3

Poetics Poetics
nerys williams
This chapter presents an overview of current discussions regarding the con-
ceptualization of poetics primarily in twentieth and twenty-rst century
poetries. Covering criticism received during 2011, an overview is provided
of the following: the history and legacy of the British Poetry Revival, the
relationship between so called experimental British and American poetries,
denitions and exchanges regarding innovative writing practices, connect-
ives between poetic experimentation and questions of multilingualism, how
an understanding of cultural studies can inform our conception of poetics,
the social impact of micropoetries and a reconsideration of jazz poetics.
Issues of poetic technique and ambition come to the fore in critical reec-
tions upon ideas of poetic personhood and the knowledge of being.
Differences between textual, spoken word and hip-hop performances are
also analysed. Following growing interest in the poetics of the Berkeley
Renaissance, considerable critical attention is dedicated to the work of
Jack Spicer in tandem with ideas of epistolarity, religion, campness,
humour and the communal.
With its mapping of key elements and subsequent directions of the
British Poetry Revival, Robert Sheppards P|. io1 1.. Mo1. c. ccc1
tc.., is a compelling read. This book reminds us that while critics and
poets alike have extensively documented the emergence of provocative
strands of modernist poetics in the US; the situation in the UK is very
different. Sheppard states that: What I regret about the poetry scene at
the momentI try not to harbour resentmentsis the way in which it fails
to embrace its own history (p. 215). He adds in his epilogue that what I
regret about the poetry scene over a longer span is its resistance to the
development of poetics as a specic speculative discourse about poetic de-
velopment, both for individuals and groups. Compared with North
American Writers, we have been reluctant to speculate about the kinds of
1|. 1.o. Pc.| . c....o! o1 co!o.o! 1|.c.,, 2: The English Association (2013)
All rights reserved. For permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oup.com
doi:10.1093/ywcct/mbt002

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poetry we want (pp. 21617). The conceptualization of poetics in this book
challenges the more dogmatic claims of archetypal manifesto making.
Strongly inuenced by the work of concrete poet Mary Ann Caws and
Rachel Blau DuPlessis, Sheppards conguration of poetics draws on ideas
of the provisional and speculative. Poetics he suggests involves a theory of
practice, a practice of theory (p. 15) creating a place of permission in a
hoped for writerly community (p. 15). Cawss denition of the manifesto as
speculative and reective chimes with Sheppards guration of poetics. She
asserts that the manifesto moment positions itself between what has been
done and what will be done (p. 15). The bad times under scrutiny in this
work are marked by the blanket cloud of Thatcherism (p. 9).
Many of the chapters in Sheppards book were rst presented in confer-
ences; some pivotal in the emerging dialogues between so called innovative
poetries in the US and the UK during the 1990s. Sheppard is keen to present
a personal contextualization of the debates concerning poetics at that time,
as well as more current readings of poetry by Maggie OSullivan, Iain
Sinclair, John Hall, Tom Raworth and Allen Fisher. Usefully he comments
upon poetrys relationship to history as a transformative one: Poems are
coherent deformations and reformulations of the matter of history into the
manner of poetry, and it is their transformative, disruptive, power, precisely
their inability to afrm [. . .] that characterizes the force of art (p. 12).
Sheppards personal recollections of the development of British modernist
poetries add to key earlier works in the eld such as Andrew Duncans 1|.
to.!o.. c cc..o. . Mc1.. i...| tc.., (Salt Publishing [2003]) and
Peter Barrys tc.., Po. i...| tc.., c |. :v o1 |. io!. c io.!
cco. (Salt Publishing [2006]). Not surprisingly the rst chapter grapples
with the notorious poetry wars within the Poetry Society and their rela-
tionship to Eric Mottrams self-coined British Poetry Revival. The divisions
between radical activist poets and more mainstream practices nally resulted
in conict and resignations. Reecting on the manifesto for new poetry
presented to the Poetry Society in 1976, Sheppard concludes that it provided
one of the few British examples of a public radical poetics and signied an
attempt to go public and inform the nation (p. 28) of their practice.
These are two qualities that the author perceives as curiously lacking in
contemporary British Poetries, especially when compared to American
poetry practices.
A key essay of the collection Beyond Anxiety: Legacy or Miscegenation
considers the relationship between Contemporary British and American ex-
perimental practice. Focusing primarily on language writing, the essay was
originally presented at a pivotal poetry conference Writing at the Limits at
44 | Poetics

