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PoeticsPoeticsnerys williams

This chapter presents an overview of current discussions regarding the con-ceptualization of poetics primarily in twentieth and twenty-first centurypoetries. Covering criticism received during 2011, an overview is providedof the following: the history and legacy of the British Poetry Revival, therelationship between so called experimental British and American poetries,definitions and exchanges regarding ‘innovative’ writing practices, connect-ives between poetic experimentation and questions of multilingualism, howan understanding of cultural studies can inform our conception of poetics,the social impact of micropoetries and a reconsideration of jazz poetics.Issues of poetic technique and ambition come to the fore in critical reflec-tions upon ideas of poetic personhood and the knowledge of being.Differences between textual, spoken word and hip-hop performances arealso analysed. Following growing interest in the poetics of the BerkeleyRenaissance, considerable critical attention is dedicated to the work ofJack Spicer in tandem with ideas of epistolarity, religion, campness,humour and the communal.

With its mapping of key elements and subsequent directions of theBritish Poetry Revival, Robert Sheppard’s When Bad Times Made for Good

Poetry is a compelling read. This book reminds us that while critics andpoets alike have extensively documented the emergence of provocativestrands of modernist poetics in the US; the situation in the UK is verydifferent. Sheppard states that: ‘What I regret about the poetry scene atthe moment—I try not to harbour resentments—is the way in which it failsto embrace its own history’ (p. 215). He adds in his epilogue that ‘what Iregret about the poetry scene over a longer span is its resistance to thedevelopment of poetics as a specific speculative discourse about poetic de-velopment, both for individuals and groups. Compared with NorthAmerican Writers, we have been reluctant to speculate about the kinds of

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poetry we want’ (pp. 216–17). The conceptualization of poetics in this bookchallenges the more dogmatic claims of archetypal manifesto making.Strongly influenced by the work of concrete poet Mary Ann Caws andRachel Blau DuPlessis, Sheppard’s configuration of poetics draws on ideasof the provisional and speculative. Poetics he suggests ‘involves a theory ofpractice, a practice of theory’ (p. 15) creating a place of permission in ‘ahoped for writerly community’ (p. 15). Caws’s definition of the manifesto asspeculative and reflective chimes with Sheppard’s figuration of poetics. Sheasserts that ‘the manifesto moment positions itself between what has beendone and what will be done’ (p. 15). The bad times under scrutiny in thiswork are ‘marked by the blanket cloud of Thatcherism’ (p. 9).

Many of the chapters in Sheppard’s book were first presented in confer-ences; some pivotal in the emerging dialogues between so called innovativepoetries in the US and the UK during the 1990s. Sheppard is keen to presenta personal contextualization of the debates concerning poetics at that time,as well as more current readings of poetry by Maggie O’Sullivan, IainSinclair, John Hall, Tom Raworth and Allen Fisher. Usefully he commentsupon poetry’s relationship to history as a transformative one: ‘Poems arecoherent deformations and reformulations of the matter of history into themanner of poetry, and it is their transformative, disruptive, power, preciselytheir inability to affirm [. . .] that characterizes the force of art’ (p. 12).Sheppard’s personal recollections of the development of British modernistpoetries add to key earlier works in the field such as Andrew Duncan’s TheFailure of Conservatism in Modern British Poetry (Salt Publishing [2003]) andPeter Barry’s Poetry Wars: British Poetry of the 1970s and the Battle of EarlsCourt (Salt Publishing [2006]). Not surprisingly the first chapter grappleswith the notorious ‘poetry wars’ within the Poetry Society and their rela-tionship to Eric Mottram’s self-coined ‘British Poetry Revival’. The divisionsbetween radical activist poets and more mainstream practices finally resultedin conflict and resignations. Reflecting on the manifesto for new poetrypresented to the Poetry Society in 1976, Sheppard concludes that it provided‘one of the few British examples of a public radical poetics’ and signified anattempt to ‘go public’ and ‘inform the nation’ (p. 28) of their practice.These are two qualities that the author perceives as curiously lacking incontemporary British Poetries, especially when compared to Americanpoetry practices.

A key essay of the collection ‘Beyond Anxiety: Legacy or Miscegenation’considers the relationship between Contemporary British and American ‘ex-perimental’ practice. Focusing primarily on language writing, the essay wasoriginally presented at a pivotal poetry conference ‘Writing at the Limits’ at

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Southampton University in 1994. Sheppard claims that it was during thisconference that the term ‘linguistically innovative poetry’ gained its currencyand was embraced in particular by the American delegates who ‘started touse it of their own better documented avant-gardes’ (p. 8). He argues thatwhile there has been a sometimes-symbiotic relationship between the ex-perimental strands of contemporary poetics in the USA and UK, the poetriesassociated with British Poetry Revival emerged independently to languagewriting:

