I Remember Louisville

I've been going to The Louisville Conference on Literature and Culture — what everybody just calls "the Louisville Conference" — on and off since I was a graduate student, and I should probably be writing up my paper for this year's conference, which takes place later this month.  Instead, though, I've been thinking about the conference and all the changes it's gone through over the years.  The name has changed — it used to be the "twentieth century literature" conference, but the 21st century brought that to an end.  The post-conference party venue has changed — from Alan Golding's little house to his new, big house.  The attendance went down after the Modernist Studies Conference came along and never really came back to what it was.  And the old jeans-and-blazer look seems to have been supplanted by a grad-students-in-cheap-suits aesthetic, which might have something to do with the lousy job market.  What I remember most, though, was how the conference provided the best seats in the Theater of Academe from which to watch the language poets enter the universities.   Anyway, in commemoration of my past visits, and in anticipation of this year's events, here's a bit of Joe Brainard-inspired conference memoir:

I Remember Louisville

I remember little plastic tablet desks and cinderblock walls.

I remember knowing it was the south because the girls out jogging had Aqauanetted their hair into immobile perfection.

I remember Lyn Hejinian sitting down next to me in the school bus they used as a shuttle and saying “Hi, I’m Lyn,” like it was my first day at a new school and she was being the nice kid.

I remember how tight the jazz combo was in the Seelbach lounge, and my friend Grant, who was another kind of tight, woo-ing and hooting his approval in the otherwise silent crowd.

I remember being surprised, every year, that Alan Golding wears an ear-cuff, and writing a haiku about it for my blog.

I remember a lot of red brick buildings on campus, and a lot of cab rides to get Ethiopian food.

I remember a beautiful African-American woman sidling up to me at a bar, fingering the edge of the tweed vest I picked up in Ireland, and saying “you rich, huh?”

I remember not wanting to go see Judith Roof talk about “female comic seconds” and then being glad I went.

I remember Gary Geddes running out to the book display where they were selling his collected poems and asking, with a big grin, “has there been a run on them yet?”

I remember a bunch of the language poets standing in a circle in the lobby with their cell phones out.

I remember not having a cell phone and using the last remaining pay phone to call my dad and tell him the ceramic artist Peter Voulkos had died.  They were friends.

I remember going with my grad school friends down to Bardstown Road and, year after year, seeing the same band.  We hadn’t planned it.  They were called “El Roosters.”

I remember the singer from El Roosters looking, at first, like a young Jim Morrison, then like an older, puffy Jim Morrison.  Every year he said they’d be going to Nashville next year to cut a record.

I remember always thinking I should book the F. Scott Fitzgerald suite at the Seelbach, then forgetting until it was too late.

I remember being at some kind of reception in a fancy building when a woman with a name-tag came rushing up to me and pointed at a piece of furniture.  “What is this thing called?” she demanded.  It was a credenza.

I remember C.D. Wright reading “Deepstep Come Shining” and the top of my head being lifted off, just like Emily Dickinson said.  It was beautiful.

I remember bedposts carved with tobacco leaves.

I remember Mark Scroggins sitting at the desk in my hotel room looking through the course pack for my theory seminar.  He asked me something.  I forget what it was, but I remember I changed the syllabus after that.

I remember telling some bullshit story at a long table full of Jamaican food and grad students.  They all laughed when I wanted them to and it felt great.

I remember Charlie Altieri saying he found my paper on Pinsky irritating, but that he didn’t find the other papers on the panel interesting enough to be irritating.  That felt great too.

I remember someone at Alan Golding’s end-of-conference party changing the CD from The Beatles to some old-school rap, and how Alan came in, switched it back, nodded curtly, and left.  No harm no foul.

I remember leaving early when someone I love had some bad medical news, the airport empty at four a.m.

I remember Burt Hatlen being the biggest, oldest, smilingest man at the conference.  I want to always remember him that way.

Can Poems Communicate? Yeats, Magic, and the Problem of Modernity

"Where can you go in your poetry," the grand old poet-critic Donald Davie once wondered, "when the King James Bible has become a recondite source?"  The problem Davie framed is an old one, and was already eating away at W.B. Yeats in the 1890s, when he constantly worried over whether there was a public language through which poems could connect with the wider world.  What can a poet do when he or she can't expect a shared frame of cultural reference with an audience?


