Date: Thu, 5 Jan 1995 09:34:39 -0500
Subject: JRNL: Poetry on the Margins, cont.

***JRNL: T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

RB

I would like to suggest that one factor in the popular"marginalization" of poetry in this country may be the absence of a shared culture. I am a high school teacher, and standard English is a second language for the majority of my students. They respond positively to poetry, often, I think, because it appears less challenging to them in terms of the number of words on the page to be read and understood. But poetry relies on association, which often means associations with words and images which are shared by people who share a language and culture, and who have a similar range of experiences and education. Thus, in teaching Phillis Wheatley, Emily Dickinson, or even the more accessible Robert Frost or Lanston Hughes, I find myself "explaining" poems much more than I am comfortable with. I am forced to decode what to me are the obvious cultural references made by the poet - it's very much like translating for my students from a language they supposedly already speak and read, but don't! What I often end up doing, among other things, is leading them into reflection and free association on colors, images, and dialogue which, while usually unsatisfactory in getting at a poet's meaning, at least allows for some personal and immediate response to the text. And then we move on to contemporary song lyrics. I have thus seen firsthand that is that the marginalization of poetry is due not to conscious rejection of it, but rather to delayed acquisition of cultural literacy. In another generation, I expect the landscape will be much more friendly to poetry.

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Dear t-amlit folks,

I've been quite interested to read the responses to my post about teaching and talking about poetry. I have also taken the liberty (hope this is all suitably decorous) of cross-posting those responses to a "poetics" list, made up mostly of poets rather than academics (tho the two categories, of course, are far from mutually exclusive, now more than ever). Thought it might be interesting to get some responses from the production end of things as well as the teaching/criticism end. Now, with Ron Silliman's permission, i am cross-posting his response back to this list. Since "language poetry" was explicitly mentioned in the t-amlit bundles, Silliman's take wld seem especially apposite. Here's to transgressing boundaries...

steve shoemaker

Forwarded message:
From: Ron Silliman
Subject: Poetry on the Margins of What?
To: Multiple recipients of list POETICS

Both Tony Petrovsky and Paul Lauter's comments reflect quite clearly some very different ideas of what might be meant by the proposition "poetry is at the margins."I don't know Tony but given Paul's long involvement with bringing radical politics to the academy, it's interesting how inherently non-market oriented each approach seems to be.

The idea that poetry "is at the margins" of course proposes some spatial model of something, with an identifiable center from which poetry could then be distant. What is that thing? Books sold? Cultural influence? Fame? Petrovsky speculates that the diversity of poetic subcultures in our society might be causal (rather than, say, a reflection or manifestation of some larger social process). Paul gets in a gratuitous (and completely reductive) slap at the avant-garde tradition (w/o recognizing it as the only *international* literary tradition the world has ever had). Its role in identitarian political movements is then posed as a truer center.

That reminded me of the condition that poets found themselves in the former Soviet Union (FSU). For a long time, almost 30 years, poets held a critical social function for political opposition. Since political meetings were verboten, poetry readings often took on the role of a public rally. Audiences were large. But it is not evident that this benefited more than a handful of individual poets and its impact on writing per se seems to have been quite a mixed bag.

Once a broader terrain of discourse was possible, the necessity of the poet as a symbol of resistance quickly disappeared. Audiences shrunk rapidly and the new market economy of Russia and the other republics has meant that the next generation of poets over there will probably be no more well distributed and read than their contemporaries here.

Jan Clausen, a poet and novelist who has long been involved with lesbian poetics and politics (until she married a man a couple of years ago, but that's another story), wrote an excellent pamphlet on this subject called *A Movement of Poets: Thoughts on Poetry and Feminism* (Brooklyn: Long Haul Press, 1982). She is generally very suspicious of the impact of each on the other. For example, writing of poetry's decline as a leading force for feminism once second-wave feminism created its own institutions, she notes:

"Ironically, I suspect that poetry as a genre has lost prestige within the women's movement for the same reason that fiction lacked it in nineteenth century patriarchal England--because it is perceived as something almost anyone can do. That is the hidden meaning of a code phrase like 'there's so much feminist poetry,' and it points to the hypocrisy of the general feminist rejection of critical standards; rather than apply them, we have sometimes simply stopped paying attention to poetry at all." (pp. 46-7)

If Clausen suggests the logical end result of the kind of reductivism that Lauter's comments exhibit, Petrovsky's variation of Teach the Conflicts seems equally problematic. I personally would prefer to have a new formalist who was both passionate and knowledgeable about that tendency to teach a lit course than a liberal who sees Sharon Olds and Bruce Andrews as points of equal interest on an undifferentiated plane.