I was aware of language poets but much of the writing inL¼A¼N¼G¼U¼A¼G¼E was incomprehensible and it was notuntil about 1983 that I saw the creative work. The avant-garde reviewseemed, and still seems, a self-defeating form, which aroused a re-sistance in me to the work that it failed to describe. But some of theother prose is excellent and contributed to my own post-1985practice. The attempt to use post-structuralist thought that too manyliterary critics have actually used to prop up the canon, as the basisfor a poetics seemed to me just and exciting; but in the 1980s thisthought had been coming directly into Britain, so there was a sense ofrecognition alongside that of discovery. (p. 139)

For a British poet such as Allen Fisher the influence of language writing isdeemed negligible; Fisher insists rather upon a shared aesthetic with anearlier generation of American poets such as Clarke Coolidge, LouisZukofsky and Jackson MacLow. Fisher is cited commenting ‘what (the lan-guage poets) radically changed was the way in which they discussed andmarketed their work’ (p. 138). For Sheppard, there is more contact betweenthese two strands of experimental writing than can be framed just in terms ofAmerican influence or British ‘derivativeness’ (p. 139). He maintains thatthere were useful discussions of poetics exchanged and cites contributions byDavid Trotter on poets Rod Mengham, Bob Cobbing’s writings on the workof Paula Claire, as well as essays by Lawrence Upton and cris cheek.Hopefully Sheppard’s book will inspire further histories of recent Britishpoetry. He wishes that British poets would shake off their resistance tobroaching public discussion and debate.

The rather clunky descriptor ‘linguistically innovative poetries’ makes itsappearance, though often tongue in cheek, in Scott Thurston’s Talking Poetics:Dialogues in Innovative Poetry. Both Sheppard and Thurston are editors of theonline Journal of British and Irish Innovative Poetry which considers poeticwriting since the late 1950s under various rubrics of experimentation, beit avant-garde, second wave modernist or underground. Constructed around

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a series of interviews with four poets—Karen MacCormack, JenniferMoxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Brady—the work explores the rela-tionship between theory and praxis as well as the processes of writing.Recognizing that the term might have lost a little of its allure or precision,Thurston appears apologetic when he raises the issue of innovation andpoetry. Interviewing Brady a rather perturbed Thurston asks ‘Let’s takeon this thorny word innovation because it is something which is nailed tothe masthead of my research bid, for better or for worse’ (p. 110). Brady’sresponse is thoughtful and sheds light on the premises of experimentationand its sometimes troubled relationship with the academy:

I think like you that it’s a term which I used to use much morecomfortably than I could do now. I was just noticing that it formedpart of my description of the Archive of the Now in a conversation I hadwith Rosheen Brennan, which was published on How2. At that pointit seemed like the most acceptable way of designating this lateModernist, or experimental, or avant-garde work or whatever elseyou want to call it! But now my encounter with the term innovationis almost entirely in the context of institutions, in my case the aca-demic sector, where it is a perpetual requirement. (p. 111)

Both Brady and Thurston agree that ‘innovative’ can designate a useful lin-eage of poetic experimentation without reducing poetic work to static char-acterizations or rhetorical positions. Brady admits that ‘I’ve never liked theterm experimental because it means that there is a kind of provisionalityabout the work’ (p. 112). She adds that the term avant-garde does not seemparticularly useful since ‘it suggests a kind of cohesiveness of groups withmanifestoes that meet regularly and have commonalities’ (p. 112). She re-flects that ‘I don’t think, unfortunately, any of these properties really applyto our little community’ (p. 112). The overall thrust of this book is that‘innovative’ poetries acknowledge an earlier poetic lineage of sympatheticconstellations and correspondences. In his preface Thurston is keen to em-phasize that the terms ‘linguistically innovative’ or ‘formally innovative’poetry have been used to refer to British and Irish poetry which ‘has other-wise been described as avant-garde, experimental, neo-modernist, non-mainstream, post-avant, postmodernist, and as constituting a paralleltradition’ (p. 10). He adds that ‘it is important to recognize the commitmentof innovative poetries to a literary-historical tradition of dissent’ (p. 10).

A refreshing element of this collection is its refusal to over-categorize thework of the four women poets. Affiliations with other poets as well asinfluences and collaborations, emerge naturally during the course of the




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conversation. Thurston’s choice of poets offers multiple perspectives on therelationship between European thought and the US, questions of multilin-gualism and poetics, concepts of practice and form, tradition and recentwriting as well as the role of poetry in the public sphere. In considering thecharacteristics of a twenty-first century poetic, Karen MacCormack drawsattention to the dynamics of different media and discourses upon the writingof poetry. She proposes that poetry is ‘a privileged form of thought, but I’malso intent on finding out what happens to poetry and different discourseswhen they are brought into the same field’ (p. 28). For Jennifer Moxley thenegotiation of the lyric impulse has led her own poetics to challenge some ofthe more pedagogical impulses inherent in language writing. Acknowledgingthe vitality of language writing’s enabling of ‘permission’ for contrary opin-ions, she nonetheless despairs of how the tendency has been oversimplifiedand taught:

