The Disintegrating Quality of Avant-Garde Discourse (Pt. I)

I have "Part IV" of the "There's a War On" series almost ready, but I was distracted today by a conversation now happening amongst some European (and possibly Canadian) avant-gardists regarding the essays I've been posting on this site (and many other issues besides). The confusion these folks have about those essays is concerning to me, particularly as to their specific critiques of this essay/note-taking exercise:

• "[This essay] is really not about poetry so much as academic politics."
• "When [the essay] is 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 now what I'd call cogent about the poetry he seems to know something about."

The confusion here is a pretty foundational one: The fundamental premise of all these TSE essays/note-taking exercises, and my research presently, is that the entirety of the history of contemporary American poetry (say, from 1912 to 2012) has been miswritten because we had our data and consequently our history (and consequently our terminology) entirely wrong. And that it may well have been a well-intentioned yet nevertheless propaganda-driven/agenda-driven conspiracy that set us on our current path in Contemporary Poetry Studies. My prelims reading list -- and I'll emphasize again that all of the essays here on TSE have been billed as "pre-prelims note-taking exercises" -- has 90 books of poetry on it, out of 150 total books. Most of those 90 books hail from the twentieth-century "avant-garde" tradition. So this blog will be featuring a lot of discussion about individual poems and poets and poetries, but for now it's emphasizing literary-historical and sociological research which is not about academic politics but something much greater: the historical reliability of anything any of us have read about contemporary poetry in the last half-century.

I'm reading some of the top scholars in Contemporary Poetry Studies right now, and not one of them has yet escaped having entire sections of their treatises deemed erroneous or misleading on the basis of the historical research I've been on about since at least 2006. That's not a boast; I've been extremely frustrated and saddened (hokey, I know, but I mean this seriously) to be not at all sure how to interact with these texts now that I see much of their scholarship as suspect. I don't want (and I think nobody wants) for us to be treated to another ten or twenty years of avant-garde discourse of conspicuously disintegrating quality.

So, to dive right into this ancillary issue, here's the note that recently appeared on the Argotist Online (I've made notes between paragraphs in bold):

The Academisation of Avant-Garde Poetry

Jake Berry's essay, "Poetry Wide Open: The Otherstream (Fragments In Motion)" deals with the issue of certain types of avant-garde poetry as not yet having found favour within the Academy, or with poetry publishers of academically "sanctioned" avant-garde poetry. The damaging aspects of this exclusion, and the concept of an "approved" versus an "unapproved" avant-garde poetry, are also examined in the essay. And these things could well be described as "the academisation of avant-garde poetry."

TSE: This is a good example of the increasing incoherence of avant-garde literary criticism. In the paragraph above, "Academy" is used as a catch-all to include both literary studies and "creative writing" -- two forces that have been at war for approximately 75 years, that generally have sanctioned and promoted entirely different poetries, and that are now administratively segregated at most colleges and universities due to the decline and fall of the academics-oriented creative writing MA (and the subsequent rise of creative writing MFA). So when the above author speaks of "types of avant-garde poetry...not yet having found favour within the Academy," no one reading that phrase could possibly have any idea what's being discussed. Are we speaking of passive receipt -- and translation into scholarship -- of avant-garde literary mateiral by literary studies professors, most of whom are now suffused in literary theory, but a few of whom are historicists or New Historicists or (even fewer still) neo-New Critics? Or are we speaking of whether or not these "types of avant-garde poetry" are being taught by working writers in creative writing workshops -- most of whose faculty and students have minimal to no familiarity with or interest in literary theory, historicism (or the New Historicism), or even (though they may have had some "training" in it in high school) the New Criticism? 

In other words, precisely who is excluding whom? And from where? Who is doing all this "sanctioning" -- of what, and where, and when, and how? Who is doing the "approving" -- and of what, and where, and when, and how? Nobody in these discussions amongst avant-garde poets and critics really knows. But we do have the boogeyman of "academicisation" brought out from under the bed yet again, the only problem being that the term is not (of course) being used literally here, or anywhere, as the above author is neither claiming that avant-garde poetries are increasingly being written by literary studies professors ("academics"), nor that avant-garde poetries are now being produced primarily in literary studies degree programs ("academic degree programs"), nor even that the only evident consumption of avant-garde poetries is now happening on college and university campuses (broadly, "the academy," though as noted this includes both the scholarship-oriented fiefdom of "literary studies" and the "creative writing"-inflected spaces delineated by creative writing workshops -- even if all the students in such workshops are also, to complicate things further, taking traditional literary studies courses to complete their MFA degrees).

