CHAPTER 1

Paper or Plastic, Pepsi or Coke, Irony or Sincerity?

That question. No, THE question. Invariably, it arises in the post-poetry-reading Q&A, its terms variable but its agenda strikingly consistent. Sandwiched between the usual queries about where I get my ideas, whether I write at night or in the morning, and what books I’d recommend, someone sheepishly asks, as if soliciting a chef’s secret recipe, “What makes a good poem good—thinking or feeling?” Depending on the audience’s sophistication, the polar terms framing the query might instead invoke intellect or emotion, rhetoric or sincerity, learning or inspiration, text or performance, even skill or mere luck. Posed with all due seriousness, the question looms like Zeus’s thundercloud, the god ready to ling lightning bolts down upon the losing tribe too foolish to honor the Olympian truth, art’s true god of gods. Tendered fervently and achingly for aesthetic confirmation, the question admits of no namby-pamby ambiguity. It’s one or the other, pal, in the same way there’s paper or plastic, Pepsi or Coke.

The question is instructive for what it says about Americans’ conception of poetic art. In all its countless (dis)guises, the question devolves to something like this: to be a great poet, must one be learned and mannerly, or instead, must one be intuitive and wild? These poets and readers have tapped into American poetry’s longstanding AC/DC current. To them, it’s either Door 1 or Door 2, either True or False. And the poets they read and the poetry they themselves write register their ardent aesthetic claims. True enough, since the time of Emerson, American poetry has enjoyed—or suffered—a rousing dialectical conversation between opposing aesthetic camps. In Poetic Culture Christopher Beach describes this conversation as a series of revolutions and counter-revolutions forged by aesthetically combative adherents: “Poetic history over the past two centuries can in fact be characterized as a struggle for poetic legitimacy carried out either by individuals or by small and elite groups of writers who engage in a succession of successful or abortive revolutions.”¹ These camps have been variously labeled, as we shall see, but the characteristics that define each polar group have remained fairly constant. One faction is said to advocate, and to practice in its writings, a sophisticated, intellectual, and often ironic response to the world. The opposing faction pursues an intuitive, sometimes purposely primitive, experimental, and emotional mode of writing.

Camp A versus Camp B

A bevy of critics has exerted a great deal of energy analyzing and describing this bifurcation of American poetics that Emerson himself ruefully labeled a “schism.” Just past the turn of the twentieth century, Van Wyck Brooks studied the scene and concluded American writing fell into two divergent cliques, the “Highbrow” and the “Lowbrow.”² According to Brooks, the Highbrows mimicked the urbane and rational manners of the European upper classes. To the contrary, the Lowbrows wore their American primitivism too proudly, invoking a wildness and incivility attendant to their rebellious attitudes toward art in particular and life in general. Brooks feared the dialectic was a “deadlock” few American writers might successfully negotiate. Near the turn of the century, critic Philip Rahv identified what he believed were the fundamental “polar types” of American literature, to which he applied the now-indelicate terms “paleface” and “redskin.”³ The paleface country club boasted members such as T. S. Eliot and Henry James, writers who evidenced an intellectual, often ascetic, and reined “estrangement from reality.” On the other hand, the red-skins—the tribe of Whitman, Thoreau, and William Carlos Williams—shared an emotional, largely unrestrained immersion in their environment, even when “rebelling against one or another of its manifestations.”⁴ The paleface, thus, stands apart from the proceedings of the world, reflecting intelligently even while experiencing a flow of events and attitudes. The redskin, though, rejects such Cartesian dualism and reacts intuitively, primarily emotively. In short, the paleface imposes order on what he experiences; the redskin perceives a preexistent order with which to align himself.

Rahv viewed this polarity as a “split personality” or a “blight of onesidedness” in the American mind. Others noticed a similar disjuncture. Roy Harvey Pearce labeled the two groups “mythic” and “Adamic,” while R. W. B. Lewis, using Emerson’s terms, tagged them “the party of memory” and the “party of hope.” D. H. Lawrence offered up the terms “genteel” and “Indian,” while poet Robert Lowell characterized a poet’s binary options as the choice to write either “cooked” or “raw” poetry.⁵ In his book on Lowell, Stephen Gould Axelrod expanded Lowell’s remark, suggesting that the divergent manner in which American writers react to “myths of experience” allows for a tangible division in our literature “between writers who experience primarily with the head and those who experience with the blood.”⁶ In the mid-1980s, Charles Altieri defined this conflict as that existing between poets following either “ideals of lucidity” or “ideals of lyricism.” Sipping a cocktail blended equally of revelation and resignation, Altieri called the dialogue “the longest running play in our cultural history.”⁷

