Keston Sutherland responds to Carol Mirakove

[I received the following from Keston Sutherland, editor of the issue of Quid 11 in which Andrea Brady's essay on the poetry of Laura Elrick first appeared. Keston's email is a response to Carol Mirakove's comments on Andrea's essay that appear elsewhere on this blog. KS gave me permission to post it, and so I do here in the main column of the blog instead of the "comments" section, even if it doesn't read like an "open letter," simply to keep the matter stage center.]

Hey C: great news that the Q issue is generating some feedback. I got a good letter from Jules Boykoff about it this afternoon, plus several other responses already through e-mail. It's filtering into the UK scene concurrently.

I'm writing here about your piece in response to Andrea's. First off, let me say: I'm absolutely committed to publishing it if you decide that's what you want. It raises some important questions, though from a rather insistently speculative viewpoint that I don't personally find I have much sympathy for. Which is not to say that I agree with Andrea's estimation of Laura's work or even with her manner of criticism. Your point about the French language is a good one; but it doesn't exactly falsify Andrea's, unless Laura expects her work only to be read by people in her local environment (who can therefore claim initiate-status, as you do). There is after all a double-context to any speech act in poetry: its representational alliegance to a specific environment and social complex, and its necessary incorporation into the history of speech-acts in poetry as a whole; Andrea may have stressed the latter and so missed the former, but I think your corrective (although necessary in itself) tends toward a simple reversal of negligence. I have to say that your point about U.S. readers being more responsive to "new" and "valid" kinds of poetry is one that I absolutely do not share, and indeed one that I can't imagine you've actually researched; furthermore it's an idea that's just bristling with surreptitious ideological reverb, of a kind that my initiative in publishing QUID 11 was intended to quell or expose. I mean, C, how many British readers of contemporary poetry do you know well enough to classify them in this way? Surely you're not basing that view just on what the mainstream publishers, journals, educators etc. see fit to tell you? The whole question of what you could possibly mean by "valid" is something that instantly tears open a crate full of worm-cans. Valid for whom? Is poetry written in NY focused inevitably and justly on a NY reader-constituency, such that the misapprehensions of outsiders are total and dismissible from the perspective of insiders? You know, Andrea lived in NY for quite a few years too. I don't mean this to be a defense of her position, which I'm sure she'd want to offer for herself; but I don't think of her as a naif even of the wilful or elective stripe.

All this is just to say that I don't on the whole share your objections. Neither do I find Laura's work any less compelling on that account. But please don't let this put you off publishing in QUID, if you think it's important. I do think it's important to begin a dialogue of the kind you gesture toward in this piece; I think though--to be honest, and I say this as a friend--that people will discover in your piece a latent patriotism (or at least, NY-patriotism) that you might not see in it yourself. Partly that's just a misfortune caused by current political circumstances inside / outside USA: the left in Europe long ago gave up expecting anything from its natural allies in the US, who seem too preoccupied with parapolitical deflections and anti-corporate reformism to remain truly internationalist, and what I hoped to promote through starting the QUID dialogue was a recognition in both countries that poetry is potentially an internationalist (and not merely an international) discourse and power of social connection. I suspect that some readers of your piece might think that it goes somewhat against that trend, if indeed such a trend could even begin to exist.

I'm happy to say all this more objectively and clearly in QUID itself, alongside your article, if you like.

Above all: I can assure you there is absolutely nothing ad hominem in Andrea's piece. It is not intended as a slantwise reflection on her own work; I think that in raising that question you probably ought at least to offer your own answer to it.

Love and very best wishes, K