Josef Kaplan wrote me an email a few days ago in response to my "Increasingly" post:
It seems like what you're trying to say is that the institutionalizing of poetic modes, whether they be "mainstream," and thus canonized long ago, or "experimental," and just recently being brought into the fold of MFA curriculum and publishing house watch-lists, is what makes them uninteresting. You use this distinction to dispel the "experimental" vs. "mainstream" argument, instead repositioning it as a case of what is traditional in either category vs. what would "fly in the face" of acceptable, mainstream "poetic," or experimental "poetic," language. What "[flies] in the face" of poetic language, you're saying, is an "unpoetic" language, a language that will "piss off other poets," ideally experimental ones. Is that about right?
If so, my question would be: how exactly is an "unpoetic" language supposed to work? You define it as a desire to "resist the stifling influence of self-appointed Guardians of the Ideological Purity of the Experimental Contemporary," but that desire, at least to me, seems to be an externalizing one: you want to be un-poetic, outside of traditional, an "outlaw," literally out-lawed. Isn't this an impossible task? Any attempt to externalize tradition, at least to me, seems to make you that much more indebted to it. Your "unpoetic" language necessitates itself as "poetic," it's right there in the term, in the same way that an "outlaw" poetry reinforces a need for law, since it is that very law which affords it discernability.
I guess what I'm trying to say is that, ultimately, an "unpoetic" language seems to be mirroring the processes by which a "poetic" language establishes itself; I'm not seeing the break you're proposing. You write that: "Increasingly, most of the poetry that affects me (I said this would be predictable) is poetry that is in some way conspicuously 'unpoetic,' a description that no longer has any real meaning in relation to most work which announces itself as experimental, avant-garde, procedural, etc." So if "experimental, avant-garde, [and] procedural" writing is no longer "unpoetic," how is a reintroduction of "unpoetic" writing going to accomplish anything other than a similarly constructed "experimental, avant-garde, [or] procedural" writing? It seems to me that the end result is that the aesthetics change: what is "unpoetic" looks different, but their conditions of production, their traditional role as a decidedly poetic process, remain the same. I fail to see what is so interesting in that.
By attempting to question the assumptions behind what looked like a statement of aesthetic preference on my part, Josef has actually said in a much clearer, more direct way what I think I really wanted to say. The present conditions of social intelligibility for poetry--its limits of possibility for reception and categorization--are depressingly narrow. I didn't help this situation by positing a vague divide between the "poetic" and the "unpoetic," which as Josef quite rightly points out, only reinforces and perpetuates a preexisting concept of mainstream vs. avant-garde, etc., with all the aesthetic prejudices that attend such a split.
So maybe what I really want to say is that an unpoetic poetics is no better than a poetic poetics, as long as the definition of "poetic" is determined by the work's adherence to
any "official" set of guidelines laid out explicitly or implicitly by any governing body of aesthetic legislation, whether "traditional" or "experimental," and as long as those practices conceived under the rubric of the experimental rely upon their status as a negative image of traditional practice as a means of self-identification,
without supplying some additional criterion by which the work may be appreciated "on its own terms". That is, the work's "own terms" must, in order to be interesting outside the moment of its resistance to some other, competing form[s], be terms which include some reference to a context beyond that of a basic
x vs.
y conception of poetic approaches.
At the same time, I am
not saying that such critical distinctions never serve any useful function, nor indeed that we have completely exhausted the functionality of the most recent mainstream vs. avant-garde distinction. I am saying that this distinction, though possibly necessary, is not sufficient in and of itself. In fact, I am tempted to posit an equation in which it could be shown that the conception loses its vital force in inverse proportion to the extent to which it considers itself solely sufficient, as divided [negatively squared? I don't know from math] by the extent to which it replaces the forms it challenges with some positive value.
So I share Josef's belief that if "the end result is that the aesthetics change: what is 'unpoetic' looks different, but their conditions of production, their traditional role as a decidedly poetic process, remain the same," then the results are condemned to uninterestingness. My hope is that there is some juice in the dialectic whereby that poetic process is ceaselessly subjected to periods in which it inspires revulsion, resulting in productive overhauls of its infrastructure. I don't believe it can or should be dismantled entirely; if there weren't some perceived value in the grounding notion of the poetic as it has more or less been (mis)understood for centuries, we wouldn't be pursuing it in the first place. Any transformation is going to have to be just that: a transformation, not an annihilation. But maybe it needs to
feel like an annihilation, at least for a time. And maybe just for me! These are just feelings, after all. If people don't need to not need poetry, bully for them.
