Let us propose that when a poet offers a close reading of a famous living poet who quotes another famous dead poet who supposedly said a stupid thing, then that poet will spell the dead poet’s name correctly–no matter how stupid the remark supposedly is or was, or how far the paraquoter poet’s aesthetic may be from the paraquotee.
Let us propose we ignore that Schapiro’s [sic] comments spring out of his rather famous criticism of the high dictioned seriousness of Modernism, which many other people had then as now, as well as Shapiro’s speaking out about Ezra Pound’s anti-semitism in the wake of some prizes he got late in his career; ones that, as a Jew, he had a problem with.
Let us strategically ignore that the same Hiroshima trope that Kooser/Schapiro [sic] employed is also used by Yasusada to great trickster effect; that Auschwitz is pointed to as a watermark period after which poems could be written. If Kooser is ignorant in his genocidal invocations, then so are so many others.
Or is it because of Kooser’s is a direct statement, that it wasn’t part of an ongoing “project” for which the Poetrycriticismlander can offer context, or some death-of-the-author science fair Rube Goldberg machine?
Instead, let us simply put our Poetrycriticismland blinders on and portray Shapiro as an agent of Wal-Mart anti-intellectualism, and as Kooser taking up the baton, and mimic the noblesse oblige of the Poetcriticlander.
We may ask: Since when Ted Kooser is from, let alone an agent of, the bourgeoisie? Oh, I get it. He worked for an insurance company, writes mainstream poetry, whatever that is, and so therefore he must be a middle class, boring person. And in the world of Poetrycriticsmland, that’s only two steps away from oppressor-agent.
***
While I’m at it, some other things.
Let us take odd confort in the consideration that this upper middle-classing of mainstream American poetry has been going on at least since the purely aesthetic approaches dried up in the 1970s, and the movement camp loyalty oaths came back from the early 20th century in half-force. (Let us, too, remember that John Ashbery lambasted these oaths and demonizations in his address to the Yale Art School back 1968; let us assume many upper-middle class poet-critics continue to miss that memo.)
Let us witness, as an example, the last decades’ poetrycriticismlanders’ Swift Boating of Philip Levine’s career–and really, so many others of his ilk–of, as Hank Lazer says of J.D. McClatchy, the “concealed ideology” that manifests itself in the “unstated preference for the bourgeois subject.” In Levine’s case, here is a man who has worked more days in a factory than all of the Language poets over three decades put together–and hell, let us throw in a good chunk of Poetry Projecters. But it is the idea of Levine’s Knopf-fonted, full-lined poems that remain, to the noblesse oblige of Poetcriticismlanders, the force of stripmall vanilla imperialism. It’s gone past, in other words, an objection to a certain kind of writing: now it’s moral, political, all of a piece. Whereas as recently as the early 1980s there would be anthologies with all camps inside its pages, as Jed Rasula points out in his article “The Empire’s New Clothes: Anthologizing American Poetry in the 1990s” (American Literary History, 1995). The poetcritical reception to such an idea is so tin-whistle lockstep nowadays–to my mind, mostly on the experimental sides–that such a thing would never happen under the current binary camp conditions.
Let us consider the Thomas Frank paradox-in-reverse branding efforts of those poets-critics who take to task those who write in a lyric or line not sufficiently revolutionary as not only mainstream–again, whatever that is–but as barbarous, as true anti-intellectuals. Indeed, there is a reverse-reverse Thomas Frank/Baffler movement afoot, in which Dana Gioia is cast as Karl Rove. The rhetoric here, you might guess, is potentially laughably inflated. (And I think the author, Steven Evans, a very good critic, is open to thinking things as otherwise.) To be sure, when you compare poets to being complicit with Iraqi war efforts because they are a civil servant or funded by a grant or gives grants, or fail to see art and politics as two different things, you implicate a lot of people, yo.
(Indeed, I know a couple poets who are aggressively experimental or whatnot and are Republican–God forbid I out them here in a News post. What are we to make of that phenomenon? Is it important that a poetry writer be completely expunged of all corporate patronage in order to write a pure poetry? To some, it is, and I respect that, but keep the sliding scale pari passu.)
Let us at least propose, or let me propose, that one source of the this warped-class-based criticism has been since the MFA programs ballooned and expanded to include, like, common people, so even working class people, many of whom wouldn’t have considered college, let alone graduate school, saw academia as an option to explore their writing. For every rich kid who drops out of MFA school, there’s one who get a PhD maybe, and there’s another who congratulates him or herself for staying “outside of the academy.” And the bizarre side effect of the MFA boom, has been, along with the rest of the culture, that there is an extra need to distinguish one’s self from the so-called mainstream. The thing is, there is no nicheing of poem-writing. That’s because there is no mainstream poetry anymore, just the same as there is no mainstream pop music, movies, TV, journalism, painting, dance, clothes, or politics, for that matter. True to form, poetry is still about 50-100 years behind every other artistic and societal trend, and aesthetic politics is no exception.
Let us promise ourselves: Whenever we meet one of those back-patters, those hard-hard-core avant gardists who keep it real with the straw poet arguments–please, please ask what their parents did/do for a living. Or even if they, say, work for the state themselves.