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Southampton University in 1994. Sheppard claims that it was during this
conference that the term linguistically innovative poetry gained its currency
and was embraced in particular by the American delegates who started to
use it of their own better documented avant-gardes (p. 8). He argues that
while there has been a sometimes-symbiotic relationship between the ex-
perimental strands of contemporary poetics in the USA and UK, the poetries
associated with British Poetry Revival emerged independently to language
writing:
I was aware of language poets but much of the writing in
LANGUAGE was incomprehensible and it was not
until about 1983 that I saw the creative work. The avant-garde review
seemed, and still seems, a self-defeating form, which aroused a re-
sistance in me to the work that it failed to describe. But some of the
other prose is excellent and contributed to my own post-1985
practice. The attempt to use post-structuralist thought that too many
literary critics have actually used to prop up the canon, as the basis
for a c... seemed to me just and exciting; but in the 1980s this
thought had been coming 1....!, into Britain, so there was a sense of
recognition alongside that of discovery. (p. 139)
For a British poet such as Allen Fisher the inuence of language writing is
deemed negligible; Fisher insists rather upon a shared aesthetic with an
earlier generation of American poets such as Clarke Coolidge, Louis
Zukofsky and Jackson MacLow. Fisher is cited commenting what (the lan-
guage poets) radically changed was the way in which they discussed and
marketed their work (p. 138). For Sheppard, there is more contact between
these two strands of experimental writing than can be framed just in terms of
American inuence or British derivativeness (p. 139). He maintains that
there were useful discussions of poetics exchanged and cites contributions by
David Trotter on poets Rod Mengham, Bob Cobbings writings on the work
of Paula Claire, as well as essays by Lawrence Upton and cris cheek.
Hopefully Sheppards book will inspire further histories of recent British
poetry. He wishes that British poets would shake off their resistance to
broaching public discussion and debate.
The rather clunky descriptor linguistically innovative poetries makes its
appearance, though often tongue in cheek, in Scott Thurstons 1o!|. tc...
.o!co. . ico.. tc..,. Both Sheppard and Thurston are editors of the
online jco.o! c i...| o1 i..| ico.. tc.., which considers poetic
writing since the late 1950s under various rubrics of experimentation, be
it avant-garde, second wave modernist or underground. Constructed around
Poetics | 45

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a series of interviews with four poetsKaren MacCormack, Jennifer
Moxley, Caroline Bergvall and Andrea Bradythe work explores the rela-
tionship between theory and praxis as well as the processes of writing.
Recognizing that the term might have lost a little of its allure or precision,
Thurston appears apologetic when he raises the issue of innovation and
poetry. Interviewing Brady a rather perturbed Thurston asks Lets take
on this thorny word innovation because it is something which is nailed to
the masthead of my research bid, for better or for worse (p. 110). Bradys
response is thoughtful and sheds light on the premises of experimentation
and its sometimes troubled relationship with the academy:
I think like you that its a term which I used to use much more
comfortably than I could do now. I was just noticing that it formed
part of my description of the +..|.. c |. :c in a conversation I had
with Rosheen Brennan, which was published on uc2 At that point
it seemed like the most acceptable way of designating this late
Modernist, or experimental, or avant-garde work or whatever else
you want to call it! But now my encounter with the term innovation
is almost entirely in the context of institutions, in my case the aca-
demic sector, where it is a perpetual requirement. (p. 111)
Both Brady and Thurston agree that innovative can designate a useful lin-
eage of poetic experimentation without reducing poetic work to static char-
acterizations or rhetorical positions. Brady admits that Ive never liked the
term experimental because it means that there is a kind of provisionality
about the work (p. 112). She adds that the term avant-garde does not seem
particularly useful since it suggests a kind of cohesiveness of groups with
manifestoes that meet regularly and have commonalities (p. 112). She re-
ects that I dont think, unfortunately, any of these properties really apply
to our little community (p. 112). The overall thrust of this book is that
innovative poetries acknowledge an earlier poetic lineage of sympathetic
constellations and correspondences. In his preface Thurston is keen to em-
phasize that the terms linguistically innovative or formally innovative
poetry have been used to refer to British and Irish poetry which has other-
wise been described as avant-garde, experimental, neo-modernist, non-
mainstream, post-avant, postmodernist, and as constituting a parallel
tradition (p. 10). He adds that it is important to recognize the commitment
of innovative poetries to a literary-historical tradition of dissent (p. 10).
A refreshing element of this collection is its refusal to over-categorize the
work of the four women poets. Afliations with other poets as well as
inuences and collaborations, emerge naturally during the course of the
46 | Poetics

