Robert Sheppard: Poetics 4: Some British Poetics

Herbert and Hollis’ Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry (Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000) and Poets on Writing, edited by Denise Riley, (Basingstoke and London: Macmillan, 1992), and some of the anthologies referred to in the previous three postings on this subject, can be used to provide a limited guide to British poetics of the avant-garde. I have formed from them a representative cluster of texts, though with a number of important exclusions that result form this decision: for example, the poetics work of Allen Fisher, that of the apparently tight-lipped Tom Raworth, and that of the senior experimentalist Christopher Middleton. Indeed, I compare Allen Fisher’s Necessary Business (1985) to Charles Bernstein’s ‘The Artifice of Absorption’ (1986) elsewhere to assess both the contents and forms of the poetics of the North American and British avant-gardes. These two formally hybrid works constitute exemplary poetics and demonstrate its faculty of keeping its arguments open by its very disposition in form. Middleton's poetics I speak of in my inaugural leccture. Doubtless my method throws up other exclusions, but the effort is worth the risks.

A link with the North American tradition is immediately apparent in D. H. Lawrence’s ‘Preface to New Poems’ (1920), which is quoted a great deal in American poetics, and was, in any case, the preface to the American edition of his poems; it compares the poetry of rigid finished thought, which he associated with metrical form, with the fluid poetry of the future, which Lawrence predicted would embody itself as a process in an organic free verse. (Cook 2004: 106-110) Mina Loy, though of British birth, thought of herself and of the subject of her essay ‘Modern Poetry’, as distinctly American by the time she wrote it (1925), despite her earlier close involvement with European futurism. Her review essay focuses upon rhythm as a metaphorical quality of attention and – less fashionably - as an imprint of the poet’s own nature (which is a constant of her various poetics). (Cook 2004: 131-34)

W.S. Graham – a Scottish poet who has a growing reputation as a precursor to recent innovative poetries – prefigures the imagery of his later poetry by figuring language as a beast (as well as material) in his ‘Notes on a Poetry of Release’ (1946). Though a made thing, the poem is not static, as it is taken on board by the reader, again suggesting one of the later themes of his verse, which developed into a poetics-medium of its own, like Wallace Stevens’. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 117-121) Graham’s first mentor, Dylan Thomas, in his ‘Notes on the Art of Poetry’ (1951), actually an epistolary answer to questions from a student, covers a number of unrelated issues: from his early love of the sound of words to his decision as a craftsman to use any or every element of poetic artifice; from his denial of the non-rational method of the Surrealists to his refusal to define poetry (which, in poetics, is as common a theme as the attempt to define it). (Scully 1966: 195-204) Thomas’ fellow-Welshman, David Jones’ ‘The Preface to The Anathemata’ (1952) is an apologia for his great epic poem in terms of the author’s linguistic, cultural and religious inheritance, and his making of this into an artefact of signs. (Scully 1966: 205-236) Basil Bunting’s ‘The Poet’s Point of View’ (1966) is loquacious by Bunting’s standards of self-commentary, which he normally kept to the acerbic minimum. He affirms the primacy of sound over sense, beauty over meaning, or rather his notion that meaning is in the sound of the poem read (well) out loud. This is a good example of where poetics is both a guide to the work, but it is best read against it. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 81-2) Pure sound, though, has been theorised well. Bob Cobbing’s ‘A Statement of Sound Poetry’ (1969) is one of his rare excursions into poetics, outlining the abandonment of lexical items in sound poetry (but reminding us that the uniqueness of his own work was that it was also visual). (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 426)

John James’ ‘A Theory of Poetry’ (1977) is an ironic poem that plays with the kinds of interpretations that entered Britain on the back of continental theory in the 1970s, as I show elsewhere. (Riley 1992: 249-252) Veronica Forrest-Thomson knew some of that theory well but abandoned it for the development of her own strategies of dealing with the processes of naturalisation and for a theory of reading that respected both meaningful and non-meaningful elements of poetic artifice in her book Poet Artifice. ‘From Poetic Artifice’ (1978) combines her theoretical introduction with a portion of the book where she uses her own poem as an exemplar of her poetics, which derives from her theory of artificial devicehood. (Riley 1992: 222-233; see another excerpt in Cook 2004: 456-463). By contrast, John Riley’s ‘What Are You Going to Call It?’ (1980) is an impressionistic narrative of creativity that resists critical thinking, or rather resists the embracing of those ideas by a true poet. He or she had better abandon bogus ideas in favour of immersion in the rhythms of the earth. Not surprisingly, the short piece deliberately turns into what appears to be a species of prose-poetry. (Riley 1992: 83-4) Michael Haslam’s ‘The Subject of Poems’ (1992) is an ‘outsider’ poetics that opens poetry to notions of truth and purity, and the transcendental ego which patterns itself into poems. (Riley 1992: 70-80) Peter Riley’s ‘The Creative Moment of the Poem’ (1992) is an attempt – at some length – to grasp that moment and to reflect upon it. (Riley 1992: 92-113)