To have any value at all, the "teach the conflicts" approach requres the instructor to have (and argue) a theory of organization and history that positions every text and author.

Both Lauter and Petrovsky presume (reasonably enough for a Teaching of American Lit discussion group) a defining privilege for the classroom in determining the answer to the question. Needless to say, I have my doubts there.

So I keep coming up against the problem of the Margins of What. Walt Whitman self-published the first edition of Leaves of Grass. Much of Stein's work came out the same way. George Oppen's To Press, which Williams and Zukofsky hoped would be the vehicle to bring the objectivists to a larger audience, was just one more tiny press. As Charles Bernstein and others have pointed out (repeatedly, I must say), the problem of poetry's distribution to The Masses has changed very little in the past 200 years. What has changed, it seems to me, is the set of assumptions we making about what is central in public discourse, i.e., what is a center? Where is it and who defines it? Is Bill Moyers fawning over Donald Hall or Robert Bly an example of the potential success of poetry? Or quite the opposite?

What has changed, beyond the ongoing revolution in media (I'm old enough to remember the paperback as the exception, not the rule), has been an articulation of communities of writing. There may well be 300+ poets working in, or more or less directly from, what has been called Language Poetry. And publishing. Plus another 300 to 500 coming out of other variants of the New American tradition of 50s and 60s. And as Petrovsky notes in his comment of Gluck's attitude towards Olds, the establishmentarian tradition in American Lit is as well articulated. All of these discussions of the decenteredness or marginality of poetry seems to me to give very short shrift to very real communities, communities that are ultimately very different from the ones that Lauter imagines (precisely because they derive from lived experience of daily contact rather than application to some ideal of race, gender or nationality). Then the question of the marginality of any community would be one directly of its role within the larger society, poetry being the symptom more than the cause.

No?

As Lee Ann Brown,
the quintessential "NY School" poet of her generation
might say,
"Happy New Year, y'all."

Ron Silliman
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Date: Tue, 10 Jan 1995 09:48:37 -0500
Subject: JRNL: Poetry on the Margins, cont.

***JRNL: T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

RB

I would like to respond to a few things Ron Silliman mentions in his reponse to our responses to the Poetry on the Margins questions. I thought his comments on the communities of poets helps a lot. They are everywhere, in towns and boroughs, on electronic boards, in letters that they exchange with each other. More so I suspect than 10 or 20 years ago and I take that as hopeful. I'm not as interested as he is, though, in setting up good guys and bad guys in the language of the establishment poets and the others, more particularly the Language Poets. I remember being very excited about what was happening in Language Poetry when Ironwood did an issue devoted to the work, but itdidn't seem to me then nor does it seem to me now that Language Poetry needs to have the establishment to stand against in order to be language poetry in the Objectivist tradition and to extend that tradition. I feel thesame way, for example, about Gluck and Olds. They represent different traditions, different extensions of those traditions, but they don't need to position the other as the blackhat in order to be credible. The philosophy and language of each is not the others but so what. I think of a recent poem by Elaine Equi that goes like this:
PRESCRIPTION

Take Herrick
for melancholy

Niedecker
for clarity

O'Hara
for nerve

The poem, for me, says there are different things totake fromm different poets. So the, for teaching, it becomes a question ofhowto putbefore my students, most of whom are not readers of poetry or fiction, contemporary poetry so that they would be willing to contiue to read and perhaps to write it. Ithink then of letting them see the difference rather than, say, presenting them with just my preferences, and letting them write and talk about the difference to see for themselves what might be available to them from modern poetry. Sure I have a theory of organization and history, as Ron points out, and I can certainly see his suspicion of it as I would be suspicious of other teachers and their agendas if I had one I was proposing over others, but it isnot ppossible to not have, even in the slightest way, a theory of organization and history. At best, I think, I can see mine, such as it is, and be up front with my students about where I come from and how I organize.

