After completely reading through all 508 pages, I went back and re-read the introductions to see if I had missed something. Swensen, in her introduduction to the work, gives a clear and concise definition of what she calls hybrid poetry with these words:

Hybrid poems often honor the avant-garde mandate to renew the forms and expand the boundaries of poetry – thereby increasing the expressive potential of language itself – while also remaining committed to the emotional spectra of lived experience. (emphasis mine)

This is what I believe ties most of the poems in American Hybrid together, though that’s not what I would consider a hybrid poem.

What Is A Hybrid Poem, Exactly?
To be sure, whoever defines the terms controls the conversation. The way that Swensen and St. John have defined hybrid, it could almost apply to any poet who has ever written a poem in any century except that the term and concept of avant-garde didn’t exist prior to the 19th century. Here’s what St. John says in his introduction:

Although I have always distrusted writers who run in packs, I welcome all literary partisanship as a gesture toward what I would call a “values clarification” in poetry. However, let’s be frank. We are at a time in our poetry when the notion of the “poetic school” is an anachronism, an archaic critical artifact of times long gone by.

In other words, since poetic schools are no longer necessary and you are a poet writing today you can borrow elements from two or more schools and that makes you a hybrid. I don’t think so. I believe the concept of hybridization in poetry deserves a more critical look than that.

While Swensen starts out discussing the historic divide between the avant-garde and everyone else, she quickly moves on to other waters in an attempt to get to the heart of the American hybrid. In the end, it all boils down to whether or not a poet is true to one school or flirts with another.

Personally, I think the delineations between avant-garde and traditional poetry are still necessary and helpful. The emergence of both the Language poets and New Formalists at right about the same time is evidence of this. While I would not adhere to, or encourage others to adhere to, either extreme entirely, I do think that poetic purity is a positive in a volatile world.

Is The Avant-Garde Truly The Vanguard?
The avant-garde philosophy has been around in some form through most of written history. However, it is recognized that the art movement began in the early 19th century with a French utopian socialist by the name of Henri de Saint-Simon.

It is important to note that Saint-Simon was a Christian Humanist who had a vision to reorganize society into a group of elites made up of philosophers, scientists, engineers and other intellectuals. His philosophy was instrumental in the development of many ideologies that are now considered mainstream and a part of the hierarchical structure of society that he tried to tear down. Among them are sociology and economics. His disciples include Auguste Comte, the founder of sociology as a science, renown utilitarian economist John Stuart Mill, and Karl Marx, who needs no introduction.

In essence, avant-gardeism started out as a political movement, but it was the artists, most notably in France and Italy, who picked up on it and started communicating the ideas of the movement through their works. The poetic forerunners of the avant-garde include Baudelaire, Mallarme, Rimbaud, and Apollinaire, ensuring that French surrealism would take a high position within the movement.

Avant-garde artists of all media have historically considered themselves to be the progenitors of greatness while their traditional counterparts were mired in unthinking mediocrity. While some of that may be true, it is largely a posturing move to make avant-gardeists feel better about themselves for being shunned by the power structure that mocks them. Art and poetry have long been a violent political battlefield.

But politics aside, the real matter is whether avant-garde poetry is any good or not and whether it is, as their most vocal apologist’s maintain, the vanguard of letters. While I maintain that poets writing today can learn from any poet or movement of poetry and incorporate synergistic elements into their own work, I also am baffled at some of the techniques that poets use in their attempts to communicate. Just because it can be done doesn’t mean it should be done. And just because it is done doesn’t make it great. Furthermore, just because it hasn’t been done before doesn’t suddenly make it a genius moment for those who do it. Replace any innovation with the word “it” as you will.

Those are postulates, not absolutes. By the same token, just because the mainstream doesn’t like it or appreciate it doesn’t mean it isn’t great, shouldn’t be done, or not profitably worthwhile when it is done. Everything must be judged on its own merit.

Introduction To The Post-Avant Malaise
I write in many forms and styles. I try not to restrict myself, though I recognize that certain techniques are more useful than others. Some are just plain ridiculous.

We all have our preferences and many of us have our prejudices. With regard to the latter, I try to keep an open mind and attempt to understand what a poet is trying to do. But that is sometimes hard.

In order to get to the bottom of what precisely is considered “post avant”, it is necessary to understand what is avant-garde, the genesis of the post. At the heart of it, the avant-garde consists of the following attributes:

• Experimental
• Rejection of traditional values
• Esoteric
• Bohemian
• Anti-structural

To what degree then is post-avant poetics opposed to these values? The answer is: None. The post-avant poet is firmly rooted in all of these avant-garde values, rejecting none.

However, the post-avant is just as likely to use traditional elements as avant-garde elements in their poetry. See the contradiction?

Good. Because it’s a planned and conscious contradiction.

The difference between the avant-garde and the post-avant is that the latter has no political overtones. It seeks to borrow literary elements from wherever it may find them and incorporate them into a singular poem without regard for the social or political implications. That obviously leaves some schools out of the running for post-avant status.

The Problem With The Avant-Garde
I will say right at the outset that I am not a formalist, either new or old. While I have a deep and abiding respect for all the forms and reserve the right to use them, or modify them, they are not the defining attribute of poetics. By the same token, they shouldn’t be rejected outright because they are traditional. I see both extremes as irrational prejudice.

