Chris Murray (Chris, you can call me Chris… I hope it’s ok that I call you Chris) has a very interesting take on my recent exchange with Ron Silliman.
I’m really short of time this week and I want to mull over the idea of “traditions” quite a bit more. But there is one aspect that I feel compelled to note quickly here… the idea of poetic “stasis.” It seems like a common bit of knowledge among proponents of the post-avant (or should I say opponents of the School of Quietude?) to argue that the quiet poets exist in a kind of stasis.
I question that assertion. It seems to me that this presumes value in only one kind of change– and the most obvious and least subtle one at that– the aspect of form. There has to be more to it than that. I suppose some part of the post-avant eschews all ideas of forms as well, but the obvious example to contradict this is looking at work that is done in forms. Does the use of a form that another has used automatically qualify a poem as static? Can no poetry be of interest unless it is breaking new ground in an obvious way such as its physical layout on the page? And what does this say for all the cummings-esque post-avant poets?
To continue using my battered music analogy, does this mean that there can’t be any interesting music using the 12-bar blues form or the pentatonic scale?
The concept of stasis is important, because all the rest of the debate about tradition hinges upon some presuppositions about the continuity of schools of poetry, reliance upon received ideas, etc. I maintain that the stasis of many poets of the School of Quietude is mythical– just as I am convinced (so far) that much of the post-avant group of poets who assert a claim to newness are really only writing like their compatriots. I am reminded of the scores of similar looking teenagers, each having adopted their style under the mistaken impression that they are being different. But in their repeated attempts at difference lies a startling sameness.
I think the “facts” of the matter are both much more mundane than we are allowing, but at the same time more complicated. There is just a lot of shitty poetry out there, and we all find our own way to sift through it. One convenient way to make the job easier is to slough off a whole kind of poetry, writing it all off as something we aren’t interested in. But to do so is necessarily to make a choice that results in loss. This isn’t a big deal as long as we don’t delude ourselves that we are doing something different.
From my perspective, this is like going into a museum and bypassing entire wings based on the assumption that nothing of period X can be any good and everything of type Y is the same, despite vast differences within any given group (I find it hard to fathom any conception of a “school” that can bind tightly together poets as diverse as Charles Simic and Galway Kinnell, for example), and many subtle differences even within poetry that appears the same (anyone who can’t see the wide range of execution over the life of James Wright, for example, or who thinks that superficially similar poets such as Adrian Louis and Sherman Alexie are anywhere near the same, is in dire need of a major upgrade in their critical faculties).
In short, the idea of stasis is a myth, or at least no more true for the School of Quietude than for the post-avant, though there is certainly more than a little truth to the fact that being obviously new is of much more importance to one school than another. I find it amusing that Silliman takes it as gospel that the only way to better poetry is to do something new and different, as if there is some cosmic checklist that informs this mandate, only one possible worthwhile sonnet and only one possible worthwhile Mathemaku– or that this is the only KIND of difference that matters. It appears to me to be an argument remarkable only for being startlingly superficial.
It has been interesting to watch this argument develop, become sharper and more focused.
Unlike you, I like the idea of stasis, especially as Chris Murray ties it to death, “the big problem”.
Poetry-making seems to arise out of an impulse to defy or deny death. the hush in so-called school of quietude writing sounds to me like the whisper from a death’s head. some have subtle enough ears to hear this, some do not. perhaps it is a pathological state, after all.
The new and the different are only the most obvious markers of a death-defying impulse. the howl vs. the hush. which camp is more frightened? I don’t know.
“School of quietude” implies a kind of resignation. Maybe this is why so many people like it.
Try googling “school of quietude” — not many hits. it is still in the process of definition. I thought it a crock until you began discussing it. Now i find it useful. I’m beginning to understand why i don’t like certain poetic utterances but am ravished by others.
thanks for stirring things up.
petra
it’s easier for the young——for you——to be eclectic. . .
i can remember being able back in the 1970s to read School of Noisiness poets, Coolidge and Notley for example, whom i can’t read now. . . indeed i can’t seem to read any SONs these days, only SOQs whose prejudices i share
in theory ecleticism is defensible. . . but in practice poets tend to specialize. . . Micheal Palmer never wakes up one day saying Gee that Mark Halliday really does some interesting things with that slangy colloquial approach of his I think I’ll try something like that. . . . nor does Halliday ever try the Palmer method. . . the 2 you mention, Simic and Kinnell, never trespass on each other’s patch . . .
here’s a quote from Anna Akhmatova: “When they’re young, poets like the work of poets in their own group. Later though, they don’t like anybody else’s——only their own.”
but look at the british poet Carol Ann Duffy, who has enormous diversity in her work. Compared to her, american poets are inhibited. . . She seems to have more freedom than we do. She can write in several styles/modes whereas each american poet confines herhimself to a specialized trademark style. . .
no one wants to open a coke bottle and taste pepsi. . . Palmer’s readers don’t want to open his book and see him attempting a Hallidayish poem. . .
anyway, re the School of Noisiness, here’s a quote from Paul Valery: “Everything changes, except the avantgarde.”
Googling “School of Quietude” returns few results because it’s Ron Silliman’s private fantasy, which he’s been promoting through his blog for a year or so now. If there’s any justice, that’s where it will stay.
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