[New-Poetry] Frost on the edge

[David Graham]

Very interesting NYTimes review of the recent edition of Frost's  
journals, by David Orr:

http://www.nytimes.com/2007/02/04/books/review/Orr2.t.html? 
_r=1&pagewanted=1&ref=review&oref=slogin

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The longest-running feud is probably the low-intensity border war  
between so-called experimental poets and their “mainstream” brethren.  
Since the distinctions can be hard to parse (to most people, saying  
“mainstream poetry” is like saying “mainstream tapestry-weaving”),  
it’s helpful to turn to the experts. In her book “21st-Century  
Modernism,” Marjorie Perloff, a professor emerita at Stanford and  
longtime champion of the avant-garde, claims the “dominant” mode in  
poetry these days is “expressivist,” whereas experimental writing  
involves “constructivism ... the specific understanding that  
language, far from being a vehicle or conduit for thoughts or  
feelings outside and prior to it, is itself the site of meaning- 
making.” She fleshes out this concept with quotations from several  
contemporary avant-garde poets, who argue among other things that  
“there are no thoughts except through language” and “as soon as I  
start listening to the words they reveal their own vectors and  
affinities, pull the poem into their own field of force, often in  
unforeseen directions.”

Indeed, experimental poetry “finds its own name as it goes” and “may  
be worked over once it is in being, but may not be worried into  
being,” because ultimately “the whole thing is performance and  
prowess and feats of association.” After all, where a given poem is  
concerned, “what do I want to communicate but what a hell of a good  
time I had writing it?” Such poems necessarily disdain lyric  
sincerity in favor of what one writer calls “the pleasure of  
ulteriority” and are usually — no surprise — aggressively bookish  
(“So many of them have literary criticism in them — in them”).  
Admittedly, this approach may not appeal to more conservative tastes,  
but as a general description of much of today’s most successful  
experimental writing, it’s not too bad.

The problem, however, is that only the first two of those statements  
were actually made by contemporary avant-garde poets. Everything  
else, of course, was said by Robert Frost (who is, to put it mildly,  
rarely described as a forefather of vanguard poetics). The point here  
is not that our self-consciously avant-garde writers are kidding  
themselves, or that your ninth-grade English class was sliding along  
the razor’s edge of American culture by reading “Birches.” No, the  
point is that whenever we begin forming up teams in American poetry,  
we run into the problem of picking sides for such complex and hard-to- 
place poets as Frost, T. S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens (not to mention  
Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop and Lorine Niedecker). Rather than  
take these writers as they are — rather than acknowledge, for  
example, that Frost was as innovative as many poets more often  
considered “experimental” — we prefer to reduce such figures to a  
size better suited to the game we want to play. We cut the poet to  
fit the jersey.

--David Orr

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David Graham
grahamd at ripon.edu
Home Page:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/index.html
Poetry Library:
http://www.ripon.edu/academics/faculty/GrahamD/poetrylib.html
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