Academic poetic output is operating to a healthy extent in the US, where university creative writing departments are flourishing. The University of Pennsylvania has its Kelly Writers House programme, its PennSound website and its Center for Programs in Contemporary Writing, all sympathetic to academic avant-garde poetry. The University of Pennsylvania also edits Jacket2, an influential online poetics website, which was formerly called Jacket, and which was edited by the independent John Tranter before he passed it over to the university. And similar things are happening in the UK, with various institutions such as the Contemporary Poetics Research Centre at Birkbeck University, and the Poetry and Poetics Research Group at the University of Edge Hill, both promoting academic avant-garde poetry.

TSE: We must put aside that the only university referenced here -- Penn -- is one that does not have a graduate creative writing program (which maybe, depending upon our working definition of "Academy," puts it outside the "Academy"?), just as we must put aside the author's minimal awareness of what's happening at any of the 200+ American universities which do have graduate creative writing programs. No mention is made here of the evident and notable avant-garde sympathies of the MFA programs at Brown University, University of Notre Dame, University of California-San Diego, Temple University, California Institute of the Arts, Mills College, Cornell University, Columbia College Chicago, Naropa University, The New School, Saint Mary's College of California, University of Colorado-Boulder, University of Montana, University of Utah, or any of the other avant-friendly universities even the greenest MFA applicant in America would be aware of. No -- we get none of that. We get no such acknowledgments here, because -- as noted already on this blog, in previous essays -- the avant-garde, of whose various poetics and poetries I consider myself both an admirer and a student (and sometimes an adherent, poetics-wise if not often aesthetically) seems fixated on discussions of "the academy" despite not understanding its contours in the slightest. It is no coincidence the author of this brief piece mentions Penn, one of the only universities in the United States to have a conspicuous non-degree-granting avant-garde outpost -- as no other presence of the avant-garde in the academy is cognizable to these avant-garde poets and critics. It seems their distaste for academia is so virulent they're unwilling to even "know thy enemy." 

A greater issue is this new coinage, "academic avant-garde poetry," which bears the same ills of easy misinterpretation (or even meaninglessness) as does its originary term "academicisation." What does it mean for an "avant-garde poetry" to be "academic"? Again, the discourse of these fellows is designed to create the appearance of a mutual understanding of terms when in fact no such consensus does -- or could -- exist.

Consequently, one could say that the term "avant-garde" has now, essentially, been appropriated by the Academy, and, as such, has become associated with the sort of poetic writing practices that could be fairly said to represent "establishment" poetry, to the extent that the historical resonances of the term "avant-garde" have become meaningless. In contrast, Bob Grumman’s term, “otherstream”, which Berry uses in his essay to describe poetry that is marginalised by the Academy, can be seen as a more apt replacement for the term “avant-garde”, which has now become obsolete as an appropriate description for poetry that isn’t anecdotal, descriptive or prose-like.

TSE: We see here that the author's use of the term "Academy" has suddenly switched; as "poetic writing practices" are being discussed now, we must assume we've now returned to "creative writing" spaces within the academy, and literary studies scholars -- all of them; their entire institutional history -- have suddenly been divorced from any working definition of "the Academy." (For surely we could not include those scholars, else we be forced to admit that the avant-garde was "appropriated by the Academy" just as soon as prominent avant-garde poets started storming the academy -- via the acceptance of teaching positions -- in the 1980s. Indeed, we might then be forced to note, too, that literary studies scholarship adopted the avant-garde during that very same period, meaning that "creative writing" spaces in the academy are now -- assuming the author's claim of "appropriation" is true -- either experiencing a generative "bleeding-over" of their peers' work in literary studies -- a phenomenon which would be worthy of study, if identifiable -- or else that the avant-garde has found its way into "creative writing" via other means -- which might suggest, to the horror of all these fellows, that there is something inherent in "creative writing" that is amenable to, susceptible to, conducive to the introduction of avant-garde poetries and poetics). 

