The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics

Response to Hybrid Aesthetics and its Discontents

148 Response to “Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents” Cole Swensen iwould like to thank the editors of this volume for giving me the opportunity to add a few words here, for though, of course, many things are covered in these papers, the American Hybrid anthology is referred to sufficiently frequently and in the context of such crucial issues, that, as one of its editors, I value the chance to join the conversation , even after the fact. The anthology project was, for me, far from unfraught with many of the concerns addressed in these papers. I felt it was worth risking them because I hoped that what would be gained, particularly in terms of bringing many people’s work before a larger public, would be worth the inevitable difficulties and disagreements. Megan Volpert remarks that these people are all already well-known, but I think that, while it might seem so to a deeply committed, deeply involved poet, in fact, a good many of the people in the volume are not known at all beyond that deeply committed, but small, world. I found all the papers here extremely interesting and agree with much of what is said in all of them. I particularly valued Michael Theune’s observations about the lack of humor—it’s really true—and a lack! And I hear very seriously Craig Santos Perez’s criticism—the anthology he implies that ours should have been, while a different project entirely, would make a wonderful book, and I hope someone does it soon. Response to “Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents” / Cole Swensen 149 Essays into Contemporary Poetics One of the general concerns raised here repeatedly about American Hybrid and, to some degree, Reginald Shepherd’s Lyric Postmodernisms, is that it tends to minimize differences and seems to be trying to make a case for a homogeneous middle ground. The rationale for the AWP panel is a case in point, stating, “Such synthesizing aesthetics are ubiquitous in American poetry.” This conflates synthesizing and hybridizing, disregarding their important distinction: in a hybrid, the heterogeneous elements remain distinct; in a synthesis, they do not. Another example is the title of Mark Wallace’s paper, “Against Unity,” as well as much of its content, such as the statement, “This notion of hybrid tries to find similarity across divergent practices. It breaks down the idea of singular schools by looking for things different poetic groups have in common. It tries to find middle ground. It imagines itself, perhaps, as a new center, one from which the most extreme and divisive elements of divergent practices have been tempered or simply removed.” I’m amazed by this statement—it’s simply an inaccurate reading of the American Hybridanthology, ignoring and even directly contradicting what is expressly stated in the introduction and imputing to its editors values and agenda that we simply don’t hold. We are not trying to find similarities, or a middle ground; we have no desire whatsoever to remove divisive and divergent practices—in fact, we present quite a few in the anthology—and the only time I used the term “center” to speak of the work was in the phrase “a center of alterity,” specifically to figure any assumed center as itself a collection of differences. Nowhere in the introduction or other framing materials is the word “synthesis” or “synthesize” used, nor the word “unity,” nor any word that would suggest unity; instead, difference is repeatedly stressed. The first paragraph of the introduction posits that “everywhere we find complex aesthetic and ideological differences; the contemporary moment is dominated by rich writings that cannot be categorized.” Page xx repeats the stress on difference: “American poetry finds itself at a moment when idiosyncrasy rules to such a degree and differences are so numerous that distinct factions are hard, even impossible, to pin down.” And the introduction ends on a note stressing difference: “Poetry is eternally marked by, even determined by, difference, but that very difference changes and moves. At the moment, it is moving inside, into the center of the writing 150 Response to “Hybrid Aesthetics and Its Discontents” / Cole Swensen The Monkey and the Wrench itself, fissuring its smooth faces into fragments that make us reconsider the ethics of language, on the one hand, and redraft our notions of a whole, on the other.” And the rest of the paragraph goes on to develop the argument that...