Yeats has taken a lot of heat over the decades for his interest — no, let's not soft-pedal it — his belief in magic.  And I'm as put-off by some elements of this as the next secular humanist.  In fact, I'm probably more put-off, since it's not just the whole supernaturalist angle that bothers me, but the authoritarianism of it: cults with hierarchies and secret knowledges not to be explained to outsiders are odious things, if you believe (as I do) that knowledge should be as widely disseminated as possible.  But much of Yeats' thinking about magic was actually a way of thinking about the nature of symbolic communication, and the place of symbols in modern life.  Consider the following passage from his 1901 essay on magic:

I believe in the practice and philosophy of what we have agreed to call magic, in what I must call the evocation of spirits, though I do not know what they are, in the power of creating magical illusions, in the visions of truth in the depths of the mind when the eyes are closed; and I believe in three doctrines, which have, as I think, been handed down from early times, and been the foundations of nearly all magical practices. These doctrines are:--- (1) That the borders of our mind are ever shifting, and that many minds can flow into one another, as it were, and create or reveal a single mind, a single energy. (2) That the borders of our memories are as shifting, and that our memories are part of one great memory, the memory of Nature herself. (3) That this great mind and great memory can be evoked by symbols.

There are a couple of different ways to read this passage.  What we might call the strong interpretation would stress the supernaturalism.  In this view, Yeats is talking about a kind of collective soul, or group dreaming, or telepathy, or symbols that radiate some kind of glowing mist of mojo throughout creation. Me, I grow a bit queasy at such a reading, and prefer what we might call the weak interpretation of the passage.  In this view, Yeats is saying something not too different from what people like Jung or Northrop Frye have to say: that there are large cultural systems of symbols and images, that these symbols and images inform our thinking, and unite groups of people in terms of their assumptions and ideals, often in ways those groups do not apprehend consciously.  This isn't all that different from the sort of thing structural anthropologists study.  Of course in actuality both readings apply: Yeats wants to get away from Arnoldian skepticism, and the atheism of his Darwinian father: hence the supernaturalism.  He also wants to get away from the individualism that the triumphant late-Victorian bourgeoisie rode down the boulevards of the capitals of Europe like some giant white pachyderm: hence the interest in collective experience.  And if a belief in magic was what it took for him escape bourgeois individualism, well, okay.


Let's stick with the weak reading for now, with Yeats trying to articulate his sense that communication depends upon large, enduring sets of collectively apprehended symbols.  The problem, for him, was that modernity had become inimical to such symbolic systems.  Just after the passage quoted above he writes:

I often think I would put this belief in magic from me if I could, for I have come to see or to imagine, in men and women, in houses, in handicrafts, in nearly all sights and sounds, a certain evil, a certain ugliness, that comes from the slow perishing through the centuries of a quality of mind that made this belief and its evidences common over the world.

Yeats' disgust with modernity has many sources: all the really shitty moments of his childhood took place in then-hyper-modern London, where he was despised for his Irishness; he identified modernity with the English oppressors of Ireland; and the intellectual atmosphere of his childhood home was saturated with Pre-Raphaelitism, with the medievalism of Ruskin, and with William Morris, who wondered, in his great essay "How I Became a Socialist" whether modern civilization was "all to end in a counting-house on the top of a cinder-heap?"  But the problem is also one of communication, and, ultimately, of cultural cohesion.  In Yeats' view, we were once united by a "centuries old quality of mind" that modern, urban, industrial capitalism has somehow swept to the sidelines.


We get a better sense of the endangered world of shared symbols when we look into Yeats' essay "What is 'Popular' Poetry?" which appeared in print a year after the essay on magic (both are collected in Yeats' book Ideas of Good and Evil, if you want to check them out).  Here, he distinguishes between three types of poetry: popular poetry, coterie poetry, and poetry of "the unwritten tradition."


The last one is the really interesting one, so let's start there.  For Yeats, the "unwritten tradition" is the oral folk tradition, still viable in the more out-of-the-way parts of Ireland in his lifetime (indeed, he took a lot of inspiration from the folksongs and tales he heard around his mother's family's place in Sligo).  The "true poetry of the people," whether written or oral, says Yeats, comes from this unwritten tradition, and gains its power and resonance from a framework of allusions, echoes, and references that are, at some level, familiar to the whole community.  The words of such a poetry "borrow their beauty from those that used them before," and the full resonance of the poems comes from seeing the events they depict or the emotions they express as if they were "moving before a half-faded curtain embroidered with kings and queens, their loves and battles and their days out hunting, or else with holy letters and images of so great an antiquity that nobody can tell the god or goddess they would commend to an unfading memory."  The tapestry image is a very Pre-Raphaelite inflected way of describing the archive of collectively remembered past usage that would give poems resonance for the community, isn't it?  But the idea at stake here really is something like a set of archetypes, or at least of points of reference.  It's interesting, too, that Yeats gives as examples both Celtic legend and Theosophical spirituality, since these were exactly the cultural archives he was using in his own poetry.  At times he even tries to unify them, making the Celtic legends a kind of local manifestation of a trans-cultural primal mythology — but that's another story.  The main point is that this kind of poetry has resonance because it comes out of  points of reference that have been shared by a community over time.  It communicates rich and complex meanings, because it doesn't just have a simple denotative meaning: it references a whole shared archive of meanings and connotations.  I think what Yeats is claiming for written or oral poetry that rises up out of the "unwritten tradition" is something like what George Steiner claims when, in "On Difficulty," he says:

Poetry is knit of words compacted with every conceivable mode of operative force. These words are, in Coleridge's simile, 'hooked atoms', so construed as to mesh and cross-mesh with the greatest possible cluster of other words in the reticulations of the total body of language. The poet attempts to anchor the particular word in the dynamic mould of its own history, enriching the core of its present definition with the echo and alloy of previous use…. The poet's discourse can be compared to the track of a charged particle through a cloud-chamber. An energized field of association and connotation, of overtones and undertones, of rebus and homophone, surround its motion, and break from it in the context of collision... Multiplicity of meaning, 'enclosedness', are the rule rather than the exception. We are meant to hear both solid and sullied, both toil and coil in the famous Shakespearean cruces. Lexical resistance is the armature of meaning, guarding the poem from the necessary commonalties of prose.

Over against this kind of poetry, Yeats places "popular poetry," which for him is a stunted and attenuated thing, and less the property of the people per se than of the modern bourgeoisie.  He just hates this stuff. "Popular poetry," says Yeats, "never came from the people at all."  Rather, it came from and spoke to "a predominant portion of the middle class, of people who have unlearned the written tradition which binds the unlettered, so long as they are masters of themselves."  The middle classes, having disinherited themselves, have started to disinherit the general populace, as the peasants move into the cities and become proletarianized.  This kind of poetry communicates immediately and easily, but does so at a terrible cost: it loses all the frames of reference (and therefore all the subtlety) of poetry that comes from the unwritten tradition.  Its main features are "the triviality of emotion, the poverty of ideas, the imperfect sense of beauty of a poetry whose most typical expression is Longfellow."  And Longfellow, says Yeats, "has his popularity, in the main, because he tells his story or his idea so that one needs nothing but his verses to understand it."  There's no tapestry of ancient kings and battles behind this stuff: just the plain, cheap wallpaper of a Victorian parlor, cast in the harsh glare of gaslight.


The third type of poetry — the poetry of the coteries — is the unpopular poetry of Yeats' time, poetry that works by literary reference and codes of allusion, perhaps ultimately derived from unwritten traditions, but filtered through layer after layer of bookishness, and flavored with a strong dash of aestheticism.  It is the poetry of the Rhymer's Club, of Dowson and Symons and the rest of the guys Yeats visited when he was living in London.  It has the same allusive quality built into its words as does the poetry of the unwritten tradition, and is, in some sense, that tradition's ally.  This may seem like a bit of a stretch, this linkage of the peasant's oral tradition and the deeply cloistered and rather hothouse poetry of London aestheticism in the 1890s, but Yeats claims (perhaps more out of psychological need than factual accuracy) that the two go hand in hand, because of their allusive richness.  And they have common enemies, these two types of poetry: the modern middle class and the commercial world it has brought into being:

...it is certain that before the counting- house had created a new class and a new art without breeding and without ancestry, and set this art and this class between the hut and the castle, and between the hut and the cloister, the art of the people was as closely mingled with the art of the coteries as was the speech of the people that delighted in rhythmical animation, in idiom, in images, in words full of far-off suggestion, with the unchanging speech of the poets.

So there it is: the cloister (of coteries, the modern version of monasticism), the aristocracy, and the peasants are all allied, for Yeats, in their cultural traditions, traditions that propose a language and a poetry of depth and resonance.  Against them we see the world of the counting-house (which I'd bet money is a deliberate reference to William Morris' essay), a world of efficient, shallow communication, and of poetry that does little but entertain shallowly.


There's something a bit questionable in the linking of the world of erudite, remote, vaguely symboliste poetry with the poetry of the oral tradition.  And there's something a bit questionable in the valorizing of the hierarchical, narrow world of agrarian society, too.  But what Yeats is reacting to is real: there's a big transformation afoot in his lifetime, a transformation involving the rise of mass literacy, cheap books sold in high volume (making the selling of poetry economically marginal for publishers, which it had not been in the 1850s and 60s), and the displacement of poetry as a respected medium for knowledge (I touch on all this in my essay "The Discursive Situation of Poetry" in Biddinger and Gallaher's book The Monkey and the Wrench, and T.W. Heyck really lays it out in The Transformation of Intellectual Life in Victorian England, and Richard Altick's good old standby The English Common Reader: A Social History of the Mass Reading Public still has a lot to say on the transformation, if you want to understand it in detail).  Yeats doesn't have a very clear socio-historical understanding of the events happening around him (who does?) but he's right about the general trend of things, and right about what it means for the language of poetry: with the dissolving of old agrarian communities, and the rise of complex, diverse social formations, the old frames of reference that gave poetic language such power and resonance start to fall apart.  Only a coterie audience of mandarins (and, in Yeats' nostalgic view, a hardy peasantry) still feel connected to those frames of reference.