Another idea I reject is the notion that poetry is inherently an aural art. It isn’t. The reason primitive cultures chose to communicate their poetry through oral presentation is because they couldn’t communicate in writing. When they did undertake written communication it was done in the way of visual images first. Later, language was developed. As societies and cultures grew and developed new technologies, poetry evolved into visual and concrete forms and structures. It was a natural development.

Poetry is communication. Plain and simple. That means that poets can use any medium at their disposal. It also means that there are a rich diversity of structures, forms, and techniques available, both oral and written. Nevertheless, any virtue can be taken to extreme.

The avant-garde is possible because of the visual nature of modern poetry. Aural poetry could never develop an avant-garde movement because there’d be no way for it to communicate apart from sound. So it’s no coincidence that the avant-garde didn’t come along until the 19th century. But there is one thing that bothers me about the style of avant-gardeists and that one thing is evident in many of the poems to be found in American Hybrid.

The problem with the avant-garde is its emphasis on the disjunctive over the logical in language. I’ll use a poem from American Hybrid to illustrate my meaning:

Lucent road, first letter.                      Evening spooked with light.
Quarter moon road                     with the darkness inside it, and full
moon
sky with the tree inside it.                    Curved road in the gloaming.
Oak trunk, a vector of force          punched upward. held in place

The above lines are taken from a poem titled “Road And Tree” by Forrest Gander, who the editors describe as “Lyrically rooted and visually adventuresome”. That’s not quite how I’d put it.

To start with, we’re not given an instruction manual on how to read this poem. Do we read down first or across first? We’re left to figure it out. I found that it reads better when read across first. But if it reads so well that way then why do we need the fissure down the middle of the poem? You’d think that maybe the subject matter is a clue, but it’s not. This is a device that Gander uses throughout several poems, always with the same disjunctive feel. There seems to be a constant flow of thought across the spaces, but not necessarily.

For instance, in the second line, is the quarter moon road dark inside and full or are we supposed to see these two clauses as independent as evidenced by the crack between them? We’re not told. And there aren’t any clues. Nor, does the poet (or the editors, for that matter) feel the need to clue us in. We’re just supposed to accept it the way it is.

This is the kind of disjunctive language that epitomizes much of the avant-garde, particularly schools like the Language school. It’s one of the most irritating things I’ve seen in late-school poetics.

On the other hand, there are poets, like Brenda Hillman and Martin Corless-Smith, who use this double-line form to great effect and I understand those poems. While it isn’t a technique I’m particularly married to, it is something I can live with if the lines appear controlled by the poet and not vice-versa.

In summary, the problem with a pure avant-garde philosophy is that if you are anti-traditional and experimental for the sake of the same then it’s a lot like spending $200 on a paid escort for the night and masturbating while she waits outside your dorm room fully clothed.

Is It Hybrid, Post-Avant Or Millennial?
Call it what you want, but poetry written today is nothing like poetry that was written 100 years ago, or even 30 years ago. And that’s the point behind Swensen’s and St. John’s American Hybrid. To them, a hybrid poem can consist of a poem borrowing elements from the Language School and Surrealism, both avant-garde traditions. To me, that’s not really a hybrid poem. But a definition is only as good as the theoretical foundation upon which it stands.

Some of the poets in American Hybrid are purely married to the avant-garde. Who can deny that John Ashbery hasn’t been one of the most experimental poets of the 20th century? I like his work, but I’d be hard pressed to find anything traditional in it. So should he be considered a hybrid poet simply because he achieved a certain level of mainstream notoriety?

What about Rae Armantrout, a founding member of the Language School who has gone on to better things, albeit mostly in the avant-garde tradition? Or Barbara Guest, who is the “quintessential hybrid poet” according to Swensen? She started out identifying with the New York School and later moved into the Language camp. But the former is a forerunner to the latter so how is that “hybrid”, exactly?

I hope you can see my dilemma. To me, it isn’t hybrid if you borrow elements from two or more avant-garde schools. Nor would I particularly consider that post-avant, to use Ron Silliman’s phrase.

When I think of post-avant, I think of poets like Reginald Shepherd, Paul Hoover, or Brenda Hillman, all of whom are represented in American Hybrid. Their work truly exemplifies elements from the avant-garde tradition as well as the formal traditions.

I appreciate the work that Swensen and St. John put into American Hybrid. There are truly some fabulous poems, and great poets, included. But I think they have broadened the definition of hybrid too far. I agree with St. John when he says “Our poetry should be as various as the natural world, as rich and peculiar in its potential articulations”. I was glad to see Swensen discussing poets using the Internet to market and publish their poems and reach new audiences (a hot button for me). But my definition of hybrid differs from theirs.

To revisit some posts that I wrote last year, I offer the following principles as a 10-pillar base for a new school of poetics, what I call The Millennial School. But it makes no difference if you call it The Millennial School, Post Avant, or hybrid poetry, it all points back to the idea that 21st century poetics is on the move, not tied down by traditions or tainted with political baggage. Poets today care about one thing: Writing great lines fused with great images that communicate great things.

