within their sub-communities) share certain common traits, largely because the avid pursuit of Art does certain predictable things to the Human, and is predictably rewarding and not-so-rewarding to a human life across all time-periods and aesthetics. There are post-avantists eating tuna for dinner, true, and there are SoQers doing the very same thing across the hallway of the very same tenement building in Brooklyn...