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| Bill Knott |
I was recently struck by a blog post by Bill Knott entitled "can she bake a cherry pie" that initially left me shaking my head: wondering how post-avant theory & practice (or any poetics) could be so curtly dismissed, & in language that doesn't pretend to be critical at all. Just outright invective in a glaringly large font, hardly fifteen lines long, directed against the critics of Billy Collins everywhere who (as the owner of Bill Knott's prose re poetry blog contends) can't reconcile the popularity of a single poet with their own "poeticspeak", try as they might. And tried they have.
Knott's blog post seems to speak uncomfortably to people like me who really can't seem to account for anything like public taste either. If the best and brightest post-avants out there (presumably the likes of Silliman, Bernstein, Watten, Armantrout et. al.), "armed with their grad degrees in poetics, in post-posty theory", can't really tell the good from the bad, then we're really left with two options: to damn poetry theory or the reading public. And of the two I'm going to damn least the reading public. Of theory & theorists he's pretty explicit & I'm inclined to agree with him for the most part:
Avant-hicks: I used to call them avanthacks, hacks, but hicks is I think more appropriate for these impoverished pockets so cut off from the rest of the world, saved in their isolation, incestuous, bristling, mad"Incestuous, bristling, mad", indeed. Any poetry that's written to the specifications of theory can't help look lop-sided & a touch "mad": mad as anything that, as Einstein once quipped, does the same thing over & over and yet hopes for a different result. And why should cultural productions be exempt from this characterization? With Language theory you just get more Language poetry, whatever the practitioner, materials or artistic temperament, and if you expect anything interestingly different to arise, well, you must be a tad nuts. Even erudite commentators like Curtis Faville get hopelessly entangled in the insane circularity of a poetry that's slavishly tied to theory: as is seen in his recent discussion of Michael Palmer.
In fact, I might argue for a sort of poetic psychosis to account for the complete disconnect between reality & art, even going so far as to suggest (as I did in the case of Barrett Watten's Plasma ) the Language poem loses itself completely in theory, cast into the form of a literary changeling easily (& eerily) reproducible by mechanical means (such as a Google translator). And what does this mechanical reproducibility envisage if not a poetry that's been turned into a beast without a heart or a deleuzian "body without organs, or even a “natural language processing chatterbot” named ALICE to which Christian Bök recently posed a series of questions taken directly from Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris.
Does anyone expect a fashionable poetry interchangeable with translators, eviscerated literary tropes & chatterbots to be embraced by a reading public? Can ALICE really bake a cherry pie? After all, Knott had rather be asked, as he already has, to contribute to a Billy Collins poetry anthology than to one edited by more fashionable literary theorists. Explaining the salient differences between them, he says in a Monday, April 4, 2011 post
Collins transcends the in-house standards of PoBiz, which most other anthologists are required to obey: he can include a pariah in his anthol and not suffer reprisals, whereas the other compilers fearful for their careers must exclude blacklisted writers like me or face negative consequences in their professional currency.Billy Collins (if I read Knott aright) seems to have become the fearful Other of contemporary poetics, and with good reason. Like Frost, Sandburg & Crane before him, he commands an almost instant readership in his own lifetime & looks as if there isn't a single critical blemish to be found on him. At least that's the appearance & it's enough to make the "PoBiz" crowd a little flustered. The Language poets have only bought time for themselves by exporting their views into areas where Billy Collins will always be read with more enjoyment than Ron Silliman.
9 comments:
One small correction: Ron doesn't have a graduate degree, not even an undergraduate degree. He never finished his bachelor's.
Collins is an interesting case, because he isn't a person anymore. Instead, he is the representation of a poetry that is hated by some. Just to mention his name can cause consternation and then reviling.
Strange, since he's such the poet of such unassuming verse. It is bland, though he can turn a phrase well, so it doesn't seem to me anything to revile, or to cherish.
But Collins represents the other. He doesn't even represent himself anymore.
Bill Knott, well, let's say, the evidence is that he must have been doing the same thing over and over at some point.
Geof
Thanks for the comment, Geof
I knew that Silliman doesn't have a university degree but his 'New Sentence' is so influential among academic poets, & he's taught so many writing seminars over the years, I'm still inclined to consider him one, too.
I call them ... Credentialists
which is antithestical to mere Academics
and
as for this Billy Collins ... who's he ?
and have I missed anything re: ?
or as Gracian says/write in his # 191:
"[...] The true courtesy is performance of duty; the spurious, and especially the useless, is deceit. It is not respect but rather a means to power. Obeisance is paid not to the man but to his means, and compliments are offered not to the qualities that are recognized but to the advantages that are desired."
et cetera;
Ed,
that's a great quote!So much of LangPo is indeed "spurious".
