[New-Poetry] Is American Poetry at a Dead End?

[Mark Weiss]

Or if more got eaten by lions. Hint: It's cheaper to go to the zoo.

At 10:23 AM 12/12/2010, you wrote:
>Well, I have to agree with John Barr that our 
>poetry would be better if more American poets 
>went on safaris. Maybe the Poetry Foundation could do something about that.
>
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>-----Original Message-----
>From: David Graham <grahamd at ripon.edu>
>To: NewPoetry List <new-poetry at charlemagne.cddc.vt.edu>
>Sent: Sun, Dec 12, 2010 10:18 am
>Subject: Re: [New-Poetry] Is American Poetry at a Dead End?
>
>Prominent poets speak out by Anis Shivani
><http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/american-poetry-dead-end_b_794033.html>http://www.huffingtonpost.com/anis-shivani/american-poetry-dead-end_b_794033.html
>
>
>Now I've read through the article. It's a lot 
>better than I anticipated it would be.  My fear 
>was that it would be mostly a rehash of 
>hand-wringing platitudes about the parlous state 
>of contemporary verse, with the obligatory 
>swipes at the academy.  And there is some of 
>that present from the various commentators.  But 
>there is also a healthy range of views, 
>including some vigorous disagreement.  That 
>seems about right, in capturing something 
>essential about the current state of poetry in the U.S.
>
>I was heartened to see a number of poets quite 
>sensibly questioning the premises behind the 
>questions they were asked, for another thing, 
>and replying in a more interesting vein than 
>they were prompted to.  Several made a point 
>that I would have:  that "modernism" is hardly 
>monolithic, and contains all sorts of variety, 
>just as the current scene does.
>
>And several poets made a point of trying to put 
>the inane questions in a richer historical 
>context.  One thing that drives me up the wall 
>in a lot of similar debates is the lack of 
>historical grounding that you often see--I am 
>thinking of various godawful panels at AWP & 
>elsewhere in which younger poets don't seem very 
>aware of any poetry before about 1960.  If one's 
>idea of The Tradition begins with Allen Ginsberg 
>and Anne Sexton, well, discussion seems rather delimited.
>
>One of my favorite voices was Wayne Miller.  Let 
>me end by quoting him at some length.  Plenty to 
>ponder & argue with here, I think; but in any 
>case he's attempting to look at matters 
>holistically and historically, and not just 
>complaining about "the MFA" or whatever was in 
>the latest issue of Supercool Review.  He's also 
>aware that there are many flavors in the current 
>stew as well as many continuities with earlier debates.
>
>____________________
>At any point in poetic history, one finds 
>hand-wringing about the state of the art. These 
>days, Tony Hoagland is concerned by the 
>"skittery poem of our moment," Ron Silliman 
>complains about the pervasiveness of the "School 
>of Quietude," Franz Wright worries about the 
>chatty sociability--the lack of focused 
>quietness--found in the "MFA generations," 
>Dorothea Lasky is bothered by too many poets 
>writing "projects," John Barr complains about 
>the lack of safari-going among today's poets, 
>Ange Mlinko decries the legacy of Lowell's 
>"tyranny of psychological verismo," Michael 
>Theune frets that "middle-ground poets" don't 
>have clear evaluative criteria, Anis Shivani 
>worries about the "mechanical" nature of our 
>poetry, and numerous poets have asserted in 
>response to Ashbery that "the emperor has no clothes."
>
>I say "these days" because we could also be in 
>some other historical moment when, say, William 
>Carlos Williams is complaining about T. S. 
>Eliot's "conforming to the excellencies of 
>classroom English," or M. L. Rosenthal is 
>bothered by the "shameful" nature of 
>Confessional poetry, or France is scandalized by 
>Baudelaire's "incomprehensible" and "putrid" 
>work, or Ezra Pound is attacking the influence 
>of Walt Whitman, whose Leaves of Grass "is 
>impossible to read [. . .] without swearing at 
>the author almost continuously," or the Acmeist 
>poets are decrying the lack of craft in the work 
>of the Russian Symbolists, or Dunstan Thompson 
>is complaining of "the smugness, the sterility, 
>the death-in-life which disgrace the literary 
>journals of America" in that poetic nadir of 
>1940--the same year Auden published Another 
>Time, E. E. Cummings published 50 Poems, Kenneth 
>Fearing published his Collected Poems, and 
>Kenneth Rexroth and Robert Hayden made their literary debuts.
>
>The legacy of Modernism is alive and 
>well--though, frankly, it's so broad as to be 
>pretty much unbetrayable. After all, the 
>Language poets and Philip Levine both envision 
>their work as building on William Carlos 
>Williams. Robert Bly thought "Deep Image" poetry 
>was a return to true Imagism, yet Ron Silliman 
>lumps Bly and James Wright with many of the 
>"academic" and Confessional poets Bly excoriated in The Fifties.
>
>All poetry lives somewhere on a spectrum between 
>Classicism and Romanticism. If high Modernists 
>such as Eliot, Pound, and Moore tilt toward the 
>Classical side, and the Confessional and Beat 
>poets inhabit the Romantic, then we've more or 
>less marked the boundaries of the Modernist 
>legacy. But that gives us quite an aesthetic and 
>intellectual range to play around in.
>--Wayne Miller
>_______________
>
>
>
>========================================
>David Graham
><mailto:grahamd at ripon.edu>grahamd at ripon.edu
>
>Home Page:
><http://web.me.com/drjazz>http://web.me.com/drjazz
>
>Poetry Library:
><http://web.me.com/drjazz/Site/DGPoLibrary.html>http://web.me.com/drjazz/Site/DGPoLibrary.html
>==========================================
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New from Chax Press: Mark Weiss, As Landscape.
$16.  Order from http://www.chax.org/poets/weiss.htm


"What a beautiful set of circumstances! What a 
lovely concatenation of particulars. Here is the 
poet alive in every sense of the word, and 
through every one of his senses. Instead of 
missing a beat or a part, Weiss’ fragments are 
like Chekhov’s short stories­the more that gets 
left out, the more they seem to contain
 One can 
hear echoes from all the various 
ancestors...[but] the voice, at its center, its 
core, is pure Mark Weiss. His use of the fragment 
is both elegant and bafflingly clear, a pure 
musical threnody
[it] opens a window, not only 
into a mind, but a person, a personality, this 
human figure at the emotional center of the poem."

M.G. Stephens, in Jacket. 
http://jacketmagazine.com/40/r-weiss-rb-stephens.shtml
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