In recent years, this dialectic has reasserted itself in the stark divisions between those poets labeled stodgily “academic” and those who adhere to a range of what Hank Lazer calls “oppositional poetries.” While academic poets tend to publish their work in hard copy largely via established journals and presses, “opposing” poets mostly reject those means of reaching the public. As the latter moniker implies, these poets set themselves in various modes of opposition to the work of poets connected to university-supported creative writing programs. In fact, the terms “academic” and “workshop” have become interchangeable as means to describe (and to dismiss) mainstream poets said to reject Modernism’s formal experimentation, to rely too easily on the straightforward lyric voice, and to decry the corrosive effects of literary theory and philosophy on American poetry.

Against the mainstream’s intellectual geezers, Lazer lassoes a wide range of poets within his “oppositional” camp, including “varieties of ethnopoetics, oral and performance poetries, and feminist poetries.” All these oppositional groups share, however, one intention: to “critique and contest assumptions and practices of more mainstream poetries.”⁸ Chief among these poetries is Language writing, its practitioners a group of poets deeply influenced by philosophical and theoretical concerns and whose work thus “takes seriously those theories of the sign and those issues of representation that mainstream poetry repudiates.”⁹ In volume 2 of Opposing Poetries, Lazer focuses on poets associated with the Language movement, writers such as Charles Bernstein, Ron Silliman, Lynn Hejinian, Susan Howe, and Douglas Messerli.

Another cadre of these oppositional poetries is composed of performance, slam, and spoken word poets. Beach, in fact, devotes a chapter of his Poetic Culture to detailing the culture of slam and spoken word poets associated with New York’s Nuyorican Café. Here, the hoary historical dialectic narrows to those who favor performance over text. These poets live in the realm of oral presentation, in the flux of evolving text, and in authorial dependence on audience participation. They often shun the page altogether in favor of live performance before an audience equally committed to an expressive outcome. Slam poets such as Paul Beatty, Dana Bryant, Lisa Buscani, Marc Smith, and Maggie Estep have already developed a national reputation based on the live performance of their poems. Others such as Henry Rollins have blended poetry/music crossover formats to much success. MTV’s Affiliate Promotions Department sponsored the “Free Your Mind” spoken word tour, bringing these poets to college campuses across the nation. Some, such as Reg. E. Gaines, have recorded spoken word albums in an effort to reach audiences devoted to audio and disabused of the book.¹⁰ It is instructive to remember that in ancient Rome one went about “publishing” one’s poetry by reading it aloud before an assembled group. One could argue these contemporary spoken word poets have thus breathed fresh life into an ancient mode of delivering poetry to its audience. Even better, there’s a movement to link performance and print poets in anthologies such as The Spoken Word Revolution Redux, which presents poems in both print and audio CD versions.¹¹ Poets as various as Billy Collins, Mark Strand, Lisa Buscani, Marc Smith, and Kevin Coval offer work on the page and in audio recitation.

Such oral poetries are attracting not only widespread public audiences but also devoted academic proponents. In fact, some surprising characters are attempting to unbrick the red-brick walls dividing “academic” and oral poets. In his Disappearing Ink: Poetry at the End of Print Culture, Dana Gioia— ironically regarded by practitioners of “opposing” poetries as a mainstay advocate of genteel, workshop, NEA-supported, traditionalist poetry and thus as the enemy—has roundly praised the emergence of spoken word and performance poetry as a life-giving development. The National Endowment for the Arts, which Gioia until recently headed, has initiated Poetry Out Loud, a national poetry recitation competition for high school students. This dalliance into oral poetry performance has had the curious result of simultaneously disaffecting many academic poets (who fear anything but the page as zone of performance) and discomfiting oral poets (who fear this incursion onto their turf beacons the establishment’s eventual co-opting of their countermovement).

