And the Best Poet is...: Poetry Prizes and Normative Criteria

How does one decide which poet, or which manuscript, should win any of the ever-growing number of poetry prizes?  Peter Riley, in an article in the Fortnightly Review, remarks on the obscurity of prize criteria.  Awards tend to be given out to poets who are “the best” or to collections of poems that show “excellence,” but very little is ever said by way of clarifying “the best at what?” or “excellence in terms of which criteria?”  In this, poetry competitions are quite unlike cattle shows.  As Riley points out, cattle shows have clear, objective, and normative criteria for excellence:

If at a county show you are one of the judges in the section for Aberdeen Angus cattle, you will have a comprehensive list of points which must be fulfilled. There is the carriage of the creature’s head, with even teeth and broad muzzle. It should have a long body and strong legs with the joints well set. The back should be straight with a slight dip at one end. It should be well and evenly muscled with not too much fat. Viewed from behind the rump should be rounded, the legs straight and the hooves correctly positioned. When it walks its hind hoofs should enter the marks of its front hoofs without overstepping or understepping. If it is a cow its udder should not be pendulous and the teats should be of the right size and placement. If it is a bull the testicles should be large and the sheaf firmly attached and not pendulous. But all these distinctions should be weighed against the proportions of the whole animal and the aim is to assure that both it and its progeny should fulfill their commercial function. If all these boxes are ticked, you have your winner.

For poetry prizes, though, we have no clearly articulated normative criteria — and even though Riley says “surely some version of this schemata could be devised for judging poetry competitions,” one suspects his tongue is in his cheek.  Much as one is tempted to simplify matters of judgment by simply taking the cattle competition criteria over into the literary sphere (the winning poet should be “well and evenly muscled without too much fat” and “viewed from behind the poet’s rump should be well rounded,” if male the poet’s “testicles should be large,” etc.) no version of overtly normative criteria is likely to appear in the judge’s guidelines for any competition.  Not even if the norms had to do with meter, imagery, and syntax rather than body fat, rumps, and testicles.

In fact, revulsion at the thought of normative criteria for poetry runs deep, and even manifests in our popular culture.  Consider the first two minutes of this clip from Dead Poets Society, in which the teacher played by Robin Williams offers a strongly worded condemnation of the normative criteria for poetry outlined by the fictitious critic J. Evans Pritchard:

A few critics have laid down fairly clear normative criteria for poetry. Yvor Winters, for example, comes to mind—and it is perhaps worth noting that in addition to being a poet and critic, he bred show dogs and had them evaluated by criteria much like those applied to cattle.  But the rare exceptions prove the rule: normative criteria for poetry are unusual, and generally perceived as crackpot-ish at best, philistine at worst.  Despite what Dead Poets Society would have you believe, such criteria are unlikely to appear in any textbook, except perhaps surrounded by apologetic statements, qualifiers along the lines of “this will help get you started as a poetry reader but shouldn’t be taken too seriously” and other semi-retractions.

Why is this?  I’m not asking in order to say we ought to come up with criteria for poetry.  I’m asking because a sense of the origins of our current anti-normative way of thinking may cast some light on what is actually happening when poetry contests are judged.

The notion that the things that make poems excellent can’t be defined is at least as old as the seventeenth century.  It was then that the French poet Nicolas Boileau-Despréaux put forth the idea that what distinguishes truly sublime work from lesser poetry was “a certain je ne sais quoi”— that is, a certain “I don’t know what.”  Boileau’s ideas were immensely influential, and the notion that excellence could be felt but not defined gained currency across Europe.  The nature of good writing, a believer in the je ne sais quoi says, is something I know and I can't explain.  Inherent in the idea is the notion that there's no point in trying to explain one's criteria, since it is inherently elusive.  

Boileau's ideas are connected to the reception of art, to what goes on in the mind of the reader.  In the nineteenth century, there's a new turn of mind, toward the art object itself, and thinkers like Coleridge begin to argue that the internal qualities of works of art resist normative judgement.  When Coleridge talks about organic form, for example, he tells us that poems, like all works of art, cannot be held up to some external standard.  They generate their own rules from within.  In this way Coleridge dismisses those who would criticize Shakespeare's tragedies for deviating from the formal criteria outlined in Aristotle's Poetics.  He opens up the theoretical pathways that justify a great deal of artistic innovation.  He also makes it much more difficult to offer a theoretical justification for the normative assessment of poetry.