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conversation. Thurstons choice of poets offers multiple perspectives on the
relationship between European thought and the US, questions of multilin-
gualism and poetics, concepts of practice and form, tradition and recent
writing as well as the role of poetry in the public sphere. In considering the
characteristics of a twenty-rst century poetic, Karen MacCormack draws
attention to the dynamics of different media and discourses upon the writing
of poetry. She proposes that poetry is a privileged form of thought, but Im
also intent on nding out what happens to poetry and different discourses
when they are brought into the same eld (p. 28). For Jennifer Moxley the
negotiation of the lyric impulse has led her own poetics to challenge some of
the more pedagogical impulses inherent in language writing. Acknowledging
the vitality of language writings enabling of permission for contrary opin-
ions, she nonetheless despairs of how the tendency has been oversimplied
and taught:
There is a sort of pedagogy [. . .] that drives me crazy though. The
idea that poetry is going to teach you how to be free, the rhetoric
about liberating the reader from their own oppression, the oppres-
sion of believing the texts they read. (p. 58)
Central to Moxleys own poetry is the sense of nding correspondences with
earlier writings. She refers to this sense of dialogue and exchange as equiva-
lent to Robert Duncans valorization of derivation, in that He sees himself as
a poet who is in dialogue with the tradition, and derives their sources and
energy and meaning from that conversation with the past. I feel a great
kinship with that sentiment (p. 76). Equally Moxley refutes a conceptual-
ization of innovation in poetry as a valorization of the latest cultural zeitgeist:
Im ne with writing in more traditional modes and referring to poetry of
the past and I feel very connected to the idea of traditionits very import-
ant to me. Innovation is less so (p. 76).
When questioned about the creative issues faced by innovative writers in
Britain and North America, Caroline Bergvall proposes that a key issue is the
very role and function of poetry itself and the need for direct exchange
between poetry and other artistic practices:
What is the role of poetry in a changing world, where reading
matters less, where writing is not the immediate inscription used,
and where poetry at large is more often than not considered an art of
circumstance and occasion? What does this mean for the practice
itself? For its readerships? For its diversity and scope? The demands
and forms that cultural, aesthetic, social cohabitationones
Poetics | 47

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existence with othersmay have on writing is a key issue. Questions
about language-use, translocal experience and cultural exibility are
important too. (p. 80)
Multilingualism is central to Bergvalls poetic. Language acquisition and
usage naturally inform a sense of cultural belonging and her work enacts
the coexistence of more than one language through the shattering of estab-
lished syntactic patterns. Asked about her work c.c.. Bergvall responds
that the volume explores the whole idea of using or developing a form of
writing as an account of my personal experience of multilingualism (p. 97).
Reecting on bilingualism and biculturalism in the work of writers such as
Theresa Cha, Lisa Linn Kanae and Coco Fusco, Bergvall adds that there is:
an immense inventive exibility that derives from bilingualism. But
this can also be a way of tackling often pressing concerns tied to
biculturalism, when it clashes with the discourses around national-
ism, citizenship, loyalty as a monolingual value, prejudice around one
of ones identities. (p. 97)
The range and responsiveness of the poetics expressed through these inter-
views is mesmerizing. Thurston shows us the importance of chronicling the
dynamism of a contemporary poetics that enables international exchange.
Bergvalls concerns regarding the situating of contemporary poetry in
todays world form a central consideration of the collection tc.., o..
co!o.o! :o1.., edited by Heidi R. Bean and Mike Chasar. The essays in
this collection examine how new methodologies of analysis can reveal more
about the cultural and social context of poetry. In many ways this book
follows the ground-breaking work established by the earlier publication of
tc.., o1 co!o.o! :o1.. + r.o1.. edited by Maria Damon and Ira Livingston
in 2009. Bean and Chasars preface addresses the problems faced by the
contemporary critic of poetrynot least the sheer amount of poetry
being produced during the twentieth century:
More than ever, scholars are aware of the enormous amount of
poetry that was written, distributed, circulated, and recirculated in
the wake of industrial and consumer capitalismthe historical period
that saw the emergence of new economic logics, new imperatives for
social change, and the birth of mass culture. (p. 3)
In treating poetry not only as an aesthetic act but as a site of and for social
and aesthetic activities (p. 5), the commentary of these essays is wide-
ranging. Indeed the editors suggest that the essays give a sense of the
48 | Poetics

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different trajectories that cultural studies offer. The scholarly elds in this
volume include: American studies, autobiography, documentary studies,
environmental studies, ethnography, history, media studies, music, new
geographies, postcolonial studies and performance studies. Multiple inter-
pretative contexts drive this collection. The ambition is to indicate how what
new critics called the poem itself may be subjected to rigorous formal
analysis and close reading but that analysis is not the only, or even prefer-
able, way of getting at how and why a poem means as it does (p. 10).
A selection of the essays is dedicated to an analysis of print culture.
Margaret Loose considers the work of Chartist reformer Ernest Jones and
how the media of nineteenth-century Englandnewspapers, novels and
popular songnearly destroyed his reform campaign. The empowering of
the burgeoning environmental movement in America is analysed by Angela
Sorby, who considers how mass-distributed childrens magazines, antholo-
gies, bird-watching manuals and school textbooks bridged the discourses of
science and poetry. Other essays include Edward Brunner on James Norman
Halls hoax volume o| M.!!...!!., Carrie Noland on the poetics of
Martinique writer E