There is a sort of pedagogy [. . .] that drives me crazy though. Theidea that poetry is going to teach you how to be free, the rhetoricabout liberating the reader from their own oppression, the oppres-sion of believing the texts they read. (p. 58)

Central to Moxley’s own poetry is the sense of finding correspondences withearlier writings. She refers to this sense of dialogue and exchange as equiva-lent to Robert Duncan’s valorization of derivation, in that ‘He sees himself asa poet who is in dialogue with the tradition, and derives their sources andenergy and meaning from that conversation with the past. I feel a greatkinship with that sentiment’ (p. 76). Equally Moxley refutes a conceptual-ization of innovation in poetry as a valorization of the latest cultural zeitgeist:‘I’m fine with writing in more traditional modes and referring to poetry ofthe past and I feel very connected to the idea of tradition—it’s very import-ant to me. Innovation is less so’ (p. 76).

When questioned about the creative issues faced by innovative writers inBritain and North America, Caroline Bergvall proposes that a key issue is thevery role and function of poetry itself and the need for direct exchangebetween poetry and other artistic practices:

What is the role of poetry in a changing world, where readingmatters less, where writing is not the immediate inscription used,and where poetry at large is more often than not considered an art ofcircumstance and occasion? What does this mean for the practiceitself? For its readerships? For its diversity and scope? The demandsand forms that cultural, aesthetic, social cohabitation—one’s




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existence with others—may have on writing is a key issue. Questionsabout language-use, translocal experience and cultural flexibility areimportant too. (p. 80)

Multilingualism is central to Bergvall’s poetic. Language acquisition andusage naturally inform a sense of cultural belonging and her work enactsthe coexistence of more than one language through the shattering of estab-lished syntactic patterns. Asked about her work Cropper Bergvall respondsthat the volume ‘explores the whole idea of using or developing a form ofwriting as an account of my personal experience of multilingualism’ (p. 97).Reflecting on bilingualism and biculturalism in the work of writers such asTheresa Cha, Lisa Linn Kanae and Coco Fusco, Bergvall adds that there is:

an immense inventive flexibility that derives from bilingualism. Butthis can also be a way of tackling often pressing concerns tied tobiculturalism, when it clashes with the discourses around national-ism, citizenship, loyalty as a monolingual value, prejudice around oneof one’s identities. (p. 97)

The range and responsiveness of the poetics expressed through these inter-views is mesmerizing. Thurston shows us the importance of chronicling thedynamism of a contemporary poetics that enables international exchange.

Bergvall’s concerns regarding the situating of contemporary poetry intoday’s world form a central consideration of the collection Poetry after

Cultural Studies, edited by Heidi R. Bean and Mike Chasar. The essays inthis collection examine how new methodologies of analysis can reveal moreabout the cultural and social context of poetry. In many ways this book

follows the ground-breaking work established by the earlier publication ofPoetry and Cultural Studies: A Reader edited by Maria Damon and Ira Livingstonin 2009. Bean and Chasar’s preface addresses the problems faced by the

contemporary critic of poetry—not least the sheer amount of poetrybeing produced during the twentieth century:

More than ever, scholars are aware of the enormous amount ofpoetry that was written, distributed, circulated, and recirculated inthe wake of industrial and consumer capitalism—the historical periodthat saw the emergence of new economic logics, new imperatives forsocial change, and the birth of mass culture. (p. 3)

In treating poetry not only as an ‘aesthetic act’ but as ‘a site of and for socialand aesthetic activities’ (p. 5), the commentary of these essays is wide-ranging. Indeed the editors suggest that the essays give a sense of the




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different trajectories that cultural studies offer. The scholarly fields in thisvolume include: American studies, autobiography, documentary studies,environmental studies, ethnography, history, media studies, music, newgeographies, postcolonial studies and performance studies. Multiple inter-pretative contexts drive this collection. The ambition is to indicate how whatnew critics called ‘the poem itself’ may be ‘subjected to rigorous formalanalysis and close reading’ but ‘that analysis is not the only, or even prefer-able, way of getting at how and why a poem means as it does’ (p. 10).

A selection of the essays is dedicated to an analysis of print culture.Margaret Loose considers the work of Chartist reformer Ernest Jones andhow the media of nineteenth-century England—newspapers, novels andpopular song—nearly destroyed his reform campaign. The empowering ofthe burgeoning environmental movement in America is analysed by AngelaSorby, who considers how mass-distributed children’s magazines, antholo-gies, bird-watching manuals and school textbooks bridged the discourses ofscience and poetry. Other essays include Edward Brunner on James NormanHall’s hoax volume Oh Millersville, Carrie Noland on the poetics ofMartinique writer Edourard Glissant and Barrett Watten’s consideration of‘Avant-Garde Poetry, New Music and Cultural Studies’. Three essays inparticular caught my attention: Alan Ramon Clinton’s ‘Sylvia Plath andElectracy’, Maria Damon’s ‘Pleasures of Mourning: A Yessay on Poetriesin Out-of-the Way Places’ and Cary Nelson’s ‘Only Death Can Part Us:Messages on Wartime Cards’.