Both Boileau, with his sensitive reader who detects the undefinable, and Coleridge, with his hyper-individualistic artist discovering his personal path in art, can be seen as symptoms of modernity, of the gradual replacement of old, collective, authoritarian ways of thinking with new, atomized, individualistic ones.  Fredric Jameson gets at the nature of the shift they represent when he writes, in "Criticism in History," of the difference between the rhetorical and the stylistic.  The former, Jameson says, is normative and conformist, while the latter is deeply bourgeois and individualistic:

Rhetoric is an older and essentially pre-capitalist mode of literary organization; it is a collective or class phenomenon in that it serves as a means of assimilating the speech of individuals to some suprapersonal oratorical paradigm, to some non- or preindividualistic standard of the beau parler, of high style and fine writing.... Style on the other hand is a middle-class phenomenon, and reflects the increasing atomization of  middle-class life.... in its emphasis on the uniquely personal, in the etymological sense of the stilus, the inimitable and wellnigh physiological specificity of my own handwriting.

So when we shy away from normative criteria for poetry, we're simply being who we are, participating in our modern or postmodern individualistic identities.  But this leaves us in a tricky spot when it comes to poetry contests, and our position is made all the trickier by virtue of the fact that poetry prizes and contests have become a bigger and bigger part of how poetry in Western countries is published and rewarded.  There was a very brief period in the middle of the nineteenth century when poets were rewarded well by the market, and after that there were a number of decades when to be a poet was almost necessarily either a bohemian (Yeats lived for most of his adult life in a two room flat) or someone with a day job (Wallace Stevens as insurance man).  Now many poets live in the publish or perish sphere of academe, and poetry publishing is often done via the contest method, with poets submitting manuscripts to prize-givers.  At the more senior end of things, the big prizes given out by foundations and (less often) government agencies play a significant role as sources of income and, more importantly, as badges that give one clearance into the more prestigious clearings in the groves of academe.  Prizes matter now, but we live in a poetic culture inimical to clearly articulated, objective, normative criteria of judgement.


What to do?  One path that's been tried, both in the past and in our own time, involves moving away from criteria for the poem to criteria for the person judging the poem.  David Hume's great essay "On the Standard of Taste" argues that we may not be able to define beauty, but we can describe the sort of person who is likely to have a good sense of beauty. Such a person must be familiar with many art objects of the kind under consideration, for example—you wouldn't want someone who'd only read fifty poems to be the judge of a poetry contest.  Such a person would also have an un-agitated mind at the time of judging, and (among many other criteria) would give due attention to the object of judgement.  


Kant's Critique of Judgment takes Hume one step further, and tells us that a true judge of beauty must, above all else, maintain disinterest.  That is, he shouldn't let personal connection to the artwork, or its maker, or its moral sentiment, get in the way of his judgement.  Good judgement of beauty, for Kant, is essentially a manner of screening out all non-aesthetic criteria and looking at what's left.  In our own time, the emphasis on high-profile expert judges for poetry competitions is, in essence, an adopting of a Humean or Kantian position: we may not be able to define what the best poems are like, but we know what sort of expert can make a good judgement.


The problem, of course, is that this solution doesn't always work.  First of all, the proliferation of different styles and schools of poetry means that the familiarity with tradition upon which Hume's good judge depends becomes difficult to attain: no one has mastery of the entire spectrum of poetic styles.  A Helen Vendler covers one corner, a Marjorie Perloff covers another, and the room has many, many corners.  In addition the criterion of "due attention to the object" is trickier than it sounds in our present context: I've been a judge for a poetry prize, and found myself with literally hundreds of manuscripts to read, all while teaching, grading papers, looking after my kid, and trying to do my own writing.  It wasn't easy.  Indeed, I don't think I was fair to every manuscript, and I don't think I could have been.  The day has too few hours, and the world too little caffeine.  And with regard to the Kantian notion of disinterest—well, it was given a good sharp kick in the teeth by multiculturalism, by the claim that so-called disinterest was simply a screen behind which certain entrenched (white, male, bourgeois, heterosexual) norms lurked.  It never really recovered.