Which brings us to Donald Davie's cri de coeur.  Where do you go in your poetry when the old frames of reference have become the property of coteries?  T.S. Eliot, at least early on in his career, dramatized the conundrum ("these fragments have I shored against my ruins," etc.).  Other poets, deliberately or intuitively, went in the direction of popular culture, though the gains there may be temporary: nothing fades as fast as pop (not because it's bad, but because pop is a business of fashions, and you have to hustle old stock out to bring in this year's model).  Others ditched the idea of resonance-with-historical-usage and went for a kind of play of syntax and formal properties (the "new sentence," anyone?), or for a poetry that eschews matters of meaning and historically resonant language (Merz and Zaum are early examples).  Others have soldiered along with the poetics of allusive and resonant language, either content with a coterie audience, or filled with uncomprehending rage at a reading public with whom they have difficulty communicating.  Still others celebrate obscurity, in ways both sophisticated and otherwise.


What would Yeats do, were he with us?  Good question!  I imagine he'd embody all of the contradictory responses in poems that argued against each other.  That is, after all, what he did in the period from which the essays I've quoted come.  The results — the poems of The Wind Among the Reeds and In the Seven Woods — include some of the finest in the Yeats canon.  He dramatizes and embodies the contradictions of poetry in an age when its ability to communicate is questionable.  To judge from the results, this might not be a bad way to go in one's poetry in an age when the King James Bible has become a recondite source.

Addendum: chart of Yeatsian concerns, 1889-1914, drawn on paper stolen from Alan Golding's printer at his post-conference party in Louisville, 2/26/2011.  Click to enlarge.

Know Your Rights: Poetry and Copyright

So there I was, stepping into the offices of the Poetry Foundation to drop off a contract for a piece I'd written and pick up a couple of lunch companions, when I found someone pressing a svelte little printed document into my hand. Glancing down, I read the title: "Code of Best Practices for Poetry."  Fantastic, I thought: here at last was the guide that would give me such useful tips as "Don't use too many rhyming couplets — people find that annoying nowadays" and "Writing another pseudo-Ashbery poem? Ask yourself why before proceeding with extreme caution."  I wondered: dare we hope for an appendix on the care and feeding of egomaniacal power-brokers in the poetry demimonde?

Four hours later, when the remains of the massaman curry had long-since been carted away by the long-suffering waiters at Star of Siam, and Issues of Great Importance permanently resolved by the consensus of the gathered poets, I popped the document out of my pocket for a proper looking-over.  As it turns out, it wasn't a guide to the best practices for poetry: it was a guide to the best practices "in fair use for poetry" — a set of guidelines for using copyrighted material in criticism, scholarship, performance, and in one's own poetry.  And it was good, too: we've needed something like this for some time (if for no other reason than to put bullies like Paul Zukofsky in their place — I mean, PZ has been trying to intimidate people for years about the use of Louis Zukofsky's poetry, and now his over-stepping of his legal rights  will be seen for what it is).

I had the privilege of playing a small supporting part in the creation of these guidelines, which emerged from interviews with many poets across the country.  But the real work was done by a host of legal minds, under the general guidance of Peter Jazsi of the Program on Information Justice and Intellectual Property at American University, who worked along with Professor Patricia Aufderheide  of American University's Center for Social Media and a Legal Advisory Board including Michael J. Madison, of University of Pittsburgh School of Law, Gloria C. Phares, of Patterson Belknap Webb & Tyler, and Elizabeth Townsend-Gard, Tulane University School of Law.  These are some serious people in the field of copyright law: they're responsible for the Best Practices guidelines for documentary film, and they've advised many other industries on these issues.  They know what they're talking about, and they know how to listen, too: the guidelines they developed represent a consensus view from a broad and deep survey of people in the field.

The general consensus, says the document, is this:

Poetry, as a highly allusive art form, fundamentally relies on the poet’s ability to quote, to copy, and to “play” with others’ language, and poetry scholars and commentators equally rely on their ability to quote the poetry they are discussing. In fact, poets generally acknowledge that essentially everything they do in their workaday lives, from making their poems to writing about poetry to teaching poetry, builds on the work of others.

And here, in the briefest form possible, are the general guidelines on fair use for material that remains in copyright:

1. Regarding Parody and Satire

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, a poet may adapt a poem or a portion of a poem in order to (1) offer a direct or indirect critique of that poem, its author, or its genre; (2) present a genuine homage to a poet or genre; or (3) hold up to ridicule a social, political, or cultural trend or phenomenon.

