And on the lighter side of verse, mzbarbielicious – no, seriously, that’s Mz. Barbielicious (and her uno el friendo) – tells us how to write a poem “from the heart”. I just love how she uses your in place of you’re. Makes me think she’s a member of that elite group called the Language Poets.

And On The Not-So-Funny Side

The Poetry Project upcoming calendar.

Liz Henry wages war on the Republican Party.

Mark Strand does George Herbert, class of 1633.

What’s the real debate about?

Then there’s …

Ron Silliman On Sarah Palin

Ron Silliman discusses the election. He’s almost brilliant. He does, in fact, understand electoral politics and his analysis of the electoral landscape is fair and stark. But he totally misses the point on Palin’s selection as VP. It was meant to mend the broken relations between John McCain and the Religious Right. Yes, there are gender politics going on there, but the conservative religious voters who follow Pat Robertson and James Dobson needed someone to cling to because it wasn’t McCain. If he didn’t pick a strong evangelical – and by strong I don’t mean politically, I mean religiously dogmatically – then he was going to ensure that a good number of evangelical voters in key states were going to stay home on election day. As it is, they may not stay home, but I’m not sure that John McCain and the Republican operatives are aware of just how many of their evangelical base are upset with Bush and the Republican Party over the war in Iraq and lost opportunities in other areas of importance to them. They do not necessarily see Obama as their political savior, but in a land of ‘lesser of two evils’ he is looking a lot less like Lucifer than the other guy. Palin just takes one of McCain’s horns away.

I’ve spent the last week in a bubble – actually, two weeks. The day after I made this very difficult decision, my wife and I received some heartbreaking news that spun our little world into a topsy-turvy whirlpool of chaos. This past week has been a huge adjustment as our grandchildren – we have three – came to live with us. This is the second time since I’ve been home from Iraq that we’ve had to take them in. The last time there was only two of them. I won’t spare any more details than that, but it’s been a hectic week for us as we’ve made adjustments to accommodate them.

I didn’t know Reginald Shepherd personally. I was only barely familiar with his poetry. But I liked reading his blog. He was always thoughtful. And it was Ron Silliman, from whom I learned the terrible news, who got me to thinking with this comment:

But what I appreciated most about Reginald Shepherd’s writing and his person was his ability, unparalleled in the world of letters, to address those with whom he disagreed about all else with great respect, dignity and humor. To argue with him was to participate in a debate at a very high level, in which you knew that he would give no ground unless he really felt persuaded by your point, and that he expected no less from you. He could be wrong, and I’m sure he felt the same way about me, but I never traded emails or comments in our various blogs that I did not enjoy, and that I did not come away from feeling less than enriched.

Not to turn this into anything self-centered, but Silliman’s comment is one that I’d hope someone might say about me, though I’m sure they never will. I am very aware of my temperament, a large part of which I inherited from my father. I have spent most of my life trying to overcome the self-defeating temper of a poor truck driver with a fast tongue. I’ve managed to control much of that part of me I loathe, but at times it has been at my own expense. If I’m not overreacting then I’m overcompensating. For a while I thought I might win out over that beast within then I found myself living in the desert for too long with an overabundance of near-perfect replicas of my father.

It occurred to me that life is short and fleeting. We are all within a moment’s notice of facing that grim ghost. And I know there are times that I have been much closer, such as the time when, while driving through the streets of Seattle, Washington, with some friends of mine and the breaks went out on my vehicle. It was raining and the breaks were wet therefore failing to engage as I was on a rather steep decline; I ended up driving straight off a T-crossing right into a ditch at about 50 mph and landed between two trees with about six inches of clearance on either side. That was perhaps my first brush with the mystery of split-second breathing.

Then there was the time when I jumped from a C-141 at 800 feet. Anyone familiar with static line parachuting knows that the exit technique from a C-141 and a C-130 are vastly different. Most of my jumps were from a C-130, but on this particular instance I jumped from a C-141 – right into the back draft of the jet stream. The laws of physics took control and the back draft sucked the air right from my chute. In my descent at a speed of 100 feet per second, I pulled my risers away from neck and lifted my head to see a parachute flapping around in the wind like an overzealous flag. Immediately, training kicked in, and I began pedaling my feet as if riding a bicycle. I unraveled my chute just in time to make a hasty parachute landing fall, one of the bumpiest rides of my life.