Even more discrediting to the notion that choosing qualified judges will save us from having to articulate normative criteria was the whole unpleasant business exposed by the people at Foetry some years ago.  They looked for nepotistic patterns in the awarding of prizes, and they found them.  Far from being disinterested, many prominent contest judges proved all-too-human, awarding prizes to friends, lovers, and former students.  The score of the game, it seemed, was: self-interest 1; disinterest 0.


Another path, one worth trying, would be the one suggested by Michael Theune and Bob Broad in the November 2010 issue of College English.  Theune and Broad began with the premise that people who care about and work with poetry have internalized certain criteria of judgement, and that those criteria can be made explicit through conversation about particular poems.  Their work involved conducting sessions in which poets and critics discussed poems they admired, and gave reasons for their admiration.  From this, Theune and Broad began to tease out things that the poets themselves might have been unable to articulate before.  They moved from je ne sais quoi to mais oui, je sais quoi—a movement many more of us should follow.  In fact, it might be worthwhile for contest judges to do some long hard self-examination before agreeing to act as judges, and then make public some kind of statement about what they love in poetry and why they love it, including all of their ambivalences, their contradictions, and their openness to surprise.  It would be strange, at first, but it might begin to take us forward from our current situation, where so much rides, for so many, on such vague criteria.

British Poetry Wars: The Battle of Prague

While we here in the United States were gathered round our Thanksgiving turkeys for our annual family re-enactments of Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf, strange doings were afoot across the Atlantic, doings in the form of a dust-up among the more experimentally oriented British poetry crowd. Lest we vulgar, hostile, petty, fame-obsessed Yanks feel we're alone in our many vices, your present humble blogger offers this fragmentary account of the latest Britpo contretemps.

Toward the end of the scuffle, one of the participants claimed that the whole affair was a sign of the increasing Americanization and academicization of British poetry. In a sense, I think that's true. But I'm getting ahead of myself. Let's begin where the battle began: in Prague, where the always-interesting — nay cutting-edge — press Litteraria Pragensia issued a collection of essays called Complicities: British Poetry 1945-2007, edited by Robin Purves and Sam Ladkin.

While the book has an essay on W.S. Graham and another on Seamus Heaney, overall the book takes a pretty strongly Cambridge-centric look at the poetic landscape. Of the nineteen essays, at least four are either on or by Jeremy Prynne, two are on Andrea Brady, one's on Keston Sutherland (who wrote one of the Prynne pieces), two are on Chris Goode, and there's another on Peter Monson.

When I first received a publicity email blast about the book, I was a bit stoked: whatever else you may say about the Cambridge crew, they're not that well known in the U.S. — miraculous polymaths like John Matthias know about them, as do a few hard-core alt-Britpo types like Keith Tuma, Devin Johnston, and Romana Huk, and the current Chicago Review gang takes an interest, but it doesn't seem to extend too much further. Here, I thought, gazing at the email I'd rescued from my spam-filter, was a chance to delve deeper into what seems to be some fertile terrain.

But seen from another perspective — specifically that of Geraldine Monk — the book was a bit of an insult. Monk, writing in to Keith Tuma's British poetry discussion list, took issue with the the subtitle "British Poetry, 1945-2007." The subtitle claimed a representative status for the book that was manifestly false, she said, and the contents skewed to a younger crowd of poets who hadn't yet "earned their stripes," while neglecting poets who'd been working away in obscurity for years. (Monk, by the way, was recently the subject of what looks like a good, and well-deserved, collection of critical appreciations: The Salt Companion to Geraldine Monk).

Monks' criticisms did not sit well with Keston Sutherland, who fired back a broadside worthy of one of Admiral Nelson's ships of the line. "Seniority be damned! Bah! Yargh! Fire all carronades and batten down the bosun's quindledeck! Bring me grog and a flaming spar-smutter!" quoth Captain Keston (I'm paraphrasing here), before launching into a very plausible explanation of the subtitle as a necessary evil, a publisher's ploy to lure librarians and profs into having their institutions order copies. After reading Bill Allegrezza's grim description of the economics of small press publishing I'm inclined to sympathy for this kind of concession to the logic of the market, even if it involves a bit of misrepresentation. Then again, I'm not a British poet who's worked in obscurity for decades only to find myself left out of a book that purports in its subitle to cover the field in which I've labored. Ask me how I feel about the issue again, after a book called Poet-Critic-Bloggers of the American Midwest, 1999-2015 comes out without so much of a mention of my tireless efforts, and you'll likely hear some grumbling. I'm steamed about it already!

