Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde by Peter Quartermain (review)

T.S. Eliot held that genuine poetry can communicate before it is understood. In Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde, Peter Quartermain quantifies Eliot’s theory. He identifies twentieth-century poets whose poems are difficult to pin down meaning and bolshie in focus. However, as Quartermain views them, the poets and their poetry communicate and reverberate long after their cultural moment.

There is much to impress and savor in the life-long writer, manuscript reviewer, editor, artist, and small press operator’s newest book about select modern poets, poems, and poetics. Two primary reasons for critical endorsement of this book are that, first, Quartermain appreciates creative writers, and second, he is attentive to communicating excitement about poetry. He is especially passionate and deeply committed (stubborn himself!) to the critical advocacy of modern poets whom he feels should not be marginalized or forgotten. Perhaps above all, Quartermain makes clear in Stubborn Poetries: Poetic Facticity and the Avant-Garde that there are some poets of our time who have produced real artistry with works that should be considered among the finest of our literature. Hence, the scholars’ long-held or rather, own stubborn strategy is to evoke continued interest in, and add hype to, a very privileged group of poets who have yet to attain current popular literary acclaim, in spite of their superior poetry.

These poets should be cherished for their uniqueness and blends of influences. Their poems display a wide array of traditions and individual translations, transposing and stretching back through Shelley and Shakespeare, Wordsworth and Wyatt, and Byron and the Beowulf-poet. These “stubborn poetries” further show influences of high modernism, vast cultural experiences, and divergent views of history. However, because these works are not becoming canonical, they remain Quartermain’s focus, and he is especially spurred to speak and write about nonmainstream poets. In fact, the former lecturer in the Summer Writing Program at Naropa University, Boulder, and Writer in Residence for Capilano College in British Columbia is very obstinate about touting writers whom he feels are neglected yet who have produced “avant-garde” poems resisting critical convention and linguistic norms.

For Quartermain, “avant-garde” translates as literary precision that withstands space and time and grows in scope and range when decontextualized and recontextualized (71). Consequently, among Quartermain’s select group of neglected poets are, principally, the following, in no certain order: William Carlos Williams, Basil Bunting, Louis Zukofsky, Lorine Niedecker, Robin Blaser, Richard Caddel, Mina Loy, George Oppen, Robert Creeley, Lyn Hejinian, Steve McCaffery, Bruce Andrews, Hilda Doolittle, Charles Olson, and Susan Howe.

Through remarkable cross references, striking technical details, in-depth analyses of history and criticism, imposing philosophy, and impeccable scholarship, Quartermain explains why certain poets’ “stubborn poetries” possess accentuated styles that should have curtailed popular dismissal. In spite of the works being difficult, obdurate, and resisting or contrasting with conventional explication, Quartermain argues that they are worthy to be placed inside our canon. Most poignantly, he advises that the larger social and political drama of the “moral imperative of Authority” works against these texts becoming canonized (81). Instead, and unfortunately, they have been deemed “irregular” or “corrupt” and remain unstudied and overlooked. The texts are not seen as pure. As a result they remain unworthy of aggregation of language and literature which has been classified and comfortably fits into the arbitrary order and ranking of the logical, syntactical, etymological, material, and socio-political.

Therefore, Stubborn Poetries advances not just Quartermain’s purposes and excitement but each of our own sense of rationale for academic inquiry and intensity for re-engaging with current poetry. This book succeeds an earlier work by Quartermain titled, Disjunctive Poetics: From Gertrude Stein and Louis Zukofsky to Susan Howe (Cambridge UP, 1992). In Disjunctive Poetics, Quartermain examines some of the most interesting and experimental contemporary writers. Certainly, Stubborn Poetries is foundational for reappraising postmodernism and twentieth-century language and literature which counter mainstream writing. Quartermain has at long last set down...