I'm reading Frank O'Hara at the moment: & I guess as far as literary movements go the "New York" school seemed pretty genuine. It's interesting to discover that O'Hara spurned the fashionable "parlor games" of his day, and he was pretty much ignored at first.
What saved him was genuine 'talent': good ol' language mastery. Not the butchery of the fashionable "PoBiz" crowd.
I'm interested in Geof's statement that Billy Collins "doesn't even represent himself anymore." An odd judgment—as if the representation weren't a projection, I mean. Unless the point is that Collins writes to sustain his "representation," in the manner of an actor sustaining his "image," I don't see how this is anything but a critique of the projectionists. Bill Knott is one of them, in this instance; I am one every time I read about Christian Bök and is ego-satruated "Xenotext" project: I realize that he and Kenny Goldsmith are the Elmer Gantrys of the so-called avant-garde, and the credulity of those who give them a platform (see under: Harriet) makes me want to chew nails. We are all beset by our representations. That's why we read and write poems, I guess: to escape the representations now and then—to touch something real. Poetry that does that for me—LangPo doesn't, Bill Knott's does—is a great pleasure and a great relief.
Joseph,
the "Xenotext" project is a variation on derek beaulieu's "Prose of the Trans-Canada" that's a variation on Cendrar's "Prose of the Trans-Siberian" (see Geof's April 24 post) that's a variation on, etc. etc. The repetitiveness of slavish imitation that's tantanount to literary madness.
Or perhaps that's what the avant-garde is striving for: feigned craziness in contrast to the all too real, hard-won normalcy of a work finely executed.
Chi sa?
Gosh, Conrad, I don't know where to begin.
I think it's important to keep separate things which are inherently unalike, before you paint them all the same color--whatever their value.
Bill Knott and Billy Collins.
Robert Creeley and Cid Corman.
Robert Frost and Eddie Guest.
Ron Silliman and Jorie Graham.
Stephen Rodefer and Michael Palmer.
Robert Grenier and Aram Saroyan.
The point about Collins is that he could be a stand-up comic, working night-clubs, with about the same kind of talent, and the same kind of wit. It has to do with audiences, and accessibility, and training, and taste, and everything else. Collins isn't in the strict sense a "serious" writer. Instead, he fashions a vision of his audience the same way ad-writers do, relying on amateur demographics and market-test-groups to create a "product" with enough mouth-feel to command shelf-space. As books, and the audiences for them, die, people like Collins will probably turn into archeological ruins. Or morph into the stand-up comics they were born to be. Do people still go to comedy clubs anymore? I never did, but I still appreciate a good joke. But that's not what I go to poetry for. Ogden Nash and Phyllis McGinley took care of that corner of the realm. God rest their souls. Even John Updike was a better poet than a novelist.
Bill Knott wrote a handful of not-bad (gloomy) minimalist poems in the 1960's, but he got side-tracked by the formal surrealists, somewhere along the way, and also tangled up in his inferiority-complex, which he exploited almost as if it were an archetypical dramatic role.
Feeling sorry for yourself isn't a full-time job, despite what Knott thinks. If you place an ultimate value in the response of an imaginary "public" you will live or die by that measure. Knott's relationship to this imaginary audience has driven his whole poetic persona for at least the last 25 years, and it's sad. He's old enough, and smart enough, to know better. Either he's squandered his talent, or his talent was never very big to begin with--take your pick. Failure is its own reward.
Conrad:
I think you're short-changing Silliman's commitment to avant garde theory and criticism. There's nothing wrong with thinking seriously about literature, or even positing new kinds of writing.
What may be bad is how it is used to privilege inferior writing, which I've felt several times in his capsule reviews of new poetry over the years. If your theory backs up and promotes good work, then your theory probably has merit. But when it's used to prove how good some bad work is, then there's a problem. Several times Ron has quoted fragments of poems which do nothing for me, and he's enthralled by it--I'm thinking "huh?...."
Several times, I accused him of praising bad work which is formally correct, while condemning very good work because it's un-PC (from his vantage). I think you have to acknowledge good work in all kinds of genres and styles. As Chomsky says, we have to see the value in everything, especially where we least expect it, and especially in our enemies, and especially when it may cost us something to acknowledge it. That's also a kind of courage.
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