Anyway. Après Keston, le déluge, avec un grand kaboom. Many people chimed in, some with sage advice and level heads, some sounding more hostile notes. It got nasty and weird, there was some name-calling, some ugly misogyny, and some sidetracking into bickering about who got, and didn't get, invited to participate in a poetry reading. Change the names and it might have been the Buffalo POETICS list back in the mid-1990s. The ever-even-keeled Mairéad Byrne did what she could to convert anger into wit by a clever bit of verbal alchemy, but it took a while before things settled down. At one point one discussant suggested that she and the other women of the list secede and form their own discussion list. In part this was to be a withdrawal to "a safe place" away from male chest-thumping, and in part it was to be a continuation of the war-for-turf: the proposed topic for the list was the formulation of a strategy to get into the male-dominated anthologies. (By the way: the rhetorical move in which men are condemned for their overly emotional discourse really should have a name: I propose "The Reverse-Victorian Tongue Hold," since it quite effectively reverses the patriarchal move of dismissing women's discourse as emotionally motivated hysterics). Geraldine Monk wasn't enthusiastic about the idea, though, so I don't know if it will go anywhere.

That's about where things stood when the smoke started to clear and the clamor faded. Maybe the negative energy needed to be expelled. Anyway, it doesn't look like much has changed after all of the pushing and shoving and, of course, this tempest in the avant-teacup hasn't even registered in the world of laureateships and the TLS, where the experimental poets continue to be pretty thoroughly shut out.

The best thing to emerge from the whole affair, I think, has been Stephen Rodefer's reflections on the nature of literary reputation. In what I take to be a kind of valedictory address as the wounded limp away from the battlefield, Rodefer asked whether early recognition (the critical praise of young poets who hadn't yet "earned their stripes") was always a good thing; and whether critical neglect through a long career was always bad. While early recognition can be good for a poet (as it was for Robert Hass), it can also be as debilitating as the lack of recognition. I admire Rodefer's philosophical distance here.

So what about this business of the recent battle as a sign of the Americanization and academization of Britpo? Well, one of the sad characteristics of American academe is captured in the quip, attributed to Henry Kissinger, that "university politics are vicious precisely because the stakes are so small." In the end, I think this applies to the outpouring of anger about what boils down to little more than a questionable subtitle. In a world like alt-Britpo, there's so little recognition to go around, and so much deserving talent, that when the little dribs and drabs of recognition are thrown out into the world, it can all look a bit like monkey feeding time at the Kyoto zoo. Which is sad, really.

All I can offer as an antidote to the Americanization/academicizing/hungry-monkey-ization witnessed over the weekend is this bit of very English wisdom, from Samuel Johnson's blog entry (sorry, I mean his Rambler essay) of May 29, 1750. Johnson begins with a cold hard look at writers and their self-satisfaction:

Every man is prompted by the love of himself to imagine, that he possesses some qualities, superior, either in kind or in degree, to those which he sees allotted to the rest of the world; and, whatever apparent disadvantages he may suffer in the comparison with others, he has some invisible distinctions, some latent reserve of excellence, which he throws into the balance, and by which he generally fancies that it is turned in his favour.

The studious and speculative part of mankind always seem to consider their fraternity as placed in a state of opposition to those who are engaged in the tumult of publick business; and have pleased themselves, from age to age, with celebrating the felicity of their own condition, and with recounting the perplexity of politicks, the dangers of greatness, the anxieties of ambition, and the miseries of riches.

But no such superiority exists, really:

It was well known by experience to the nations which employed elephants in war, that though by the terrour of their bulk, and the violence of their impression, they often threw the enemy into disorder, yet there was always danger in the use of them, very nearly equivalent to the advantage; for if their first charge could be supported, they were easily driven back upon their confederates; they then broke through the troops behind them, and made no less havock in the precipitation of their retreat, than in the fury of their onset.

