Who Is More Wrong? (Because we all know no one is ever right.)

Because love is a battlefield, baby. And don't you forget it.

  

As Hank Lazer writes in his introduction (http://writing.upenn.edu/library/What-Is-a-Poet/), “The 1984 ‘What Is a Poet?’ symposium took place at a time of considerable tension within the world of American poetry.”  It begs the question regarding the tension or not so much tension there might or might not be in the world of American poetry in the fall of 2012.  How tense are we?  Do you feel tense?  Are we all happy campers with each other?  Are we playing nice? 

Over the past few years I was thinking there was quite a bit of tension, mostly surrounding—people taking pot-shots at—what some were terming Third Way or Post-Avant poetry.  Does anyone term anything that way anymore?  Has the wind gone out of the sails of periodizing? 

Well, in 1984, that ominous-sounding time that we all were looking forward to, we were, as the saying goes, promised jetpacks by then, if you’ll recall.  And all we got was Ronald Reagan’s second term.  I don’t know about you, but I was feeling a little sore about the whole thing. 

So, here’s the question (it’s not my question, by the way, but it seemed to be 1984’s question): does language create the world or does language describe the world? 

In my 2012 view, they’re both wrong.  As I see it, poetry is a social act, and social acts are constructed by language.  But they get themselves all swirled up in flying bullets and getting hit by busses and such.  Those were simpler or else more complex times. 

Here’s an exchange:

Louis Simpson:  I think I’m beginning to see a basic reason we’re disagreeing here.  You approach the world as a construct which humanity has made, and therefore language is a construct, so you approach experience through language.  I would argue that for poets experience occurs as a primary thing, without language in between.  I quoted Dante yesterday to you about visions.  We have visions, we have experiences for which there is not language, and our job is to create that into a poem.  And that seems to me a radically different point of view.

Gregory Jay:  O, yeah, yeah.  We do disagree fundamentally because I don’t think that there is any such thing as uninterpreted experience and I don’t think we ever have an experience of anything that isn’t an interpretation when it arrives to our knowledge.

Louis Simpson:  I don’t believe that for one second.  If you had been in an automobile accident, or I could give you even worse examples – if you’ve ever had somebody shooting at you in a battlefield, where the heck is interpretation coming in there?

Gregory Jay:  Well, I have to decide whether the bullet’s going to hit me or not, Louis.

Louis Simpson:  But what has that got to do with interpretation?

Denise Levertov:  If a child dying of cancer is suffering excruciating pain just as if it were a grown-up person who is able to reflect upon its pain, does that mean that it is not experiencing that excruciating pain?  Bullshit!

Charles Bernstein:  Of course it doesn’t mean that.  I think, I mean nobody is saying that.  I think we’re not going to resolve what are essentially philosophical and theological or metaphysical differences, religious differences, really, among us. If you had a panel of different religious people representing different religious groups you would, who were trying to come to some consensus, you would have some of these same disagreements. I think the problem I have is not so much understanding that people have a different viewpoint than I have – believe me I've been told that many times [laughter] and I accept that. I do find it a problem that, and I certainly tend to do this too, that we tend to say "poets" think this and "poets" think that – because by doing that we tend to exclude the practices of other people in our society of divergence.

Lazer, writing in 2009, sums up the continued relevance of the 1984 symposium this way:

“The emerging critique of the burgeoning creative writing/workshop industry, the rise of critical theory and its importance to English Departments and to interpretive methodologies, and the increased attention to Language poetry and other innovative poetries contributed to the kinds of tensions reflected in the concluding panel discussion.  One might argue that the mid-1980s represented a much more polarized time in American poetry – a time when camps and schools of poetry held more sharply delineated differing assumptions and when those affiliations led to a sharp sense of turf (reflected in networks of publication, employment, prizes, and the other apparatuses of official [and unofficial] verse culture).  While today it might be more common to assume that we live in an era of happy hybridity – a sort of post-polarized poetry world, in which students are free and encouraged to try any form of writing – that claim belies the fact that there still are walls and differing assumptions about how to proceed as poets.  It would be intriguing to have another symposium – again, with the deliberate intention of having poets and critics of differing perspectives (and beliefs) present to articulate and discuss those differences (and commonalities).”

So who would be on the panel list at such a symposium if you were hosting it in 2013?  I’d be up for watching that. It would be a good use of AWP or The Poetry Foundation. 

 

Here’s the 1984 final panel:

 

Hank Lazer

Denise Levertov

Charles Altrieri

David Ignatow

Marjorie Perloff

Gerald Stern

Louis Simpson

Helen Vendler

Charles Bernstein

Gregory Jay

 

What’s your 2013 panel of ten?  Hmm?

Here’s one, off the top of my head, just for fun. It’s not as diverse as it should be to really get things rolling. I should try again at another, but why don’t you instead?

 

Stephen Burt

Robert Archambeau

Vanessa Place

Johannes Göransson

Claudia Rankine

Tony Hoagland

Mary Ruefle

D.A. Powell

Ange Mlinko

Cole Swensen