Yo! MTV Ropes

John Coombs and I used to have this thing where whenever someone would ask us a quick question we'd pull long faces and intone in the most funereal tone possible, "Yes AND No!" Not as good as "The answer's right in your hand," I guess, but in the same mysterious ballpark.

I only have a few minutes here. Unfortunate, because after reading several of Houlihan's essays and then your comments, Jared, I have a lot more to say than I expected to. To try to nutshell it, I think this is in large part because her fundamental charges are pretty good and frictionful, but she presents her argument, like you said, in this totally wack Fortress Bloom kind of way. And hell, at least Childe Harold pays lip service to the Ashbery he keeps in his stable. Houlihan's classico-critical course, from what I can suss of it, is incapable of swerving even so gently as to find much merit in, say, the New York School (& btw, does she really write without any consideration as to how her critical apparatus would fare in, say contemporary visual arts? Poetry Island is a show so old it's not even in syndication anymore). I mean, bagging on a painfully homogenous crew of Languagers chosen by Hejinian and claiming they represent the full range of contemporary avant-poetry (they aren't even a good random sampling from that Best Of collection (which was at least sometimes interesting) (and I have to say what the fuck when she claims that Hejinian's discomfort with "bestness" equates to a complete gutting or dismantling of poetry evaluation -- this is simply feeble thinking) (oh yeah: similarly, her bitter coinage of "the church of new writing" comes off as awfully shallow when she a) makes clear straightaway that she knows fairly little about what's actually happening out in this new cult she's so bent about; and b) never turns that phrase around -- God forbid she should rub "the [painfully existent] church of old writing" the wrong way, right?), and then giving us Dorianne Laux and "The Shipfitter's Wife" as an example of writing excellence one might aspire to -- the ship-puker's puke is more like it, dude.

(And a quick side question here: what did you make of it, Jared, when she called in Pound as an ally?)

But like I said before, I think that some of these questions are fundamentally good ones to ask. Much internal struggle as I've read contemporary wanna-be-a-poem-weirdo work has been because I've had to recalibrate my critical gauges, and there has been struggle -- so much newer experimental poetry displays both profound strength and profound weakness, sometimes in the same poem, sometimes across a range of work. Kasey Mohammed's poems in A Thousand Devils blew, but some of his collagey stuff (which raised my hackles at first, esp. in the way "flarf" and maybe "The New Brutalityismo" seems to advance or even trumpet collage as a sparkling innovation -- wow, that's like so NOW) is actually pretty interesting. It just requires some shifting. In the shift, though, things and clarities are lost, and some of those things are importent. Impotent? Imped.

(I'll add to this soon. I guess in the meantime we can table my suggestion for group icepicking of "difficult" poems. The problems with mainline Language poetry have certainly been spelled out more clearly than I could hope to do here, and classic Lang-Po slabs are hardly worth blunting our icepicks over. Isn't anything out there more "difficult" than Language poems, anyway? The problem to me is actually their frequent lack of difficulty, which often ends up coming off as anti-rigorous and even lily-livered, in the right hands...)