....The garlands gained by the heroes of literature must be gathered from summits equally difficult to climb with those that bear the civick or triumphal wreaths, they must be worn with equal envy, and guarded with equal care from those hands that are always employed in efforts to tear them away; the only remaining hope is, that their verdure is more lasting, and that they are less likely to fade by time, or less obnoxious to the blasts of accident.... [But] if we look back into past times, we find innumerable names of authors once in high reputation, read perhaps by the beautiful, quoted by the witty, and commented upon by the grave; but of whom we now know only that they once existed. If we consider the distribution of literary fame in our own time, we shall find it a possession of very uncertain tenure; sometimes bestowed by a sudden caprice of the publick, and again transferred to a new favourite, for no other reason than that he is new; sometimes refused to long labour and eminent desert, and sometimes granted to very slight pretentions; lost sometimes by security and negligence, and sometimes by too diligent endeavours to retain it.

Against the uncertainties and inequities of ever-fickle fame, Johnson offers a kind of stoic distance, a resolution to labor on regardless, and to care a little less, if possible, about the laurels, and on whose heads they momentarily rest. You've got to love Johnson for that. And for the elephant analogy. That was good too.

The Battle of Chicago: Peter Riley Emerges from the Rubble

This just in from Peter Riley, regarding my earlier post "British Poetry Wars: The Battle of Chicago.". Riley, whose open letter to John Wilkinson set off what I've thought of as a bit of a dust-up about the claims made for British experimental poetry, weighs in here with a few points about the context of his remarks and, more importantly, his reservations about a phrase of my own, "the Prynne tradition."

Just read Archambeau's excellently cheerful American response and wanted to append a couple of disclaimers.

First is that while I recognise the light tone I don't thing "war" or even "conflict" is the right way to characterise this. It is not a row between me and John Wilkinson, still less between two cultural positions. It is a challenge within a shared framework. I am not ironic in positioning myself within the tradition which I interrogate ("how did we...") . If I speak strongly it is because my worries about my own share in the condition entitle me to, and also put me in a position to shoot out arrows at targets far beyond immediate company.

And I'd essentially like to add for the record that when I sent the letter to Chicago Review I didn't know that the next issue was to be a British poetry issue featuring particularly those four poets. So it's not a response to that content, and John Wilkinson's review of Andrea Brady in it is both prior to and posterior to my remarks, for it indeed confirms that what I say is being said, is being said, but it is also a pre-answer to what I say.

Secondly I can't take this idea of a"Prynne tradition", which I think is an American reading. What I said was "The poetry that developed through Cambridge in the 1960s and 1970s" to which I attach great importance. This isn't a "Prynne tradition" for a number of reasons--

1) Jeremy Prynne was only one of about ten poets strongly involved in that formation. The poetry I'm speaking of emerged from a meeting, confrontation and to some extent conflict, between Prynne and the other poets, who I think affected his writing at that time as much as he did theirs. This contact produced a particular and recognisable way of writing which has emerged sporadically from those poets and others for some ten or twenty years afterwards, including some who were only marginally involved. Anthony Barnett, for instance, is relevant, the only contemporary British poet Prynne has ever devoted a lecture to, but who seems to have vanished from sight in the "Prynne tradition".

2) There are at least two JH Prynne poetries, polarised as early and late, and I for one find them so separated from each other that I don't see how one can be in the tradition of the other, let alone anybody else's.

3) I think Prynne's poetry has always been unique and inimitable. All attempts to write like him have failed. That's because there is a long developed and cultivated aesthetic underneath the affects of his poetry which he has pursued to an extreme condition and if you don't participate in that, and you can't, you don't have a chance of writing in that way. R. F. Langley, alone, knows and participates in this programme, which he turns to his own purposes. I don't think Keston Sutherland's poetry resembles Prynne's, or barely, still less any of the other poets in that issue.

I've got to own up to this much, at least: I did invoke Prynne in a broad way, using him as a figurehead for British experimental poetry with a Frankfurt-school inflection from midcentury on — from where Riley sits, this is painting with very coarse strokes indeed. And I can see why I finer brush is needed: as one of the many people who got in touch with me after the initial post pointed out, what's at stake here (in what I still take pleasure in calling the "Battle of Chicago") is Prynne's place in the history of British experimental poetry. Will we end up treating Prynne as the godfather of experimental Britpo, the key figure of the current generation's "useable past"? Or will he recede in importance until he seems like one of ten or so equally important figures? Will we or won't we see some future Hugh Kenner writing The Prynne Era? We don't know the future, but we know where Peter Riley has taken his stand.