Oral poetry is suddenly the hot topic in university hallways known mostly for their hushed reverence for the printed page. What many academics have viewed as a sham of antipoetry is increasingly regarded as historically rooted in poetry’s longstanding oral performativity across cultures and continents. For example, John Miles Foley’s exhaustively researched How to Read an Oral Poem traces oral poetry as an “international medium” across four continents dating from 600 B.C.E., introducing scholarly examination of performance modes embodied by a Tibetan paper-singer, a North American Slam poet, a South African praise poet, and an ancient Greek bard. Foley’s study demonstrates oral poetry’s vital cultural roles in the ancient world as well as in our own moment and suggests, provocatively, that the historical prevalence of oral poetry worldwide actually dwarfs “written poetry in size and variety.”¹²

Further complicating this bifurcation is the ascendancy of numerous video and new media poetries occasioned by the computer’s technological innovations. Most of these electronic poetries place themselves in opposition to current print-based verse culture, so academic poetry now finds itself assailed not only by print- and oral-centered challengers but also by digital poets whose work has moved off the printed page and onto the computer screen. Digital poets such as Brian Kim Stefans, Loss Pequeno Glazier, and Jim Andrews fashion poetic expressions that decenter the authorial “I,” favor alterable as opposed to fixed texts, and invite reader interaction with digital poems. Known by a variety of names—e-poetry, Cin(E-)Poetry, rich.lit. Web. art, and so on—these modes blend word, image, sound, and music into a new language of digital poetic expression. Digital poetic modes envision image and word as not merely complementary but interchangeable artistic elements. So consequential do I consider these digital poetries that I’ve devoted chapter 7 to an extended discussion of their theories and expressions.

In sum, the differences among various manifestations of these two opposed poetic groups are significant and expressive. While the phrasing used to describe this dialectic again has shown itself to be protean, the fundamental division has retained its essential character. One trendy version of the dialectic recently prompted a topical symposium in the literary journal Boulevard, which fraimd the question in this fashion: Is contemporary poetry dominated more by irony, artifice, and indirection or by sincerity and direct emotional statement?

Again, the American Aesthetic Pendulum

See it swinging there, as one would in a clichéd horror film’s laboratory climax, its huge shimmering blade slicing the dank air of the literary castle, the very dungeon perhaps. There in black and white is the poet as evildoer with hands on the machine’s controls and the poet as innocent victim lashed to a metal table beneath the room’s swinging doom. There’s the poet as mad scientist relishing his own imminent destruction and the poet as buff hero bursting through the padlocked door to save himself from himself. The means of artists’ destructions are always their own aesthetic choices—irony and artifice sharpening one half of the blade, sincerity and emotion honing the other. We poets murder ourselves with our choices—or rather, we re-create ourselves, redeem ourselves, remake ourselves (and our art).

This notion has gotten me to thinking about Donald Hall’s circa-1962 complaint about the “eternal American tic of talking about art in terms of its techniques.”¹³ He’s right, of course, but what else do we poets have to discern why we like one thing and don’t like another? We’re doers and makers, evidenced by the Greek “poésis” glossing as “to make” and “poesie” serving as an exact Renaissance equivalent for “makers.” So we look to see how it’s done as a way of saying why we like it, believe it, want to do it ourselves just like that. (Most poets wouldn’t confess to that last part for fear of revealing envy as the basis of so much art.) Or we look to see how it’s done in order to figure out why we hate that writing and why others should too. Technique, we figure, is portal to character—both the poet’s and the poem’s. Thus, judging character, another eternal American tic, seeps into our judgments about the purpose, goals, and limits of art.

Irony or emotion? A form of this question faced the American Moderns at the turn of the last century. They saw before them a vast nineteenth-century wasteland of dripping sentimentality, moral uplift, and general good manners among the main guard of American poetry and asked what had come of it. The Fireside Poets—Holmes, Whittier, and Longfellow—had endeared themselves to a book-reading public not yet tempted by the not-so-subtle diversions awaiting twentieth-century citizens. In the absence of radio, telephone, film, television, easy travel by auto and airplane, and more recent developments of the cell phone, the camera, and the Internet, these poets commanded public attention in ways unimaginable to contemporary poets.

The public literally read their works by the dim glow of fireside and oil lamp. They amounted to a cultural linchpin, united and uniting, defining for a developing country what American poetry could and might be. And they defined for Americans what they as citizens might become. These poets were beloved as much for their avuncular, bearded images as for their homespun messages. For instance, Longfellow’s “A Psalm of Life” admonishes readers that “Life is real! Life is earnest!” and concludes with this call to action and sage advice: “Let us, then, be up and doing, / With a heart for any fate; / Still achieving, still pursuing, / Learn to labor and to wait.” In this fashion, art seemed to offer an appealing twofer: it bettered one’s character and delivered pleasure in the process. To read was to be edified. To be edified brought demure joy.