This is a related problem to thinking about teaching any texts, it seems. I don't want it to prevent me from presenting modern poetry to my composition students or my intro. to lit. students or my school of Ed. students who want to be secondary teachers. Most of them know almost nothing about poetry. They have smatterings of Frost, Whitman, and Emily Dickinson in them, but what they have read usually stops there. The don't kow about the communities of writers in magazines like AMERICAN VOICE or the ST.MARKS POETRY PROJECT NEWSLETTER. So it's not that I would propose that there is a "defining privilege for the classroom in determining the answer to the question" of why poetry is marganilized but thatI would propose the classroom, all kinds of classrooms (e.g., religious studies, composition, educational methods, and so on)as places where poetry can be a part of the curriculum to address questions in those subjects and areas, to be, that is, a part of the conversations of thinking about, say, soul, or language and culture, or American traditions.

It is within thiscontext, the one that has to do with speaking to my collelagues about why I might include poetry in these courses, that I locate the problem of poetry on the margins. THe other issues, the unchanged state of distribution of poetry, Bill Moyers and Robert Bly, the creation of good guys and bad guys in poetry weren't my subjects in the last postings, although those seem to me to be certainly related issues. My expeerience is that my colleagues, college and secondary English teachers, by and large are not familiar with the vaariious traditions and commnities of poets or fiction writers, and I'm interested in how this might be changed and I see a place to begin in my immediate teaching by positioning poetry as a serious voice avaailble to my students. I still don't see theusefulness of fractionalism. As poets it is possible to discuss poetry that is not the poetry we write or prefer without positioning it to be establishment, representative of larger social forces, bad, and so on. The difference is a place for discussion rather than dissmisal. In the movesof dismissal and disparagement the new boss--the culturall critique--is the old boss--New Critical critique--with another name and another set of terms. It'sthe same end game: who shall be judged or critiqued the true (and we all know about the will to truth now, don't we, from Foucault for instance), with the same divisiveness, and I don't think that helps poetry communities, poetry, or my thinking about howto present poetry to my students and colleagues. I like theEqui poem and what it proposes. Locate me there.

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I want to pick up on one of Ron Silliman's side comments, which criticized me for making what he called "a gratuitous (and completely reductive) slap at the avant-garde tradition (w/o recognizing it as the only 'international' literary tradition the world has ever had)."

Ron is certainly right in criticizing the offhand way I criticized the tradition of Eliot and Pound, and many of their successors. One shouldn't do that in a sentence, any more than one should attack the equally pernicious impact of abstract expressionism and its apologists, like Hilton Kramer, in a sentence. I didn't want to repeat what I had written at length elsewhere--there's one piece coming out in an NCTE volume edited by Jim Slevin and Art Young and another in the next issue of the Yale J of Crit. In both I reflect on the powerful hold that the critical tradition derived from Eliot, Pound, Ransom, Brooks, etc. has had even on those of us committed to a revisionist canon. I think that hold is most of all demonstrated in the New Critical ways in which poetry continues largely to be taught, especially in secondary schools. And in the ways we conceive--even in a revisionist anthology like the HEATH--literary/ historical conceptions like "modernism."

Here it's worth considering the other post, from an unnamed high school teacher, that appeared with Ron's post. The teacher mourned the fact that his or her students don't share a great deal of the culture assumed even by relatively approachable poets like Frost. Thus the teacher is put in the position of being the class expert--nothing wrong with that, as such, and probably inevitable in many situations. Yet for students, in my observation, that turns poetry into a puzzle to which an observably more "mature" person has the key, rather than into a form in which they may participate. I think the result of this dynamic is to create among many and perhaps most students a kind of fear and loathing, a sense that poetry, writing in general, is something done by people other than themselves, different from them, distant from them. And that, it seems to me, is precisely the intent of Eliot's form of modernism--see, for example, his comments on the special qualities of the poet's "sensibility" in "The Metaphysical Poets." Eliot's point, I would argue (after Adreas Huyssen in "Mass Culture as Woman: Modernism's Other," AFTER THE GREAT DIVIDE), is precisely to create the critical and teaching apparatus that underwrites the elite forms of poetic practice he helped develop.