The reading of Plath’s fiction and poetry through a cultural studies lens isof course not new. One has only to consider existing critical work thatexamines her writing’s relationship to the language of advertising, fashion,music and the self-help manual. However, Clinton’s ambitious essay wedsPlath’s poetics to the conductive logics and rhetorics it performs, which heargues predate the advent of the personal computer. This situating of Plathchallenges the simplistic construction of confessionalism that has stultifiedthe reception of her writing:

What is at stake in wedding Sylvia Plath’s poetics to electronic logicand the development of computer technology? Not only will it fur-ther contribute to the waning prestige of confessional approaches toPlath, which tend to marginalize her cosmopolitan concerns andreiterate the ideology of separate spheres on the level of literatureand criticism, but it also complicates our sense of the relationshipsbetween historical references and the personal and lyric agendas inPlath’s writing. (p. 48)




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Indeed Clinton views Plath’s work as a nascent form of digitality. He pro-poses that ‘Just as the Dadaists attempted to achieve the effects of cinemabefore its possibilities had been fully implemented, so Plath attempted toachieve the effects of digitality before it became a popular (or even widelyknown) technology’ (p. 45). The assertion of this thought-provoking essay isthat our understanding of digital technology and ‘the decentred, networkedstructures of global power arising from it’ alert us to ‘poetry’s ability tomake unexpected connections’. This awareness and openness to the ‘con-ductive logic operating within media conditions’ may even enable us to‘navigate the hidden structures animating the ever-expanding archive ofthe spectacle’ (p. 49).

Damon asserts that she is a ‘literary cultural studies salvage-scholardocumenting events and writings that are both ephemeral and powerful,attempting to make them signify beyond their immediate reference points’(p. 76). Her essay draws attention to the social impact and resonance of whatcan be termed micropoetries. Synonyms for micropoetries might include‘Ephemera, doggerel, fragments, ‘‘weird English’’ (the phrase is Evelyn Ch’ien’s),graffiti, community and individual survival-ecriture brute, folk-letters [. . .] gnomicthought-bytes and lyrical bullets’ (p. 63). All these works ‘fly beneath the radar ofaccepted poetic practice, that is not practice but object—these are processes ratherthan object/products’ (p. 64). We could generally characterize this work as‘found’ poetry. The sites for such found poetry also include virtual space anda section of Damon’s essay reflects upon the poetics of Flarf. This generalizedcollective specializes in ‘sentimentality and bathos’ (pp. 67–8) mostly work-ing through listservs (early electronic mailing lists) on the web. She alsodraws some attention to the way in which social networking sites work atmemorializing the dead. Damon revels in the slightly idiosyncratic form ofher own essay, which describes elegiac behaviour amidst her friends andcommunity. The focus here is on a broken and incomplete poetics, whichis often created from a sense of occasion and commemoration, in one casethe death of a friend’s daughter and in the second that of a friend. We canunderstand micropoetries as writing which delights in the ‘local and theephemeral’ and incompletion is its key characteristic:

Micropoetries comprise traces of the ‘poetic’ within the everyday,unworked-over; that is, ‘raw material’ left raw instead of beingcooked into artistically self-conscious collage, pastiche, ‘retelling’, orother incorporative literary genre. (p. 67)

Contemplating the study of micropoetries we are made alert to the terrifyingvolume of material which can be at our disposal. This essay alerts us to how




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an empathetic poetics is performed in everyday life. However, an awarenessof this limitless ‘archive’ of material can make reading can make its receptionseem like a daunting task.

Nelson’s essay presents us with methodologies to approach the narrativesfrom his personal archive of 10,000 wartime popular poems. The poems

feature on cards, postcards, envelopes and miniature broadsides ‘designed

for personal exchange rather than public display’ (p. 115). Nelson expressesthe poignancy of war ephemera:

These cards and their messages give us glimpses—but onlyglimpses—of how those who are conscripted to fight wars conducttheir lives and make sense of experience that is fundamentally beyondcomprehension. The result is a distinctive sort of textual microhis-tory, not a comprehensive account of ordinary life during war butrather a partial window on ordinary life gained by way of discon-tinuous recovered voices. (p. 116)

The essay charts how the postcard poem served its different roles during the

Boar War, First and Second World Wars. Not only is the postcard poem an

expression of affinity, love and friendship, loss and mourning but in oneexample it becomes a medium for nurturing continuities with newborn

children and toddlers. Commenting on the postcard as a form Nelson

states that ‘Brevity is the first law of the postcard, the mixed tyranny and

promise of its minimal allowance’. Unlike the letter ‘in which digression,

explanation, and persuasion are all possible’ the postcard ‘imposes a law ofconciseness’. The fragmentary nature of postcard correspondence in