In any case, if "the historical resonances" of the term "avant-garde" have become meaningless -- per this author's contention -- we would need to say, also, that the term "establishment" (used by this author) has likewise been rendered meaningless, as the avant-garde historically used the term to denote the hegemony of the New Criticism, then once the New Criticism was gone it used it (per Bernstein) to denote Official Verse Culture (which the data now suggest did not originate in the academy), and now... well, now we've simply no idea what the term "establishment" means to these guys. Except to say that it's a murky term all of whose myriad valences we're presumed to disapprove of instantly.

I'm no New Critic, but I'll note also how generally shabby a job of "close reading" avant-garde critics often do when they choose to avail themselves of the tools of their oppressors. The fellow writing the above paragraph defines "establishment"/"Academy" poetry -- produced by whom, and where, and when, we don't entirely know, but surely somewhere on some kind of campus at some time by somebody -- as "anecdotal, descriptive or prose-like." These three terms historically have nothing in common. "Anecdotal" poetry could well be used to describe the highly-social "walking-around" poetries of the New York School, or the literary tradition of the Black Arts Movement, unless the author means "epiphanic" poetry, in which case we're speaking of those same Romantics "mainstream" poetry has lionized and the avant-garde has merely adopted wholesale as to their theories of "creative genius." 

As an anti-descriptive poet -- I almost never use metaphors or similes or "describe" anything in my work, which is quite intentional (I read rather a lot of Dorn in Iowa City) -- I know that those who feel otherwise could as easily claim the avant-garde Imagists as their direct predecessors as anyone else. And "prose poetry" was, of course, an avant-garde creation entirely. So the aesthetic engagement of the essay-introduction above is minimal; we might even say it's only gestural. Which would be less of a problem if the article weren't entirely grounded in a study of aesthetics.

This Argotist Online feature presents Berry’s essay, the responses to it from poets and academics it was first shown to, and an interview with Berry where he addresses some of the criticisms voiced in these responses. Many poets and academics (including those most famously associated with Language Poetry) were approached for their responses but declined. Other poets and academics that had initially agreed to respond ultimately declined. I mention this not as criticism but merely to explain the absence of people who one would normally expect to have responded and taken part in such a discussion.

TSE: Here we encounter the old "poets and academics" canard. You know, those "academics" -- the ones every other paragraph implies work in creative writing programs and are themselves working poets and not academics. Or does "the Academy" now mean only literary studies programs, and we ought to presume that no one in a literary studies course could possibly be a working poet -- even though almost every creative writing MFA and definitely every creative writing MA and definitely every creative writing doctoral program requires literary studies coursework from its working poets? (The last form of program even requires, too, the same preliminary examinations as English Literature doctoral candidates take.) 

The point I'm making is hopefully an obvious one: Discourse in the avant-garde community has become so sloppy in part because there's been no one pushing at it from the other side, as Ron Silliman has long noted. That is, scholars of "creative writing" -- whether or not they write in that alleged vein or rather an avant-garde one -- are needed, men and women who know that their brethren in the avant-garde community have gradually lost all definition of their terms. And if those conversations held between and amongst members of the nominal "avant-garde" are to have any meaning or resonance or relevance to anyone else, those terms have to be defined.

Anyone who uses the phrase "poets and academics" has absolutely no handle on what's happened in American poetry over the past 125 years, because the myriad forms and methods of juxtaposing those two roles -- most of which forms and methods were invented from whole cloth by the avant-garde itself -- are such that a dramatic realignment of terminology is needed before we even have the conversations alluded to above. 

One reason I've engaged in this research is because I believe (as I've written in the next essay shortly forthcoming on this site) that this research benefits everyone: literary studies scholars, "creative writing" students and faculty, neo-New Critics, avant-garde poets and scholars, even the "Otherstream" folks discussed in the essay-introduction above.

In the second "part" of this essay I'll address the article itself (the one by Jake Berry).