These two incidents – both noncombat, obviously – stand out in my mind as far more dangerous than anything I faced in Iraq. The closest call for me in Iraq was when I had a close encounter with a rocket to the tune of about 100 feet distance between us. Had I not been standing in a stone building at the time then I might have caught some of the shrapnel. Though I’ve never been anywhere near an earthquake, the rumble and shake from the impact is what I’d imagine it might be like.

So what does any of this have to do with Reginald Shepherd? Nothing. Except that I know that some day I, like he, and all of you, will be looking at this life from the other side of window. And I wonder what I will see.

According to Theosophy, there exists in the Mind of God what are called the Akashic records. These are universal records of human history, complete with macro and micro acts, accessible only by divine beings and humans with divine abilities. I’m not one of those, but if the legend is correct then when we all go to the great beyond we are confronted with our lives – both the good and the bad. I don’t know what Reginald Shepherd might see, but I do know what I’d see and I’m not altogether too proud of it.

I find myself these days considering how I might make the rest of my life more meaningful. Not in a religious sense, but in a real human one. Can I fashion myself to be more respectful and dignified, or am I stuck in this old temperamental rut? Only the records of time will tell, but since they don’t reflect future acts we’ll just have to wait and see. Meanwhile …

I will miss reading Shepherd’s thoughtful analyses and insights on his blog and at Harriet. I will make a point to read more of his poetry, and learn what I can from it. But I’m sure that’s not the best I can do.

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.

Interestingly, Silliman started his blog on August 29, 2002. The first mention of the School of Quietude was on September 2, 2002, but only as a label, or a tag, and not within the blog post itself. This makes me think that maybe he went back later and added that label to that post after having written other posts about the SofQ.

Silliman has been criticized for his delineations between the School of Quietude and Post-Avant poets. Criticisms have largely centered around these distinctions being too simplistic and that the pejorative only describes poetry as it existed some time ago (in the past). These are words Silliman himself articulated in his September 2, 2007 post, characterizations that he says his critics are correct on. So he has adopted another path, which he calls the “third way.” I’m not sure what that is.

Essentially, Silliman’s descriptions are divided by the level of experimentation that exists in one’s poetry. It is obvious that the SofQ poets are descendant of Henry David Thoreau. Everyone else, Walt Whitman. But that’s a rather odd distinction seeing as how Thoreau was a contemporary of Edgar Allan Poe, from whom Silliman borrows his quietude phrase. Brian Campbell succinctly states my thoughts on that with these words:

Yet if we look at Poe in comparison with Whitman (the real post-avant prototype), he definitely comes across as British-accented, narrow, conservative, even like — curse the thought — a Sylvia Plath or Ted Hughes. I think by Silliman’s definition, Poe would be a hard-core SoQ’er. He definitely doesn’t seem very post-avant to me.

It seems to me that the SofQ and Post Avant poetics breakdown is an arbitrary political (not poetic) distinction. It fits in conveniently with Silliman’s collectivist thinking as he can lump anyone with an individualist politic or poetic into the SofQ category. That would be me, a libertarian politically and an individualist in every way, characteristics which would put me in the same category as Walt Whitman, the consummate individualist poet who self-published his own work. Admittedly, I have no use for Thoreau (and he deserves the moniker “quietist” as much as anyone), but Poe was my very first literary influence and to this day still is an idol of mine.

So who would fit into the School of Quietude today? I suppose virtually anyone who is an establishment-type poet, a darling of the NEA, an MFA grad with a small press badge of honor, or anyone who isn’t taking great risks with language and form. That’s almost everyone who writes poetry, but it isn’t the Language Poets, which would include Silliman and his friends, and it isn’t anyone who belongs to any of the other obscure schools of poetry that won’t get noticed by the first type of poet who is centered on the connectedness of the academy.

But what about the modern heirs of Poe? Well, there aren’t any really. At least, not in poetry. They’re all writing detective mysteries and science fiction novels. But not poetry.

Poetics is less about distinctions that divide and more about nuances that define. I see these distinctions as somewhat helpful, but only if they can be drawn upon to make definitions as to what is important and what is not. Is nature poetry, for instance, bad? Well, some of it is actually. But some of it is quite good. How do we know which is which? We can know, but we will never get to the bottom of it if we splinter poets off into groups – OK, you guys over there, no, no, further to the right; now you langpos, to the left; everyone else, in the middle. Sorry, that’s an un-nuanced way of leading us to the dance floor.

