Blog sites — those personal internet addresses updated on a regular basis — have emerged as valuable and respected opinion resources for the general reader as well as for journalists and magazine editors. The same can similarly be said for email discussion lists, particularly when conversation rises above the rapid fire of short, sharp replies to take the form of well-articuluted and considered responses.
A recent focus of conversation on the poetryetc email list was the issue of sensibility in judging poetry — questioning form and structure, traditions (modern, postmodern, avante-garde) — and of the resulting divisions these create between poets. It led to the following exchange between Mark Weiss and Alison Croggon— two poets living on opposite rims of the Pacific: Alison in Australia, Mark in the U.S. — which is reproduced here in an abbreviated form.
MARK WEISS
The divide really is that deep. I deal with poets of all stripes constantly. I've published two books by a Trinidad poet, who got an MFA at Columbia and teaches at New York's New School. He's hardly a naif. During his last visit he noticed all of the Olson on my shelves and said he'd never understood what all of the fuss was about, altho he hadn't tried very hard. So I pulled down some books. That weekend he learned for the first time about Olson, Duncan, Creeley, Wieners, Niedecker and Spicer. Mervyn is in his 60s. This isn't at all unusual. A few years ago I tried convincing the staff at the Tucson Poetry Festival, all MFAs, to invite Armand Schwerner (I lent them a copy of the Tablets, which they found totally opaque). So I tried further. Turns out they'd never heard of Spicer, had never read Olson or even Oppen. No surprise — when I taught a course at University of Arizona I learned that none of the poets that I read were in the curriculum. I can't count the number of times that I've mentioned Blackburn and gotten "who?" as a response.
The journals are really telling in this regard. There's almost no crossover. A recent exception is Lorine Niedecker, who's now being taught enthusiastically by poets otherwise ignorant of the other poets of her cohort. One could ask why it's taken them so long — Jonathan Williams published her in convenient editions in the 60s, but that crowd couldn't be bothered with Jargon Press. Niedecker has been adopted, by the way, as part of the movement by female poetry teachers to excavate the past for more women to teach. Somehow they haven't managed to discover Reznikoff, Oppen or Zukosfky along the way. Another piece of data is the position of Williams. Almost everyone in the US pays him lipservice. He's been thoroughly domesticated — one could say gelded — by the other side (what Silliman calls the School of Quietitude) into something of a suburban confessional poet, when he's radically not. Symptomatic is the radical misunderstanding of the 'variable foot' as a kind of formalism in the common sense instead of as his attempt at demonstrating at once that free verse can produce its own kind of music and that the old way of scanning didn't make much sense to him. The confusion, of course, stems from his use of the conventional term 'foot' to explain his unconventional practice to the conventionally inclined. To be perfectly clear, he's not advising poets to start out with a scansion in mind but to break with traditional rhythms.
The poets I'm most interested in are, I guess, on the wrong side of literary history. There was a resaon why Donald Allen all those years ago had to compile The New American Poetry and why Rothenberg and Joris had to do Poems for the Millenium. Interestingly, the Spanish language poets I work with, all of them vastly well read in all manner of foreign poetry, are, as outsiders to anglophone poetry, unaware of the divisions. It may be that the same is true of Australians. Tho I guess you guys are usually anglophone. A lot of the history of the split is in Jed Rasula's The American Poetry Wax Museum. I didn't learn it there, didn't need to--I live it every day.
ALISON CROGGON
Dear Mark,
Reading your mail I see more clearly where you are coming from on what you mean by "divide". It's a world that's very foreign to me, sitting here in Williamstown, (trying and failing again today to write something...but what's new?) - this world of MFAs and opinion and reputation. It's not that I'm unaware of it, or of the ideas that spin around in it. It just threw something into relief for me, about my own expectations of poetry and about where poetry resides within my own poetry context. I'm not going to be shocked (though to be frank I'm a little surprised) that people like Olson and Creeley and Oppen aren't regarded as extremely well known American poets, after all a couple of years ago there was a review of a biography of Rimbaud in The Age by somebody who very clearly had never previously heard of Rimbaud, and regarded him as an obscure and rather strange poet... I gave up years ago, if I ever tried, trying to fit myself into some larger cultural context here. The real reasons are I think inner rather than outer, though the above example should do as an admonition. I was watching a documentary on the photographer Bill Henson the other day, about a series of photos he had taken just down the road from here, of places like Coode Island (the chemical storage facility which blew up a few years ago) and the Newport railyards and the Werribee trainline. Henson was obviously raised in the west, because he said something along the lines of, it's the landscapes you live in as a child which you really feel at home in. Well, as a small child I had three landscapes on three different continents - not an uncommon story, I hasten to add - and so the at-home-ness has always been a questionable quality for me. So too with poetry; there is no particular idiom, no particular place or aesthetic, no particular language within the fractured tongues of English, which I feel is precisely my own. It's rather more complex than a feeling of exile, it's not about a feeling of being isolated - although having the accident of poetry in your life in a society like ours is often a rather lonely feeling (why are we all here?) So on certain arguments, I feel a real disconnection: they have no meaning for me, in any real way that connects with my own private practice and context. But I guess this is a kind of freedom. Susan Sontag said when she was a child, books were her friends. I certainly was like that as a child, and I still feel a bit like that about all the poets who live (more or less in alphabetical order) around my desk. Where poetry comes from, for me, is from the conversations from all those poems, the constellations they make in my head and the collisions between them and what I encounter when I walk around in the world I live in. It really has little to do with these other divisions and categorisations, although I guess we dance around those things all the time. The real thing is like when Zoe came up to me yesterday and said, Mum, I want to read some more poetry, what should I read? and I give her Neruda, whom I wish I had read at fourteen... I feel I'm putting this very badly. But when I read Creeley, when I read Rukeyser, when I read Shakespeare, when I read Riding or Hill or Rilke, I'm not reading arguments or reputations or degrees; I'm just reading poems, and how they speak to and against each other and to me, the different musics they make; and that's really the only kind of "culture" I'm interested in. The questions I was asking you come out of those conversations, and feed back into them. I guess for me, as for many poets here and everywhere else, it's a question of "making your own oxygen", as Wittgenstein said once. Sometimes you get tired of that. But I honestly don't think there's any alternative.