dourard Glissant and Barrett Wattens consideration of

Avant-Garde Poetry, New Music and Cultural Studies. Three essays in
particular caught my attention: Alan Ramon Clintons Sylvia Plath and
Electracy, Maria Damons Pleasures of Mourning: A Yessay on Poetries
in Out-of-the Way Places and Cary Nelsons Only Death Can Part Us:
Messages on Wartime Cards.
The reading of Plaths ction and poetry through a cultural studies lens is
of course not new. One has only to consider existing critical work that
examines her writings relationship to the language of advertising, fashion,
music and the self-help manual. However, Clintons ambitious essay weds
Plaths poetics to the conductive logics and rhetorics it performs, which he
argues predate the advent of the personal computer. This situating of Plath
challenges the simplistic construction of confessionalism that has stultied
the reception of her writing:
What is at stake in wedding Sylvia Plaths poetics to electronic logic
and the development of computer technology? Not only will it fur-
ther contribute to the waning prestige of confessional approaches to
Plath, which tend to marginalize her cosmopolitan concerns and
reiterate the ideology of separate spheres on the level of literature
and criticism, but it also complicates our sense of the relationships
between historical references and the personal and lyric agendas in
Plaths writing. (p. 48)
Poetics | 49

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Indeed Clinton views Plaths work as a nascent form of digitality. He pro-
poses that Just as the Dadaists attempted to achieve the effects of cinema
before its possibilities had been fully implemented, so Plath attempted to
achieve the effects of digitality before it became a popular (or even widely
known) technology (p. 45). The assertion of this thought-provoking essay is
that our understanding of digital technology and the decentred, networked
structures of global power arising from it alert us to poetrys ability to
make unexpected connections. This awareness and openness to the con-
ductive logic operating within media conditions may even enable us to
navigate the hidden structures animating the ever-expanding archive of
the spectacle (p. 49).
Damon asserts that she is a literary cultural studies salvage-scholar
documenting events and writings that are both ephemeral and powerful,
attempting to make them signify beyond their immediate reference points
(p. 76). Her essay draws attention to the social impact and resonance of what
can be termed micropoetries. Synonyms for micropoetries might include
i|...o, 1c...!, .o., ...1 i!.| (|. |.o. . i.!, c|..),
.o., .co., o1 .1..1oo! o..o!. ...o.. /.o., c!|!... [. . .] c..
|co|/,. o1 !,...o! /o!!. (p. 63). All these works , /..o| |. .o1o. c
o....1 c... .o...., |o . c .o.... /o c/..|.. o.. .c... .o|..
|o c/...c1o. (p. 64). We could generally characterize this work as
found poetry. The sites for such found poetry also include virtual space and
a section of Damons essay reects upon the poetics of Flarf. This generalized
collective specializes in sentimentality and bathos (pp. 678) mostly work-
ing through listservs (early electronic mailing lists) on the web. She also
draws some attention to the way in which social networking sites work at
memorializing the dead. Damon revels in the slightly idiosyncratic form of
her own essay, which describes elegiac behaviour amidst her friends and
community. The focus here is on a broken and incomplete poetics, which
is often created from a sense of occasion and commemoration, in one case
the death of a friends daughter and in the second that of a friend. We can
understand micropoetries as writing which delights in the local and the
ephemeral and incompletion is its key characteristic:
Micropoetries comprise traces of the poetic within the everyday,
unworked-over; that is, raw material left raw instead of being
cooked into artistically self-conscious collage, pastiche, retelling, or
other incorporative literary genre. (p. 67)
Contemplating the study of micropoetries we are made alert to the terrifying
volume of material which can be at our disposal. This essay alerts us to how
50 | Poetics