This is still a shorthand form of the argument, to be sure. And one can speculate about Eliot's psychology--as in "Tom and Viv"--or about the conservative politics he shared with the founders of the New Criticism. Those are interesting issues, to be sure. But here I only want to suggest that the continuing impact of this tradition is to help create distance between many people who pass through the educational system and those forms of language designated within it as "poetry."

Underlying the argument is, of course, the question of what we agree to call "poetry." It's the issue Cary Nelson powerfully joins by, for example, quoting H.H. Lewis' little argument about material conditions and consciousness:

Here I am
Hunkered over the cow-donick,
Earning my one dollar per
And realizing,
With goo upon overalls,
How environment works up a feller's
pant-legs to govern his thought.
(Thinking of Russia)
Let's leave it at that for the time being.

Paul Lauter
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Date: Tue, 10 Jan 1995 09:49:47 -0500
Subject: JRNL: Poetry on the Margins, cont.

***JRNL: T-AMLIT JOURNAL***

With regard to Shoemaker's further remarks and Silliman's contributions, maybe a few more comments might buzz along the web from here and draw some interest from whoever "lives along the line," as Pope and his classical ancestors have put it. First, is it not interesting that "poets" have their separate web? Is it not also interesting that networkers can assume those of us etherized on this part of the table are professors NOT poets, while
those in the poet-hammock hangup of this network ARE poets, whether professors or
not? Does anyone think this kind of compartmenting is part of the reasons poets and poetry are perceived as marginalized? Second, since a poet has asked the question of what the metaphor of margins is supposed to mean, let me respond--as medievalist, teacher of American Indian Literature, and practicing poet--that I believe the basic metaphor is that of TEXT vs. MARGIN, and I take it that in the medieval period the text was that "woven" part of the page's words, while the margin was the place outside the weaving, where space was "free." One way "progress" took place, that is, people invented an idea called the Renaissance and relegated the medieval period to a meaningless dark MIDDLE AGES unlike the clean well-lighted humanistic Sixteenth Century of enlightened popes, holy Roman Emperors, reformed bishops and kings able to marry all they wanted, and so on--one way was to turn the marginalized things of the previous age into the textualized central part of the page. Instead of the Virgin Mary, they looked at models for the Virgin Mary, instead of a human image representing a cosmos, they looked at the image as representing an individual unlike all others. You no longer talked of a soul, you talked of a self--in English, that is, a language in which it was possible to take the former pronominal intensifier and turn it into a noun and let it carry the responsibilities which a soul had earlier had to bear. You invented psychology. You invented a blank table on which the senses wrote you you you. (Well maybe you didn't do this, and neither did I, but it seems kind of nasty to keep blaming THEM for it, so I am giving you the honor of riding out of the Middle Ages on the rail of Self.) So anyhow, I take it that behind all the political discourse of margins there is the original textual discourse, the manuscript making, the writerly image. Does that make sense? It should please any language poet, should it not?

But there is another assumption I'd like to look at. Someone pointed out very usefully that poetry requires readers to learn the culture inscribed within it, before the poems make sense. Is this not also true of prose? Is it not true of the Dick and Jane readers, as well as of the James and Nora or Tom and Viv or Emily and God anthologies? Is it not true of any human utterance, or lifting of an eyebrow? I suspect therefore that it does not differentiate poetry from the rest of the noises off or on the page or stage or CD-ROM.