Millennial Poetics Revisited

• Craft is of utmost importance
• There is no room for prejudice
• Form is just another element of craft
• Creativity and craft go hand in hand
• No topic is taboo
• Language is the fundamental tool of the craft
• All poems are individuals
• There is no acceptable method to writing poetry
• All convention should be shunned
• Technology may be used to enhance the poetry experience.

I’ll leave the elaboration for another post, or you can revisit my series on this topic from last year.

Meanwhile, pick up your copy of American Hybrid and make your own judgments.

1. The Twitter poem experiment for National Poetry Month went very well. While I wasn’t much impressed with some of the poems I wrote for Twitter distribution, it seems my audience liked them. I appreciate those of you who are now following me as a result of the experiment. You’ll be glad to know that I’m planning to keep it running through May. Twice daily – at 3 p.m. and 10 p.m. EST you can catch my Twitter poems by following me on Twitter.
2. If you haven’t seen the free chapbook, Hardwood, based on the full-length poetry book of the same name by Gary B. Fitzgerald then I encourage you to download it for free along with the Poetry Toolbar. A second chapbook titled Softwood, also by Gary B. Fitzgerald, will soon join it. Download the toolbar for free and get both chapbooks and many other literary goodies.
3. Recent purchases include American Hybrid and Lyric Postmodernisms.

I will write more on this topic in the near future, and I know I still owe you one on vanity publishing, but I just wanted to remark that American Hybrid, edited by Cole Swensen and David St. John, appears to be the book that confirms what I’ve been saying on this blog for the last year-and-a-half. The anthology consists of poems that, according to the editors, flow from the preceding poetic traditions of traditional verse and avant-garde poetry, fusing the two into one poetic style that many times is exhibited within the same poem.

While Swensen and St. John call this type of poem a hybrid, I have taken the liberty of calling the movement itself the Millennial School without ascribing a name to the type of poem. I essentially meant the same thing that Swensen says in her introduction, which I’ll quote a piece of in a moment.

When I started this blog in September 2007 I did so with the intent of putting a voice to this direction in poetry, a philosophy I have adhered to since I started writing poetry in the late 1980s when the Right Wing and the Left Wing of American poetics, New Formalism and Language Poetry, respectively, were pounding faces in competition for the Golden Glove. I rejected that neither should prevail and still do. It seems I am not the only one.

My Hybrid Confession
I have not spent much time over the years conversing with other poets about poetics. I am not much of a social being and prefer to keep to myself. Not quite a recluse, but just enough asocial to not be antisocial. I guess, somewhere in between. My point in saying that is that my poetic philosophy has mostly been developed by my own preferences and some observations that I’ve made in the direction of published poetry in the popular journals over the last 20 years. So I am delighted that others have seen the same developments.

Until I started writing this blog I’d never heard anyone speak of the fusion between the traditional and the avant-garde. Ron Silliman speaks of the third wave of poetics and the “post-avant”, but I sense that his meaning is much more constrained than mine. The late Reginald Shepherd, author of Lyric Postmodernisms, defended the same idea on his blog and is one of the poets in Swensen’s and St. John’s anthology.

Here is what Swensen says in her introduction to American Hybrid:

The hybrid poem has selectively inherited traits from both of the principal paths outlined above (traditional and avant-garde). It shares affinities with what Ron Silliman has termed “third wave poetics” and with what is increasingly known as “post-avant” work, though its range is broader, particularly at the more conservative end of its continuum…. Today’s hybrid poem might engage such conventional approaches as narrative that presumes a stable first person, yet complicate it by disrupting the linear temporal path or by scrambling the normal syntactical sequence. Or it might foreground recognizably experimental modes such as illogicality or fragmentation, yet follow the strict formal rules of a sonnet or a villannelle. Or it might be composed entirely of neologisms but based in ancient traditions.

This is precisely what the Millennial School of Poetics, and the philosophy behind this blog, is based upon. The idea is to learn new techniques from any corner of poetics and employ them into one’s own without prejudice as to form or substance.

Swensen continues:

…hybrid poets access a wealth of tools, each one of which can change dramatically depending on how it is combined with others and the particular role it plays in the composition.

I am currently muddling my way through an epic narrative poem written precisely with these tenets in mind. Titled “The Sandbox”, it is based on my own experience as a soldier-participant in the Iraq War though the setting is post-experience.

I just wanted to share an initial impression of this book after having read the first introduction. I will leave you with these thoughts and return to them later.

• The Epic of Gilgamesh
• Beowulf
• Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey
• Virgil’s The Aeneid
• Dante’s Inferno
• Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales
• Milton’s Paradise Lost

After Milton, most people outside of academia couldn’t name many epics. The Eastern epic aside, epic tradition has mostly followed one strain from Homer through the Romantics. It isn’t until we get into the 20th century, with Imagism and Realism taking poetry into new directions, with Ezra Pound whacking us all on the head with his Cantos, Louis Zukovsky giving birth to Ron Silliman through “A”, and William Carlos Williams outdoing them both with Paterson. There have been other epics since, but these are the most significant in terms of the birth of 20th century poetics. And you can add Eliot’s The Waste Land, a short epic by comparison, in there as well.

In each period throughout the literate age there is a dominant recognizable structure among the works that have been canonized. Dante’s terza rima, Milton’s blank verse, and Lord Byron’s ottava rima are examples. These forms represent the popular forms of the time. Even when the poets were innovative they were innovative within certain popularly understood constraints. For instance, it was largely understood that poetry should rhyme and Western poets wouldn’t have thought to write an epic without the use of some kind of rhyme scheme – until Milton.