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an empathetic poetics is performed in everyday life. However, an awareness
of this limitless archive of material can make reading can make its reception
seem like a daunting task.
Nelsons essay presents us with methodologies to approach the narratives
from his personal archive of 10,000 wartime popular poems. The poems
feature on cards, postcards, envelopes and miniature broadsides designed
for personal exchange rather than public display (p. 115). Nelson expresses
the poignancy of war ephemera:
These cards and their messages give us glimpsesbut only
glimpsesof how those who are conscripted to ght wars conduct
their lives and make sense of experience that is fundamentally beyond
comprehension. The result is a distinctive sort of textual microhis-
tory, not a comprehensive account of ordinary life during war but
rather a partial window on ordinary life gained by way of discon-
tinuous recovered voices. (p. 116)
The essay charts how the postcard poem served its different roles during the
Boar War, First and Second World Wars. Not only is the postcard poem an
expression of afnity, love and friendship, loss and mourning but in one
example it becomes a medium for nurturing continuities with newborn
children and toddlers. Commenting on the postcard as a form Nelson
states that Brevity is the rst law of the postcard, the mixed tyranny and
promise of its minimal allowance. Unlike the letter in which digression,
explanation, and persuasion are all possible the postcard imposes a law of
conciseness. The fragmentary nature of postcard correspondence in
Derridas words creates a residue of what we have made of one another
of what we have written one another (p. 128). This brevity lends itself to
the potent ambiguities inherent in the poetics of the postcard; its restrained
space offers a relatively unconstrained potential for multiple meanings
(p. 129). Most interesting is the interaction between the ofcial, often
patriotic verse written on the postcard and the senders own writing. For
Nelson the unstable poetics of the postcard message places them in dia-
logue with literary poetics. Thus the relationship of the two forms of writing
is never merely oppositional. On the poem card, they can be mutually
supportive or undermining, interrogative or echolalic (p. 129). The tracings
of these fragmented histories offer much to the cultural critic and the reader
of cultural criticism. Poignantly Nelson states that these cards testify to a
unique moment when private emotion is communal, inextricable from pol-
itical and ethical crisis (p. 133). In effect, this wonderful archival gathering
Poetics | 51

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offers important testimonies of everyday experience written during terrify-
ing circumstances.
Until recently Jack Spicers poetry collections and prose were notoriously
difcult to access. Spicers own antipathy to the circulation of his work during
his lifetime did not help. However, the publication of his collected poems M,
c.o/o!o., .1 1|. c M. (Wesleyan [2010]) and lectures 1|. uco. 1|o jo.|
io.! 1|. cc!!...1 t..o.. c jo.| :.... (Wesleyan [1998]), has remedied the
situation. It is therefore tting that a collection of essays +.. :.... c....o!
io,, also from Wesleyan Press, brings his poetry and poetics to a twenty-rst
century audience. Remarkably this is the rst book of criticism exclusively
focused on Spicers poetry and prose. The editor John Emil Vincent suggests
that the collection is an attempt to reassess Spicers poetics from a new
vantage. He proposes that all too often early critics tended to follow
Spicers poetics to the letter, adopting rather than interrogating the phrase-
ology used in his own essays. Vincent adds that Spicers notions of dictation
and the serial poem have more often than not disabled rather than helped
exegesis of Spicers work. Often, critics either listen too inattentively or too
literally to the lectures he delivered toward the very end of his life (p. 7).
Explaining Spicers conceptualization of the serial poem, Vincent proposes that
seriality is a way to get narrative pulsation to interact with lyric units. It
doesnt however do away with the lyric [. . .] It works to achieve narrative
diachrony and lyric synchrony in the same space (p. 8). He explains Spicers
comments on dictation by comparing his poetics with those of his close friend
Robert Duncan: Spicer wanted to distinguish his practice of dictation from
Duncans theosophically-based practice. In Duncans dictation, specic spirits
speak through mediums; in Spicers, while the poet still acts as a medium, the
speaker is absolutely unidentiable (p. 8).
The volume offers us new research ndings regarding Spicers life and
poetics. Overall, reading these essays one learns how Spicers poetry can be
read as part of the Berkeley Renaissance (with Duncan and Robin Blaser),
about his uneasy relationship with the poetics of the San Francisco
Renaissance and how his prose and poetry pregures Language writing in
the 1970s. Kevin Killians essay Spicer and the Mattachine uncovers the
extent of Spicers involvement in the East Bay chapter of the Mattachine
Society which was dedicated to defending gay human rights. Vincents own
chapter focuses on the poets detective novel 1|. 1c.. c io/.! and its rela-
tionship to biography. Maria Damons Jack Spicers Ghost Forms examines
Spicers relationship to ideas of poetic heritage, the gay community and what is
often posited as his internalized homophobia (p. 10). Michael Snediker con-
siders the often fraught relationship between lyric sensibility and the serial
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poem in Spicers i.!!, |. x.1. A reading of Spicers poetics in the light of
Giorgio Agambens philosophical writings enables Anita Sokolsky to examine
the impetus of posthumousness in Spicers poetry and its relationship to
assassination and the destruction of a poetic personality. A poetic collaboration
between Rosmarie and Keith Waldrop Spiced Language closes the collection
during which the two poets occupy Spicers idiom and, at least metaphoric-
ally, take dictation from Spicer himself (p. 11). This quixotic work includes
the playful assertion Both souls and onions make me weep (p. 217) as well as
the command Fake too many images (p. 216).
Three essays offer a way into reconsidering the relationship between
derivation and exchange, campness and entertainment as well as logos and
belief in Spicers poetics. Kelly Holts Spicers Poetic Correspondence: A
Pun the Letter Reects considers the role of the epistolary in its many
forms through Spicers poetry. Initially the essay examines composition of
poetic correspondence by his transformation of lyric and epistolary genres
(p. 37). Focusing also on +.. tc..o Holt reads the relationship between
prose and poetry, and how this work establishes its epistolary address.
Reading the ctional letters to Lorca in tandem with personal correspond-
ence enables Holt to reect upon the construction of community in Spicers
poetics. Correspondence can be read as a term which inscribes exchange
with ones literary predecessors:
For Spicer, the living poet is a medium, whose agency conducts a
simultaneous position as linguistic subject (writing and speaking) and
object (being circumscribed by language, as the poem is written
|.co| the poet) to yield poetry that maintains this active connection
with ones authors. (p. 37)
Usefully Holt charts the impact that historian Ernst Kantorowiczs lectures at
UC Berkeley had upon Spicers practice of the epistolary. As a linguist,
Spicer with Duncan sought a methodology equivalent to the medieval c1
.o. in order to write a poetics of phonemic signication and performance
(p. 44). The development of their ideas resulted in their poetics being taught
at the Poetry Center at San Francisco State College during 19567, sessions
which became known as Spicers Poetry as Magic workshop. The ghost-
written correspondence between Lorca and Spicer in +.. tc..o moves ideas
of correspondence to the realms of poetic possibility and authorization. Holt
suggests that:
As guide, master, and author text, Lorca authorizes Spicers series
as a poetic lineage, forming a rite of passage. The poetics of
Poetics | 53

