A Response to Perloff's Response to Yankelevich's Response to Perloff's Response to Dove's Anthology

Obsession With "the Academy," Prizes, and the General Public Is Just Killing Literary Criticism of Contemporary American Poetry

Noted academic Marjorie Perloff wrote this. Then Matvei Yankelevich, a poet, wrote this. Then Perloff wrote this. And now I'm writing this.

Perloff first alleges that "there's almost no real debate or argument" among poets about the direction of American poetry. That's not been my experience. I can't thinking of many working poets who would say it's been their experience. So let's put that aside, it being clearly off.

The bigger question is, "What does 'academic mainstream poetry' mean anymore?" And how can it form, as it implicitly does for Perloff, the very foundation -- the pushing-off point -- of a critique of the national poetry scene? Isn't "academic mainstream poetry" the sort of terminology whose usefulness ended twenty-five years ago, and which in no way recognizes or engages the complexity of contemporary American poetry and its culture and communities? Peter Gizzi, cited by Perloff, graduated from the Brown University MFA, has a hybrid academic/non-academic doctorate from SUNY-Buffalo, and teaches in the University of Massachusetts-Amherst MFA; Charles Bernstein, placed in the same group as Gizzi by Perloff, has aggressively opposed any iteration of "creative writing" (including the creative writing MFA) but also founded the first of the three hybrid doctorates -- those intended equally for creative writers and scholars -- now extant in the United States. Srikanth Reddy, plopped into the same camp as Gizzi and Bernstein by Perloff, has a creative writing MFA from the University of Iowa, an academic Ph.D. from Harvard University, and now teaches (I presume both creative writing and literary studies) at the University of Chicago. Natasha Trethewey's biography looks even less "academic" than Reddy's or Gizzi's or Bernstein's by comparison -- despite being aligned, by Perloff, with "academic mainstream poetry" -- as she graduated from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst creative writing MFA and now teaches creative writing in the Emory undergrad program. Not to mention the fact that the "confessionalists" (a dubious bit of critical terminology, in the first instance) who Perloff speaks derisively of and links up to "academic mainstream poetry" were none of them academics -- and were never embraced by literary studies scholars, post-New Criticism -- but the Language writers lauded and even lionized by Perloff in many instances were (as to both their categorization as "academics" and their treatment by literary studies scholars).

Why don't we just put aside all the language regarding "the academy" and say what Perloff really means: This is just about prizes. Laurels. Money. Fame. Period.

The sort of prizes, laurels, money, and fame that almost no one in poetry gets and therefore almost no one seriously invested in poetry really thinks about much. The 99.999% of poets who will never win a Pulitzer, a Guggenheim, be deemed one of the seventy-five most important poets of last century, or be named U.S. Poet Laureate must be absolutely amazed that it is these inaccessible, unimaginable laurels which somehow are treated by critics and working poets alike as the most immediate basis for starting a conversation about what's happening in American poetry. As we all know, most of the major prizes and non-prize laurels in American poetry are handed out not by rank-and-file poets but by non-poets or poets who owe their successes to non-poets, so such bounties will always go to those whose poetry is most "accessible."

Now can we have an actual conversation about how varied and exciting American poetry is?

Perloff writes, "[Y]ou can’t very well oppose the Penguin canon by bringing up the names of what [sic] are, outside the world of small-press and chapbook publishing, wholly unknown poets." But the thing is, we can, because only working poets are reading any of these essays anyway -- the general public doesn't choose what to read based on either scholarship or working poets' protestations, they elect champions (where they do) based on which poets most remind them of work in the genres they actually enjoy (fiction, television, movies, comic books, &c) -- and as all the poets who Yankelevich wants to speak of are widely known in the poetry community, it really is time to broaden the conversation to include (say) the MFAed but also theory-conscious poets congregating at Montevidayo (McSweeney, Goransson, Pafunda, Glenum, et. al.). Likewise, Perloff's "I am not convinced that the 'ever-growing margin on the sidelines of mainstream poetry' is as rich and fruitful as Yankelevich suggests" is a statement which can/should only be credited when the scholar who authored it writes her first essay intelligently addressing such poets and poetries, thereby proving she is aware of what they're doing and is in a position to dismiss them wholesale. Until then, it's the worst sort of off-hand erasure of thousands and thousands of poets whose work and ideologies resist easy categorization.

Speaking only for/of myself for a moment: I graduated from the Iowa Writers' Workshop, am a doctoral candidate in one of the three "hybrid" doctorates I mentioned above, am strongly associated with "creative writing" due to my research on MFA programs, and yet my fourth book is almost entirely comprised of modified readymades inspired by Duchamp -- a man explicitly championed by Perloff in her response to Yankelevich -- and is intended to theorize and reify the hybridization of lyric and academic discourses in a way I've not seen done before. I'm also an obscure poet, true, but if I'm trying to push boundaries, despite my "academic" credentials and my ample involvements with "creative writing," certainly there are thousands of others doing the same who are completely whitewashed by narrow conversations such as this one between Perloff and Yankelevich (though the latter is clearly trying to broader the conversation, at least). In a community in which -- contrary to Perloff's claims -- dissent and disagreement is typically the order of the day, we deserve better and more informed and more subtle dissent and disagreement than this.

So let's ditch the "academy" talk, ditch our unnatural and perverse obsession with prizes and other laurels, and start talking not merely about those poets who somehow seem iconic figureheads for some more or less now-irrelevant taxonomy of American poetics, but about the wide range of work evident among the 70,000 or more working poets now publishing today. Sure, it'll take certain scholars and poet-critics a) putting aside their Quixotic quest to "educate" a public that isn't listening to such conversations and never will be, and b) reading much more broadly than they currently do -- perhaps even finding new poets (i.e., those not party to the present stunted dialectic) -- to ask for reading recommendations from, but we have to do something. These conversations about Conceptualism (as if that's new? Dadaism was Conceptualism) and Conservatism (as if that means anything?), or about "academic mainstream poetry" (meaningless!) and the "avant-garde" (ever-shifting!) are not going anywhere or advancing our understanding of poetry in any way. And I bet I'm not the only one who's sick of it.