Another element to the epic is that the storyline typically involves some cultural significance. The hero must be someone with whom the audience can relate. Whether Gilgamesh or Charles Olson’s Maximus, who was possibly a piece of Olson himself, the hero is a cultural icon. The epic is a national story.

The perfect example of a cultural epic is Longfellow’s Song of Hiawatha. Published in 1855, the poem captured the imaginations of its audience much the same way that films like Independence Day do today. In almost every case, the epic poem is written idiomatically for the current culture.

20th Century Epics: A Pound Of Cure

Ezra Pound changed the course of poetry, probably forever. One of the most important ways in which he did is to toss out the traditional rhyme scheme and to invent new rhythms. Ezra Pound loathed the rhymes of the past and he set out to turn poetic structure on its ear, which he did, with the help of his friends Hilda Doolittle, T.S. Eliot, Gertrude Stein, and William Carlos Williams. Of the four, Williams and Eliot are the best. Pound’s ideas were not necessarily bad in and of themselves, but his disciples have taken them and turned them into rain water for buckets of mud.

Pound’s Cantos, six decades in the making and still unfinished, represent the Modernist aesthetic very well. He was much more concerned with precise language, as he should have been, than he was in, as he called it, the “sequence of a metronome.” (That could have been a direct ridicule of Longfellow.)

Iambic pentameter was out, irregular patterns were in. So began the disintegration of poetics (not that I’m defending iambic pentameter). Ironically, Pound’s ego had this to say about his legacy:

The art of letters will come to an end before A.D. 2000. I shall survive as a curiosity.

He was almost right. He did survive (and will). But did the art of letters come to an end? Well, sort of. The end as it was known at the dawn of the Modern era has certainly come to an end. Poetic forms have been altered permanently, for better or worse.

Pound’s Legacy: The Late 20th Century

While the 20th century has seen its windows of traditional poetic structures, the bulk of it has simply been lesser poets trying to reach Pound’s pinnacle of expression. But instead of heeding his instruction …

Good writers are those who keep the language efficient. That is to say, keep it accurate, keep it clear.

… many 20th century writers have drifted off into garrulity or gratuitous obscuration. It’s unclear when you read much of it whether or not these are intentional or just a result of a lack of discipline. In general, I’d say it’s a lot of both, but the degree of either depends on the individual poet and the school or movement he or she represents.

A large portion of writing in the 20th century has been a denial of Pound’s insistence that writers should study criticism. Most don’t, and it shows in their work. Pound’s words again:

I consider criticism merely a preliminary excitement, a statement of things a writer has to clear up in his own head sometime or other, probably antecedent to writing; of no value unless it come to fruit in the created work later.

This is a rather cutting statement because the 20th century has seen the proliferation of more schools of thought in poetics than any other century. While the splintering has needled down to the smallest denominations, fewer people in the general public are reading poetry. The reasons for this are disputed and debated, but the truth of it widely recognized.

Rhyme and meter, with some exceptions, were not all that important in 20th century poetics. The forms and structures changed all around. The epic hero was not a solitary figure any more as in the case of Gilgamesh and Hercules. The line units have changed, the rhythms have changed, the nature of the characters have changed, and virtually every aspect of the story itself has transformed into a different mode. That’s significant, but it isn’t necessarily bad (though, I’ll argue, it isn’t all good either).

Rather than send a hero on some epic quest for gold and glory, modern epics have a grander dream. Pound sought to tell the universal story. Charles Olson, in The Maximus Poems, sought to revise U.S. history. Williams, too, sought to retell American history through Paterson, but in a less overtly ideological way. These epics of place have positioned themselves against the previous strain of the heroic epic and the potential to explore that strain of epic storytelling has yet to be tapped fully.

Another kind of epic that has emerged in recent years and which The Maximus Poems might be considered a part is the personal epic. Olson used his narrator Maximus to convey a sense of himself in many ways, but a better example of this type of epic is John Ashbery’s “Self-Portrait In A Convex Mirror.” This long narrative deals with Ashbery’s reflections on a painting by that name so it is partially a personal narrative, but it is also an ekphrastic poem. You could call it a personal-reflective ekphrastic epic and not go wrong.

These long narratives in the late 20th century, when fast food and flash fiction are the norm, may seem out of place. In a way they are. But they are not dead. There are still epics being written as late as the 1990s and early 21st century. New Formalist poet Frederick Turner published his epic poem Genesis in 1988. As late as 1996, Gary Snyder introduced Mountains and Rivers Without End. Earlier this year, journalist Thomas Flynn published his 76-page epic poem Bikeman, which tells of his experience during the World Trade Center attack on September 11, 2001 while riding his bike in Manhattan. So the epic is still alive and well.

Splinters In The Wood: Poetry’s Multiplying Strains

The popular poetic expressions today – Spoken Word, confessional poetry, creative nonfiction, barely read memoirs, a dying postmodernism still gagging on its last breath – all have their roots buried somewhere in the poetry of the past. Whether they owe their allegiance to Pound or Williams, the pre-literates, Walt Whitman, Medieval Renaissance literature, or Homer, there is someone you can point to in the past who was an influence. That’s as it should be. It means there is no broken strain. Poetic expression does not exist in a vacuum.