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incorporation that informs +.. tc..o operates through tensions be-
tween textual genres, which negotiate the boundaries of poetic
possibility in relation to both the interior phantasmic realm and the
physical landscape. (p. 47)
Catherine Imbriglio informs us that in 1949 Spicer took part in a symposium
of poetry at UC Berkeley. Noting the size of the audience Spicer is reputed
to have commented Why is nobody here? Who is listening to us? (p. 99)
Imbriglio takes this famous lament as her point of departure. Her essay
examines the seemingly conicting ideas of the orphic and campness as
strategies of performance in Spicers work. Following Spicers use of the
word camp in his poetic, she denes elements of both as descent, lament,
dismemberment; humour, incongruity, artice, spectatorship and theatrical-
ity (p. 99). The essay seeks to extend Susan Sontags use of camp in her
essay Some Notes on Camp (1964) as purely an aesthetic. The essay also
seeks to build upon Damons consideration of a Spicers camp poetic as a
discourse characterized by a deterritorialized language (p. 100). Camp,
Imbriglio suggests in Spicers work can be read as as both a destabilizing
and a meaning-making mechanism which in turn may help ameliorate some
of the disconnect between overly serious critical readings and the humour
and playfulness that is one of the signicant animating features of the poetry
(p. 99). The deployment of what she terms the Orphic in Spicers poetics,
is wedded to ideas of lamentation, sincerity, emotion and voice (p. 113),
strategically works with and against the texture of camp. Imbriglios key
claim in this essay is that while neither camp or the Orphic are themselves
sufcient to energize or account for the evolutions that take place in Spicers
poetic practice, together they provide necessary correctives to the excesses
inherent in the others approach (p. 113). Indeed she suggests that this
tension enables Spicer to entertain his audience, to keep in fragmented
playemotion o1 artice, lamentation and humour, sincerity and irony,
depth and surface, plenitude and vacuum (pp. 11314).
It might initially appear curious to link Spicers poetic with religious
belief and doctrine. However, Norman Finkelsteins essay Spicers Reason
to Be / leave makes a compelling argument for examining his poetry in
the light of Calvinist belief. This approach draws comparative readings with
the poetry of Emily Dickinson and Susan Howe. Finkelstein asserts that the
struggle for religious faith in Spicer, or to be more precise, the dialectical
tension between poetry and religious faith that unfolds in his writing, de-
termines not only the content or matter of the work, but its form as well
(p. 157). Finkelstein builds upon Spicers notorious pronouncement of the
54 | Poetics

