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In the summer of 1999 Joan Retallack organized a conference at Bard College on the topic “Poetry and Pedagogy: The Challenge of the Contemporary.” I was unable to attend the conference but promised I would contribute an essay to the volume based on it, to be edited by Retallack and Juliana Spahr. The prospective contributors were sent a list of questions revolving around the central issue: how does teaching the new experimental poetries differ from teaching the poetry of “the familiar canon”? Since the conference included workshops for high school teachers, this question was evidently designed to elicit specific strategies that might be replicated. But to my mind, the more important questions were ones that hadn’t been posed: how does one tell a good “experimental” poem from a bad one? And what is an experimental poem anyway? In the essay that follows, first published in the Buffalo journal Kiosk in 2002, I take a stab at these questions. 13 Teaching the “New”Poetries The Case of Rae Armantrout How does the avant-garde poetry being written today play out in the contemporary college classroom? Having taught courses in “Modern Poetry” since 1965, when I began my teaching career at the Catholic University of America, let me begin by saying that, paradoxically, the poems of, say, Bruce Andrews or Harryette Mullen are at one level more accessible to students than are those of W. B. Yeats or Ezra Pound. For however scrambled a new “experimental” poem may be—however nonsyntactic, nonlinear, or linguistically complex—it is, after all, written in the language of the present, which is to say the language of the students who are reading it. On the other hand— and here’s the rub—since the contemporary undergraduate is likely to have almost no familiarity with poetry, beyond the obligatory Robert Frost poem that may or may not have been taught in high school, the class will have a lot of catching up to do. Indeed, the notion of teaching “beyond the familiar canon” that I have been asked to discuss here is something of a mystery to me, because there is no longer a canon beyond which to go! At Stanford University , where I now teach, we have English PhD candidates who have never read Keats’s “Ode on a Grecian Urn,”much less Milton’s “Lycidas.”And when I recently gave an invited lecture to the Engineering Honors Club at the University of Southern California on the topic “What Is Poetry?” I learned that most of these juniors and seniors—high I.Q. students, all of them—had never read any poetry and couldn’t cite the name of a single poet. The only work they had all read—and I doubt it will help them with the analysis of radical poetries today—is Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s The Yellow Wallpaper. So much for the “familiar canon,” the irony being that the lack of consensus is not necessarily a blessing for the avant-garde. For the absence of any serious discourse about poetry, of a real debate as to the merits of X or Y, coupled with a commercial poetry scene controlled by only a few publishing houses whose chosen poets win the big prizes and ¤nd their way into The New Yorker, makes it dif¤cult to teach students how poetry actually works and when a given poem has value. Accordingly, those of us who want to broaden the readership for the new poetries must take nothing for granted, must take up the work of the contemporaries we care about and read their work closely and critically, bearing in mind that Of¤cial Verse Culture, as Charles Bernstein has dubbed it, tends to valorize very different models. Let me illustrate how this might work, using as an example a subtle and intriguing book published by Green Integer Press: Rae Armantrout’s The Pretext.1 Armantrout is a leading and, we might say, established Language poet—the author of seven previous collections, including one in French, and a prose memoir—but she is hardly canonical on the New York publishing scene represented by Norton or Viking, Knopf or Farrar, Straus & Giroux, by the New York Review of Books or New York Times Book Review.2 I shall speculate later in this essay why this might be the case, comparing Rae Armantrout ’s poems to some recent work by a woman poet of the very same generation whose poetry has won every prize and honor, including...

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