I was thinking about this particular Silver Screen Dialogue as I was looking up, yesterday, the pseudo-Albertus Magnus Book of Secrets, in which I finally found (having looked off an on since 1980 or so) the probable source of a Latin excerpt copied about 1340 in or near Ludlow by a scribe who was a minor lawyer and probably a chaplain there. The excerpt occurs on fol. 137r of BL MS Harley 2253, and its two parts describe the herbs heliotrope (marigold) and celandine. Of heliotrope it is said that whoever gathers it in summer, when the Sun is in the Virgin, i.e. in August, and rolls it in a laurel leaf and adds the tooth of a wolf, will be able to pacify all opponents with his discourse; also, if anything has been stolen from him, and he lays this under his head at night, he will see the thief and perceive all the thief's circumstances. Further, if one places this leaf etc. inside a church within which are women who have committed adultery, none of the women shall have power to go out of that church without confessing to it. Of celandine, we are told that if one wraps it around the heart of a mole, one will successfully overcome all opponents in discourse, even litigation; and if one places the celandine and mole-heart under the head of any sick person, then if that person is fated to die he or she will begin to sing loudly, but if fated to recover will begin at once to weep. What, you may ask, has this to do with the difficulty of reading poetry, or with the alienation of poetry's audience, or with marginalizing of poetic discourse? Well, there is a poem in this manuscript (Harley 2253--in case you are interested, there is a facsimile that is Early English Text Society No. 255, 1964, edited by the great paleographer N. R. Ker; and there is an edition of the famous "Harley Lyrics" from this manuscript by G. L. Brook, as well as by various other scholars), which consists of five stanzas in each of which the poet compares the lady he is praising to something beautiful and wholesome: in stanza one, to various gems; in two, to flowers and herbs (including celandine and marigold--solsecle is the poet's term for the latter, which is derived from the Latin Solsequium that occurs in the latin excerpt I have mentioned above); in three, to birds; in four, to medicinal herbs or potions; and in five, to heroes and heroines of "romances" including Welsh, Germanic, and French prose and poetry.

By now you have guessed that my point is how obscure and difficult this poem must be. It is also heavily alliterative, obviously a highly ornate piece of poetry. But one of the nicest things about it is that its poet has found a very clever way to both conceal and give away the name of the lady he is praising--I should add that in such poems, the medieval writers usually make it a taboo to name the lady, since a courtly lover's affair is actually not supposed to be made public except so far as the pair of them show the symptoms of love, and the man is allowed to "complain" in a GENERAL way, naming no names. This poet, however, has managed to name his beloved in a riddling way, in the third stanza when he is comparing her to birds: HIRE NOME IS IN A NOTE OF THE NYHTEGALE, IN ANNOTE IS HIRE NOME: NEMPNETH HIT NONE! WHOSO RIGHT READETH, RUNE TO JOHON! The clever reader or listener will easily see that the lady's name is Annote, and any medieval or medievalist with half a brain would know that that is a pet name or nickname for Agnes, so the poet is saying: Listen up now and you'll hear her name--and when you get it, whisper it to John!

I think the poet could certainly expect his readers (it may have been HER readers, though we have little evidence for women lyricists in the 1300's; little is not NONE!) to get the riddle. But at that point we have another question: what's the poet doing breaking this taboo? I think the answer is that the poem is addressed to, and intended for reading aloud to, a courtly audience of men and women, and that the names Agnes and John were very common names--so that a given audience might have several women and men with those names. The "answer" would therefore become a "debate topic", and not only WHICH Agnes, but which JOHN for which Agnes, would be debated. Can we now go back to that Marigold and Celandine? The poet expects his audience to understand that the lady is not merely like flowers of various colors and fragrances, but flowers and herbs and gems and birds and medicines of various powers--reputed or real, credible or just "interesting" is not certain, according to Lynn Thorndike's History of Science account of the pseudo-Albertus Magnus BOOK OF SECRETS in which the powers of celandine and marigold are explicated, and from which the Harley 2253 scribe carefully copied those passages. The audience would not only know this plant-lore and gem-lore and bird-lore (and star-lore, since the gems and plants linked to Zodiac), but would presumably have the romances all by heart so that comparing the lady to their heroes and heroines would make as much sense as our references to Hamlet or Portia or Oedipus or Prufrock.

