Eagles Mate in Freefall -- What?! (--That's Gross! --That's Cool!)

So Earlham U. was squawkboxing announcements at me as I tried to get my plastic owl-words out last night -- "The library be closing in fift- minutes -- please bring any materials to main circulation ..." As I fled the evil eyes of the work-study stooges and crossed the grass I found myself wishing I'd had time to get a couple more things down. Here they are: first, I did enjoy, in a semi-satanic way, the Houlihan essay that horsewhipped Fence, even if the attack was again less than honorable or elegant (my impression was that it was more about rhetorical victory than meaningful investigation). Second, this is deja-vuing my socks off -- skimming through Liz's Hart Crane book the other morning, "nimble blue plateaus" reminded me of him writing prose explaining and defending his technique. I also have a vague memory of Stevens being questioned (maybe by a relative?) about his work's weirdness and responding with something to the effect that apples are always going to be puzzling to people who are used to/expecting potatoes. And it's not like these are the only two 20th century poets who've answered criticisms and accusations like these -- they're much more the exception than the rule. I guess this is the problem I was trying to get a compass of when I commented earlier on the lack of solid, careful criticism of current unconventional (that is, non-Dorianne Laux) poetry: poetry benefits from people asking hard, well-informed questions of it, and the current laxness deplored by Houlihan could be in large part due to the dearth of those questions and question-askers. And this goes both ways, of course -- think of how criticism as a whole has benefitted from having to grapple with the monsters of Modernism. It's only going to get flabby sucking down those pre-chewed tomatoes and cans of neo-Romantic Ensure! (Uh?) So in the end, what a shallow and ideology-driven essay like Houlihan's does more than anything is advance the notion that nothing "experimental" deserves to be taken seriously, which ultimately undermines poets and critics alike ("poet-critics" getting doubly fucked, I guess). Anyone who actually gives a shit about poetry and knows one nanobyte about the way it has developed since, say, 1880 would hopefully take a different tack.

One other thought from yesterday: I totally applaud your attitude, Jared, in taking this series of essays, warts and all, and trying to see how they might apply to your own ways of writing poems. I don't think "smugness" is the right word -- I don't mean for such a riptide of negative connotations -- but there does seem to be something attitudinal shared by most non-mainstream poets, an attitude that seeks to cut any perceived opposition or differing tendency off at the knees, a general inclination to hermeticize and thus raise forcefields around ourselves and our poetic loved ones, and it really contributes to the problem. ("Wait, you mean SHE's telling avant-people they're not DEMIGODS? She must be square/ on the NEA payroll/ out of her gourd! I will now ignore her completely!") Absorbing and applying as many questions as possible to oneself, regardless of their origin, seems like a good way to build a sound foundation for one's work. (It's also a good way of fucking up the American-media-advanced modes of public dialogue, which have everything to do with shrill rhetoric and dividing into opposing pods. Totally discouraging the way even smart people continue to fall into this crap.)

(Can you tell I'm typing this from a Quaker university?)

A few other thoughts from reading your post today, then, Lauren:

-- I love the quote from the Waldrop book. Brings our ghost-word "rigor" to mind. That the amount of energy required to fully engage with something on a critical level should equal the amount of energy required to produce it seems very reasonable and 2nd Law of Thermodynamics-y. I do wonder if the ascendance of Beat & NY School speedy-poetics -- those emphasizing a flash of heat and emotion over craft and intellectual Goldberg-rigs -- has really screwed everyone in the end, what with so many critics not wanting to touch O'Hara or Corso with a ten-foot sterilized pole. And if they could ignore O'Hara and Corso, it was pretty easy to ignore X and then Y who followed. Then the po-Friendster cycles started in the vacuum (less with the Beats, obviously), if only to get something going, critically -- writing about each other, appreciating the thought and energy that were steering this new work that so baffled outsiders.

-- I very much know what you mean about disliking things that you later grow to admire. I've come to think of it as getting an aesthetic splinter. I can't help pushing at it and worrying it, and eventually it seems much more important than it did at first. I'm getting better at spotting these when I first get them, although I'm still often taken by surprise... I also think that proceeding based on intuitive reactions as you describe, without falling into rigid ways of classifying or evaluating -- this is a really great way to go. My karma ran over your dogma and all that. Things feel so fluxy to me right now, too. It's a good time to be exploratory and willing to bend. (I just saw a bendy straw in my mind and thought periscope. I guess a straight straw would be a telescope?)

Last thought: I've really been enjoying Laura (Riding) Jackson's The Telling lately. In the section about her idea of rebeginnings she drops some bombs that are, among other things, impacting my ideas concerning criticism and its function. This one blew me up two days ago, where she's taking issue with the concept of "finishing":

"What has, truly, been achieved in the progress towards fullness of knowing being is obscured by the works of the 'finishers', which crowd the historical horizon -- so that there is no just seeing to where, by truth's measurements, we have come, no just seeing where we are, in our advance as beings charged with carrying the spirit distributed to us in a point of union, of us in it, it in us."