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Overview
—- Beckian Fritz Goldberg, Arizona State University
"Kevin Stein is the most astute poet-critic of his generation, and this is a crucial book, confronting the most vexing issues which poetry faces in a new century."
—-David Wojahn, Virginia Commonwealth University
At a time when most commentators fixate on American poetry's supposed "death," Kevin Stein's Poetry's Afterlife instead proposes the vitality of its aesthetic hereafter. The essays of Poetry's Afterlife blend memoir, scholarship, and personal essay to survey the current poetry scene, trace how we arrived here, and suggest where poetry is headed in our increasingly digital culture. The result is a book both fetchingly insightful and accessible. Poetry's spirited afterlife has come despite, or perhaps because of, two decades of commentary diagnosing American poetry as moribund if not already deceased. With his 2003 appointment as Illinois Poet Laureate and his forays into public libraries and schools, Stein has discovered that poetry has not given up its literary ghost. For a fated art supposedly pushing up aesthetic daisies, poetry these days is up and about in the streets, schools, and universities, and online in new and compelling digital forms. It flourishes among the people in a lively if curious underground existence largely overlooked by national media. It's this second life, or better, Poetry's Afterlife, that his book examines and celebrates.
Kevin Stein is Caterpillar Professor of English and Director of the Creative Writing Program at Bradley University and has served as Illinois Poet Laureate since 2003, having assumed the position formerly held by Gwendolyn Brooks and Carl Sandburg. He is the author of numerous books of poetry and criticism.
digitalculturebooksis an imprint of the University of Michigan Press and the Scholarly Publishing Office of the University of Michigan Library dedicated to publishing innovative and accessible work exploring new media and their impact on society, culture, and scholarly communication. Visit the website at www.digitalculture.org.
Product Details
| ISBN-13: | 9780472900404 |
|---|---|
| Publisher: | University of Michigan Press |
| Publication date: | 07/01/2010 |
| Sold by: | Barnes & Noble |
| Format: | eBook |
| Pages: | 275 |
| File size: | 561 KB |
Read an Excerpt
Poetry's Afterlife
VERSE IN THE DIGITAL AGEBy Kevin Stein
The University of Michigan Press
Copyright © 2010 the University of MichiganAll right reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-472-07099-2
Chapter One
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 fling 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 r or Door z, 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—arousing 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." 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." 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." The paleface country club boasted members such as T. S. Eliot and Henry James, writers who evidenced an intellectual, often ascetic, and refined "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." 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 one-sidedness" 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. 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." 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."
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." 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." 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 Cafe. 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. Games, have recorded spoken word albums in an effort to reach audiences devoted to audio and disabused of the book. 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. 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 60o 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."
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 framed 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 clicked 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." 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, Whither, 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.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Poetry's Afterlife by Kevin Stein Copyright © 2010 by the University of Michigan . Excerpted by permission of The University of Michigan Press. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.
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