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

[NB: Read Part I of this essay here].

In this essay, Jake Berry uses two terms coined by Bob Grumman in the 1980s, "otherstream" and "knownstream." Grumman himself defined the terms as follows in March of 2011:

"'Otherstream' is my adjective for works of art the great majority of arts academics, well-known critics, commerical 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."

Well, the definition is what it is, I guess, but we need to point out from the outset that it's not at all functional, for five reasons:

1. "Arts academics" (my 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.
2. That term "great majority" is what we used to call "weasel words" in law school--meaning they're so open to interpretation you can make them mean whatever you want. How do we measure how many "arts academics" (whatever that term denotes) know about a certain poetry or poetries? And if we could measure that, what does a "great majority" mean? Now, I'm not just trying to be cute here. One aspect of my research has been to try to divine, through data, how many working poets are now living and writing in America. Ron Silliman always tried to keep that figure very low (~10,000; I got him to grudgingly change his estimate to ~20,000) because the lower that figure is, the more cultural capital individual critics--like Silliman--can accrue by seeming to "have a handle on" what's happening in American poetry. The problem is, every piece of available data suggests that there are between 70,000 and 100,000 working poets in America, meaning that no one can claim cultural (literary-critic) capital because no one can access a comprehensive understanding of what's happening in poetry. Though he was writing in the 1980s, Grumman's aim is clear: To posit an entirely transparent, microcosmic community of poetry institutions that someone (say Grumman) can not merely theorize but even quantify--for instance, by asserting (from what could only be his own paltry anecdotal knowledge) that he (Grumman) is certain that Poet X is "only" known by "a small minority" of "arts academics." In other words, no one can ever quantify which poets or poetries or poems are "otherstream," so all cultural capital accruing to that term stays with Grumman, just as it does with Silliman and "Quietism" or Bernstein and "Official Verse Culture." These terms are poorly defined on purpose. And quite possibly Grumman designed his terms that way--and with that intention--also. Anyway, I'll put aside now other "weasel words" in Grumman's definitions, like "well-known"-- we all use such words on occasion, we just usually avoid putting them in definitions.
3. I don't know what a "commercial publisher" is. A trade press? These days, the folks at Black Ocean are outselling nearly everyone else, and they're a small independent press from Boston which (I presume) makes a little money but surely is not motivated by monetary gain. Likewise, while trade presses can and do publish poetry, almost none of them make money on it, so how are we alleging there's any segment of the poetry-publishing community--the full roster of publishing institutions that comprise that "institutional" wing of the literary arts community--that is "commercial"? Again, the term isn't functional, but it seems to be deliberately non-functional: Only Grumman gets to decide who's commercial and who isn't, even when (by any normal usage of the word) nobody is.
4. 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!). I don't think anyone kids themselves into believing Bob Grumman knows the curricula of more than a handful of academic institutions; that's particularly true if his aversion to discussing the academy or investigating the academy or really knowing anything at all about the academy is as strong as that of his acolytes. But more importantly, does this mean that the only innate quality of the "otherstream" is a negative quality? So, like, if everyone starts teaching a certain poet, and nothing about that poet or her poetry changes, she's suddenly not "otherstream" merely because she's become popular within and among a certain (poorly-defined) "academic" community? Does that sound flimsy to anyone else?
5. 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 rankly speculate) as compared to any other? Whose mainstream are we speaking of?

Jake Berry speaks in his essay of "the academic system, with its university presses, creative writing degrees and workshops." The problem is that creative writing degrees are non-academic fine-arts degrees, university presses are unaffiliated (in many if not most instances) with university English departments, and the "academics" in academic-institutional spaces -- literary studies scholars, i.e. -- aren't considered by Berry at all, even though they've been the life-blood of the avant-garde's continued relevance for decades, and even though, before them, the creative-writing-averse New Critics (also "academics") kept the then-avant-garde (High Modernism) in the public view quite intentionally and dramatically. "Creative writing" -- as admittedly comprised, in part, by "creative writing degrees and workshops" -- is such a newcomer to the scene that for anyone to associate a specific phenomenon with it they'd have to prove, too, that that phenomenon does not pre-date the late 1980s. Possibly the mid-1990s.