Today, though, there is no dominant school of poetic thought. There are competing schools of thought, and sometimes schools within schools that compete. With Pound, the one strain of poetic tradition that has existed for most of literary history split in two. The avant-garde went one way and the traditional, or formal, went the other way. You can trace the avant-garde strain from Pound through Williams, the Beats, the Black Mountain poets, and on up to the Language School. Now there are new avant-garde movements developing with Flarf and hypertext poetry. Visual poetry has exploded online.

The formal strain has run its course primarily through the academy and the National Endowment of the Arts. It has seen a resurgence in its historic roots with the New Formalists, but much of the 20th century formal element prior to this latter day revival was cross-pollinated from the avant-garde strain, especially from the Black Mountain poets onward. Postmodernism itself saw a sort of fusion between the two strains even while other strains developed from the two – a sort of convergence-divergence matrimony. And this is where we stand today at the dawn of the post-literate age.

Poetics has splintered into competing groups, sometimes quite hostile to each other. The original splintering took place with the Modernists. From there you can see a hard break from the past. The Victorians were the last group of poets to be explicitly formal in their structures until New Formalism saw its birth late last century. By then, the great schism was complete. The fissures are permanent and there is no turning back.

Coming next: The future of the epic.

If you missed the first post in this centuries, click here to catch “The Epic Future: 21st Century Narratives And Poetic History”.

I found myself in the unusual position of defending a piece written by a young college-bound woman who was new to the group. It’s not unusual that I was defending a young woman, but that I was defending her Cubist aesthetic. As you know, I’m not preferential to the avant-garde schools, and particularly Cubism, but I’m a firm believer in critiquing a poem toward a poet’s intent and not toward my own preferences.

The regulars of the group are a rather diverse crowd. We met in Michael Hoover’s home. Mike is the current poet laureate of Hanover, Pa. He is a poet’s poet, a sort of John Donne among a cast and crew of rather colorful characters. My friend Gary is the Beat poet, protege of Jack Kerouac. Anna is an older woman, a traditionalist who is rather rigid in her poetics. Janet is another older woman who is quiet most of the time, but who writes strictly in form and meter, almost always. Tonight she presented a sonnet, complete with the obligatory and obvious end rhymes. Katie is much more contemporary and Millennial-thinking in her approach than the others, tipping toward the postmodern without falling into it. Then there is me and I’m all over the poetic map. Some of the other regulars weren’t there.

At any rate, the young college-bound lady is a former student of Mike’s. Her poem was firmly entrenched in the avant garde. Her poem consisted of several hyphenated adjectives, a handful of colons followed by short bouts of terse pith, imagery that would make Ezra Pound stand up and sing “Holy Moses”, uncanny indentations, and an all-around creative visual and thought-provoking piece. It was quite imaginative and I was blessed to have read the poem. At her age, to have pulled that kind of poem off without the use of the most overused word in any language – the confabulated “I” – was incredible. I think it may have been the best, and certainly was the most creative, poem of the evening.

I defended her because everyone else in the group seemed to want to change the strophe in the poem that I thought was the heart and soul. In the midst of all this imagery surrounding that verse, the poet committed the cardinal sin of “author intrusion”, only it wasn’t so much an author intrusion as it was an addition of “self” in a family portrait. The poem’s title, you see, was “Cubism Family Portrait.”

What Is Cubism?
Anyone who has seen a Cubist painting will have one of two reactions. They’ll either love it or hate. I hate them. Pablo Picasso, heralded a genius by many art lovers in the 20th century, was a crazed, maniacal canvas abuser. I don’t like his Cubist art and I much less like his Blue Period paintings. But a thing is what it is.

When a poet presents a poem that is titled “Cubism Family Portrait”, it is pretty obvious what she is attempting. As a critique group participant, it is my duty to help her achieve her goal in creating the poem that is true to her aesthetic and reaches the point of perfection according to the principles of that aesthetic and not to infuse her poetry with my own aesthetic preferences or attempt to turn her into a miniature me. But that, unfortunately, is the approach of many critique group participants.

The Cubists attempted to present their subjects as geometric lines and shapes rather than the way we would normally see them. Cubist paintings are like stick figures on steroids. They are, in a certain sense, simplistic, but then they are also quite complex in other senses. The idea is to turn reality into an abstraction and the Cubists did that quite well.

I thought the young lady’s poem captured that sense of abstraction that can be found in Cubist art quite well. There was no mention of “I” in the poem, which I thought was a marvelous absence, yet the poet, or narrator, was definitely present. The poem attempted to describe the family in a very imagistic sense, including the dog, and even included two thoughts, spelled out explicitly, of the narrator regarding two imaginary events based on the movement of a chair in the scene. I thought the scene was spelled out quite well. Others didn’t think so. I didn’t have a problem with their inability to visualize it so much as I did with their attempt to fix the problem.

The suggestions had more to do with changing the way the poem was presented rather than improving it in the direction that it was moving. Group members didn’t like that she numbered her thoughts; well, it was unconventional, sure, but I thought it worked for her poem. The “author intrusion” as it was called was a necessary component to the poem because how can you have a family portrait without the painter, who is also a part of the family? The painter has to draw herself in too, doesn’t she?

