In the Process of Poetry: The New York School and the Avant-Garde, and: Everybody's Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity (review)

These two studies show how the formal preoccupations of the post–World War II American avant-gardes constitute a cultural politics. In The Process of Poetry, William Watkin casts the New York School poets' emphasis on process as a refusal of the division between art and life present in avant-garde practices at the beginning of the century. While dadaists and futurists sought, through acts of negation, to shock their bourgeois publics out of their quietist presumptions separating art from life, this later generation refuses that divide by making the very stuff of every day life—thought processes and events—their only poetic subject. Repudiating transcendent and hierarchical meanings, the New York School poets—represented in this study by Kenneth Koch, James Schuyler, Frank O'Hara, and John Ashbery—established the significance of their poetry exclusively in the daily processes of living and of writing poetry.

Although the importance of process to these poets is often noted, there is little sustained critical attention to its cultural significance. In order to get at the poets' complex motives and methods, as well as their different practices of a "processual aesthetic," Watkin agilely engages Peter Burger's The Theory of the Avant-Garde, as well as Julia Kristeva's work on how subjectivity changes through revolutionary language and Jean-Francois Lyotard's notions of the irreproducible, sublime event. Through these theories of cultural formation, Watkin regards O'Hara's poetry as drawing "together the process of living with the process of loving so as to introduce the issue of desire into the otherwise affectless avant-garde critique of bourgeois institutions" (142). Ashbery's poetry is "the place where the subject comes to know what politics, history, and nationhood are [through their being] transformed. . . within poetic process itself. In this way, the aesthetic becomes political, by being active not just reactive; by doing something" (139).

While Watkin's study deftly uses theory to show how an emphasis on poetic process is a form of cultural politics that refuses modernist rationalized separations between art and life, he depends too much on the theories to answer finally for the need for overreaching cultural analysis, leading him, for instance, into tendentious arguments with critics (such as Harold Bloom) rather than further development of his own often excellent insights. The study needs to address more specific cultural issues, which it discusses but does not draw together, especially the poets' shared homosexual and queer affiliations. Watkin also completely ignores women poets in this poetic movement, most notably Barbara Guest.

Setting 1975 as the end point of his study, Watkin notes that the avant-garde ardor of the group dissipates at this time because of the untimely death of Frank O'Hara and the ascendance of the poets' individual careers, particularly Ashbery's. With this bracketing, Watkins reifies one kind of avant-garde formation, the coterie, rather than viewing the sustained writing practices of this group as constitutive of avant-garde cultural politics.

In Everybody's Autonomy, Juliana Spahr, a practitioner and critic of "language" writing, approaches this poetic movement as ongoing rather than limiting her study to the 1970s and 1980s, when it emerged. She stresses that writing practices committed to engaging with cultural materialism and a concept of the reader as the coproducer of the text span the twentieth century. Like Watkin, Spahr emphasizes the poetics heralded by the poets themselves, often somewhat confusingly referred to as "the freedom of the reader." Noting the potential fit of such a concept with liberal humanism and capitalistic consumerism, she stresses instead that language texts are written to enable the...