What would be helpful is a discussion on method. Not just some rigid set of rules such that you might find among the New Formalists. And not some vague generalizations that you might find in an experimental journal. But I mean a real discussion on method, technique, poetic renditions.

Discussions of poetics quite often descend into nothing but bland diatribes against someone else’s poetic philosophy or amusement for the sake of amusement. But a true discussion of poetics would help everyone get a better grasp of what is possible, permissible, and praiseworthy. Disagreement is good, but vague distinctions that serve no purpose other than to categorize those we don’t like isn’t helpful. And whatever emerges from the armpit of the fire can take the helm into the 21st century. If it be quietitude¹ then let the silence reign.

1 Quiet + Attitude, not quietude.

Rather than say I agree, or disagree, with the whole post, I’d rather simply take a few snippets from the post – highlights, if you will – and respond to those. Some of them are rather harsh and striking. Whether they ring true or not, you can be the judge.

Silliman started off with this paragraph, a finely written thesis that set me up right away with anxious anticipation:

If you set a Google Alert for the name Robert Creeley, one thing you will discover fairly quickly is that there are quite a few blogs and a growing number of Flickr! pages that tend to post snippets of literature as daily words to live by, rather in the manner of homilies on page-a-day calendars. And that Robert Creeley is becoming something of a favorite for this kind of use. I have no idea how long these sites stay up, nor how many of the upwards of 180,000 websites that mention Creeley they might account for. But there do seem to be a couple of new ones every single day.

Creeley has become somewhat of a hero for many poets of my generation, and Silliman’s as well (I’d like to point out that Ron Silliman is a Baby Boomer; I’m one of the oldest of Generation X), though I think he may have had more direct influence on Silliman’s generation. Creeley was a seminal member of the Black Mountain Poets, who were heavily influenced by the Beats, and who in turn influenced later avant-garde movements including Silliman’s own L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E School. I’ve said before that I’m not a big fan of the avant-garde, though I believe Creeley to be among the best poets of that tradition.

Silliman wasted no time getting right to the meat of his argument, a skill that I admire. Why waste time? In his second paragraph he launched into the “setting of the stage” for what is to come. If paragraph one was “Lights!”, paragraph two was “Camera!” Get ready for action; it’s coming!

Lights, Camera, Silliman!
Here are the opening sentences of “Camera!”:

This is, of course, a traditional use of literature, not so far removed in its historical context from the sort of use implied in the idea that high school students memorizing & reciting poetry is a “good thing.” Both are a far cry from the conception of poetry as “news” advocated by William Carlos Williams, and are in fact profoundly pre- if not outright anti-modern (let alone postmodern) notions. They recreate a world prior to the invasion of technology (or, for that matter, electricity) into the home. They’re one step removed from using the Bible for these exact same purposes,

Nice jibe. In one breath he gut punches high school students, pre-modern humans (if you wish to call them that; maybe “Neanderthals” would be a better term?), and Bible quoters. For the record, I like quoting the Bible; to me, it’s one of the best reads of ancient literature still extant. Nevertheless, Silliman is quite clear that he doesn’t like the use of poetry as “daily words to live by.” Well, quite frankly, I can think of worse.

Ready for “Action!”? Here we go:

(Paragraph 3) I tend to think of such literary projects as the true flarf of our time, since both public recitation and the idea of poetry as homily seem deeply committed to the most sentimental notion of writing one could imagine.

Well, there you go. That could have been Silliman’s thesis statement right there, except that it was finding Creeley in a Google Alert that sparked it. Still, he has a point. As far as “literary” projects go, taking words of out context as a means to daily inspiration is rather sentimental. It’s the same kind of sentimentalism that the majority of Christians adhere to when they clip Bible verses to chains and hang them around their necks. It’s good to look down and be reminded of all the things we should be doing before we forget to do them. “Poetry as homily” as Silliman calls it is the secular version of this practice.