So what we had was a poem that was primarily based on images, but which took a short excursion in two ways:

1. The painter, who was also a member of the family, entered the poem with thoughts and feelings (well, she is human, isn’t she?)
2. And the form of the poem changed, including a numbered sequence of the intruding author’s thoughts along with double indentions and italics

I thought the author intrusion was appropriate, but I was in the minority.

That’s not to say I thought the poem was perfect. I had my issues with parts of it, but I thought the one verse that everyone seemed to fixate on and wanted to fix was the part that needed the least work. Michael was the only one who saw my point, though I could see that Katie also agreed with me in at least one sense. While Michael could see my point, he still insisted the verse needed to be fixed.

I never try to fix someone else’s aesthetic while in a critique group. I don’t think it’s appropriate. I may not like their approach to writing, but it’s not my place to say it there in that setting. The best influence I can be is to help them improve their poem in the direction that they want it to go. If the aesthetic they have chosen doesn’t work for their poem, I think they’ll discover that on their own in due time. If they don’t then it will just have to be a bad poem. I’m not there to put a clay roof on a steel building.

The problem with didacticism isn’t that you take a position, it’s that you take it from the start — maybe it’s as simple as the reader’s trust, and being suspicious of rhetoric. Although I think it’s more than that — I think it’s hard to write a poem that isn’t dull without surprising yourself.

Bear in mind that didactic poetry is instructional and, as such, its purpose is to teach. Now, I come from the position that there is a place for didacticism in poetry. I think that all poetry is, in some sense, instructional, but the problem with much of the poetry that seeks to be instructional as an end in itself is that its instructions are preachy and detract from the poetry. I believe that poetry must always strive to be poetry first and anything else secondarily.

That said, however, I take issue with Tim’s opening statement here. He likely didn’t intend it the way it sounds, but this is how I took it. Where you start out with a position that you believe and you write a poem to defend that position. Tim’s statement makes me think that he believes that isn’t appropriate, but I think otherwise. There are many great poems that do just that. One such poem is Archibald MacLeish’s “Ars Poetica.”

In “Ars Poetica”, MacLeish sets out to tell us what a poem should be. Right from word one he takes a position and he sticks to it. All the way down to his final line, that poem makes one point. Every line contributes to the point. It’s a fabulous exercise in polemics. He doesn’t say what he needs to say in every way possible, but he does say it in every way that it needs to be said in order for the poem to make its point. And he took his position right from the start.

I think that’s what good poetry does, but I also agree with Tim’s last point. It’s hard to write a poem that doesn’t surprise yourself. I think Archibald MacLeish would honestly say that he did surprise himself in writing “Ars Poetica”. The lines are surprising, not for what they say, but in how they say it. Again, that is a mark of good poetry.

Pardon Me For Being A Wise Ass
I’d like to thank Jim Murdoch for his response to my last blog post. I think anyone who reads my blog long term has figured out by now that I don’t believe that a poem is a poem just because somebody decided to throw some lines on a page and call it a poem. My point for that post was two-fold: No. 1, I just wanted to be a wise-ass and make fun of myself a little bit, and, secondly, just prove that I’m a bit of a contrarian on these matters. I don’t follow rules too well. I prefer to deal with principles because principles are flexible; rules are not. That doesn’t mean that everything is equal. To echo the words of the Apostle Paul, the author of much of the Christian New Testament, all things are permissible, but not all things are profitable. In other words, anyone can call himself a poet and just toss words onto the page, but the real test of one’s work is not what he himself thinks of it, but what the aggregate of posterity thinks of it.

The Many, Many Types Of Poetry
I’d like to issue a third thank you. This one to G.M. Palmer who writes the Strong Verse blog. He’s drawn a bit of a line in the sand over there about what constitutes good poetry and what doesn’t. I certainly give him credit for his passion. I like many of his ideas and agree with them. But he’s got a few as well that I think are a bit stuck in the barn.

What I do like about him is his willingness to promote narrative long-term poetry. I too believe that it’s time to bring back the long form narratives, though not necessarily in the traditional rhyme and meters of old. Nevertheless, his passion is commendable.

Where I do take issue with him is in his insistence that avant garde poetry and Spoken Word forms are not poetry. While my readers know that I’m not preferential to the avant garde, I don’t think it’s fair to dismiss them on the basis that we don’t like them. Just because I don’t like somebody’s style or techniques doesn’t mean that what I do is superior to what they do. Palmer’s polemics leave much to be desired and I’ve found that, by reading his blog, he often contradicts his own principles.

For example:

1. In his “Modern Aesthetics As Sola Fide” post he criticizes contemporary poets for their “it’s poetry because I say it is” position then he turns around in less than one week later and makes the argument that Language Poets, Spoken Word poets, and avant gardeists are bad because he says they are. Well, I think he owes it to us to defend his position with some examples rather than saying Google will lead you to the self-evident truths. Sorry, bad positing.
2. In his bio he says his favorite book is The Divine Comedy by Dante then he says in “Why I am a Skeptic” that he dislikes anything trendy or experimental. This is really quite laughable. Dante himself was an experimenter. All great poets are. Dante’s experimentalism is evident in his use of the terza rima, which was never used before he employed it in The Divine Comedy. Dante’s work went on to inspire Petrarch and Chaucer, who borrowed the form for English literature. Other English language poets followed, all the way down to William Carlos Williams, who is perhaps an iconic figure in the avant garde traditions. Personally, I’ve got no use for any poet who doesn’t step outside of the ranks and do a little experimenting. Who wants to read the same rehashed lines over and over again?