SO, AS I SAY, I was thinking about this question of marginalizing poetry yesterday as I was dinking about the Science and History of Science shelves trying to get a little footnote finished. But you know, one reason I was doing that was that I had just read Gayle Margherita's new book on medieval literature, all the Lacan and Freud and Marx and such, and been greatly interested by her marvelous hammerlock on the poet of ANNOTE AND JOHON, who clearly was a patriarchal bastard if ever there was one. And I was the more interested because she cited Daniel Ransom's earlier book on the Harley Lyrics in which he claimed there are all sorts of obscene puns in ANNOTE AND JOHON, and it was a little hard to tell whether she thought Ransom was right or thought he was worse than the Harley Lyricist. Anyhow it occurred to me that one reason we may have a lot of non-readers of poetry is that we have convinced so many potential readers that they have to ask a professor before daring to dip into any collection of real literature. And once we ask, we are treated to an incredible pile of unbelievable interpretations, all of burning importance, all proving that every medieval poet was John D Rockefeller plus John Gacy plus the Marquis de Sade plus Faulkner's Popeye, at least when not proving that the poets were really (according to D. W. Robertson of blessed Princetonian memory) John Knox or a Polish Pope. So it is just possible that professors have marginalized their texts pretty athletically. Having perfected an Explanation Factory, having apprenticed all readers to this factory and seen to it that they are chained to the sewing machines fabricating not glosses or footnotes but literary bi-ogre-phy, we have committed them to reading poetry, fiction, essays, newspapers, laws as projections of the psyches of damaged tyrants and misers and sociopaths of various talents and inclinations.

Well, maybe that is just auld, lang, and syne.

But having got into the Science section of our library, and actually found a book on the shelf that was said by the computer system to be there, and got the footnotes, and read the intelligent and interesting discussion by Margherita (U of Penn Press, 1994; well worth reading, lots besides the problematic misreading of the Harley Lyrics), and so on, I managed to get a copy of the magazine SCIENCE and look at its piece casting doubt on the existence of Black Holes (Jeez, how to write a headline for THAT?!) and another on the anniversary of Oncogene Research in which Harold Varmus, head of NEH and recent Nobelman for that work, had a few things to say and I was reflecting on what a good student of English Literature Varmus had been at Amherst College when I was a junior instructor there. And I kept thinking, you know, if I pick up SCIENCE, I expect to get news, some surprises, some revisions. If I pick up a journal of poetry I don't expect that. Is that maybe one reason people don't pick up poetry journals? But of course scientists complain of being marginalized too. I read that 14.7% of Math Ph.D.'s are going unemployed. Wonder what kind of poet Harold Varmus would have made?

You must have asked me the question I am about to answer: How to get back into the text people read? The answer is: be a good host. You let some of the guests tell stories too. You answer questions, you bring other characters onto the show. You treat readers as guests, and not as unworthy approachers of your throne. I bet this will make quite a few readers--especially some who class themselves as poets--mad as hell. I bet the romantic view of poets as dictating rather than as entertaining is still the going thing. I bet the view of readers as not deserving of the wonderful stuff poets are writing is the common one. I bet poets still think of themselves as abused victims of the Philistine masses. And of course the damnable truth is that I write what I please and invent, afterwards, excuses, rationales, explanations which may have little to do with motives and techniques and processes of the actual writing. Still, it seems to me poetry is intended to be a shared thing, a way of getting together with people and things and creatures, not a way of walling out or walling in only. A really great poet should do what Shakespeare did, or Dickens, take a popular medium and make it bear great poetry. The rest of us can try to do that and no doubt fall way short. But I still think if we do it right people will laugh with us, go up the mountain with us, because they will find our words help them, speak to them, make sense of experience they know personally and closely. Sometimes it even seems that really good poetry is whatever people read for themselves because they need it. But that would allow the directions for microwaving a tuna casserole to be poetry, I suppose. [Return to Index]

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This page was prepared by Audrey Mickahail at the Center for Electronic Projects in American Culture Studies (CEPACS), housed at Georgetown University, under the direction of Randy Bass, Department of English.

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