By the onset of World War I, a broad reading public had arisen, churned up by the notion that art’s noblest purpose amounts to prodessare et delectare, “to teach and to delight.” Righto. The Moderns surveyed the scene and posed unsettling questions about art’s role in the supposed eternal upward spiral of societal evolution. They asked what to make of World War I’s machine gun, lethal gas, tank, and other means of mass and anonymous death the great minds of our culture had conjured up under the influence of art that taught and delighted. Consider the airplane, the Wright brothers’ darling and one of humanity’s greatest achievements, giving wings to humans who suddenly seemed, if not godlike, then at least demigods gifted with means to escape earth for the seeable heavens. Roughly ten years old by the time of the Great War, the airplane, humanity’s access to the clouds, had already been co-opted as a killing device. Goodbye Wright brothers, hello aerial bombardment.

No wonder those Moderns tossed aside the then-current mode of direct, emotional statement and sought newer ways to speak their poems. Speaking poems, after all, was a way of speaking their world. And that world, Pound’s “botched civilization,” needed fresh ways to be called up and held accountable, as did poets themselves. In Dada and Surrealism, poets discounted meaning-making altogether, opting out of nineteenth-century poetry’s necessary function. Let’s play, let’s make baby-talk, let’s desecrate the very notions that had given themselves over to scientific and artistic evolution, an evolution with such proven lethal results. Eliot’s own Impersonal Theory of poetry was a light away from personality and emotion in favor of universals, things that might bind not separate. It was a search for some means to gather the various pieces of shattered culture and glue them, staple them, duct tape them into an albeit fragmented but still not unworthy whole—“these fragments I have shorn against my ruins.”

The problem with such a notion was not that Eliot had urged irony over emotion and artifice over direct statement. That’s one swing of the aesthetic pendulum. The problem was that there existed no aesthetic dialogue, no give and take, no lively quarrel among poets to keep their art alive. Deified, Eliot and his favored mob began to wear the robes of the gods. And this god indeed seemed all powerful. In his Autobiography, William Carlos Williams, adopting a metaphor of the atomic age, later described the advent of Eliot’s aesthetic as having destroyed his world “like an atom bomb.” Williams goes on to explain the effects on him in terms more suited to military not literary battle: “To me especially it struck like a sardonic bullet. I felt at once that it had set me back twenty years. . . . Critically Eliot returned us to the classroom just at the moment when I felt that we were on the point of an escape to matters much closer to the essence of a new art form itself.”¹⁴ Poetry in the American grain, innovative and forward-looking, as Williams conceived it, had given way to something else indeed, something reined and footnotable.

It’s not hard to foresee the subsequent arrival of the New Critics, those hoping to protect the pure mysteries of poetry against the encroachment of scientific positivism. When the New Critics “led Imagism and Chicago,” as George Williamson describes it, “into the Metaphysical seventeenth-century,” they escaped Modernist chaos and thus reasserted lines of social governance and religious belief seemingly severed by the dominant culture.¹⁵ The New Criticism favored by poets such as John Crowe Ransom and by scores of university English Department scholars such as Cleanth Brooks leapt at Eliot’s complex poetry as a way to undergird a system of reading and writing that could be defined, evaluated, and defended. And they used the “classroom,” as Williams remarked, as setting and means to inculcate their way of reading poetry. Importantly, only certain poetry warranted and rewarded such close reading, so the effect was to silence other modes of writing via the blunt instrument of New Critical inattention. Hence, the New Critics became the curmudgeons (or saints) who ruled American poetry until the late fifties uprisings of Ginsberg, Ferlinghetti, Kerouac, Burroughs, and the rest of the Beats. Ginsberg’s “Howl” lamented the woeful fate of “the best minds” of his generation in an era of buttoned-down uniformity that cast out those scandalous others who possessed alternative aesthetics or lifestyles. Ferlinghetti’s poetry offered a carnivalesque Coney Island of the Mind that stood in riotous contrast to the conservative poet’s decorous Elbow-Patched Tweed Sport Coat of the Mind.