Rather than wear myself out poring over every word of his blog, I’ll just stop right there. I am not setting myself up as opposition to Palmer’s ideas. I simply think he should communicate them better. I like what he has to say in “A Declaration on the Revision of Poetry”, but we can’t get too wrapped up in the language of forms.

To say that no one reads poetry today because “artsy journals” publish crap is ludicrous. People stopped reading poetry when they could just flip on the channel and watch Uncle Miltie wearing a dress and smoking a cigar. Poets have to stop dreaming about the future halcyon days when poetry makes a big comeback. We should instead put our overactive imaginations to work and produce good, imaginative literature for the people who appreciate it. What do I care if my audience is 500 or 5 million? I hope, of course, that it’s 5 million, but I’m not holding my breath.

While Palmer’s declaration has merit, I wouldn’t expect it to revive interest in poetry. People just aren’t going to flock to Borders Books to buy the latest issue of Palmer’s grand opus. They might, but they’ll only do so if their friends tell them it’s good enough to spend their money on. Otherwise, they’d rather watch Homer Simpson.

Poets have got to quit blaming each other for the problems that we find. It isn’t Ron Silliman’s fault that your books don’t sell on Amazon. It isn’t some vaguely-defined School of Quietude’s responsibility to ensure that the avant garde poets are represented in the great poetic pantheon. These kinds of ridiculous assertions are just rhetoric that gets us nowhere. If you don’t like concrete poetry then don’t read it. Someone else may love the hell out of it. That’s their business. Leave it alone.

Today, there are more poets writing poetry than there ever have been in U.S. history. There are also fewer non-poets reading it. Dana Gioia noticed that 20 years ago. He wrote a manifesto and it was widely distributed. Still, even after the New Formalists waged their hostile takeover and ransacked the halls and walls of academe and the NEA, fewer people care about poetry. I’m not going to cry about it. Ultimately, poetry will live on in some form. If it’s a form that I don’t appreciate then at least I’m glad that it’s still alive.

How Many Types Of Poetry Are There?
The answer to the question, “How many types of poetry are there?” is this: As many as people read. The poetry tent is big enough to hold the Language Poets, the New Formalists, and everyone in between. It’s big enough for lyric poetry and narrative poetry. It’s even big enough for a few lyric-narratives. Perhaps we’ll all have to tolerate a little bad poetry in order to enjoy the good, but the good that is there is really good so why let the rest get us down?

This isn’t some “live and let live” manifesto. It’s a hope that poets will take the time to learn from each other. I think you can learn good poetics from bad poetry. I also think you can pick up bad habits from good poetry. The real issue is, What are you doing to make yourself as good a poet as you can be? And don’t spend all your time fixating on the different types of poetry. Rather, take some time out to invent a type of your own.

Since I could never get a real read from Silliman on just what these terms meant, I am thankful that I finally found a resource that has shed some light on the subject. Reginald Shepherd wrote a blog post in February of this year titled “Defining ‘Post-Avant-Garde’ Poetry”.

Shepherd had originally published his piece on the Poetry Foundation’s blog, Harriet, where he is a regular contributor. I’ve noted some of his insights regarding the definition and character of the Post-Avant “school” of poetics and would like to offer my own thoughts.

His first bit of meaty insight comes in this rather long sentence that at least makes an effort to define post-avant poetics in some sense (he gets better):

“Post-avant” (as in, “post-avant-garde”—insider groups love shorthand) poets can be described as writers who, at their best, have imbibed the lessons of the modernists and their successors in what might be called the experimental or avant-garde stream of American poets, including the Objectivists (especially Oppen and Zukofsky), what have been called the New American Poetries, particularly the Projectivist/Black Mountain School and the New York School(s), from Jack Spicer and Robert Duncan to John Ashbery and Frank O’Hara, and the Language poets (including such poets and polemicists as Charles Bernstein and Ron Silliman), without feeling the need (as so many other poetic formations have) to pledge allegiance to a particular group identity (the poetry world is full of fence-building and turf wars) or a particular mode of proceeding artistically.

The bold parts of this sentence are the essence of what he’s getting at (minus the parenthetical clauses). I see three things here to highlight and draw attention to:

• They’ve imbibed the lessons of the Modernists and successors
• In the experimental or avant-garde stream of American poetics
• Without pledging allegiance to a particular group or mode of artistic expression (my term: aesthetic)

Without getting into too much detail about the Modernists (I think you all know how I feel), I’d like to just point you to a link that covers, in broad brush strokes, how they ruined American poetry. Keep in mind, however, that the Modernists did have much to teach us and it wasn’t all bad, but it certainly wasn’t all good either.