British Poetry Wars: The Battle of Chicago

It shouldn't surprise us that the latest round of internecine British cultural warfare has occurred on American soil. I mean, this country was founded by a bunch of disgruntled refugee British cultural dissidents with funny hats and a lot to learn about growing corn and trading beads for turkeys and real estate. So the Brits have a distinguished tradition of exporting their squabbles. They also have another distinguished tradition: one of arguing bitterly about the nature and value of avant-garde poetry over the last three decades or so (if you want to read about a particularly savage episode, check out Peter Barry's new book Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of Earls Court, out last summer from the good people at Salt Publishing). And the last few weeks have seen the two traditions collide, with the carnage splattered across the pages of the Chicago Review, and on the walls of Chicago's Elastic Arts Center.

Let me explain.

It all started quietly enough, with a review of a new book by the younger British poet Simon Jarvis by John Wilkinson, a fellow Brit recently transplanted to (God help him) South Bend, Indiana. The review itself begins with the not-all-that-hyperbolic assertion that Jarvis is an odd kind of poet. "It would defeat rhetoric to overstate the peculiarity of Simon Jarivis' book The Unconditional: A Lyric," writes Wilkinson, claiming that it "must be among the most unusual books ever published." How's that, you ask? Well, Wilkinson continues: "imagine if you can... a continuous poem of 237 pages mainly in iambic pentameter, in which whole pages pass without a full stop," a poem "dedicated to a high level of discourse on prosody, critical theory, and phenomenology; all this conducted in a philosophical language drawing on Adorno's negative dialectics" and "a narrative language that is the unnatural offspring of Wyndham Lewis and P.B. Shelley." Moreover, the book is filled with a particularly unusual cast of characters, a group resembling nothing so much as "refugees from an Iain Sinclair novel finally fed up with walking" with names like "=x" "Agramant" "Qnuxmuxkyl" and "Jobless," a group who start out on a Canturbury Tales-like trip, but wind up in a dingy pub displaying unlikely degrees of alienation and erudition.

(I can't be the only one to rush to Amazon.com immediately after reading that description, can I? Amazon's note on the status of the book, then and now — "currently unavailable" — indicates that Jarvis' American fan base is either so large that the book flies off the shelves like the latest Harry Potter, or so small that Amazon can't be bothered to keep the book around. I dream of a world where the former case prevails, but suspect otherwise...).

Anyway, after outlining the oddball parameters of Jarvis' book, Wilkinson lays down some heady lines about the goals of Jarvis' project, saying that Jarvis wants to invoke Adorno's notion of a negative utopianism, that is, "a redemptive utopianism that is understood to be impossible" but is nevertheless "the necessary horizon for art, philosophy, and political struggle." What Jarvis fears, says Wilkinson, is that "the extinction of a utopian horizon for the left leads necessarily to the installation of capitalism as an historical terminus." Instead of getting his Thomas More mojo on and laying out a specific utopia, though, Jarvis (in the story Wilkinson tells about him) refuses such a temptation (which could only lead to violence and dystopia). Instead, says Wilkinson, Jarvis wants to use difficult form, full of things that can't be glossed over or assimilated to our usual patterns of understanding, to set the reader "on edge" so he or she will not "float into a complacent sphere beyond all struggle." You know, the usual Frankfurt School, Langpo-ish stuff you learned from the local school marm while working on your M.F.A. Ah, how fondly I look back on those days, taking a crayon to the image of Max Horkheimer in my coloring book, and nervously standing before the class, my hair slicked down, my Hush Puppies freshly shined, as I recited Charles Bernstein's poems at prize day in the quaint old chapel by the soccer pitch. Oh, the fun we had in those salad days! But I digress.

So. When I first read Wilkinson's review, I admired his specific and clear description of Jarvis' book, which sounds unlike anything I've read. But I sort of blew off the big ideological claims Wilkinson made, since claims of that kind I have read before, in, I think, about every third review of experimental poetry I've come by over the past 15 years.


But Peter Riley did not stand by so idly and complacently in the face of these familiar claims for the political value of experimental poetry. Gird, did he, his loins for serious battle. Tap, did he, most vehemently into his laptop. Publish, did he, an open letter, in the next issue of the Chicago Review. And, judging by Wilkinson's response, wound, did Riley, his formidable foe. Check it out.