Ken Edwards’ ‘Grasping the Plural’ (1984/1992) is a text deriving from an American language poet-style ‘talk’ on the use of ‘we’ in poetry and elsewhere. (Riley 1992: 21-9) John Hall’s ‘Writing and Not Writing’ (1992) is a variety of non-poetics, since it concerns the act of renouncing writing poetry altogether; I examine Edwards’ and Hall’s contributions elsewhere. (Riley 1992: 41-9)

Nigel Wheale’s ‘A Curve of Reading’ (1992) is an impressionistic account of the growth of the poet’s sensibility, peppered with quotations from poems, popular songs, and sound-bites of poetics. (Riley 1992: 124-134) Geoffrey Ward’s ‘Objects That Come Alive at Night’ (1992) similarly traces influences but sees poetry, via the poetics of both Shelley and Bernstein, as a utopian critique created by alternative images. (Riley 1992: 135-39) John Welch’s ‘Two Poems’ (1992) is a text in poetry and prose that meditates upon, mediates between, the signs that appear in writing and those that appear in dreams. (Riley 1992: 151-3) John Wilkinson’s ‘Imperfect Pitch’ (1992) combines poetry and prose in the classic format of Dante’s La Vita Nouva, alternating poetry with ‘commentary’, though here the prose is as elliptical as the poems. At one point it theorises lyric poetry (the poetry between its prose, it implies) at once as a strict binding of representation to poetic presentation, as an excessive projection of a doomed pretentiousness, and as abundant exploding of space and a freeing of itself from nature. (Riley 1992: 154-172)

Kelvin Corcoran’s ‘Sometimes a Word will Start it’ (1992) demonstrates these titular words about poetic genesis that Corcoran has borrowed from John Ashbery; a prose passage dwells on three ‘favourite’ letters and then seems to segue into a resulting poem about his father. (Riley 1992: 173-77) Ralph Hawkins’ ‘A Period of Gestation’ (1992) opens up his poet’s notebook to the way randomly interesting quotations trigger poems. (Riley 1992: 253-259) Roy Fisher’s ‘Poet on Writing’ (1992), also sees the notebook experience as primary to the development of poetic ideas. Indeed, it argues that the multitude of notebooks he keeps sometimes seems to be his major occupation. (Riley 1992: 272-75) Carlyle Reedy’s ‘Working Processes of a Woman Poet’ (1992) also spells out a number of writerly methods in a practical poetics. (Riley 1992: 260-271) Tom Lowenstein’s ‘About Filibustering in Samsāra’ (1992), on the other hand, is a direct statement on his poem (printed alongside it in the anthology Poets on Writing) and its ethnographic sources and borrowings from native Inuit poetics (Riley 1992: 207-8). Douglas Oliver’s ‘Three Lilies’ (1982/1992) is an offshoot of his study Poetry and Narrative in Performance (1989), about prosody in action. Prosody is the life beat of poetry, and his account of it is combined with a personal consideration of the thematics of his work, including the implications of real-life emotions becoming transfigured in poetry.

Edwin Morgan, on the verge of his eightieth year, reflects on his long career in ‘Roof of Fireflies’ (1999). He considers the poems he did not write (another species of non-poetics), but also justifies his own extraordinary stylistic range as a kind of poetic diversity modelled on the necessity of its ecological cousin, bio-diversity. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 190-194) Elaine Feinstein’s ‘A Question of Voice’ (2000) also looks back on a long career, and on her turn towards the tradition of American poetry described above. (Indeed as a student her enquiry had provoked Olson to write his statement of poetics ‘Letter to Elaine Feinstein’. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 158-161)) Perhaps under the influence of her work on Russian poet Marina Tsvetayeva, she confirms her position as a lyric poet, and poetry’s function in making us feel alive. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 188-9) As against this earnestness one may pitch Scottish poet Robert Crawford’s ‘Cosmopolibackofbeyondism’ (2000), which argues for a regional internationalism, a parodic manifesto in typical postmodernist style, (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 262-4) as is John Hartley Williams’ ‘A Manifesto’ (2000) which argues for ‘extilism’, a neologism compounded of the words, ‘Exile, extricate, extrapolate, inexplicable and ectoplasm’, whose tenets amount to a poetry of denial and a vanishing of the poet! (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 287-8)