Derrida’s words creates ‘a residue of what we have made of one another

of what we have written one another’ (p. 128). This brevity lends itself to

the potent ambiguities inherent in the poetics of the postcard; its restrainedspace offers a ‘relatively unconstrained potential for multiple meanings’

(p. 129). Most interesting is the interaction between the ‘official’, often

patriotic verse written on the postcard and the sender’s own writing. For

Nelson the ‘unstable poetics’ of the postcard message ‘places them in dia-

logue with literary poetics. Thus the relationship of the two forms of writingis never merely oppositional. On the poem card, they can be mutually

supportive or undermining, interrogative or echolalic’ (p. 129). The tracings

of these fragmented histories offer much to the cultural critic and the reader

of cultural criticism. Poignantly Nelson states that these cards ‘testify to a

unique moment when private emotion is communal, inextricable from pol-itical and ethical crisis’ (p. 133). In effect, this wonderful archival gathering




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offers important testimonies of everyday experience written during terrify-ing circumstances.

Until recently Jack Spicer’s poetry collections and prose were notoriouslydifficult to access. Spicer’s own antipathy to the circulation of his work duringhis lifetime did not help. However, the publication of his collected poems MyVocabulary Did This to Me (Wesleyan [2010]) and lectures The House That JackBuilt: The Collected Lectures of Jack Spicer (Wesleyan [1998]), has remedied thesituation. It is therefore fitting that a collection of essays After Spicer: CriticalEssays, also from Wesleyan Press, brings his poetry and poetics to a twenty-firstcentury audience. Remarkably this is the first book of criticism exclusivelyfocused on Spicer’s poetry and prose. The editor John Emil Vincent suggeststhat the collection is an attempt to reassess Spicer’s poetics from a newvantage. He proposes that all too often early critics tended to followSpicer’s poetics to the letter, adopting rather than interrogating the phrase-ology used in his own essays. Vincent adds that ‘Spicer’s notions of ‘‘dictation’’and the ‘‘serial poem’’ have more often than not disabled rather than helpedexegesis of Spicer’s work. Often, critics either listen too inattentively or tooliterally to the lectures he delivered toward the very end of his life’ (p. 7).Explaining Spicer’s conceptualization of the serial poem, Vincent proposes thatseriality is ‘a way to get narrative pulsation to interact with lyric units. Itdoesn’t however do away with the lyric [. . .] It works to achieve narrativediachrony and lyric synchrony in the same space’ (p. 8). He explains Spicer’scomments on dictation by comparing his poetics with those of his close friendRobert Duncan: ‘Spicer wanted to distinguish his practice of dictation fromDuncan’s theosophically-based practice. In Duncan’s dictation, specific spiritsspeak through mediums; in Spicer’s, while the poet still acts as a medium, thespeaker is absolutely unidentifiable’ (p. 8).

The volume offers us new research findings regarding Spicer’s life andpoetics. Overall, reading these essays one learns how Spicer’s poetry can beread as part of the ‘Berkeley Renaissance’ (with Duncan and Robin Blaser),about his uneasy relationship with the poetics of the ‘San FranciscoRenaissance’ and how his prose and poetry prefigures Language writing inthe 1970s. Kevin Killian’s essay ‘Spicer and the Mattachine’ uncovers theextent of Spicer’s involvement in the East Bay chapter of the MattachineSociety which was dedicated to defending gay human rights. Vincent’s ownchapter focuses on the poet’s detective novel The Tower of Babel and its rela-tionship to biography. Maria Damon’s ‘Jack Spicer’s Ghost Forms’ examinesSpicer’s relationship to ideas of poetic heritage, the gay community and what isoften posited as his ‘internalized homophobia’ (p. 10). Michael Snediker con-siders the often fraught relationship between lyric sensibility and the serial




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poem in Spicer’s Billy the Kid. A reading of Spicer’s poetics in the light ofGiorgio Agamben’s philosophical writings enables Anita Sokolsky to examinethe impetus of ‘posthumousness’ in Spicer’s poetry and its relationship toassassination and the destruction of a poetic personality. A poetic collaborationbetween Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop ‘Spiced Language’ closes the collectionduring which the two poets ‘occupy Spicer’s idiom and, at least metaphoric-ally, take dictation from Spicer himself’ (p. 11). This quixotic work includesthe playful assertion ‘Both souls and onions make me weep’ (p. 217) as well asthe command ‘Fake too many images’ (p. 216).