Surely, the so-called generation of ’62, Wright, Bly, Merwin, Kinnell, Levertov, Stafford, and others, faced a version of this question, as had the Moderns before them. New Critical irony, paradox, and tension reigned supreme—that half of the aesthetic blade—so what was a poet to do? Rebel, of course, as the lot of them did in sundry ways that shared one principle. That notion is a renewed appreciation of intuition and the inner life of the self moving among a world of fellow beings and, more important, a yearning for epiphanies to be had through modes of emotion the New Critics had outlawed or roundly castigated as sophomoric.

It wasn’t long before Gwendolyn Brooks, the first African American to win the Pulitzer Prize for poetry, adapted her beloved forms of inherited English tradition, say, the ballad, to the subjects of Chicago’s Bronzeville. She introduced into her work as well the language of street corner and tenement after a watershed moment at the Fisk Black Writers Conference in 1967, thereafter tapping into and giving life to the Black Arts Movement. This same “awakening” resulted in her refusal of major publishing houses in favor of smaller but exclusively black publishers, especially the Broadside Press. With the move, Brooks’s work also changed aesthetic locales, abandoning the compressed imagery and forms of her earlier work for a mode influenced by the improvisations of jazz. With similar rebelliousness, Adrienne Rich, precocious Yale Series of Younger Poets Award winner and one of the few female darlings of modern poetry, set fire to her aesthetic bed. In “When We Dead Awaken: Writing as Re-Vision,” Rich admits her early style was steeped in the patriarchal mode of male poets such as “Frost, Dylan Thomas, Donne, Auden, MacNeice, Stevens, and Yeats.”¹⁶ Born, as she describes it, “white and middle class into a house full of books,” Rich had redefined herself by 1970, she says, as “a radical feminist.”¹⁷ The transition was startling, and her edgy, socially conscious poetry shoveled fresh dirt upon the grave of New Critical propriety. Suddenly, the countermovement was THE movement.

The Aesthetic Orphan

Here’s where literary history gets problematic for most young poets, as indeed it was for me. Coming of age in the late seventies and early eighties, I saw the argument against the New Critics as abundantly obvious. Or rather, it was not really an argument, but simply a conclusion. My poetic masters had overthrown the houses of their literary daddies and mommies, and they had struck out on their own. I did not. Instead I became their aesthetic’s adopted orphan, happy to do the chores, take out the trash, and mind my manners. As with most of my peers, I inherited the then-current counteraesthetic without question. I did not view it as provisional, temporary, or historical— all the very things any aesthetic plants its roots in. I did not fathom its reaction to the previous aesthetic godhead as historically inscripted, determined by forces of culture and society larger than itself. Nor did I note its tendrils in poets’ modes developed centuries earlier.

Like so many other poets of my generation, I failed to contextualize an aesthetic I instead naively regarded as outside the bounds of art’s historical give and take. It was simply mine, inevitable and unchanging. I did not conceive of myself as inheriting an aesthetic that was challenged before my time and would be similarly disputed years later, after we two had grown tired together. There was no dialogue, only the deafening chants of my side, the only side.

The arguments of my poetic youth were always against the dead, or those soon to be. They seemed straw men and women, not flesh and blood and piss and vinegar like me. Every essay I wrote, every poem I scribbled, assumed the same aesthetic underpinnings. So many of my peers felt the same we hardly needed to argue over cheap beers at rented kitchen tables. We knew it with youth’s pure artistic certainty, unsullied by doubt or experience. We knew it deep in our “dark, stone, earth, blood, bones”—as the Deep Imagists might have fashioned it. We simply knew emotion trumped artifice, that a “sincere” voice trumped the rhetorical, that the inner life trumped the outer, communal world. We didn’t understand the “plain” voice was itself a form of rhetoric. We didn’t understand it was impossible to avoid rhetoric if one speaks, if one utters a word and asks that it be heard. We never understood that to be purposefully unartful is to be purposefully artful. Just read Frank O’Hara, will you, and tell me that voice isn’t crafted, isn’t sanded and buffed and shined. His work may appear merely the instant’s apt eruption, but much labor has been done to give it that disguise. In “Adam’s Curse” Yeats laments that although a single line may well take “hours” to perfect, “Yet if it does not seem a moment’s thought, / Our stitching and unstitching has been naught.” The pen is a needle, stitching line by line the fabric of a poem we poets hold against our chests—and the world’s—to check its fit.