Even allowing for the relative sizes of the countries involved, poetics as a conscious practice flourishes (often under that name) in the USA and Canada, while it only appears intermittently, and with some resistance, in Britain and (on the evidence I have gathered) hardly at all in Irish avant garde poetry (although the poetics of a poet of trenchantly Irish ancestry, Maggie O’Sullivan, are fulsome and worthy of comment elsewhere). One exception is Randolph Healy’s ‘Uncertain Questions’, collected in 99 Poets/ 1999: An International Poetics Symposium, an issue of the journal Boundary 2, which confessedly caricatures the stultifying nationalistic consciousness that Irish people – and poets – felt obliged to indwell, but shows its gradual undermining by the progressive epistemologies of the twentieth century, particularly in science and mathematics, to provide new models of the world, capable of countering the simplicities of identity politics and poetics. This very essay perhaps suggests the difficult conditions that Irish alternative poetries have in articulating themselves. Of course, one of the influences on the avant-garde writers of the British Isles is precisely the poetics of this American verse, so the inheritances are not clear-cut in national terms (and, on occasions, run the other way, a precedent set by D.H. Lawrence in 1920).


Herbert and Hollis’ Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry is a book of two halves, presenting a wide selection of avant-garde poetics of the first half of the twentieth century in its own first half. It is less useful for the poetics of recent work. This is also true of its coverage of British and Irish poetics, my account of which makes use of this anthology and the essential Poets on Writing, edited by Denise Riley. The pages on British and Irish poetics also call on Scully and Rothenberg and Joris and 99 Poets/ 1999: An International Poetics Symposium.

The recent anthology, edited by Rupert Loydell, Troubles Swapped for Something Fresh (Salt, 2009), may also widen the potential list of anthologised poetics. The use of anthologies, as in my other accounts of poetics, necessarily omits certain texts, but it heightens a cumulative sense of poetics as a discourse of contrasts.

A Note on these poetics posts.

These lists – partly because they are lists – have been excluded from the study of poetics I have bveen working on. Reference to the use of poetics in creative writing may be seen in my piece The Necessity of Poetics which can be read in one version on Pores: www.bbk.ac.uk/pores. It is this sense of poetics that is explored by the Edge Hill Poetry and Poetics Research Group and what will are celebrating this autumn. Four of our members or ex-members are included in Troubles Swapped for Something Else - and we shall be celebrating this fact.

This post was part of an abandoned book on poetics (or rather, a re-distributed book; parts of it became When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and others await their day, such as this one.). Here are others:

Part One: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/robert-sheppard-poetics-1-poetics-and.html

Part Two: Through and after Modernism

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/robert-sheppard-poetics-2.html

Part Three: North American Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-north-american-poetics.html

Robert Sheppard: North American Poetics: A Sample

Jerome Rothenberg states rightly that a characteristic of poets ‘has been the push … to self-define their workings, often in a language that makes a continuity with how they speak within their poems’, and I shall be making some play of the variety of forms in the poetics discussed. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 405) Each of these North American poets, in the interests of economy, is represented by one work only, using the list of publications established in an earlier post, and I will comment only a little on each.