Regarding the stream of American poetics classified as avant-garde, it’s rather broad. I’ve said before that I don’t like the avant-garde poets, but that’s a rather broad generalization that isn’t quite true. I do like some of them. But I tend not to like the purists. Particularly, I am averse to Gertrude Stein and her disciples as well as the Imagists and others like them. But it’s hard not to feel the influence of the avant-garde poets in contemporary poetics. It’s everywhere. With the exception of a few traditionalists and New Formalists, they’ve really have some influence on us all.

That last bullet point is the essence, I think, of what is meant by the post-avant movement – at least, as Shepherd defines it. Post avant poets do not feel the need to become a part of a group or subscribe to a particular poetic philosophy. They are much more interested in simply writing poetry using poetic devices that work for what they are trying to do.

So Who Is A Post Avant Poet?
I’ve taken the liberty to read through Shepherd’s post regarding this topic several times before writing about it. I wanted to be sure to take in as much as I could before embarrassing myself. But he goes on to add some more characteristics to this definition of post-avant poetry that prove to be useful:

• They don’t form a “movement”, but a set of tendencies (in other words, it isn’t an organized effort; post-avants just migrate toward nowhere in particular)
• Quote: such writing “intentionally blurs the distinction between ‘difficulty’ and ‘accessibility,’ preferring instead to address a continuum of utterance.” (I found it particularly helpful here that Shepherd also included several journals and publishers that publish the type of poetry he is discussing)
• Books, or projects, are important apart from individual poems
• There is a lot of writing about poetry, but not much in the way of a manifesto
• Post-avants like to explore abstraction as a mode and theme
• Post-avants also eschew the predominant autobiographical or pseudo-autobiographical anecdote
• There is a questioning of the self and personal experience without discarding the self as an ideological illusion
• There is an avoidance or complication of narrative
• Post-avants will incorporate disjunction without enthroning it
• Quote: They are interested in exploring, interrogating, and sometimes exploding language, identity, and society, without giving up on the pleasures, challenges, and resources of the traditional lyric.
• Quote: Their work combines the lyric’s creative impulse with the critical project of Language poetry, engaging the dialectic of what critic Charles Altieri calls lyricism and lucidity and what, earlier, W.H. Auden called enchantment and disenchantment without settling on one side or the other.

I found these characteristics rather interesting and helpful and found myself going through the list to see if they apply to me. As a summary of the above, Shepherd had this to say:

In Stephen Burt’s words, they are “trying to figure out how to incorporate both lyric and non- (if not anti-) lyric impulses, and trying…to put modernist fragmentation together with Romantic expectations about voice and form,” and without any preconceptions about what forms such a potential synthesis might take. Theirs is a magpie-like eclecticism, that draws from whatever materials, traditions and techniques are of interest and of use, however seemingly incompatible, however ideologically opposed historically. They don’t try to destroy the past for the sake of the future, or trumpet teleological notions of artistic “progress” or “advance,” though they are fascinated with the processes of poetic construction.

That about sums it up to me. It looks and sounds a lot like what I’ve been discussing with regard to Millennial Poetics. While there may not be a direct 1-to-1 correlation, there is, I think, enough of a common sense of judgment that we could safely say Reginald Shepherd’s Post-Avant Poetics and my Millennial Poetics are close to the same. His post-avant poetics is certainly much more defined and detailed and based on outside observation of other poets writing in a particular mode while my Millennial Poetics is simply based on my own personal philosophy and the way that I like to write. The defining characteristic for me is his statement:

Theirs is a magpie-like eclecticism, that draws from whatever materials, traditions and techniques are of interest and of use, however seemingly incompatible, however ideologically opposed historically.

This can be summed up in my own philosophy in this pillar: There is no prejudice with regard to forms, schools, techniques, or devices. While there may be some differences between my own philosophy and Shepherd’s correlatives, I suspect that if you study all the poets on his list that there will be some differences between them such that not any one of them represent every characteristic on his list. But similarities exist for the sake of comparison not necessarily for the sake of definition. As he points out, poets from historic schools are not necessarily grouped together because they share the same style or voice or even mode of expression; sometimes it is because they share the same political or social attitudes. To be sure, William Blake and Percy Bysshe Shelley (both Romantics) are about as different as night and day. One was a religious mystic and the other was an atheist, but they shared a common aesthetic attitude with regard to language even if their styles are completely different.

According to Shepherd, “This cross-fertilization has been happening in American poetry for a long time ….” Yes, and I think Ron Silliman knows that as well. I wonder if his discussions of post-avant poetics is based on his understanding that Language Poetry (his own school) is at the end of the road of the avant-garde dynamic. Is that where the post-avant idea came from?

I think it’s healthy that younger poets (I don’t think this applies to me) do not care about divisions among themselves. To me, and I think to many others, a solid poem based on any aesthetic is better than a mediocre poem based on none and a good poet with mixed aesthetic preferences is a darn sight better than a half-good poet devoted to just one mode of expression.

Poetics is not so much an art or a science as it is a philosophy. And like any good philosophy, it’s got to be grounded in the philosophies of the past. It has to say something about where it came from without throwing rocks at the glass, but it needs to also point a way to the future without being divorced from the present. In my view, Shepherd’s view of post-avant poetics does that. It’s much more defined than Silliman’s vague references and that allows me to get my mind around it. Otherwise, if I don’t look down I might trip over a poet who has fallen in a post-avant garde gutter and can’t get up.