Three essays offer a way into reconsidering the relationship betweenderivation and exchange, campness and entertainment as well as logos andbelief in Spicer’s poetics. Kelly Holt’s ‘Spicer’s Poetic Correspondence: ‘‘APun the Letter Reflects’’’ considers the role of the epistolary in its manyforms through Spicer’s poetry. Initially the essay examines composition ofpoetic correspondence by his transformation of ‘lyric and epistolary genres’(p. 37). Focusing also on After Lorca Holt reads the relationship betweenprose and poetry, and how this work establishes its epistolary address.Reading the fictional letters to Lorca in tandem with personal correspond-ence enables Holt to reflect upon the construction of community in Spicer’spoetics. Correspondence can be read as a term which inscribes exchangewith one’s literary predecessors:

For Spicer, the living poet is a medium, whose agency conducts asimultaneous position as linguistic subject (writing and speaking) andobject (being circumscribed by language, as the poem is writtenthrough the poet) to yield poetry that maintains this active connectionwith one’s authors. (p. 37)

Usefully Holt charts the impact that historian Ernst Kantorowicz’s lectures atUC Berkeley had upon Spicer’s practice of the epistolary. As a linguist,Spicer with Duncan ‘sought a methodology equivalent to the medieval mod-

istae in order to write a poetics of phonemic signification and performance’(p. 44). The development of their ideas resulted in their poetics being taughtat the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College during 1956–7, sessionswhich became known as Spicer’s ‘Poetry as Magic workshop’. The ghost-written correspondence between Lorca and Spicer in After Lorca moves ideasof correspondence to the realms of poetic possibility and authorization. Holtsuggests that:

As guide, master, and author text, Lorca authorizes Spicer’s seriesas a poetic lineage, forming a rite of passage. The poetics of




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incorporation that informs After Lorca operates through tensions be-tween textual genres, which negotiate the boundaries of poeticpossibility in relation to both the interior phantasmic realm and thephysical landscape. (p. 47)

Catherine Imbriglio informs us that in 1949 Spicer took part in a symposiumof poetry at UC Berkeley. Noting the size of the audience Spicer is reputedto have commented ‘Why is nobody here? Who is listening to us?’ (p. 99)Imbriglio takes this famous lament as her point of departure. Her essayexamines the seemingly conflicting ideas of the orphic and campness asstrategies of performance in Spicer’s work. Following Spicer’s use of theword camp in his poetic, she defines elements of both as ‘descent, lament,dismemberment; humour, incongruity, artifice, spectatorship and theatrical-ity’ (p. 99). The essay seeks to extend Susan Sontag’s use of camp in heressay ‘Some Notes on Camp’ (1964) as purely an aesthetic. The essay alsoseeks to build upon Damon’s consideration of a Spicer’s camp poetic as adiscourse ‘characterized by a deterritorialized language’ (p. 100). Camp,Imbriglio suggests in Spicer’s work can be read as ‘as both a destabilizingand a meaning-making mechanism’ which in turn ‘may help ameliorate someof the disconnect between overly serious critical readings and the humourand playfulness that is one of the significant animating features of the poetry’(p. 99). The deployment of what she terms the ‘Orphic’ in Spicer’s poetics,is wedded to ideas of ‘lamentation, sincerity, emotion and voice’ (p. 113),strategically works with and against the texture of camp. Imbriglio’s keyclaim in this essay is that ‘while neither camp or the Orphic are themselvessufficient to energize or account for the evolutions that take place in Spicer’spoetic practice, together they provide necessary correctives to the excessesinherent in the other’s approach’ (p. 113). Indeed she suggests that thistension enables Spicer to entertain his audience, to ‘keep in fragmentedplay—emotion and artifice, lamentation and humour, sincerity and irony,depth and surface, plenitude and vacuum’ (pp. 113–14).

It might initially appear curious to link Spicer’s poetic with religiousbelief and doctrine. However, Norman Finkelstein’s essay ‘Spicer’s Reasonto ‘‘Be / leave’’’ makes a compelling argument for examining his poetry inthe light of Calvinist belief. This approach draws comparative readings withthe poetry of Emily Dickinson and Susan Howe. Finkelstein asserts that ‘thestruggle for religious faith in Spicer, or to be more precise, the dialecticaltension between poetry and religious faith that unfolds in his writing, de-termines not only the content or matter of the work, but its form as well’(p. 157). Finkelstein builds upon Spicer’s notorious pronouncement of the




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poet as vessel by considering The Heads of the Town Up to the Aether, Fifteen False

Propositions and Imaginary Elegies. In his poetry Finkelstein contends thatSpicer ‘conceives of writing an on going examination of one’s spiritualstate’ (p. 160). Moreover, the critic contends that the Calvinist Covenantof Grace is exhibited in these works as ‘a religious doctrine’ and as ‘acomplex metaphor for poetry and the descent of poetic inspiration’(p. 164). As with many of the critics in this collection, Finkelstein drawscomparisons to the poetics of Duncan as a way of navigating Spicer’s writing.He proposes that both share a distrust of poetic language:

To use Duncan’s terms again, a poetry premised on apotropaic magic,aimed at defending against the seduction of words, ultimately leadsnot to a chastened language [. . .] but to a total distrust of words, a‘grand refusal’ of poetry as an expression of the irredeemably fallenhuman order. (p. 168)