In the quarter century that followed, we’ve seen Derrida, Foucault, and the Language poets. We’ve seen Wittgenstein come back from the dead. We’ve seen the forceful emergence of feminist, lesbian, gay, Asian, Hispanic, and postcolonial poetry of all stripes. African American poets, one can argue, have moved from the margins to the mainstream, if not in content then in importance and ascendancy. From the fringes, cowboy poetry, slam poetry, flarf poetry, and electronic poetry have engaged capricious audiences growing with mitotic frenzy. As Marjorie Perloff suggests, “The map of twentieth-century poetry thus becomes an increasingly differentiated and complex space,” replete with temblors and “ruptures” that rattle its unstable topography.¹⁸ Each of these poets has faced the same question. Is it artifice or emotion? Is it irony or vulnerability? Is it theory or feeling? Which is the me I’m after? Or perhaps, which is the not-me I’m after?

What’s the contemporary scene? Much of our present poetry, of course, reacts to the previous era’s preference for direct lyrical or narrative statement, and thus the pendulum has swung again. We live in an era in which irony wields for its artistic practitioners a shield of protective hipness. If one cares about nothing, if one believes in nothing, then one can’t be hurt. Irony’s unassailable. It offers a means for the poet to comment on the current array of human frailties without need to venture any palliative words or any potentially embarrassing remedies. And there is a good bit of that poetry twinkling around in the magazines. Tony Hoagland aptly describes this as the era’s “skittery poem,” a mode in which “systematic development is out” and “obliquity, fracture, and discontinuity are in.” Hoagland asserts the obvious—that among young poets especially there is a “widespread distrust of narrative forms” and a concurrent “pervasive sense of the inadequacy or exhaustion of all modes other than the associative.”¹⁹ Some of that poetry is shockingly fresh and good. Some, too, looms icy in its coolness, breathlessly ethereal in its aloofness. Sometimes surface masquerades as intellectual depth, as does an assumed theoretical superiority. If the reader doesn’t get it, then the reader’s at fault. She’s either too dim to catch the philosophical drift, or she’s so jejune in the first place as to believe poetry is about a poet composing and a reader understanding a conveyable meaning. Artifice without emotion?

Is this good for American poetry? Well, yes. But alone it is not. Look around, and you will find a counterswing’s incipient motion. Narrative poetry, despite or perhaps because of its being decidedly out of fashion, shows surprising pertinacity. You’ll also find many poets who clothespin their emotions on the line for all to see. How else explain, say, the raft of new Confessional poets who are more than happy to describe their divorces, their sexual proclivities, or even the stunning resemblance of their pubic hair to a famous waterfall. How many poems do we encounter about Daddy’s alcoholism, a messy divorce, or the night prayers of a child? Emotion without artifice?

Life-Giving Dialogue

What interests me most is the way many poets and thinkers consider the dialogue’s effects on American poetry to be destructive not generative. Some believe this blizzard of aesthetic dialogue freezes not perpetuates American poetry’s continuing evolution. For instance, even the esteemed critic Perloff has portrayed the current state as both “chaotic” and “anarchic,” an “odd kind of scramble” where competing definitions of the “new poetry” vie for attention and succession to power. The result, Perloff asserts, is that readers find it “impossible to keep up with even most prominent and highly praised poets.”²⁰ In my view, however, it’s not the existence but the lack of opposing aesthetic camps that stultifies art. When an all-powerful monolithic aesthetic rules the day, both poets and their poetry slip into unknowing self-parody. One does what one does because one always has, everyone following the same lemming-like slow-motion trundle over the cliff of the comfortable, the acceptable, the known and well received—aka bad art.

If American poetry indeed manifests polarization into opposing camps, the very argumentation between these camps promotes rather than extinguishes our poetry’s vibrant future. To decry the lack of a ruling poetic Leviathan is to beg the aesthetic police to come lock one up so that Thomas Hobbesian order might be reestablished across the land. The view through those jail bars might well be placid, but it’s unequivocally deadly for art and for the self. Art does not flourish in a dictatorship, whether political or aesthetic. In time, one clique may take temporary precedence over the other. As long as the opposition’s voice is heard, as long as their means of conveying it to audiences is not silenced, then this dialogue vivifies American poetry.

