The Monkey and the Wrench: Essays into Contemporary Poetics

Introduction: Of Monkeys and Wrenches

1 Introduction Of Monkeys and Wrenches Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher coming up with a title for this collection caused us great consternation . Monkey see, monkey do. Throw a monkey wrench in the works. Monkey mind. Don’t monkey with it. Hundredth monkey effect. Infinite monkey theorem. No more monkeys jumping on the bed. A barrel full of monkeys, etc. And then what happens? There’s a long history of monkey metaphors, as well as wrench metaphors, so as soon as our Associate Editor, Nick Sturm, suggested “The Monkey and the Wrench,” we leapt at it. It is a fine way to encapsulate our thinking behind putting this collection together, that there are many ways into contemporary poetry and poetics, and that we wanted to provide a forum for some writers to tinker with it. We wanted a book that might prove as useful to readers of poetry as it would be to poets, and, as well, as interesting for students as it would be to general readers. We share the feeling about poetry that we’re all in this together as readers, writers, critics, students, and teachers. We’re all of the above in the face of art. And to deny any of these roles is to deny a fundamental way that art works upon and with us. The essays in this volume, then, are not meant to stake out a territory or to advance 2 Introduction / Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher The Monkey and the Wrench a singular aesthetic position. Nor do we see this volume as definitive. These are open questions, beginnings or continuances of conversations around and in contemporary poetry, not manifestos or final words. We saw this as our goal. We chose these authors (with a few exceptions, which we’ll get to in a bit) without knowing what they were going to take as the specific subjects of their essays. We wanted to know what they were interested in, to let the contents lead the collection. Eclecticism was our hope, and we’ve been rewarded. Give enough monkeys a wrench, as the saying goes that we just made up. The wrench—both the way to fix something and the way one might throw it into the works. The monkey—both James Tate’s “Teaching the Ape to Write Poems” and Thomas Lux’s “Helping the Monkey Cross the River.” We’re all in this together, helping the monkey along. If we’re doing it right, we inhabit art as a part of the encounter, to paraphrase one of our teachers, Wayne Dodd, who illustrated, through his presence with a text, how it’s not reading we’re doing, but living into. Texts are experiences, and this is serious stuff, worth taking seriously , which also includes an open field for the antic. Attend, is what art calls out to us. What, if anything, art owes us, is another thing. Sometimes in this encounter it’s enough to point, and sometimes it’s imperative to point out. Beware monkeys with wrenches. You never know what they’ll do. And so what has been done here? The collection opens with a bit of context. By historically unraveling poetry’s relationship with the reading public, Robert Archambeau, in “The Discursive Situation of Poetry,” deconstructs the contemporary argument that American poetry is out of touch with its audience, and reconceptualizes the issue in the face of larger and farther-reaching USFOET
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Maneuvers in Contemporary Poetry,” where Elisa Gabbert revisits a topic that was popular on the internet last year. Gabbert, along with Mike Young, investigated some of the common compositional practices and ticks of twenty-first century American poetry on the website HTML GIANT. We asked her to work part of it up for this volume, and we were pleased that she sent it to us. Introduction / Mary Biddinger and John Gallaher 3 Essays into Contemporary Poetics Just as important as the common moves in poetry are the less common ones. Michael Dumanis’s essay, “An Aesthetics of Accumulation: On the Contemporary Litany” discusses the popularity of litany in contemporary poetry, highlighting litany’s sonic qualities as well as how it establishes a unified framework on which even a poem consisting of fragmentary elements can be built. The investigation of less common moves in contemporary poetry continues as Stephen Burt’s “Cornucopia, or, Contemporary American Rhyme” takes up the topic of rhyme. Burt...