Berry is equally invested in cooking up some kind of notional book-buying public which actually doesn't exist anymore. He notes that trade presses and university presses often see their books sold in bookstores, but fails to add that bookstores really don't exist anymore and that the most avid book-buyers -- working poets -- do next to none of their book-shopping at the sort of brick-and-mortar buildings Berry somewhat fancifully imagines. And it matters. Because if Berry is equating cultural capital with institutional visibility in a space that doesn't really exist anymore -- and that has far less cultural capital in contemporary poetry, that is, among contemporary poets, than, say, SPD -- he's headed for a world of confusion.

And yet it's precisely that world he leaps into with both feet. Here's how Berry describes the dissemination of poetry in contemporary society:

"[T]he limit [of knowledge of poetry] for many poets [is "browsing the local bookstore or online bookseller (for poetry)...or order(ing it) online"]. Though they may be aware of poetry on CD, tape and LP, Internet magazines, journals and blogs as well as videos and audio recordings online, the dominant notion, and validation, of poetry remains in those books with the greatest distribution [i.e. trade and university press publications]....If one goes online and does a general search for poetry (*) one will discover that not only is a great deal of poetry available, but that an overwhelming amount of it is very current...the usual reaction is to appeal to an authority on the subject in order to get some idea of where to start, and that authority remains major publishers with the addition of academia. They are the gatekeepers."

* = What working poet searches for poetry this way? --S.A.

This is going to sound a little strange, but doesn't Berry's description of how the poetry community works sound a little... um... unhip? Obviously I'm not hip myself, never have been, but is the above really an accurate description of how anyone serious about poetry discovers new poets or poetry? I smell a man stuffed with straw and slowly smoldering at the elbows, here.

He continues, a bit further on:

"To become deeply involved with poetry is to unsettle our broad cultural assumptions and even throw the nature of individuality in doubt. Poetry creates an ache that can never be healed, but only relieved by a lifelong experience of those conditions that only poetry can provide. No gatekeeper can make absolute determinations on such a personal level. Both the gate the keeper have become irrelevant."

A little New-Agey for me, but okay -- to a point. Berry is describing pretty accurately my own engagement with/by poetry, but a famous poet once admonished me for forgetting that people come to poetry for different reasons. As this particular poet put it (I paraphrase), "Some come to poetry merely to see their own world reflected back at them in more vivid terms than they experience that world on a day-to-day basis; and then there are others who come to poetry to be constantly surprised and shocked out of their complacency, out of their day-to-day understanding of their environment and themselves." Berry is presuming that only the second part of that sentence is true, even though for some -- not me -- that first part is a much more accurate description of their engagement with/by poetry. And if one is looking to write or read poems with the most vivid images and metaphors and similes and descriptions (none of these being things I'm much interested in as a poet), well, it probably is true that those devices are "measurable" to a degree, and therefore one probably could use a gatekeeper to discover that Amy Clampitt wrote better descriptive poetry than, say, Mattie J.T. Stepanek.

After dismissing commercial publishers as gatekeepers because they're motivated by profit margins -- though where those profits are coming from, I'm sure I don't know -- Berry turns to academic publishers, who he says focus almost exclusively on two types of poetry: "the poetry that originated and developed from the Iowa School and its workshops and Language poetry -- also a development largely within the academy." So, first, anyone who's read anything about the history of the Iowa Writer's Workshop will know the following:

1. There is no "Iowa School," both because the IWW had a habit of hiring idiosyncratic cranks as professors, and because the program was simply too large (at its height in the late 1940s there were two hundred and fifty students in the program) to accommodate a singular aesthetic vision.
2. The IWW did everything imaginable to take nothing from the UI English department but money. They had their own professors, their own physical plant far away from the UI English building (and indeed even Paul Engle derisively referred to the UI English department as "the hill"; the Writers' Workshop was then located in Quonset huts on some crappy swampland on the banks of the Iowa River), and a curriculum entirely distinct from the English department curriculum -- including dramatically variant pedagogies.
3. Language writing did not originate "largely within the academy." But I'm glad Berry claims otherwise, because it illustrates, I think -- for old-school Language poets like Ron Silliman and Charles Bernstein -- that their movement's place in history is going to shortly be decimated by young avant-gardists like Berry who've not been handed down any functional terminology by either their college courses, their Language poetry elders, or any as-yet-underdeveloped  body of scholarship in Creative Writing Studies. Loose lips sink ships; loose language sinks poetry movements. Language poetry deserves better than this shoddy armchair taxonomizing.