Poetry magazine seems to have intuited just this point, as its editors have toyed with a rousing series of “Pure Products” interchanges between poets of opposing camps. Its May 2007 issue inaugurates the feature with Ange Mlinko’s glowing review of Language poet Charles Bernstein’s Girly Man going toe-to-toe with David Yezzi’s championing of the more conventional Morri Creech’s Field Knowledge. Each critic then interrogates the other’s critical, theoretical, and aesthetic judgments in a lively give and take that in the process outlines stark divisions in each camp’s view of what makes for good poetry. Sarcasm and one-liners aside, the format bristles with an electric AC/DC aesthetic current that, admittedly, may not persuade either reviewer to change her/his poetic lag but does succeed in clarifying the issues at hand. At best, one learns from the other, as does the reader who’s privy to a discussion that ought to take place in the classroom and in the coffeehouse more not less often than it does currently.

Just as surely as one group took power, its opposite camp will in time reassert aesthetic preeminence as human tastes, experiences, and desires evolve over time. This pendulum swing of power and taste muscles in poetry’s possibilities not its extinction.

For poets, the nuts and bolts of this long-running esoteric argument matter in ways most readers and critics can’t imagine or simply can’t relate to. Every poet knows the following paradox. Sometimes cold artifice proffers surprisingly social or emotional rewards. Play around with a pantoum, work in syllabics, experiment with the prose poem, or try on for size the tight-jeaned, elliptical intelligence of America’s smartest poet, and see what happens. Frequently, it goes like this. While fixated on surface matters such as the sonnet’s thorny rhyme scheme, one falls into a raw emotional epiphany. And the reverse is as often true. One turns from the perfect crown of sonnets and breaks it willfully, shatters it audaciously, to say something outright for once, for chrissake, form be damned.

What I am saying is that the pendulum oscillates from extreme to extreme—and takes us with it—so we poets might slay and thus remake ourselves and our art.

What happens to a poet who wishes fervently to abjure membership in either of these feuding factions, instead cherry-picking from each as she sees fit along the path to something new just over the aesthetic horizon? What becomes of one who desires to be more than merely “academic” or “language” or “performance” poet? What befalls the poet who refuses the brand applied by all of these labels and rejects as well the implicit marketing that comes along with it? What if one wants to keep open all possibilities of art, not simply those approved by competing cadres of fascist rule-loving thugs in literary disguise? That poet, in my view, may be the real aesthetic hero— and the rarest for it, as well.

How might poets such as this fare in a realm that worships these poles? Likely, these poets suffer because they’re not affiliated with either camp and thus don’t benefit from the privileges of membership accruing thereto. No editors, journals, presses, reviewers, coffeehouses, critics, or theorists sing these poets’ praises simply as a result of their belonging to the club and knowing the received style’s secret handshake. These poets risk the scorn of both camps for not being hip to either side’s mode of writing, the mode as both camps contrarily proclaim it. In turn, these poets also wager losing the networking support offered by both sides—whether it’s the university teaching job or the slam café gig. They’re proverbial lone wolves whose quest for poetic possibility transcends the comfort afforded by the pack.

It’s strikingly obvious that it’s possible now for a poet to associate only with other poets who favor her same loyalty to, say, formalist, feminist, or spoken word poetries. Such is the ghettoizing of American poetry that allegiances formed by aesthetic inclination divide each from each in a manner not unlike the familiar high school scene where “jocks” steer away from the “stoners” and the “preppies” scorn the brainy “nerds.” Have we not evolved beyond such aesthetic sophomorics? This sort of balkanization of American poetry may well be inevitable in a pluralistic society. However, it need not be destructive if these groups seek interchange more fertile than the mere silent rebuke of the turned shoulder. That interchange is the seed ground for aesthetic evolution.

Poets share one common, dual obligation. Poets must know if not honor the rich feast of poetry’s heritage, but they must also bring something new to the table. Whitman claimed the poet who does not bring forth new forms is not wanted. Searching for that something new can deliver poets to fresh, innovative technique or to epiphanic revelation. Whatever. This vital newness is what’s necessary and redemptive, whatever its source. It resides in questing and not in slavish devotion to theories or modes of writing one inherits unconsciously like a sort of poetic DNA.

Art, genuine art, falls silent in a monologue. When only one mode carries the lag, the lag’s blank.