[New-Poetry] Frost on the edge

[Anny Ballardini]

Frost once said he wanted to be seen as “the exception I like to think I am in everything.”
  ----- Original Message ----- 
  From: David Graham 
  To: NewPoetry & Views 
  Sent: Sunday, February 04, 2007 5:49 PM
  Subject: [New-Poetry] Frost on the edge


  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
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