Reductio ad Hitlerum
A little further down Silliman pops a big boner and blackens the eye of his readers with a paragraph so striking in its imagery as well as its truth that many of his readers (as you can tell by their comments) totally missed the point:

Whenever we see poetry being equated with sentiment and sentiment equated with responses to military intervention, as with the Richeys, it’s hard, frankly, not to remember that schmaltz was the aesthetic preference & sentimentality the preferred emotion of the Nazis. Or, for that matter, how these same phenomena contributed also to Stalinist social realism. This isn’t a left/right question so much as one of totalitarian psychology per se. Sentimentality is the quintessential totalitarian emotion.

I couldn’t have said it better myself. As one reader put it, “Reductio ad Hitlerum.” Only it isn’t.

Usually, when someone plays the Nazi card, they have a political agenda. A left-winger hurls it at a Republican, or a Christian fundamentalist screams it at a Yellow Dog. In this case, quintessential liberal Ron Silliman is using it as a statement of literary aesthetic aimed at those who would take literature out of its context to be used for other purposes. Aside from the fact that he misused the word “sentiment” for the more preferable “sentimentalism”, I think he’s right.

He isn’t saying, of course, that the Nazis were wont to lay around reciting pretty verses of love poetry to inspire them in their quest for the Ubermensch. Rather, what he is referring to is the underlying philosophy that led the Nazis to their political statements of superiority. What is underneath it all is the Romantic notion of art. The Romantic aesthetic, which Silliman is criticizing, is the bedrock of the Nazi weltenschauung.

Joseph Goebbels, Hitler’s minister of propaganda, was an aspiring novelist whose doctoral thesis was on 18th century Romantic drama. Hitler’s favorite classical composer was Richard Wagner, one of the best classical composers of the Romantic era who is well known for his fascist beliefs. Indeed, the entire Nazi philosophy is based on the idea, propounded by Wagner and his philosophical cousin Friedrich Nietzsche, of the leader as a man of vision and the superiority of The Will over intellect and reason. Likewise, the Romantic aesthetic is based on heightened emotion to create within the reader, or viewer, a cathartic experience rather than to appeal to reason and intellect as the Modernists attempted to do. This is what Silliman is criticizing when he says “Sentimentality is the quintessential totalitarian emotion.”

And, he’s correct.

True blue liberals know this. That’s why the extremists on that wing of American politics are so quick to judge their conservative counterparts when the latter approache that end of the philosophical spectrum. Unfortunately, they seldom see the same tendency in the extremists standing next to them. And this is why Silliman is so careful not to draw a line between political right/left and to instead draw the line at the aesthetic door. The Stalinists were just as guilty.

Can Poetry Save The World?
In his penultimate paragraph, Ron Silliman follows his loaded guilt trips on the psychological extremes with this final sentence:

But no amount of poetry is going to solve the problems of Iraq.

This is a hard pill to swallow for some because poets are largely an “anti-war” crowd. I’ve said it before – I wouldn’t go to a peace rally organized by poets because it would generally consist of sentimentalism with regard to peace, love, and flower pots. There would be little, if any, intelligent discussion on when it’s right to fight, what makes a war just, and how a strong defense can curtail conflict and make the prospects of war less threatening. Instead, all one would hear is a bunch of ranting about those “Nazi-like warmongers.”

The problem with Iraq is not that it is war – it really isn’t. The problem, rather, (or one of it’s many problems) is that it is an unnecessary and unjust police-like action that could set a precedent for how future presidents, and Congresses, deal with foreign nations. This Administration’s shoot-first-and-ask-questions-later policies have established our nation, both in the minds of our enemies and our friends around the world, as bullies and unenlightened militarists. If we can’t get what we want through diplomatic means then we’ll just bomb the hell out of them and take it by force. That’s not a principle upon which this nation was founded.

Politics aside, poetry cannot solve the problems of the world. We’ll do well if we don’t create any new ones. And when Silliman makes these sweeping statements that appear to be non-logical, one must understand them in terms of historical context and the underlying philosophical principles that this context stands upon.

So far, I’ve agreed with Silliman’s insights. It is uncanny, I know, but I was with him all the way up to his last paragraph in which he wrote:

The question I have isn’t about Frances Richey or Robert Creeley or Ron Padgett, who are being used for the agendas of others, so much as it is why are we seeing this resurgence, right now, of totalitarian framing on the part of NPR, PBS and the National Endowment of the Arts? And why do we see it burbling up like so many toadstools along the riverbanks of the Web?