2. Regarding Allusion, Remixing, Pastiche, Found Material, etc.

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, a poet may make use of quotations from existing poetry, literary prose, and non-literary material, if these quotations are re-presented in poetic forms that add value through significant imaginative or intellectual transformation, whether direct or (as in the case of poetry-generating software) indirect. 

3. Regarding  Education

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, instructors at all levels who devote class time to teaching examples of published poetry may reproduce those poems fully or partially in their teaching materials and make them available to students using the conventional educational technologies most appropriate for their instructional purposes. 

4.  Regarding Criticism and Illustration

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, a critic discussing a published poem or body of poetry may quote freely as justified by the critical purpose; likewise, a commentator may quote to exemplify or illuminate a cultural/historical phenomenon, and a visual artist may incorporate relevant quotations into his or her work. 

5. Regarding Epigraphs

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, an author may use brief quotations of poetry to introduce chapters and sections of a prose work or long poem, so long as there is an articulable relationship between the quotation and the content of the section in question.

6. Regarding Online Use

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, an online resource (such as a blog or web site) may make examples of selected published poetry electronically available to the public, provided that the site also includes substantial additional cultural resources, including but not limited to critique or commentary, that contextualize or otherwise add value to the selections. 

7. Regarding Literary Performance

PRINCIPLE: Under fair use, a person other than the poet may read a poem to a live audience, even in circumstances where the doctrine otherwise would not apply, if the context is (1) a reading in which the reader’s own work also is included, or (2) a reading primarily intended to celebrate the poet in question. 

There are, of course, subtler points to be made regarding each of these principles, including limitations.  You can find the whole document online if you're interested. It's a great way to begin to understand your rights. 

Nothing in this Life: Nick Cave and the Romantics

The latest Horizon Review is out, assembled by the able editorial hands of the poet Katy Evans-Bush. Among the poems, essays, stories, and interviews lies an essay of mine called "Nothing in this Life: Nick Cave and the Romantics," about the special bond between Nick Cave and poets, who seem to adore him. The essay takes its title from the lyrics to Nick Cave and the Bad Seeds' song "There She Goes, My Beautiful World," and it begins like this:

Not long ago a pair of young poets approached me and asked if I’d like to contribute to an anthology they were editing. I write prose quickly, but I’m a slow poet, and don’t keep much ready-to-publish material on hand, so I was a bit wary. “What’s the theme?” I asked, as a series of possibilities for an anthology in which I might belong flickered through my head. Rapidly graying poets? White guys who could lose some poundage? The last generation of poets to get on the tenure track before the general derailment of academe? It turned out to be none of the above: the young poets wanted to put together an anthology of poetry inspired by Nick Cave.


When I mentioned the project to the Scottish poet Roddy Lumsden, he didn’t miss a beat. Nick Cave? Lumsden had written a poem for Nick Cave and, through a series of events too complex and unlikely to present here, he’d heard from an octogenarian friend who’d lunched with Cave that the great man himself had pored over the little chapbook in which the poem appeared — pored repeatedly, apparently fascinated, but inscrutable. There seems to be some special connection between Cave and the poets, and I think I know what it is.

The rest is online here.

Let's Hear it for the Boys, or: The Plinko Theory of Poetry

“Let’s Hear it for the Boys” is not a title I expected to find on a review of my book Laureates and Heretics, but I think I see why Brian Reed chose it for his piece on the book in the latest issue of Contemporary Literature: my book does, after all, treat a bunch of white guys as they make their way through the cultural politics of the sixties, seventies, and eighties — the very decades when the hegemonic cultural position of American white guys was starting to break apart.  There have been other bright things said about the book (notably by Henry King in the English journal PN Review) but Reed’s the first guy to make much of the way the book treats how people from the old dominant group react to the changes they live through and try to understand.

Here’s how Reed’s review opens. It had me a bit worried, really:

Robert Archambeau’s Laureates and Heretics: Six Careers in American Poetry begins by offering a reassessment of the irascible, archconservative poet-critic Yvor Winters. It then proceeds to discuss several poets from the“last generation of students” to work with Winters at Stanford University, all of whom “arrived in Palo Alto around 1962” and were later featured in the Carcanet Press anthology Five American Poets (1979): Robert Hass, John Matthias, James McMichael, John Peck, and Robert Pinsky. Each of these figures receives a chapter that summarizes his career, comments on his principal publications, and accounts for his reception history. Described in this manner, the book might not sound promising.

But then things warm up:

Despite these obstacles, Laureates and Heretics turns out to be a compelling meditation on the mechanics of canonization. Building on the work of David Kellogg, Alan Golding, and Jed Rasula, the study focuses on the institutional and social dynamics that produce different levels of popular and critical success among authors active during the same time period.