Riley begins with a genteel moment, praising the Cambridge/Prynne tradition embodied by Jarvis and polemically upheld by Wilkinson. But this feels sort of like the moment when two boxers "shake hands" by thumping their gloves together at the start of a match, and soon the blows begin to fall heavily. Riley's main target is the identification of formal innovation with political utopianism. As the first sentence in this paragraph of Riley's makes plain, he's going after Wilkinson here, for sure, but he's also going after all those other Frankfurterized reviews of avant-poetry:

For Wilkinson as for most other commentators on the forward side of things, to speak of poetical virtue is to speak of political virtue, there is no distinction. Poems and poetical thinking are politically good or they have no good in them. I guess we are used to that these days. The one big claim left to the poem, that it (rather “somehow”) holds the answer or counter to political harm by occulted inference. It’s more alarming to notice that in this particularly fervent British version the contrary also holds: political virtue can only be poetical virtue. “Aesthetically-founded politics” (which involves more than poetry of course, but): only the (poet) is qualified to be a politician. It is not just that the poet “knows better” than the working politician, indeed I don’t think that claim is made, but that only the poet has the spirit to inhabit the sphere of total oppositional negation which is the only political register to be tolerated. Doesn’t this mean that in a sense there is actually a withdrawal from politics, from the politics that happens and can happen into one that can’t possibly? An understanding of how politics works and how amelioration can be wrought through the science of it, of what the mechanisms are and so of what could be done – all this would be beneath us? To assume that you can go straight from aesthetics to ethics is worrying enough, but aren’t the two here fused into one substance?

Yow. Didja see where Riley landed that blow? Right smack on two of the Big Assumptions of avant-poetry: that formal radicalism is special because it is political radicalism; and that the total negation of current political reality is the only responsible position, and the rest is all complicity, all the time. Such assumptions, says Riley, leave "the entire non-poet population of the world (and most of the poets), condemned as criminals." Come on, admit it: you've encountered the very thing Riley's on about: the insistence that only a certain kind of poetry can be ethical, and the rest of the poets may as well all run off in their giant SUVs on their way to Dick Cheney fundraising events, spouting clouds of carcinogens from their tailpipes and tossing non-biodegradable burger wrappers out the window as they go.

Anyway, after this comes my favorite part of the piece, Riley's powerful cri de coeur directed toward the avant-garde community in which he himself has much standing: "How do we get to be so haughty?" It kind of hits home, really. I think of some of the haughty-ass theoretico-jive that's come out of my mouth at various conferences and coffeehouse readings over the years, and I shudder.

I think Wilkinson must have shuddered a bit, too, judging by his (not yet published) response. He begins with what seems like a kind of conciliatory statement, saying that he didn't mean to imply that Prynnite, Langpo-ish avant-postery was the only good or ethical kind of writing:

I reject the idea in Peter Riley’s letter that referring to a relatively small number of poets must imply an exclusivity in taste or could be used to impute an aesthetic or political programme. It is a mistake to assume that anyone necessarily worries away publicly at what he most loves; and this is especially misleading where writers rather than scholars are concerned, since generally writers write about two kinds of writer – those whom they feel fail to receive their due, to some extent a covert special pleading for their own work; and those whose work seems whether successfully or not to tackle ideas or technical problems which trouble them. But we all have different ways of reading in different circumstances, as musicians do of listening and painters of looking; what need to argue why merely to glance at certain poems by John Donne or Thomas Hardy or James Schuyler can bring tears to my eyes, any more than I have to justify to myself a preference for Lee Konitz over John Coltrane or for sea pinks over daffodils. It is typical that working life has left me too dependent on early-established taste, but teaching now shows me much to enjoy and admire in writers I once dismissed with youth’s arbitrariness.

(Many thanks to Wilkinson for letting me quote from this — you've got to admire I guy who'll let you quote unpublished material that you find intelligent but not always entirely convincing).

I'm not too keen on the "don't expect me to be fair, I'm a writer" argument. And I'm not sure how to feel about the "hey, I didn't get the chance to read around enough to have a broad taste because I had to work at a real job" line (Wilkinson was a mental health professional for many years). Had he directed the comment at me, I'd have assessed my career path so far in life (brief and inglorious military service, used bookstore clerk while a student, and standard-issue academic since), felt some kind of prof-caste guilt, and cut Wilkinson some slack. But he's directing this at Peter Riley, who scrambled to make a living as a rare book dealer for years (and may so scramble still, for all I know). So the ethical high ground falls away from beneath the Wilkinsonian sandals. That said, the embrace of ecumenical pluralism is encouraging.

