SECTION ONE
One of the joys of National Poetry Month (see Ange Mlinko's excellent article in the Nation), is the New Criterion's poetry issue. It's full of exquisite canards like this (from the article about the "New Criticism," Grammars Of A Possible World by David Yezzi):
Superstitions were common among the modernists (in painting as well as in poetry). A profound mysticism and spiritual longing animated much of the early twentieth-century avant-garde: think of Yeatsâs private mythology in A Vision, Eliotâs Anglicanism, Tateâs Catholicism. Such systems were mined for their mystery and potent symbolism. The New Critics were careful, however, to draw a line safely on this side of unreason.
Contemporary poets have pushed this irrationalist-obscuratist tendency in modernism to extremes. The result is a kind of secular mysticism that poaches on the religious impulse. At its best, it works a travesty on the mysteries comprised by deism; at its worst, it is an ironized shadow-play, in which the poet winks to his knowing audience of experimentalists and agnostics to acknowledge that the outmoded traditions are over once and for all. In their place, they substitute the vague charge that results when meaning is drained from language, offering this cloud of unknowing as a kind of sham religious experience.
The recipe for poetry of this kind is easy to follow. As the critic David Orr wrote recently in The New York Times Book Review, âthe trendiest contemporary styleâ relies âheavily on disconnected phrases, abrupt syntactical shifts, attention-begging titles, ⦠quirky diction, ⦠flickering italics, oddball openings, ⦠and a tone ranging from daffy to plangentâbasically, two scoops of John Ashbery and a sprinkling of Gertrude Stein.â For âdaffyâ read playfully opaque, the irrationality that results when reason slips on a banana pealâa briefly amusing, but ultimately cheap gag.
In fairness, artists should not be held accountable for the sins of their epigones. . .
Isn't that adorable? Hey, contemporary poets, do you recognize yourself or your camerados in this description? Must we not be thankful for this diagnosis of our Poetic Immunodeficiency Virus? That's what missing from our poems: rationality, reason, and morality.
SECTION TWO
I may have this wrong but wasn't the School of Quietude called the Poetry of Accommodation about 13 years ago? And wasn't Post-Avant called the Poetry of Opposition? Didn't these terms describe the exact same camps then as now?
If so, what an interesting evolution that is. The old terms (Poetry of Accommodation and Poetry of Opposition) carve out territory based on cultural and societal criteria. The Poetry of Accommodation dwells within existing cultural, political, and social norms. It reinforces these norms. When it cross-examines mainstream culture, it is a "soft" criticism that accepts the precepts and horizons of that culture. Its position is "inside" and never adversarial. It might vary from liberal or feminist or political to confessional or conservative or narrative, but it doesn't break any fundamental rules that let it exist and be given a space, a booth, from which to conduct business.
The Poetry of Opposition exists or seeks to exist outside these horizons and precepts. In both form and content it is a critique of the social, political and cultural structures, structures that determine how a work presents itself as a poem and allow recognition. Its goal is to root out and expose the operation of power and categories that keep everyone safe, and in their place.
The terms School of Quietude and Post-Avant seem to be strictly, or largely, aesthetic categories. The term "school of quietude" was chosen from Edgar Allen Poe's invention of the term dscribing poems in thrall to genteel English poetic traditions. And Post-avant comes from the avant guard in art.
Has there been a shift in how these two magisteria are perceived? Or have they actually moved out of the cultural/societal realm and retreated to an aesthetic one?
It could be that the terms Poetry of Accommodation and Poetry of Opposition have lost their rhetorical force. It could also be that the use of these terms undermines the arguments for which the terms were used. Perhaps key elements of one have have invaded the other, so that, in condemning
something as Poetry of Accommodation, the same accusation can be applied to the Poetry of Opposition. We thought we were outside and this justified us, but we have discovered we are inside. Now both sides need to establish a new outside and a new inside, aesthetic ones, from which survey each other.
Or perhaps the boundaries were always more porous than they were stated to be.
But I am only guessing here, reading too much into it, basing these thoughts on my very limited view and knowledge. So there it is.
SECTION THREE
Napowrimoehoward:
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SECTION FOUR
By the way, according to some of our leaders, thinkers, and pundits, we will never see a headline similar to the ones below. That's never as in us or our children or their children, generation unto generation. How about that?
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