And soon thereafter Reed turns to the business of the effect of identity politics on “the boys”:

No longer could white men speak unreflectively “of, for, and to a presumably general community.” A comparative study of Winters’s students proves to be a new and inventive means of supporting this last proposition. Hass, Matthias, McMichael, Peck, and Pinsky all came of age in an era of intense ideological demystification. They did not, however, respond to that challenge in the same way. Just as the counter- cultural poetries of the period were internally diverse and mounted a variety of critiques of entrenched authority, so too the elite-educated individuals with easier access to prominent venues for publication, employment, and promotion likewise exhibited a range of behaviors. To understand the literary system of the later twentieth century, Archambeau contends, one has to set aside reductive accusations of sexism, homophobia, and racism and understand that the establishment, too, was a mercurial, complex, self-contradictory entity, fitfully and unpredictably responsive to shifts in the larger poetry field.

Reed's got it, dead-on.  After the rise of identity politics and feminism, you really couldn't go around acting like "Robert Lowell, National Voice of Poetry" or even "Allen Ginsberg, National Voice of Rebellious Poetry."  Things were different, and you had to figure out how, and why, and what to do, not from above or after the event, but during the changes as they happened.

Soon after this part comes my favorite image in the review: the depiction of The Plinko Theory of Poetic Reputation, which is actually a pretty good way to hold in one’s mind the nature of poetic reputation-making, which isn’t primarily about the quality of the work, but about how your trajectory happens to intersect with the various forces at work in the cultural field (this does not mean that bad work gets rewarded, or good work shunted aside, only that one’s work will be popular if it has affinities with cultural imperatives, and finds its way to light through channels that happen to serve large or powerful or coherent constituencies):

Laureates and Heretics offers a theory of canonization that resembles the game Plinko on the television show The Price Is Right. A contestant drops disks from different possible starting points and then watches how initial conditions affect their paths as they descend toward more or less lucrative possible outcomes. Pinsky and Hass could never have predicted that their specific swerves away from Winters would lead plink-plink-plink to their selection as poets laureate. In retrospect, however, one can see that the “poetry field” of the 1970s and 1980s tended to reward certain moves while penalizing others. This kind of experiment could easily be repeated, perhaps with a more eclectic group. What would it be like to read a book that devotes a chapter each to the likes of Agha Shahid Ali, Mary Jo Bang, Charles Bernstein, Rick Kenney, Dana Levin, Eileen Myles, and Tupac Shakur? Would it be chaos, or a way of gaining a more comprehensive overview of poetic production in the late twen- tieth century? Archambeau has shown that there is now enough historical distance on the post–Vietnam War era that one can fruitfully approach its poetry with the cool gaze of a sociologist.

From now on, I’m going to refer to the Archambeau-Reed Plinko Theorem as if it were the General Theory of Relativity or something.

Anyway, here’s the grand finale, which I think gets me exactly right, depicting me as a man aiming at disinterested objectivity and almost but not quite getting there:

One senses that Pinsky and Hass interest him primarily as literary-historical riddles (how did they come out on top?).  He writes well about McMichael, but Peck appears to intrigue him more, and his admiration for Matthias is patent. One suspects that, if pressed, he would admit that his money is on modernist ambition and seriousness as the true route to lasting achievement. The beauty of Laureates and Heretics is Archambeau’s ability to restrain himself from making such pronouncements. He takes the tools of practical criticism and puts them in the service of a relatively unbiased literary history. No matter who their favorite poets might be, others will be able to build on his arguments. The field needs more books like Laureates and Heretics.

And I can't resist ending with this, a celebration of Brian Reed's title (I couldn't quite bring myself to post Deneice Williams' "Let's Hear it for the Boy"):

The Crack in the Teacup Opens: The Debate About Prynne and Cambridge Poetry

"The Crack in the Teacup Opens," a review of Intimate Exposure: Essays on the Public-Private Divide in British Poetry Since 1950 has just appeared in the venerable Oxford journal Essays in Criticism.  The reviewer, Yasmine Shamma, says some interesting things about recent discussion of J.H. Prynne, including this:

Archambeau's essay... [asks] 'What ought we to make of a school of poetry that has a strong public concern, but no appreciable public presence?' Robert Potts’s November 2010 article in the Times Literary Supplement addresses a similar question, outlining the ‘obscurity’ of the school, and asking how J. H. Prynne emerges as a ‘poet of our times’. Archambeau takes this obscurity apart, explaining in his ‘Public Faces in Private Places: Messianic Privacy in Cambridge Poetry’ that, as readers of the Cambridge school and, more specifically, Prynne, we ‘ought’ to consider how this school operates as a ‘poetry of public faces in private places’ (borrowing from Auden), and accordingly hold it up to some charges.