Following the continued interest in George Oppen’s poetics over the pastdecade the title of Oren Izenberg’s Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of

Social Life (borrowed from Oppen’s own mesmerizing poem) promisesmuch. Its publication elicited a lively response from different communitiesof poets and critics. Izenberg’s work is highly ambitious and impressivelynuanced in philosophical thought. This collection of essays seeks a model ofreading that traces poets’ different and frequently unattainable claims forpoetry’s ability to change the social sphere. In this work Izenberg considersthe poetry of W.B. Yeats, Oppen, Frank O’Hara and language writing. Heasserts that the motivation for the book grew from an increased dissatisfac-tion with how poetry was divided into separate encampments between theexperimental and the traditional. Izenberg is particularly scathing of how theso-called ‘experimental’ poetries are marketed by their critical commenta-tors. He states that these poetries are often:

So variously fragmented, occulted, difficult, and silent; so assertivelytrivial, boring, or aleatory are the types of poetry on the ‘experi-mental’ side of the critical divide, that critics who champion the workhave gone to great didactic and theoretical lengths to imagine, ex-plain, justify, and market alternative species of pleasure and interestto compensate for the loss of traditional aesthetics. Such justificationsinclude ‘the fascination with what’s difficult’, the penetration of theveil of the esoteric, the masochistic pleasures of derangement, thepoliticized shock of estrangement, the tranquilizing or meditativedwelling in the ambient. (p. 11)




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Moreover, he states that critical commentary has focused too much on thepoem itself as an object what he terms ‘the fact of the poem, as a made thingand an object of experience’ (p. 17). Instead, he proposes a need to return toan earlier ideal of the poem ‘not as a kind of object, performance, or practicebut as intending a knowledge or capacity—constitutive of what it is to be aperson’. He adds that a poet’s ultimate ambition must be ‘not to produce thatclass of objects we call poems, but to reveal, exemplify, or make manifest apotential or ‘‘power’’ that minimally distinguishes what a person is’ (p. 17).

I was intrigued to find out what Izenberg’s analysis of personhood inlanguage writing might entail, particularly given his scathing summary ofcurrent experimental poetic practice. Of interest is his analysis of person-hood with reference to ideas of community and the early utopic claims oflanguage writing. The conceptualization of community in the early languagewriting was influenced by continental theory, particularly reader responsetheory and ideas of collaboration challenging the primacy of the single au-thorial voice. As Izenberg comments, the poets initially made ‘dramaticclaims for the challenge that Language poetry presents to contemporaryculture, arguing for the contribution ‘‘oppositional’’ poetry makes to thereader’s freedom and to social justice’. He adds that ‘At the same time,Language poetry has understood itself to be itself something like a culture—a‘‘provisional institution’’ that grounds ‘‘an alternative system of valuation’’’.Suggesting that there is a ‘disparity between theory and practice’ Izenbergchallenges the group’s ideas of collectivity as failing, and their desire forfreedom is perceived as ‘incoherent’ (p. 140). Critically alert analyses oflanguage writing’s initial claims for poetic writing are at this point wellestablished. What is perhaps different in Izenberg’s case is his choice ofreading to make his argument, and his specific focus on the poetics of per-sonhood. The discussion focuses primarily on a collaborative work Leningradwritten by Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman and BarrettWatten. Leningrad is read as proof of language writing’s impetus towardsself-documentation (as indeed the recent publication of the ten-volumememoir The Grand Piano testifies). Izenberg suggests that Leningrad can beapproached as a ‘meditation upon the difficulty of community’ but queries itsambitious claim ‘there is no difference between collaborating on a poem andbeing a community’ (p. 146). It would have been useful to reflect a littleupon how far this grouping has shifted over time. Also, some of the poetsmentioned as affiliated to the practice, such as Moxley for example, have noconcrete connection—her own link with the group is pretty tangential. Butthis is provocative and engaging work, and Izenberg’s challenge to themythologizing of a poetics is a useful, and dynamic enterprise.




