Mainstream Marginality
Rae Armantrout’s “Mainstream Marginality” is a critical send-up of the gap between mainstream and avant-garde poetries, read in terms of the “anthology wars.” For the editors of an anthology of mainstream poets (The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, 1985), the younger poets they select are “rarely a card-carrying group member, political or aesthetic.” Armantrout questions this refusal of explicit ideology as disingenuous. To begin with, it is based on a clear set of exclusions: there will be no ideologues, eccentrics, New York School or Language poets, or lyric poets in such a collection. Armantrout’s reading of the poems included, however, reveals a consistent rhetoric of marginality, to the degree that it approaches an ideology itself: “The ‘typical younger American poet’ is outdoors in an ‘abandoned’ location doing physical labor with a sharp instrument.” Such a rhetoric of marginality leads, through the use of appropriately framed poetic narrative, to claims for authenticity—which for Armantrout are unexamined and poorly defended. At the heart of her review is a refusal to allow editorial selection to occur without itself being subject to scrutiny. The aesthetic issues she engages are still timely—the programmatic disavowal of aesthetic ideology versus the unconscious reproduction of one—in this scathing gem. In 2010 Rae Armantrout received both a National Book Critics Circle Award and a Pulitzer Prize for her collection of poetryVersed.
The Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, ed. Dave Smith and David Bottoms (New York: Quill, 1985)
Dave Smith and David Bottoms, the editors of the Morrow Anthology of Younger American Poets, include in their foreword a composite portrait of the younger, American poet. They write that “he is rarely a card-carrying group member, political or aesthetic” (19). In this foreword Smith and Bottoms, typical younger American poets in this regard, reveal none of the aesthetic criteria around which they have shaped this book. In fact, they claim to have used only two simple guidelines in choosing their contributors: “The poets chosen must have published one full length book, preferably recent in appearance, and a book that indicated future work of quality from the poet” (16), and their contributors must be “poets born since 1940” (17). Guidelines so general would produce, one would suppose, an extremely diverse anthology. The editors almost appear to deny responsibility for the contents of the book, in fact, when they write, “The publication of an anthology of new poets is an opportunity to observe the language discovering its possibilities as if for the first time” (1). We are the passive witnesses, then, to some inarguable linguistic Genesis.
An introduction by Anthony Hecht follows the editors’ foreword. He is able to draw conclusions about this generation (my generation) of American poets based on the material he finds in these pages. For instance, “Their poems are not offered as the adornments or by-products of colorful or eccentric personal lives” (37). One wonders what Hecht considers eccentric. But, leaving aside his snide terminology, one could conclude from Hecht’s statement that literary descendants of Frank O’Hara or Allen Ginsberg such as Ted Berrigan and Anne Waldman will not be found in this book. He may not have a colorful life but, according to the editors, “In his poems the younger poet tends to be himself, an invented version of himself” (19). In other words, these poems are written from a single, privileged point of view; they will be unitary, first-person narratives. From this one could conclude that “language” poets, such as Charles Bern stein and Hannah Weiner, who have opened their poems up to a number of conflicting social voices in a critique of the conventional concept of self, will not be included here. Finally Hecht finds himself able to claim, “They are a generation that seems disinclined to song” (40). From this one might conclude that poets influenced by the play of sound and reference in a poet like Robert Duncan, such as Susan Howe and Michael Palmer, will not be found in this book. If one were to take the claims of this book seriously, one would decide that contemporary American poetry represents a radical narrowing of poetic possibility. But even a moderately well-informed reader will know that many poets born since 1940 who have published full-length books have been left out. Why? It must be because the editors don’t think that their books promise “future work of quality.” Yet they never make the slightest effort to define or defend their concept of quality. It is assumed that we (a completely imaginary we) understand and agree with their taste implicitly.
Now that we have some idea of what is not in this book, let’s look at the poems that are in it. Glancing through the book, one could get the idea that these were “card-carrying members” of some club. One sees immediately that almost all the lines are of medium length and begin flush against the left-hand margin—no prose poems here. Looking closer, say comparing opening stanzas, one sees, again and again, a narrative, discursive approach which places the writer physically in some particular setting, often, though not always, rustic, and begins to relate one (complexity is not favored) particular experience meant to either make a (one) point, confer on the poet some special authority, or both. We could compare “Picking Grapes in an Abandoned Orchard,” by Larry Levis, with “An Abandoned Overgrown Cemetery in the Pasture Near Our House,” by Gregory Orr. The poem by Levis begins:
Picking grapes alone in the late autumn sun
A slight, curved knife in my hand,
Its blade silver from so many sharpenings,
Its handle black.
I still have a scar where a friend
sliced open my right index finger once,
in a cutting shed—
The same kind of knife.