"Charges" is a stronger word than I would have used, but a lot of people who read the essay when it appeared in an earlier form would probably agree with Shamma's characterization.  Anyway, if you're interested in seeing the review (which, among other things, gives a good summary of my essay), it is available online, as well as in your local university library's periodical room.

Monkeys, Wrenches, and the Discursive Situation of Poetry

Rejoice!  Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher's new collection of essays on poetics, The Monkey and the Wrench, has finally appeared (at least in my mailbox, where a set of contributor's copies arrived today).  Not only does it look good, its svelte 175 pages contains a wealth of good stuff for anyone interested in contemporary poetry and poetics, including:




• Stephen Burt on rhyme in contemporary poetry
• Cole Swenson on hybrid poetry and its discontents
• Elissa Gabbert on the common moves of the contemporary poem
• Michael Dumanis on litany
• David Kirby's "A Wilderness of Monkeys"
•Essays by Benjamin Paloff, Elizabeth Robinson, and Joy Katz
• A symposium on hybrid aesthetics featuring Arielle Greenberg, Michael Theune, Mark Wallace, and Megan Volpert


The only defilement of this otherwise excellent volume is my own contribution.  It's called "The Discursive Situation of Poetry," and it attempts to explain why poetry has declined in popularity and influence since its heyday (which was not when most commentators think it was).


It begins like this:


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The Discursive Situation of Poetry

“Why do poets continue to write?  Why keep playing if it’s such a mug’s game?  Some, no doubt, simply fail to understand the situation.”

—Sven Birkerts

The important point to notice, though, is this:

    Each poet knew for whom he had to write,

Because their life was still the same as his.

    As long as art remains a parasite

    On any class of persons it's alright;

The only thing it must be is attendant,

The only thing it mustn't, independent.

—W.H. Auden

Statistics confirm what many have long suspected: poetry is being read by an ever-smaller slice of the American reading public.  Poets and critics who have intuited this have blamed many things, but for the most part they have blamed the rise of M.F.A. programs in creative writing.  While they have made various recommendations on how to remedy the situation, these remedies are destined for failure or, at best, for very limited success, because the rise of MFA programs is merely a symptom of much larger and farther-reaching trends.  These trends are unlikely to be reversed by the intervention of a few poets, critics, and arts-administrators.  I’m not sure this is a bad thing.  Or, in any event, I’m not sure it is worse than what a reversal of the decline in readership would entail.  Let me explain.

While we don’t have many instruments for measuring the place of poetry in American life, all our instruments agree: poetry has been dropping precipitously in popularity for some time.  In 1992, the National Endowment for the Arts conducted a survey that concluded only 17.1% of those who read books had read any poetry in the previous year.  A similar N.E.A. survey published in 2002 found that the figure had declined to 12.1%.  The N.E.A. numbers for 2008 were grimmer still: only 8.3% of book readers had read any poetry in the survey period (Bain).  The portion of readers who read any poetry at all has, it seems, been cut in half over sixteen years.  Poetry boosters can’t help but be distressed by the trend.

            Poets and poetry lovers have somewhat less faith in statistics and rather more faith in intuition and personal observation than the population at large.  They’ve intuited this state of affairs for more than two decades, beginning long before the statistical trend became clear in all its stark, numerical reality.   As far back as 1983, Donald Hall sounded a warning note in his essay “Poetry and Ambition.”  Although he did not blame the rise of the graduate creative writing programs for the loss of connection with an audience, he did feel that M.F.A. programs created certain formal similarity among poems.  The programs produced “McPoets,” writing “McPoems” that were brief, interchangeable, and unambitious.  His solution, delivered with tongue firmly in cheek, was to abolish M.F.A. programs entirely.  “What a ringing slogan for a new Cato,” wrote Hall, “Iowa delenda est!” (Hall).  Five years later Joseph Epstein picked up Hall’s standard, and carried it further.  In the incendiary essay “Who Killed Poetry?” Epstein argued that the rise of writing poems led not only to diminishments of ambition and quality — it furthered the decline of poetry’s audience.  The popular audience for poetry may have shrunk by the 1950s, argued Epstein, but at least the poets of midcentury were revered, and engaged with the larger intellectual world.  By the late 1980s, though, poetry existed in “a vacuum.”  And what was the nature of this vacuum?  “I should say that it consists of this,” wrote Epstein, “it is scarcely read.”  Indeed, he continues,

Contemporary poetry is no longer a part of the regular intellectual diet. People of general intellectual interests who feel that they ought to read or at least know about works on modern society or recent history or novels that attempt to convey something about the way we live now, no longer feel the same compunction about contemporary poetry.… It begins to seem, in fact, a sideline activity, a little as chiropractic or acupuncture is to mainstream medicine—odd, strange, but with a small cult of followers who swear by it. (Epstein)

The principle culprit in the sidelining of poetry was, for Epstein, the credentialing and employment of poets in graduate writing programs.  “Whereas one tended to think of the modern poet as an artist,” argued Epstein, “one tends to think of the contemporary poet as a professional,” and, “like a true professional, he is insulated within the world of his fellow-professionals” (Epstein).  The poet, instead of responding to the audience-driven world of the book market, responds only to his peers, with the effect that the audience simply melts away.

