During the mid-twentieth century, Robert Lowell cleaved poetics into two essential styles when he asserted a difference between the “cooked” and “uncooked.” Adhering to this concept into the latter half of the twentieth century, critics and poets have used these labels to describe emerging work. Eliot Weinberger even reaffirmed these two camps in his anthology American Poetry Since 1950, published a few decades later in 1993. But despite the few anthologies that adhered to this concept, the ensuing decades also – often – saw published works that didn’t neatly fit into one form or the other. Rather, evolving poetic works seemed to select from all types of concepts and styles from previous schools of poetry, thus forming even more and differing ways to use language, form, and style.
In our previous class, we asked a significant question during our discussion about the construction of Asian-American poetics: Without the structure and identity of a school, how is a poet able to push against it, to interact or react, agree or conflict with prior works? This semester, we’ve looked at major schools of American poetry, including Modernism, Imagism, Symbolism, Vorticism, the Harlem Renaissance, Objectivism, the Beats, Black Mountain, New York School, Black Arts, Language, Confessional, Post-Confessional, and Asian-American (not to mention the influences of the Romantic period, Deep Image, European Surrealism, and others). In the case of contemporary poetry, therefore, the aforementioned question becomes the opposite: how can we define an emerging school with poets who have sampled and used, been influenced by or turned off from, a myriad of styles that came before them? Is there a way to perpetuate the tradition of grouping together like-minded artists, to affect their study as a whole, even a movement? And if so, what defines them – what, in essence, makes them alike?
How has the publication of the anthology contributed to forming schools of poetry? How has it contributed to the way we discuss poetics? For today’s readings, we looked at poems from American Hybrid, which seeks to define contemporary poetics as its name suggests. However, another anthology is simple entitled American Women Poets in the 21st Century: Where Lyric Meets Language, and yet another entitled Lyric Postmodernisms: An Anthology of Contemporary Innovative Poetries. These all drive at attempting to name the same movement of writing that’s happening, which is one that defies Lowell’s “cooked” and “uncooked” forms, and instead mines information from all available forms, content, and styles. This abundance is reasonable, given the evolution of the ever-multiplying schools of poetry with wide-reaching influence.
I’m especially interested in studying poets who have been anthologized and studied under more than one school of poetry. Take John Ashbery, for example. His career began as a New York School poet, yet he’s featured in American Hybrid. The same is true for Barbara Guest, having begun in the New York School as well, before becoming associated with the Language Poets and on to what Swensen calls the “hybrid.” Additionally, Jorie Graham, who was first rooted in the Post-Confessional Lyric before becoming one of the first outspoken hybrid poets.
This ongoing conversation of poetics must be directly influenced by publications, and certainly anthologies. Without the grouping together of like-minded writers – the cultural roots of poetic theory – the discussion about what readers are reading becomes difficult. The question is then perhaps, with the multiplying variances of influences from previous schools of poetry, how does an editor come to define contemporary work? Is calling it “hybrid poetics” enough to articulate the works themselves, or will even that definition eventually evolve?
Consider this a metacognitive approach to understanding how we define poetic movements, and, with the benefit of history to look back upon, whether these definitions are useful tools in the continuation of knowing what’s come before, and how that might determine what lies ahead.
Laura, this is a very intriguing topic. I love the scales that it deals with from the on-the-ground work of writers in space and time up to the publishing industry and the influence they have. I wonder too, how Academia might factor into this discussion? Thank you for the nod to my study of Asian American poetry, I found your restatement of it here helpful in seeing it anew. My question of the pooling and schooling of poetry is similar to one asked in regards to post-identity, being – have the distinctions always been superfluous or are the hard lines just more glaring in our new world of “posts”?
I really engage with this idea about categorizing, the defining of a movement or style in literature. I don’t know if we’ll answer those questions tonight, but I’m interested in seeing what we say about the morality (not quite the word I’m looking for) of categorizing and defining poets into specific schools, the naming of schools and defining their aesthetics, which leads to questions of power. Who has the authority to define a school? Poets? Publishers? Editors? The reading public (no matter how few we may be)?
Pinning a writer down to a single category may also be something that becomes integrated into both of our topics. Langston Hughes was concerned about poets rejecting their black labels and wanting to appear as an uncategorized “poet.” How do we define a school of poetry? In this class, we’ve seen schools defined by behaviors (form, rejection of form, styles, rejection of styles, focus on the “I,” rejection of the “I,” etc.), and content.
Another question I’m wondering if we will consider tonight is how technology may be causing this increased hybridity. How much do technology, our ever increasing globalization, and the speed with which we can access information affect the poetic schools and our definitions of them?
You both have a lot of great fodder for discussion that I look forward to engaging, even if we don’t get around to figuring all of it out in ninety minutes.
Charlotte – interesting you brought up Academia specifically: “I wonder too, how Academia might factor into this discussion?” The rise of the MFA programs in this country might be another component of this conversation. I read an article by someone who’s name escapes me at the moment, but who essentially addressed the notion of academics in light of creating art and also creating jobs for writers.
Angela, technology is yet another compelling factor to consider. Is so much being created and easily published that categories are mute? But then how do we talk about these things? Like we’ve discussed in our Crazyhorse Practicum class, the value of the “gatekeeper” is still alive. Perhaps the answer lies in the small presses?
Swenson does address both the press and the technology question, I think, as driving forces, and she presents it more as poets being increasingly empowered to frame and define their own work, which leads to a multiplicity of possibilities rather than the retrospective “schooling” of representative poets in terms of certain tendencies. It seems that you’re most interested in addressing the broader question of what to do with this multiplicity and the roles that recent formations might play. The readings from Burt and others I shared with you are important to this conversation, and I imagine there’s a lot going on in online forums as well. In this sense, your concern seem more about taking the temperature of the debate and questioning some of its assumptions rather than charting the work of poets who have sort of demonstrated a resistance to ‘schooling’ over the long term. I think that a fine direction to take, and particularly interesting when you think about not just schools and movements, but collectives and coalitions: intentionally formed communities around certain shared problems and concerns. As many of the poets we read in Angela’s mini-module seem to suggest: now is no time for a post-identity politics, and a poetics of reckoning must come before any earnest poetics of praise. This is a side concern, but how representative is the “hybrid” anthology in terms of identity? Does it try to be as broadly representative of racial identity as it is of aesthetic diversity?