Some nuggets from Donald Hall: and, again, the problem with mainstream Canadian poetry

I think it was Joseph Hutchison who alerted me to Donald Hall's (by now classical) essay on poetry and poetry writing entitled "Poetry and Ambition" posted at POETS.org. Lately I've had a chance to look at it and am exceedingly glad I did. In fact, it's a piece I'll return to often whenever, as is often the case, the deplorable state of writing today gets me down. There's no aspect of the topic Hall doesn't at least allude to: he's in the main refreshingly honest, clear-headed & just insightful enough to show us a plausible wait out of the mess writing is in today. I will quote a few passages with brief commentary of my own

Like Hall I've always believed writing is dedicated to the call of anonymity, a lifetime of patient reading, language study & persistent self-scrutiny. The passages taken from Hall's AWP address, among the many that offered themselves, develop each of these writerly virtues in ways I find personally satisfying. Though the examples in Hall's essay are predominantly American the similarities to the Canadian writing scene take on their own unique form: if nothing else the discussion will give me another opportunity to make my case against mainstream Canadian writing.

(a) "To desire to write poems that endure—we undertake such a goal certain of two things: that in all likelihood we will fail, and that if we succeed we will never know it."

There is nothing that is more appalling (to me) than the clamor for recognition & almost celebrity-like status among poets today, most of whom are mediocre and have to attribute any recognition they do get to pure happenstance.The Starnino and Bök Cage Match debate is a perfect illustration of the almost slavish devotion of contemporary poetry to the twin ideals of marketability & funky aesthetics. This crass 'performance' component (probably derived from Fluxus) almost always makes its way into the more popular poetry venues. This unacknowledged obeisance to mass media techniques is absurd.

In an age where anything that looks top-down, commercial-based is always denounced, one wonders why poets resort to staged bickering when they ought to be more collaborative, more intelligently networked, more seriously immersed in practice. At least Carmine Starnino blogs, though profiting by association with the well-established véhicule press name. What is particularly ludicrous is that Bök, putative spokesperson for the avant-garde, can't seem to appreciate the enforced 'anonymity' most of his role-models (like Schwitters, Arp, Apollinaire) had had to endure in the past. His cool will turn to 'uncool' or, even worse, the ol' 90s 'geek' from which it comes, & it won't be fun to read or hear him anymore.

When writing school production is coupled with loud poetry performance the result is a literary milieu of garish theatricality. The anticipation of failure & sanguine hopes for a future readership play no role in contemporary poetry at all. Only in Canada, you say?

(b) "We develop the notion of art from our reading. When we call the poem more important than ourselves, it is not that we have confidence in our ability to write it; we believe in poetry. We look daily at the great monuments of old accomplishment and we desire to add to their number, to make poems in homage to poems. Old poems that we continue to read and love become the standard we try to live up to. These poems, internalized, criticize our own work. These old poems become our Muse, our encouragement to song and our discouragement of comparison."

The only type of reading that's encouraged these days (especially in writing classes) is the slavish critiquing of competitors' work that takes up most of a poet's time & energies and that is touted, by paid writing masters, as solid preparation for real world publishing. What tends to get left out (if not purposely denigrated) in a creative writing workshop model is acknowledgement of literary antiquity itself. Why? Language & the notion of literary precedence seem to have been discarded decades ago as elitist 'old school' modernist baggage. Bloom's celebrated anxiety of influence won't possibly take hold in the imagination that's been reared on the editorial fiats of mostly subsidized journals and mags. As I've said before, nothing stirs literary indignation in Canada-in fact, nothing gets people really worked up-like the threat of more subsidy cuts. In a pampered nanny state like ours literary excellence is always a function of tax-payer dollars and a bogus awards infrastructure.

Reading under these pecuniary conditions can never be serious

(c)"To produce the McPoem, institutions must enforce patterns, institutions within institutions, all subject to the same glorious dominance of unconscious economic determinism, template and formula of consumerism.

The McPoem is the product of the workshops of Hamburger University."

Poetry in my country, and its grants-based operating systems, really amount to a literacy by bureaucracy in which academics, government grants & the publishing houses that subserve them quite literally control the cultural means of production (at least, in the mainstream 'wine-and-cheese' sector, as poet Andreas Gripp calls it). If culture costs money and depends on a well-oiled bureaucracy to maintain & propagate it (and the rationale for Canada Council sounds a good deal like neo-Liberal propaganda anyways), it's bound to be a real drag on the true creative impulse (what Hall & also critic George Steiner refer to as the "cafe"), making Canadian culture a kind of politics-prone product of state control and interference.