Well, I can answer that last question – it’s because the Web in all of its “democratic” glory is the last bastion of sentimental freedom. Since anyone can get online and start a blog, everyone does. And the same level of sentiment that they bring to their daily lives will undoubtedly be taken to their online lives. People’s natures and characters don’t change on the Internet. If anything, they only shed themselves more light – like a drunk’s at an all-night party.

But I do take issue with the statement previous to that last. I don’t take issue with the philosophical underpinning, but rather the timing. Why “right now?” Well, quite frankly, I think Silliman has already answered his own question, in the previous eight paragraphs.

I think the “totalitarian reframing” may be a bit harsh, but remember that these programs, for the most part, were invented by Silliman’s generation. They are the outpouring of the Baby Boomer sentimentality that has followed in the wake of the New Deal and the Kennedy/Johnson years. It his Silliman’s own generation, and the one before it, that has been the most adamant about using the government and public funding to promote the arts. I am against this.

I believe that literature and the arts should be subject to the same market forces as all other products, but if you want to see the essence of authoritarian philosophy, one need not look beyond the hallowed walls of our own institutions, one need not glance across the great pond to a small nation with big ideas or a larger nation with a dwindling economy. If one wants to be confronted with totalitarian ideas, you don’t have to listen to the radio or turn on the TV, you can just drive by Pennsylvania Avenue on any day of the week during any month of any year and pay homage to the two legs of the body politic that hold up and support the arms of our warfare. And by arms I’m not referring to arsenals, but to literary artists who survive on grants and fellowships.

Third paragraph:

and I assume (I hope) that many of those same poets are now feeling insulted and outraged by the choice of this year’s winner,

Well, I didn’t enter the contest and I’m insulted, though not quite outraged. As judge, Silliman had every right to choose whomever he felt was the best poet or who wrote the best book of poems among those that were submitted. But I understand Knott’s outrage despite the awkwardness of his delivery.

Two paragraphs later:

As for you fools at the PSA, all I can say is, what the fuck did you expect when you appointed him to be the judge? You got just what you asked for, schmucks. The joke’s on you.

Well, good question. I mean, it’s Ron “Langpo” Silliman. Avant garde of avant garde. Or post avant. Or whatever the hell they are calling themselves these days.

I’ve said before that I’m not a big fan of the avant garde. I’ve never understood the point behind making something deliberately convoluted in order to prove its sublimity. To me, that’s like masturbating to prove your manhood. OK, I’ve got the picture. You can play with yourself. But the rest of us would rather not watch, please.

So, back to Silliman and his selection for the award. It turns out that he chose Aram “Complete Super-Duper-Hyper-Over-The-Edge-Beyond-The-Universe Minimalist” Saroyan. Except that even Saroyan has outgrown his annoying adolescent fascination with flatulence. Too bad Silliman hasn’t.

I’ve got no ill feelings toward Ron Silliman as it seems that Bill Knott has. Both men made it through the ’60s alive (though I don’t think anyone made it through undamaged). I was born in 1966 so I don’t remember those years and that may be for the best. But I have often felt like I’d have enjoyed being a part of that generation. I might have even enjoyed minimalism in its hey-day (I’d have definitely enjoyed Woodstock and watching Hendrix pick a guitar with his teeth), when folks of Knott’s and Silliman’s generation sat around stoned listening to Pink Floyd and Led Zeppelin on vinyl while banging the bongos, snapping their fingers, and navel gazing to John Gage’s 4-minutes-and-some-odd-seconds of silence while looking at Saroyan’s goofy looking m on an otherwise blank page. But we are not in the 1960s any more, and this isn’t Kansas, Toto.

I have been amused, during certain times in my life, to have met people who came through the 1960s and hearing them reminisce of the beautiful times they had. I thought most of them were full of shit. The old white guy born of wealthy parents schmoozing the assholes of Dizzy Gillespie and Thelonius Monk while worshiping the Beat God Allen Ginsberg as if he had risen from some tomb and pushed the sepulcher off a cliff (I don’t know, maybe he did). There was always something fake about these old men trying to sell us young’uns on the glory days of Vietnam protests and Peace, Love, and The White Album. A new era deserves a new aesthetic, don’t you think?

Well, you would think, except that Ron Silliman’s eloquent defense of Saroyan actually makes it almost believable that he should have won:

Reading Complete Minimal Poems, we are struck by just how sturdy these poems have proven to be and just how brightly Saroyan’s sense of humor shines through these pages. These poems are works of great optimism, and are as radical and strong in 2008 as the day they were written.

