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197 rae armantrout Mainstream Marginality Rae Armantrout’s “Mainstream Marginality” is a critical send-up of the gap between mainstream and avant-garde poetries, read in terms of the “anthology wars.” For the editors of an anthology of mainstream poets (The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, 1985), the younger poets they select are “rarely a card-carrying group member, political or aesthetic.” Armantrout questions this refusal of explicit ideology as disingenuous.To begin with, it is based on a clear set of exclusions: there will be no ideologues, eccentrics, New York School or Language poets, or lyric poets in such a collection. Armantrout’s reading of the poems included, however, reveals a consistent rhetoric of marginality, to the degree that it approaches an ideology itself: “The ‘typical younger American poet’ is outdoors in an ‘abandoned’ location doing physical labor with a sharp instrument.” Such a rhetoric of marginality leads, through the use of appropriately framed poetic narrative, to claims for authenticity—which for Armantrout are unexamined and poorly defended. At the heart of her review is a refusal to allow editorial selection to occur without itself being subject to scrutiny. The aesthetic issues she engages are still timely—the programmatic disavowal of aesthetic ideology versus the unconscious reproduction of one—in this scathing gem. In 2010 Rae Armantrout received both a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetry Versed. The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, ed. Dave Smith and David Bottoms (New York: Quill, 1985) Dave Smith and David Bottoms, the editors of the Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, include in their foreword a composite portrait of the younger, American poet. They write that “he is rarely a card-carrying group member, political or aesthetic” (19). In this foreword Smith and Bottoms, typical younger American poets in this regard,reveal none of the aesthetic criteria around which they have shaped this book. In fact, they claim to have used only two simple guidelines in choosing their contributors: “The poets chosen must have published one full length book, preferably recent in appearance, and a book that indicated future work of quality from the poet” (16), and their contributors must be“poets born since 1940”(17). Guidelines so general would produce, one would suppose, an extremely diverse anthology. The editors al- 198 rae armantrout most appear to deny responsibility for the contents of the book, in fact, when they write,“The publication of an anthology of new poets is an opportunity to observe the language discovering its possibilities as if for the first time”(1). We are the passive witnesses, then, to some inarguable linguistic Genesis. An introduction by Anthony Hecht follows the editors’ foreword. He is able to draw conclusions about this generation (my generation) of American poets based on the material he finds in these pages. For instance, “Their poems are not offered as the adornments or by-products of colorful or eccentric personal lives” (37). One wonders what Hecht considers eccentric. But, leaving aside his snide terminology, one could conclude from Hecht’s statement that literary descendants of Frank O’Hara or Allen Ginsberg such as Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman will not be found in this book. He may not have a colorful life but, according to the editors, “In his poems the younger poet tends to be himself, an invented version of himself” (19). In other words, these poems are written from a single, privileged point of view; they will be unitary, first-person narratives . From this one could conclude that “language” poets, such as Charles Bernstein and Hannah Weiner, who have opened their poems up to a number of conflicting social voices in a critique of the conventional concept of self,will not be included here. Finally Hecht finds himself able to claim, “They are a generation that seems disinclined to song”(40). From this one might conclude that poets influenced by the play of sound and reference in a poet like Robert Duncan, such as Susan Howe and Michael Palmer, will not be found in this book. If one were to take the claims of this book seriously, one would decide that contemporary American poetry represents a radical narrowing of poetic possibility. But even a moderately well-informed reader will know that many poets born since 1940 who have published full-length books have been left out. Why? It must be because the editors don’t think that their books promise “future work of quality...

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