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Finally, Meta DuEwa Jones’s exciting critical compendium The Muse isMusic: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to Spoken Word reassesses ourunderstanding of jazz poetics. Her work builds upon the criticism of scholarsand poets such as Gayl Jones, Craig Werner, Sascha Feinstein, AldonNielsen, Farah Jasmine Griffin and Kimberley Benston. The range of poetscovered in this work is impressive, the chapters include readings of LangstonHughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nathaniel Mackey, Amiri Baraka, HarryetteMullen, Ntozake Shange, Carl Phillips, Yusef Komunyakaa and TracieMorris. Jones alerts us to the fact that while the idea of jazz poetic hasbecome a familiar point of reference in African-American poetry, morecritical attention needs to be paid to its conceptualization especially inlight of performance theory. The book opens with reflections upon herresearch annotating archival recordings in the Library of Congress. Jonesasserts that ‘Ultimately, the history and experience of the transatlantic slavetrade alternately haunts and hallows the legacy of voice and voicing in blackexpressive culture’. She adds that ‘Both the unheard and the heard withinpoetry and its performances always operate within the matrices of race,gender, sexuality, and class’ (p. 3). It is important to note that Jonesapproaches jazz as an overarching cadence that has its cross disciplinaryinfluence. She defines the representation of poetry in this book as ‘jazzpoetry, jazz poetics, jazz inflection, jazz infusion, jazz resonance, jazz andblues hybridism, jazz-driven poetry, and even a jazz-derived hip-hop poetics’(p. 24). Crucially, Jones establishes jazz as a vibrant adaptive tradition, whichenables past and present to dynamically intersect and rebound: ‘jazz-infusedpoetry always entails a circulatory copying and quoting, an exchange be-tween performer and audience’ (p. 17).

The first section of the book ‘Riff, Remembrance and Revision’ places itsmain focus on two icons of an African-American jazz poetic, LangstonHughes and John Coltrane. Initially Jones examines the ‘gendered perform-ance and the technologies of Hughes’s solo and collaborative poetry record-ings within the homosocial world of jazz, jazz imagist aesthetics, and formalinnovations’. Central to Jones’s reading is how Hughes’s work has beenincorporated as ‘riffs’ or intertextual echoes in the work of contemporarypoets. Coltrane’s pivotal influence upon jazz poetics is also extended to thepractice of contemporary poets. Articulated as ‘recall’ Jones traces the shiftin poetry since the Black Arts Movement while chronicling how differentpoets have attempted to versify ‘Coltrane’s evolutions in musical style, form,and technique’ (p. 27). The second section ‘New Traditions, NewTranslations’, looks at the intersection between jazz and hip-hop poetries.Jones considers how recent poetries and musicians use their work to ‘depart




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from masculinist norms’ associated with jazz. She examines how in particularthe black female body becomes a central presence in work by Shange,Mullen, Quincy Troupe and Ted Joans. This section also examines howthe spoken word influences ‘poetic stylizations of racial and gender perfor-

mativity’. Here Jones traces the development of improvization and instru-mentality aesthetics to the ‘percussive thematics in sound-directed hip-hoppoetics’ (p. 28). Key performances scrutinized include works by Morris, SaulWilliams, Major Jackson and Sharan Strange. Importantly she charts these

developments in contemporary African-American poetry as continuing thepractices developed during the New Negro and Black Arts Movements.

One fascinating issue scrutinized in The Muse is Music is the tensionbetween textual performance and stage performance. Cleverly this bookdifferentiates between the conceptualization of a jazz poetic in the radicalpoetics of text-based writers such as Mackey and Mullen and spoken wordpoetry. In a useful aside, Jones explains the difference between spoken wordart and performance poetry:

Spoken-word art, of course emphasizes the dynamic qualities entailedin speech. Not coincidentally, the term ‘spoken word’ is often usedinterchangeably with ‘performance poetry’, since the terminologysuggests the poem’s essence cannot reach fulfilment without a staged[. . .] environment. (p. 184)

Jones also examines the marketability of spoken word poetry and its collu-sion with hip-hop textures as well as the resistance of ‘accentual-syllabicverse’ to be read as performance works. The Muse as Music certainly chal-

lenges any lazy generalizing use of ‘jazz poetics’ and shows the complexinterplay between recorded performance, orality, cultural change, gender,sexuality and textuality. Jones’s opening questions ‘What is this ‘‘black’’ inblack poetics? What enables us to hear its multifocal sounds and see it

multivalent signs?’ (p. 5) are reflected upon during this work. UltimatelyJones contends that black poetry ‘as an ultra-discursive field of signification,enables some of the most compelling articulations of politics and poetics ofrepresentation, imagination and the improvisatory performance of identities’(p. 5).

Books Reviewed

Bean, Heidi R. and Mike Chasar, eds. Poetry After Cultural Studies. UIowaP. [2011]

pp. 241. pb £34.50 ISBN 9 7816 0938 0410.




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Izenberg, Oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. PrincetonUP.

[2011] pp. ix þ 234. pb £19.95 ISBN 9 7806 9114 8663.

Jones, Meta DuEwa. The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to

Spoken Word. UIllP. [2011] pp. xiv þ 285. hb £37 ISBN 9 7802 5203 6217.

Sheppard, Robert. When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry. Shearsman. [2011]

pp. 225. pb £13.95 ISBN 9 7818 4861 1368.

Thurston, Scott. Talking Poetics: Dialogues in Innovative Poetry. Shearsman. [2011]

pp. 133. pb £10.95 ISBN 9 7818 4861 1917.

Vincent, John Emil, ed. After Spicer: Critical Essays. WesleyanUP. [2011] pp. 225. pb

£21.95 ISBN 9 7808 1956 9424.




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