Introduction to Focus: But Seriously, Folks...: A Few Words on Wit

introduction to focus: But Seriously, Folks...: A Few Words on Wit Michael Theune, Focus Editor It is easy to go, to extremes; hard to standfirm in the middle. —Ezra Pound A central task of the past decade in American poetry has been the effort to establish the value of contemporary American poetry after the end of major conflict in the American poetry wars, the battles between camps variously defined as experimental/ avant-garde/Language and mainstream/traditional/ Formal. So far, this effort has taken the form of privileging the poetry of the "middle space," poetry that seems to exist between the two camps, sharing while modulating their concerns, approaches, and techniques. Such privileging is valid; in retrospect, the poetry wars dragged on for as long as they did because ofproblematic distinctions based on faulty rhetorical constructs, namely an oversimplified either-or maintained by an excluded middle and straw man arguments . Largely denying they had anything in common , each camp employed the other merely as a foil: of course poems should be open and anti-absorbent rather than (eww!) exude an air of inevitability! and of course poems should exude an air of inevitability rather than (eww!) be open and anti-absorbent! The middle space was meant to reinstate and reemphasize what so often was left out of the debate—or what in fact was admitted, though barely, in the caveats and concessions of each party. But the middle space, as it has been theorized so far, is itself a highly problematic formulation, one that mostly repeats the problems it was meant to have solved. As it is conceived of by its central theorists— among them: Alice Fulton and James Longenbach—the middle space at best is a messy amalgamation ofthe two camps, and, because it does not require that a poem be any sort of apotheosis, it even has been used to privilege poetic failure—and why not? As so many Language poems and New Formalist poems were failures — why shouldn't the poems of the middle space be failures as well? Furthermore, though the middle space begins to at least seem like a good alternative to the poetry wars' problematic methods ofjudgment, with its cliquish assessment, if almost all poetry really exists in the middle, then privileging poems of the middle means privileging too much poetry, for suddenly, all poems work—any poem can be described and so seen to succeed as a poem of the middle. However, such an assessment does not help to describe the experience of actually encountering poetry; such encounters show that there are major distinctions to be made in the middle space, that at least there are better and worse poems even in the middle space. One way to be sure of this is to admit wit into the conversation about the middle space. Here, wit should be understood as naming not merely humor or cleverness but a particularly rare state in poetry, a state in which the expectations established in a poem are simultaneously fulfilled and surprised. While such a definition of wit precisely is the definition of Renaissance wit given by Barbara Herrnstein Smith in Poetic Closure: A Study ofHow Poems End (1968), wit has just as much to do with the supposedly serious sublime—originally defined by Longinus as a "bold experiment in language" that still requires that such experiment must fit an occasion or purpose—as it does with hilarious punch lines—those language acts that fit their set-ups even while leaping beyond them. Wit demands that a poem actually do, actually achieve, something rather amazing. Representing a state of fitting surprise, wit is inherently critical. In the context of the American poetry wars, wit gives value to the middle that the poetry wars too easily excluded, and thus it shows in stark relief the faultiness of those wars' either-or. That is, while to some open poetry may be clearly superior to poetry that exudes inevitability, and vice versa, when wit is considered it is not immediately apparent that open and inevitable are the only options for poetry or that either open or inevitable necessarily is the best option; rather, wit seems a terrific, substantial mix ofboth openness...