Yeah, right. It’s not like he’s Homer or Shelley (Percy or Mary, take your pick). I mean, he isn’t even dead yet. What will the world think of him 200 years from now? Will they even know who he is? I guess we’ll just have to wait and see.

But my beef isn’t with Saroyan. I don’t care that he comes from the upper class. I don’t care that Silliman makes so much money in marketing that he turns down offers to teach and perhaps his income level clouds his thinking on poetics (or maybe he just has preferences with which I don’t agree). I don’t care one bit about Bill Knott’s chip, or the shoulder upon which it balances. What I do care about is moving with the times. As Knott said, paraphrased, there had to have been other poets who had more recently published poetry worthy of notice that could have been the winner of the award. And it should not go unmentioned that had anyone else been the sole judge of the William Carlos Williams Award, that likely would have happened.

Howard Junker sums up my view of Silliman-Saroyan with perfect clarity:

IMHO, it was misguided to give an award for work done 40 years ago by someone who hasn’t been in the poetry mix for decades.

On Silliman’s blog, Junker commented thus:

sure, these poem deserve to be in print, but they are ancient. and saroyan is no longer a practicing poet.

i wish you would have chosen a book by a poet who is still in action.

Yeah, you know, the fact that these poems were probably written and published long before many of the entrants to the contest were born might have been a clue that Saroyan’s book should have been placed aside along with Silliman’s own (he recused himself from winning when he noticed his own book was submitted for the contest). But who am I to judge? The PSA didn’t invite me to cast a vote.

This whole brouhaha is a testament to the prejudices and preferences of judges. If you submit to contests, it is always a good idea to find out who the judge is going to be before you enter and to submit poems, or books, or what-have-you, that appeal to that judge’s preferences. If I knew that Silliman was going to be the judge of a contest that I was thinking of entering, I wouldn’t send a submission because any judge that would chose Aram Saroyan, who hasn’t written a poem in ages, as the winner of a contest is not going to fall in love with my poetry. He may like it. He may praise it. He may even say sweet things about it as Silliman does the beautiful losers. But he wouldn’t pick me as the winner.

It all boils down to preferences. Judges tend to pick winners who are most like themselves. If for any reason because it’s human nature. It’s called affinity. You feel a certain sense of love for those whose aesthetic is most like your own. The problem is when those preferences become prejudices. And you can tell the difference between a prejudice and a preference. A preference is when you say beautiful things about other people’s children but you save your acts of love for your own. A prejudice is when you have nothing nice to say about the neighbor’s kids because they are different. I might not want Silliman to be a judge of a contest that I had entered, but I wouldn’t trust Knott as one. His prejudice comes in loud and clear.

I have written about these matters before with regard to my own philosophy of poetics. Preferences are nearly impossible to shed, but prejudices aren’t. One must make a conscious decision to shed them, but one can do it. I believe that there is something to learn from everyone. Even Aram Saroyan. To be sure, minimalism can teach us brevity. But too much brevity is excessive and this is the difficulty that I have with extreme minimalism. I mean, the next logical step is to serve up a blank page and call it a poem. I’m surprised this hasn’t been done yet. If it had, people like Silliman wouldn’t argue; they’d simply heap up an unhealthy level of praise and justify the blank page through some convoluted form of aesthetic rationalization. And it would likely win an NEA grant, much to the chagrin of the convalescing Jesse Helms.

Visual poetry can teach us things too. But what we should not learn is to imitate it too much. We don’t want a bunch of mini-Saroyans running around putting single letters on a page and calling it poetry. Or placing back-to-back r’s on a page and oogling it like a bouncing baby boy. There comes a time when intelligent people must say, “OK, that’s enough. We’ve heard the sound of your Mustang’s overly loud muffler long enough. Turn the key off, young man, and go to bed.” Then we can have a glass of wine and enjoy the next advancement for 15 minutes while someone else prepares for fame.

A note to the PSA: Next year, instead of just picking one person to be the judge of the William Carlos Williams Award, if you are so tempted, just go ahead and cut out the middleman and give the award to which ever entrant most resembles the preferences of your judge. Don’t waste our time with anticipation. It’s disrespectful.