Wilkinson goes on for a few pages, and, being both bright and combative, lands a few good blows of his own. But as I was watching the critical fisticuffs fly, I couldn't help thinking that what gets lost in his exchange with Riley about exclusive taste and pseudo-political haughtiness is the poetry itself. Then, as if on cue from whatever goddess reigns on Parnassus these days, a group of stangers appeared at the edge of town. They were Keston Sutherland, Andrea Brady, and Peter Manson, and if you wanted an actual exhibit of the kind of post-Prynne, Jarvis-y poetry Riley and Wilkinson were arguing about, you couldn't have asked for anything better. All three poets have work in the Spring '07 issue of the Chicago Review. But the poets themselves were making a Chicago stop on their trans-continental American tour, courtesy of Kerri Sonnenberg and her ever-amazing Discrete Reading Series at the Elastic Arts Center, so I hightailed it down to the city, disgracefully wolfed down enchilladas at El Cid with Kristy Odelius, Bill Allegrezza, and Jennifer & Chris Glomski, then made the scene. Which was really two scenes in one, since the usual Discreet crowd had been joined by tout le monde du Hyde Park, especially the Chicago Review crowd. I ran into Josh Kotin, Bobby Baird, Eirik Steinhoff, as well as Dustin Simpson and Josh Adams (who seem to be engaged in a Surrealism-versus-Oulipo debate of the sort that can only rage with such intensity in the rarified air of Hyde Park). Also Joel Craig. And I saw Chicu Reddy and Suzanne Buffam from across a much-crowded room of black turtlenecks and Amstel Light bottles. If Ray Bianchi hadn't been in Istanbul, and if Albert Goldbarth had descended upon us from his secret mountain fortress, we'd have had almost all of the main speakers from this year's Lake Forest Literary Festival on hand.

But I digress. I wanted to talk about the poetry, not the audience. For my money Keston Sutherland gave the strongest performance, and I've got to say this about his work: it was all the things Wilkinson said Jarvis' work was: formally strange, intriguingly metrical, and very much in the Prynne tradition. It even had a strong social component, addressing anxieties about capitalism (particularly incipient Chinese capitalism) and the ways it enters into our most intimate psychic spaces. Sutherland's work tries to get a handle on these anxieties not through making a statement about them (the mimetic and statement-oriented elements of language are only intermittently in operation in his work), but by casting them in oddly familiar forms (his work is strangely ode-like, and intriguingly metered — formalist, I want to say, but nothing at all like Dana Gioia). He registers all kinds of things that are going on out there politically. But there's nothing messianic about it. There's nothing in the work (at least in what I saw that night) that claims "because I do this, my politics are pure" or "because I do this, the Empire of Media-Saturated Capitalism quakes" or even "because I do this, Philip Larkin was a bad poet." And it was a hell of a show, too.

In the end, I'm inclined to agree with a comment Eirik Steinhoff made between readers at the Elastic Arts Center that night: "the problem isn't the Prynne tradition — the problem is the messianism attached to it." If Keston Sutherland represents the Prynne tradition in its current iteration, I'm inclined to think it's the most vital part of British poetry today. If we could only find some way of talking about it that didn't imply it was a way — no, the way — to save the world...


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LATE-BREAKING NEWS: THE SENTIMENTALITY OF EXEMPTION

This just in from Eirik Steinhoff:

Did I really say that about Prynne the Messiah? ....Can we correct that quote to read "print" for "Prynne" and "Masala Dosai" for "Messianism"? That sounds more like something I might have said that exciting evening.

That sd, the Wilkinson/Riley colloquy does usefully illuminate the issues that crop up when promises are made that poetry is often hard pressed to keep. Keston's keenly alive to this problem, speaking of the "sentimentality of exemption" avant-gardes fall prey to.

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MORE LATE-BREAKING NEWS: HENRY GOULD WEIGHS IN

I'm not sure how to feel about being called "chipper." Then again, I've been called a lot worse, generally with justification.