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poet as vessel by considering 1|. u.o1 c |. 1c u c |. +.|.., t... to!.
t.cc..c and io.o., i!.... In his poetry Finkelstein contends that
Spicer conceives of writing an on going examination of ones spiritual
state (p. 160). Moreover, the critic contends that the Calvinist Covenant
of Grace is exhibited in these works as a religious doctrine and as a
complex metaphor for poetry and the descent of poetic inspiration
(p. 164). As with many of the critics in this collection, Finkelstein draws
comparisons to the poetics of Duncan as a way of navigating Spicers writing.
He proposes that both share a distrust of poetic language:
To use Duncans terms again, a poetry premised on apotropaic magic,
aimed at defending against the seduction of words, ultimately leads
not to a chastened language [. . .] but to a total distrust of words, a
grand refusal of poetry as an expression of the irredeemably fallen
human order. (p. 168)
Following the continued interest in George Oppens poetics over the past
decade the title of Oren Izenbergs i.. :o..co tc.., o1 |. c.co1 c
:c..o! t.. (borrowed from Oppens own mesmerizing poem) promises
much. Its publication elicited a lively response from different communities
of poets and critics. Izenbergs work is highly ambitious and impressively
nuanced in philosophical thought. This collection of essays seeks a model of
reading that traces poets different and frequently unattainable claims for
poetrys ability to change the social sphere. In this work Izenberg considers
the poetry of W.B. Yeats, Oppen, Frank OHara and language writing. He
asserts that the motivation for the book grew from an increased dissatisfac-
tion with how poetry was divided into separate encampments between the
experimental and the traditional. Izenberg is particularly scathing of how the
so-called experimental poetries are marketed by their critical commenta-
tors. He states that these poetries are often:
So variously fragmented, occulted, difcult, and silent; so assertively
trivial, boring, or aleatory are the types of poetry on the experi-
mental side of the critical divide, that critics who champion the work
have gone to great didactic and theoretical lengths to imagine, ex-
plain, justify, and market alternative species of pleasure and interest
to compensate for the loss of traditional aesthetics. Such justications
include the fascination with whats difcult, the penetration of the
veil of the esoteric, the masochistic pleasures of derangement, the
politicized shock of estrangement, the tranquilizing or meditative
dwelling in the ambient. (p. 11)
Poetics | 55

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Moreover, he states that critical commentary has focused too much on the
poem itself as an object what he terms the o. of the poem, as a made thing
and an object of experience (p. 17). Instead, he proposes a need to return to
an earlier ideal of the poem not as a kind of object, performance, or practice
but as intending a |c!.1. or .oo..,constitutive of what it is to be a
person. He adds that a poets ultimate ambition must be not to produce that
class of objects we call poems, but to reveal, exemplify, or make manifest a
potential or power that minimally distinguishes what a person is (p. 17).
I was intrigued to nd out what Izenbergs analysis of personhood in
language writing might entail, particularly given his scathing summary of
current experimental poetic practice. Of interest is his analysis of person-
hood with reference to ideas of community and the early utopic claims of
language writing. The conceptualization of community in the early language
writing was inuenced by continental theory, particularly reader response
theory and ideas of collaboration challenging the primacy of the single au-
thorial voice. As Izenberg comments, the poets initially made dramatic
claims for the challenge that Language poetry presents to contemporary
culture, arguing for the contribution oppositional poetry makes to the
readers freedom and to social justice. He adds that At the same time,
Language poetry has understood itself to be ..! something like a culturea
provisional institution that grounds an alternative system of valuation.
Suggesting that there is a disparity between theory and practice Izenberg
challenges the groups ideas of collectivity as failing, and their desire for
freedom is perceived as incoherent (p. 140). Critically alert analyses of
language writings initial claims for poetic writing are at this point well
established. What is perhaps different in Izenbergs case is his choice of
reading to make his argument, and his specic focus on the poetics of per-
sonhood. The discussion focuses primarily on a collaborative work t...o1
written by Michael Davidson, Lyn Hejinian, Ron Silliman and Barrett
Watten. t...o1 is read as proof of language writings impetus towards
self-documentation (as indeed the recent publication of the ten-volume
memoir 1|. c.o1 t.oc testies). Izenberg suggests that Leningrad can be
approached as a meditation upon the difculty of community but queries its
ambitious claim there is c 1...... between collaborating on a poem and
being a community (p. 146). It would have been useful to reect a little
upon how far this grouping has shifted over time. Also, some of the poets
mentioned as afliated to the practice, such as Moxley for example, have no
concrete connectionher own link with the group is pretty tangential. But
this is provocative and engaging work, and Izenbergs challenge to the
mythologizing of a poetics is a useful, and dynamic enterprise.
56 | Poetics