Visual poet/artist Jim Leftwich at his textimagepoem blog has offered, in "discontinuous poem #32", a rallying cry—if ever there was one!— for artistic work that lives through the most disinterested & impassioned means: "Let us imagine instead the construction of an exemplary independence - collective, cooperative and, finally, creative, which is to say capable of disseminating evidence of its difference to and through the quotidian cultural environment." Perhaps the last time the Canadian cultural community felt this significant "difference" was the scandal of bpNichol winning the Governor-General's Award in 1970, an event that sent proverbial shock waves through both mainstream culture and the House of Commons. I don't think this extraordinary feat could be repeated today.

d) "Poets who stay outside the circle of peers—like Whitman, who did not go to Harvard; like Dickinson for whom there was no tradition; like Robert Frost, who dropped out of two colleges to make his own way—these poets take Homer for their peer. To quote Frost again: 'The thing is to write better and better poems. Setting our heart when we're too young on getting our poems appreciated lands us in the politics of poetry which is death.' Agreeing with these words from Frost's dour middle-age, we need to add: and 'setting our heart' when we are old 'on getting our poems appreciated' lands us in the same place."

Art (in my view) is by nature anti-intellectual: in fact, the academic is the toxin in the system for which there is no antidote. With few exceptions academics make the worst poets, always slavishly tied to pet theory, inclined to imitate authors of their doctoral period. Writing is an intensely lonely practice that ought to shun meddlesome institutions, whether academic, political or religious, the writer (particularly the avant-gardist) preferring life at the margins, casting aspersions, giving the finger. As Geert Lovink has aptly put it in his Zero Comments: Blogging and Critical Internet Culture, "Art should hit, slap in the face, go straight through all interference, and not question. It should present itself as an object of desire, a tangible commodity, and not see itself as a prototype. It should be instantly ready for consumption" (41). But interestingly enough the numbers of poet-academics in the blogosphere are legion. Since they seem to have always enjoyed ready access to more prestigious journals & university press publishing, I wonder what brings them there in the first place?

Perhaps the techno-networking that's corollary to having an online presence can replace the top-down hierarchical model of the contemporary university: perhaps it's to the democratizing pull of Web 2.0 that they're secretly drawn. Perhaps they see it as an alternative to traditional academe in the same way that blogging is said to compete with (and certainly, in the case of print, has begun to supersede) mainstream media, offering real diversity & alternative methodologies. However, my experience with the "credentialists' (as poet Ed Baker calls them) has been anything but utopian: and if these same instructors happen also to write poetry, well then it's the same ol' elitism & opinion-vetting as ever. I offer Frank Davey's Open Letter as a prime example of an online academic presence, fuelled by Canada Council dollars, that tries to pass itself off as a cool snarky ("irreverent") addition to contemporary writing. Robert Archambeau's Samizdat Blog, on the other hand, is a less pernicious kind of elitist blogging, a bit more enjoyable than the rest because of its knack for irony and humor . But this could be just a pose.

(e) "So the workshop answers the need for a cafe. But I called it the institutionalized cafe, and it differs from the Parisian version by instituting requirements and by hiring and paying mentors. Workshop mentors even make assignments: 'Write a persona poem in the voice of a dead ancestor.' 'Make a poem containing these ten words in this order with as many other words as you wish.' 'Write a poem without adjectives, or without prepositions, or without content. . . .' These formulas, everyone says, are a whole lot of fun. . . . They also reduce poetry to a parlor game; they trivialize and make safe-seeming the real terrors of real art. This reduction-by-formula is not accidental. We play these games in order to reduce poetry to a parlor game. Games serve to democratize, to soften, and to standardize; they are repellent. Although in theory workshops serve a useful purpose in gathering young artists together, workshop practices enforce the McPoem."

And the result's been what I call the death of the Sentence and what Hall calls "a parlor game". A condition that's markedly worse than the McPoem. In any event, I think we're saying the same thing. Not the poem but the very medium through which it comes into being; not literariness but language itself: not the product but its very conditions for existence—all these, really amounting to the same thing, are what's at stake here. Stanley Fish has recently published a work entitled How to Write a Sentence that'll probably become this century's finest defense of the lost art of effective writing.

Certainly Fish's idea of the Sentence is markedly different from that of Grenier, say, or Ian Hamilton Finlay and will turn its guns on the disastrous LangPo experiment of the past 2 decades or so. And if this happens in the States, it's bound to have its usual ripple effect in Canada where egregious language misuse, cited always as innovative, can range from slam to Bök's univocalic and now more recent DNA-constrained verses. And as for the latter's recent efforts to mix art with science, Geert Lovink, again: "The will to subordinate to science is nothing more than a helpless adolescent gesture of powerlessness and victimhood." (68)