Where Berry falls off the map, and where I probably have to stop reading his essay because I have other things to do, is here: "In both cases [the 'Iowa School' (sic) and Language writing] the idea was to create an authentic alternative to the poetry that was taught and published in the 1960s -- usually the deviations and derivations of modernism." Wow. Not sure where to start. Is Berry saying that the "Iowa School" of poetry-writing actually developed somewhere between a quarter-century and thirty-five years after the founding of the Workshop? Which faculty member leapt into the fray in Iowa City to accomplish this? But perhaps I'm being too generous here: If the "Iowa School" was a response to the "poetry that was taught and published in the 1960s," doesn't that mean that the "Iowa School" arose in the 1970s or 1980s? Again, at whose direction/oversight? Moreover, didn't the poetry championed by the New Critics -- and therefore the poetry most susceptible to "close reading," and therefore the poetry most likely to be taught in high schools -- include quite a lot of High Modernism, all "deviations and derivations" aside? Was Richard Wilbur ever more commonly taught than T.S. Eliot? Really? Or is Berry speaking, instead, of the poetry taught in graduate creative writing programs in the 1960s? If so, he's in for even more historical obstacles -- because as late as 1967 only one university in the world had ever graduated a class of creative writing MFA students, and no more than two dozen graduate creative writing programs of any kind (MFA or MA) were operating in the 1960s. I'd say Berry's history is murky, but honestly this isn't so much history we're dealing with as fanciful musings about what would have been an interesting and easy-to-understand way for history to have unfolded.

The problem is that this disintegrating discourse compounds over time. As Berry moves to a discussion of postmodernism, he offers this: "If industrialization and the move toward urban centrism is modernism, then the collapse of industry and city centers is post-modern." By which logic the San Francisco Renaissance, which was deeply informed by its urban roots -- and the New York School (ditto) -- are modernist movements, not postmodernist movements, and even the Language writing cabal (which had well-delineated spiritual headquarters and real-time haunts in New York, San Francisco, and D.C., if my history is right) would be considered modernist. We just can't work with -- can't do anything with -- that kind of bizarre terminology or taxonomy.

Thus far Berry's inaccuracies are locatable merely because they're historical; it's when he moves to discussing an institution that I actually attended -- whose operations I saw first-hand -- that I can say anecdotally that his claims are fully preposterous:

"[T]he Iowa school has, very generally speaking, sought authenticity in the discovery and development of an individual voice and a sense of place based on individual experience. It was and is welcomed as a reprieve from the difficulties of modernism and the abstractions of post-modernism. The voice is clear, the imagery and actions are precisely articulated. A deeply personal experience has been communicated."

He must be very generally speaking, because nothing in the paragraph above is accurate. Most of the kids in Iowa City when I was there were reading Taggart and Berrigan and O'Hara and Duncan, and the things they were producing for workshop often had to be specially copied because they included diagrams, graphs, experimental uses of the page-as-field, and so on. I don't know what Berry's on about, here. He must have read it from some gatekeeper.

In any case, I really am bowing out of this essay now, and it's without scholarly merit, IMHO. It's the same hip-shooting we've been seeing out of the avant-garde for a long time now; hopefully, I've unpacked a bit of it -- some of the disintegration in terms of definitions and histories -- in a way someone reading this will find helpful. I gotta get back to... I know it sounds crappy to say it, and I actually don't mean it so haughtily, but... actual scholarship that's at least halfway right empirically and historically and methodologically.

The avant-garde is, as ever, where the future of poetics and poetry lays: It deserves much better than this.

[Addendum: Here's Marjorie Perloff's response to Berry. I feel as though she is accepting many of his assumptions even as she seems to challenge them; for instance, she doesn't so much allege that the "Iowa School" doesn't exist as that university presses actually publish many poets who don't fit that mold.]