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Finally, Meta DuEwa Joness exciting critical compendium 1|. Mo. .
Mo.. jo.. tc.., .c |. uo.!. r.o.o.. c :c|. Pc.1 reassesses our
understanding of jazz poetics. Her work builds upon the criticism of scholars
and poets such as Gayl Jones, Craig Werner, Sascha Feinstein, Aldon
Nielsen, Farah Jasmine Grifn and Kimberley Benston. The range of poets
covered in this work is impressive, the chapters include readings of Langston
Hughes, Gwendolyn Brooks, Nathaniel Mackey, Amiri Baraka, Harryette
Mullen, Ntozake Shange, Carl Phillips, Yusef Komunyakaa and Tracie
Morris. Jones alerts us to the fact that while the idea of jazz poetic has
become a familiar point of reference in African-American poetry, more
critical attention needs to be paid to its conceptualization especially in
light of performance theory. The book opens with reections upon her
research annotating archival recordings in the Library of Congress. Jones
asserts that Ultimately, the history and experience of the transatlantic slave
trade alternately haunts and hallows the legacy of voice and voicing in black
expressive culture. She adds that Both the unheard and the heard within
poetry and its performances always operate within the matrices of race,
gender, sexuality, and class (p. 3). It is important to note that Jones
approaches jazz as an overarching cadence that has its cross disciplinary
inuence. She denes the representation of poetry in this book as jazz
poetry, jazz poetics, jazz inection, jazz infusion, jazz resonance, jazz and
blues hybridism, jazz-driven poetry, and even a jazz-derived hip-hop poetics
(p. 24). Crucially, Jones establishes jazz as a vibrant adaptive tradition, which
enables past and present to dynamically intersect and rebound: jazz-infused
poetry always entails a circulatory copying and quoting, an exchange be-
tween performer and audience (p. 17).
The rst section of the book Riff, Remembrance and Revision places its
main focus on two icons of an African-American jazz poetic, Langston
Hughes and John Coltrane. Initially Jones examines the gendered perform-
ance and the technologies of Hughess solo and collaborative poetry record-
ings within the homosocial world of jazz, jazz imagist aesthetics, and formal
innovations. Central to Joness reading is how Hughess work has been
incorporated as riffs or intertextual echoes in the work of contemporary
poets. Coltranes pivotal inuence upon jazz poetics is also extended to the
practice of contemporary poets. Articulated as recall Jones traces the shift
in poetry since the Black Arts Movement while chronicling how different
poets have attempted to versify Coltranes evolutions in musical style, form,
and technique (p. 27). The second section New Traditions, New
Translations, looks at the intersection between jazz and hip-hop poetries.
Jones considers how recent poetries and musicians use their work to depart
Poetics | 57

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from masculinist norms associated with jazz. She examines how in particular
the black female body becomes a central presence in work by Shange,
Mullen, Quincy Troupe and Ted Joans. This section also examines how
the spoken word inuences poetic stylizations of racial and gender perfor-
mativity. Here Jones traces the development of improvization and instru-
mentality aesthetics to the percussive thematics in sound-directed hip-hop
poetics (p. 28). Key performances scrutinized include works by Morris, Saul
Williams, Major Jackson and Sharan Strange. Importantly she charts these
developments in contemporary African-American poetry as continuing the
practices developed during the New Negro and Black Arts Movements.
One fascinating issue scrutinized in 1|. Mo. . Mo.. is the tension
between textual performance and stage performance. Cleverly this book
differentiates between the conceptualization of a jazz poetic in the radical
poetics of text-based writers such as Mackey and Mullen and spoken word
poetry. In a useful aside, Jones explains the difference between spoken word
art and performance poetry:
Spoken-word art, of course emphasizes the dynamic qualities entailed
in speech. Not coincidentally, the term spoken word is often used
interchangeably with performance poetry, since the terminology
suggests the poems essence cannot reach fullment without a staged
[. . .] environment. (p. 184)
Jones also examines the marketability of spoken word poetry and its collu-
sion with hip-hop textures as well as the resistance of accentual-syllabic
verse to be read as performance works. 1|. Mo. o Mo.. certainly chal-
lenges any lazy generalizing use of jazz poetics and shows the complex
interplay between recorded performance, orality, cultural change, gender,
sexuality and textuality. Joness opening questions What is this black in
black poetics? What enables us to hear its multifocal sounds and see it
multivalent signs? (p. 5) are reected upon during this work. Ultimately
Jones contends that black poetry as an ultra-discursive eld of signication,
enables some of the most compelling articulations of politics and poetics of
representation, imagination and the improvisatory performance of identities
(p. 5).
Books Reviewed
Bean, Heidi R. and Mike Chasar, eds. Poetry After Cultural Studies. UIowaP. [2011]
pp. 241. pb 34.50 ISBN 9 7816 0938 0410.
58 | Poetics

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Izenberg, Oren. Being Numerous: Poetry and the Ground of Social Life. PrincetonUP.
[2011] pp. ix 234. pb 19.95 ISBN 9 7806 9114 8663.
Jones, Meta DuEwa. The Muse is Music: Jazz Poetry from the Harlem Renaissance to
Spoken Word. UIllP. [2011] pp. xiv 285. hb 37 ISBN 9 7802 5203 6217.
Sheppard, Robert. When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry. Shearsman. [2011]
pp. 225. pb 13.95 ISBN 9 7818 4861 1368.
Thurston, Scott. Talking Poetics: Dialogues in Innovative Poetry. Shearsman. [2011]
pp. 133. pb 10.95 ISBN 9 7818 4861 1917.
Vincent, John Emil, ed. After Spicer: Critical Essays. WesleyanUP. [2011] pp. 225. pb
21.95 ISBN 9 7808 1956 9424.
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