Criticism and the Crisis in American Poetry

CRITICISM AND THE CRISIS IN AMERICAN POETRY / Hank Inzer Even with its wider pluralism, the early eighties has its own boundaries, though they will probably not be clear to us until they are challenged bysome stronglyinnovative poets.—James E. B. Breslin Only in poetry do we find reflected Williams' image of Burr's dream—a democracy in permanent and celebratory revolution.—Cary Nelson ON OCTOBER 18, 1984, LOUIS SIMPSON opened The 11th Alabama Symposium: What Is a Poet? with a talk entitled "The Character of the Poet." He began: For twenty years American poets have not discussed the nature of poetry. There has not been the exchange of ideas there used to be. The polemics of the Beat, the Black Mountain, the Sixties Poets, and the New York Poets are a thing of the past. The resistance to the war in Vietnam brought poets of different groups together on the same platform, and since that time they have ceased to argue— perhaps because arguing over poetry seems trivial when we are living under the shadow of nuclear annihilation. Another reason is the ascendancy of criticism. If poets do not speak for themselves others will speak for them, and when poets vacated the platform critics rushed to take their place. Those who have no great liking for poetry like to explain. The poets have been willing to see this happen— they are workers and not given to abstract thinking. They believe that the best literary criticism and the only kind that's likely to last is a poem.1 After Simpson completed his address, a lively question and answer session developed. Among those who challenged Simpson were Marjorie Perloff, Charles Altieri, and Charles Bernstein, all of whom have recently written a great deal about contemporary poetry. I cite Simpson's remarks because he is both very right and very wrong. Simpson is correct about the winding down of the poetic and polemic projects spawned in the sixties. His generation of poets, the groundbreakers of the sixties who forged an alternative to the formal, ironic academic verse of the fifties, are now the literary establishment. Indeed, one of the The Missouri Review · 201 major projects of current criticism is to offer an assessment and history of Simpson's generation. While many of that generation turned away from the kind of critical writing that Simpson characterizes as "abstract thinking," to say that poets generally have vacated the platform and that serious, heated exchanges about the nature of poetry are a thing of the past is an error illustrative of a blindness or partialness that plagues the environment of contemporary American poetry. Reading recent books and essays by Charles Altieri, Ron Silliman, Stephen Fredman, Charles Bernstein, Marjorie Perloff, Bob Perelman, and Barrett Watten, I am led to wonder how such remarks about an end to argument could even be made, let alone become a commonly accepted attitude among readers and writers of contemporary poetry. Broadly characterized, and with considerable overlapping from category to category, I find several projects being carried on in the essays and criticism of the last five years: 1) evaluative or aesthetic criticism, with an emphasis on the appreciative (here, Randall Jarrell's descendants, after Richard Howard, are critics and poets such as Helen Vendler, Robert Hass, Peter Stitt, and Dave Smith); 2) thematic approaches to contemporary poetry (Alan Williamson and Cary Nelson); 3) the writing of traditional literary history for the poetry of the sixties and seventies (Jerome Mazzaro, James E. B. Breslin, and, with a radically different emphasis, Marjorie Perloff); and 4) an expression of "poetry in crisis" (Charles Altieri, Charles Bernstein, and Stephen Fredman) which involves several related issues: the impact of philosophy and critical theory on the reading and writing of poetry, a re-reading of modernism as part of a program for innovation and renewal, and an assessment of the problems of the current institutionalization (and attendant professionalization ) of "being a poet." For this particular essay, I will examine at least one recent book from each category, but most of my attention finally wUl be devoted to the fourth area because, in my opinion, it is the flash point for current discussions of poetry. So that...