The grapes drop into the pan,
And the gnats swarm over them, as always. (390)
The second stanza of Gregory Orr’s poem reads:
I clear it with clippers;
slicing the prickly stalks
and tossing wiry tangles
of briars over the wall
to the cows. It’s a warm day.
Working, I sluff off winter’s
torpor as a snake sheds skin.
I find a wren’s nest, cup
from which ghosts sip.
What’s in it? Human tears,
their only food. Always it’s empty,
always it’s filled to the brim. (495)
Thus we see that the “typical younger American poet” is outdoors in an “abandoned” location doing physical labor with a sharp implement. Both isolation and sharp implements seem associated in the “typical” American mind with a certain glamor. Perhaps that is what lends these poems their tones of authority and solemnity. The quote from Levis seems, simply, to assert that the poet is in touch with what he probably thinks of as “real life.” This might be reassuring if one were personally concerned with the state of Mr. Levis’s mental health. Otherwise, it seems to me to be emptily self-aggrandizing. The Gregory Orr stanza sets out to establish the poet’s authority by means of an identical strategy. Once that authority is established, Orr uses it to make several assertions: ghosts drink from wrens’ nests; wrens’ nests contain human tears; tears are the only food of ghosts. Are you convinced? For me there is an oppressive machismo inherent in all this. A book full of such poems proves that poetry in the United States is “practiced in a wide and generous variety of idioms,” as Hecht states in his introduction, only to the extremely myopic.
But the characteristic of the “typical younger American” poetry that I object to most is exemplified in Diane Ackerman’s poem “A Fine, a Private Place,” which begins:
He took her one day
under the blue horizon
where long sea fingers
parted like beads
hitched in the doorway
of an opium den. (43)
This is a poem about a sexual encounter, and one can see why the writer might want to suggest the illicit by mentioning an opium den—although such imagery is somewhat trite. But the sea can only be “like beads / hitched in the doorway” momentarily and for Ms. Ackerman’s convenience. In fact, the ocean can resemble a vertical sequence of discrete, solid objects in almost no way imaginable. To make such a fatuous simile is to insult one’s materials: the sea, opium dens, and language itself. The problem with this anthology is that language is being used for ulterior purposes, not appreciated and explored. As George Oppen says in his poem “The Gesture”:
The question is
How does one hold something
In the mind which he intends
To grasp and how does the salesman
Hold a bauble he intends
To sell? The question is
When will there not be a hundred
Poets who mistake that gesture
For a style.
(Collected Poems, 80)
It is perfectly legitimate, of course, for Smith and Bottoms to choose the poets they prefer for an anthology. It is illegitimate, however, for them to obscure the nature of the choices they’ve made and pretend that other tendencies do not exist in contemporary American poetry. It is disingenuous for them to pretend that their book created itself by means of a kind of natural selection while they stood back and watched “language discover its possibilities.” As usual, it is worthwhile to examine claims to naturalness and objectivity carefully to find out what or who is being suppressed.
PUBLISHED: Marginality: Public and Private Language (1986), 6:141–44.
KEYWORDS: lyric poetry; genre; ideology; readings.
LINKS: Rae Armantrout, “Chains” (PJ 5), “On Pythagorean Silence” (PJ 2), “The Person in My Work” (PJ 9), “Silence” (PJ 3); Lydia Davis, “Some Notes on Armantrout’s Precedence” (PJ 6); William Corbett, “Harwood/Walker and Raworth” (PJ 2); Alan Davies, “Motor Mouth” (PJ 5); Norman Finkelstein, “The Problem of the Self in Recent American Poetry” (PJ 9); Kathleen Fraser, “Overheard” (PJ 4); Lyn Hejinian, “An American Opener” (PJ 1); Laura Moriarty, “The Modern Lyric” (PJ 7); Jed Rasula, “On Rothenberg’s Revised Technicians of the Sacred” (PJ 6); Ron Silliman, “The Dysfunction of Criticism: Poets and the Critical Tradition of the Anti-Academy” (PJ 10).
SELECTED BIBLIOGRAPHY: Collected Prose (San Diego: Singing Horse, 2007); A Wild Salience: The Writing of Rae Armantrout, ed. Tom Beckett (Cleveland, Ohio: Burning Press, 1999); Extremities (Berkeley: The Figures, 1978); The Invention of Hunger (Berkeley: Tuumba, 1979); Precedence (Providence, R.I.: Burning Deck, 1985); Necromance (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1991); Made to Seem (Los Angeles: Sun & Moon, 1995); True (Berkeley: Atelos, 1998); Pretext (Los Angeles: Green Integer, 2001); Veil: New and Selected Poems (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2001); Up to Speed (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2004); Next Life (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2007); Versed (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2009); Money Shot (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2012); Just Saying (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan University Press, 2013); with Steve Benson et al., The Grand Piano.