Little Review: Poetics@, edited by Joel Kusai

[I don't as usual have anything to put up today. My "conflicted" poem based on Marianne Moore's "Poetry," called "Blogs," was recently published in the St. Mark's Poetry Project Newsletter. Also, as you've noticed, there's been a redesign. Also, Circulars is officially in "hibernation" mode. Well, to test out this new design I thought I'd throw up a little review I did some years ago, which now appears on my Little Reviews page at Arras.]

poetics@
Edited by Joel Kusai

publisher: Roof, 1999
isbn: 0-93780-479-7
price: $18.95

While it is probably true that internet listservs as vehicles for the dissemination of critical thinking is still going through its "experimental" stage, with contributors still unsure of the ontological status of their words, this edition of cullings from the early years of the "poetics list," run out of State University of New York at Buffalo, should prove at least one thing: that literary criticism among the "experimental" community has advanced past the stage of statements of "poetics" and moved into something more engaged, passionate, "real time," and direct.

As the Kusai notes in his introduction:

It was all here: the quick dismissals and the brilliant precis, the idle chat and the meticulous scholarship, the silly and the self-important, the smug arrogance and startling generosity, the noise and music.
[5]

Poetics@, with all its punchiness and bravado, can be seen as the successor, and direct contrast, to the anthology A Poetics of Criticism, edited by Juliana Spahr, Mark Wallace, Kristin Prevellet and Pam Rehm out of Buffalo in 1994, a volume characterized by frequent swerves away from direct discussion of poems and poetry and hence the possibility of passionate disagreement, and by its occasionally overly-clever genre-busting tactics in the name of "poetics" that, for the lay reader, could seem terribly diffuse or simply hermetic.

As a quasi-academic volume that positioned itself against the academy -- that is, in response to the "frame lock" of much academic poetic discourse -- A Poetics of Criticism bore little relation to the poetics statements by New American poets collected by Donald Allen in the Poetics of the New American Poetry. Few of the writers really said why they wrote, what it is that they do when writing or what their social contexts were, but rather suggested their range of interests, and outside of a few -- Lew Daly, for example -- most writers didn't offer many upsetting, candid, charismatic, downright narrow-minded or convincingly visionary views of how poetry is or should be written today.

This isn't to say that Poetics was a bad volume -- it is a great record of its time, and several essays by writers such as Lisa Robertson and Tan Lin could be referenced as key texts in these writers' personal canons -- but it lacked the "whole field has been lifted" excitement that, for example, William Carlos Williams saw in "Projective Verse." Its unclear how the group of writers it recpresented interacted with each other, and one wonders if its community snapshot may have exposed more fissures than commonalities.

One can spectulate that a result of these strategies -- not just in Poetics but elsewhere -- was a decreased sense of what could be called "feedback" for works of poetry, as if poems were no longer to be understood as discrete statements executed into a living, palpable world that could be upset or enamoured by them, but were, rather, mere turns in some myriad proliferating strands of discourse concerning the "avant-garde," a text stream unresponsive to the poem's status as "outside." A pious attitude toward avant-garde writing and its traditions had settled in, and the naturally impious attitudes of the artist looking for singularity against the gray scales of the given could find no place in it.

The writing in poetics@, in contrast, is practically an explosion of the issues, anxieties, enthusiasms, intellectual rivalries, contentions and cross-cultural camaraderie -- all the barroom talk that can be, if taken seriously, the living critical culture of poetry -- that were rendered silent by an anxiety to perform in the field of "poetics."

While it is a mere chip off the iceberg of what had been written during that time (the first two years, from 93-94, running at 10,000 printed pages) and though it still leans toward the writing strategies of academics, poetics@ is nearly complete as an image of the nexus of issues that -- in our "globalized" and technologically connected world, in which the Cold War has been replaced by corporate monoculture -- have grown to characterize writing about poetry since, inside and outside the "experimental" communities.

"I think you boys must be getting a little saddle weary from all that wobbling," opens an email by Jennifer Moxley, already clearing the air of the technical stylistics of writing that is self-consciously non-academic, and she continues:
Those who muse around in definitions of community without self-referentiality obviously can 'step away' long enough to question: are we in one? do we want one? etc... Most people on earth are born into your vagary.
[tk]

The urge toward description and definition, systematically deflected Poetics, is in poetics@ encouraged by the very possibility of "feedback" (often with large blocks of quoted text) from an individual that does not "share your language"; a clashing of subcultures, rather than a pointing to a unified group of "poetic dissidents," is the natural characteristics of these exchanges.

The range of subjects run over in this volume is amazing, and little of it has appeared in any of the more standard academic texts, such as The Marginalization of Poetry or the books of Marjorie Perloff, concerning writing of the past twenty years: New Zealand poetry (N.Z. poets like Alan Loney and Wystan Curnow were active early participants), Diane Ward's book Imaginary Movie (and an ensuing debate on the relevance of the "pleasure of the text" in reading it), the meaning of "experiment" in "experimental" poetry, a debate over the journal Apex of the M which had appeared at the time (possibly the most controversial first issue of a journal to appear in the 80s and 90s), why "few women post" (i.e. write criticism from a sort of activist perspective despite the activist motivations of much feminist writing) and why the "boys" are always engaged in verbal sparring, what sort of role the academy plays in the continuation or nurturing of avant-garde activity and whether it can any longer be called "avant-garde" -- just a random selection of the topics crossed, which flow into each other with fluidity rather than being separated by chapter headings and lead sentences.

Poets from the "mainstream" mingle with "Melbournian Doctoral Students," African American poets with English cyberpoets, young upstarts with established Language poets, with both ease and masterfully expressionistic unease.

The "image" of this book, what it presents metonymically as a substitute for the whole, is that of a dialogic complexity in which the basic contract is to let the text of the "other" sound itself out prior to any knee-jerk engagement with the author or ideas.

In real life, of course, the Poetics list was, and continues to be, something quite different from this happy utopia of fleshy vectors engaged in an experiment of radical democracy. Because of the ontologic crisis about the place of these texts in the universe of time and space, writers on the list often engage in ad hominem attacks on individuals, usually with a brand of rhetorical strategies that want to be intellectual pyrotechnics, or seem born of a falsely self-convinced strategy of neo-romantic improvisational brilliance, but are unfortunately something like mental self-preening in front of the computer screen, a private, perhaps therapeutic activity gone public.

Whether this book, which finally places a lot of the digitized writing "in print" and on the poetry consumer market, could make an effect on this confusion (the list has not been nearly as central to people's concerns since then) remains to be seen, but as a break in the continuum of anthologies of poetry (in which the editor, with the exception of Ian Sinclair, seem timid in writing anything that suggests critical perspective) or about poetry by poets, poetics@ seems the place to go to get a quick bird's eye view of what poets were talking about in the nineties, in a language that is imperfect in such a way that is revealing rather than demeaning.

Posted by Brian Stefans at May 27, 2003 03:43 PM