            Après Epstein, le déluge.  The 1990s saw a phalanx of poets and critics complaining about the decline of poetry’s audience, and linking this decline to the rise of M.F.A. programs.  Dana Gioia fired the loudest shot when, in Can Poetry Matter? (published as an article in The Atlantic in 1991, republished in book form a year later).  “American poetry now belongs to a subculture,” said Gioia, “no longer part of the mainstream of intellectual life, it has become the specialized occupation of a relatively small and isolated group” (1).  While he allows that they have done so “unwittingly,” it is “the explosion of academic writing programs” that is to blame for this sad state of affairs, as far as Gioia is concerned (2).  Gioia was by no means alone in this opinion.  Vernon Shetley’s 1993 study After the Death of Poetry: Poet and Audience in Contemporary America tells us that poetry has “lost the attention not merely of common readers but of intellectuals” (3) – and that creative writing programs have contributed to this loss by cultivating “a disturbing complacency” and by “narrowing of the scope” of poetry (19).  Bruce Bawer introduces his 1995 book of criticism Prophets and Professors by lamenting the professionalizing of poetry.  He tells us that “those who read poetry — which, in our society, basically means poets” shy away from being too critical of the art, since “they conside[r] poetry so ailing and marginal a genre that criticism was… like kicking an invalid” (8).  In the same year, Thomas Disch claimed in The Castle of Indolence that “for most readers… contemporary poetry might as well not exist.”  The reason, he says, is

…that the workshops, which have a monopoly on the training of poets, encourage indolence, incompetence, smugness, and — most perniciously — that sense of victimization and special entitlement that poets now come to share with other artists who depend on government or institutional patronage to sustain their art, pay their salaries, and provide for their vacations. (5)

Blaming writing programs for the isolation of poetry extended beyond the fairly conservative literary preserves inhabited by the likes of Bawer, Disch, and Epstein. Charles Bernstein’s 1995 essay “Warning — Poetry Area: Publics Under Construction,” argues “it is bad for poetry, and for poets, to be nourished so disproportionately” by universities, adding that “the sort of poetry I care for has its natural habitat in the streets and offices and malls” (Bernstein).

            By 1999, the chorus had grown so loud that Christopher Beach claimed we were “discussing the death of poetry to death” (19).  Not that this stopped anyone.  In 2006, Poetry Foundation President John Barr caused a stir with “American Poetry in the New Century,” an article in Poetry magazine in which he noted poetry’s “striking absence from the public dialogues of our day,” as a sign that we have a reading public “in whose mind poetry is missing and unmissed.”  The problem, he asserts, stems from the writing programs.  These produce poets who “write for one another,” producing “a poetry that is neither robust, resonant, nor… entertaining.”  It cannot exist without “academic subsidies” and fails in the market, unable to sell in “commercial quantities” (Barr).  While Barr surveys the terrain from the heights of the Poetry Foundation offices above Chicago, more recently the poet Daniel Nester has come to similar conclusions (albeit without the invocation of the values of the marketplace) from the depths of New York’s poetry scene.  Nester has characterized that scene as the product of the writing programs.  Looking around at poetry events, he says he’d see university cliques such as the “Group of People Who Went to Iowa” and those starting “Teaching Jobs Out West.”  The scene was isolated from a larger engagement with society, with “a lack of connection to the reader” and readings attended only by “other aspiring poets” (Nester 2009).  “It’s an unsustainable system,” he said when asked by an interviewer about his article.  “Even the most niche of niche art forms has an audience.  Not so with contemporary poetry” (Nester 2010).

            As even this brief and incomplete survey of writers makes clear, American poets have noted the decline of the audience for poetry, and found it troubling.  But when decriers of the decline make M.F.A. programs their whipping boy they misunderstand the role such programs play in the distancing of poet from audience.  In fact, poetry’s decline of popularity predates the rise of writing programs, and such programs are properly seen as the latest episode in of a larger and long-enduring drama, a drama that began in the nineteenth century.


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Well, I go on from there for quite a while. But fret not: I don't argue against MFAs, or against poetry mattering — but I do try to look at the conditions under which poetry is hugely popular, and those conditions usually entail a lot of social negatives. 


Anyway, don't let my contribution prevent you from getting the book!  Copies are a laughably cheap ten bucks at Amazon, Barnes & Noble, or actual bookstores, if they're hip.