Amy Lowell’s ‘Poetry as a Spoken Art’ (1917) emphasises the audible qualities of poetry and offers an apologia for free verse as rhythmical utterance. (Cook 2004: 69-74) Ezra Pound’s ‘A Retrospect’ (1918) has been reprinted often, thus reinforcing my earlier contention that Pound operates, in this limited field only, as a kind of specific rather than a universal founder of discursivity. Pound, like Lowell, offers a justification of free verse or for particular rhythmical contours as analogues for certain emotions, but he adds his famous ‘Don’ts’, which additionally emphasise imagistic clarity and verbal economy. (Cook 2004: 83-90; Scully 1966: 30-43; Herbert and Hollis 2000: 17-25) T.S. Eliot’s ‘Tradition and the Individual Talent’ (1919), is a poetics for the writing that became The Waste Land, stressing how tradition impacts upon the present act of writing, and how modernist ‘impersonality’ is an escape from personality and false emotion, almost an escape into tradition, as the poem attempted to prove. (Cook 2004: 97-105) Hart Crane’s ‘General Aims and Theories’ (1925) suggests ways for the modern poet to incorporate the industrial and urban energies of the modern world into the creation of a new poetry of impersonal consciousness and spiritual illumination. (Cook 2004: 135-38) Wallace Stevens takes on the form of the aphorism in ‘Adagia’ (1934-40) to articulate a nuanced sense of a similar impersonality, testing out various metaphors for poetry as the supreme fiction. His contention that ‘The theory of poetry is the life of poetry’ expresses a commitment to poetics, a commitment felt throughout his poetry itself. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 56-66; 66) Gertrude Stein likewise was given to ‘explanation’ of a peculiarly indirect kind. ‘Poetry and Grammar’ (1935) is one of her famous lectures which justifies her work to the baffled audience created by her unlikely celebrity; in her repetitive, apparently simple prose (not unlike the texture of the creative work itself) she presents the history of her writing as the struggle to find the difference between poetry and prose, only to find that nouns and an experimental mode of minimal naming are the constituents of her poetry. (Cook 2004: 208-214) William Carlos Williams’ ‘Introduction to The Wedge’ (1944) is a short passionate modernist definition of the poem as a machine, whose parts must all function. However, he rejects formal poetic artifice for this machine, while reminding his readership of the fact that poets make such machines rather than deliver utterances. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 137-139) Langston Hughes’ ‘How to Be a Bad Writer (in ten easy lessons)’ (1949/50) is a parody of the Creative Writing ‘how to’ book: an ironical list of mistakes aimed specifically at African American writers. One offence is to refuse to write about everyday experience; another is to use archaic diction. Slapdash work and bohemian dissipation are likewise satirised. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 127-8)

Like Pound’s poetics, Charles Olson’s much anthologised essay ‘Projective Verse’ (1950) is often cited as a source of others’ poetics and, just as importantly, as a much imitated model for its writing, with its abrupt, demotic, fiercely intelligent but trenchantly non-academic tone. It presents a poetics of perceptual and scriptural kinetics, theorising the poem as a field of verbal energy, whose moments of creation gather the poem’s subject matter in an improvisatory sweep. (Cook 2004: 288-295; (Scully 1966: 271-282) (Allen and Tallman 1973: 147-158 (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 92-99) Louis Zukofsky’s already discussed Objectivist ‘A Statement for Poetry’ (1950), recasts Pound’s three types of poetry into the simpler categories of image, sound and concept, as components of a poem whose form will develop prosody during its composition, though not in the improvisatory manner of projective verse. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 143-6)

e.e. cummings’ preface ‘An Introduction’ (c. 1955) oddly works to delimit the impact of the poems they introduce: by denying their possible universality and their social engagement, for example, in favour of a private communion with the reader in the name of beauty. (Scully 1966: 124-125) The first half of Marianne Moore’s essay ‘Idiosyncrasy and Technique’ (c. 1956) opts for the efficacy of the technique of straight writing, that is, without obfuscatory diction or elaborate ornament; the second half, on ‘Idiosyncrasy’, concerns subject matter, particularly the elusive materials one can garner from literature (she quotes one of her allusive poems) and from life. (Scully 1966: 107-122)

Robert Duncan’s ‘Notes on Poetics Regarding Olson’s Maximus’ (1956) recapitulates and reaffirms the axioms of post-Poundian poetics. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 187-195) Olson’s ex-student, Edward Dorn, in his similarly entitled ‘What I See in The Maximus Poems’ (1961) looks not to history, but to geography, and finds in Olson’s work an investigation of the particularity of place, with which Dorn elsewhere makes his own poetic continuity. (Cook 2004: 361-366)

John Cage’s ‘Lecture on Nothing’ (1959) is a performance text that constitutes its own poetics (or vice versa) arranged in strict columns, across which a text about the making of itself (as poetry, as form) may be recited in fragments with unnatural silences to defamiliarise it for the contemplating audience. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 413-15)

Frank O’Hara’s ‘Personism: A Manifesto’ (1959) parodies the manifesto form to argue for a pragmatics of formal description and an ironical intimacy of address in the poetic exchange. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 353-355) Allen Ginsberg’s ‘When the Mode of the Music Changes the Walls of the City Shake’ (1961) begins with an attack on conventional forms for their inability to register the complexities of perception and consciousness (specifically Ginsberg’s own!) and ends by hailing a revolution in American letters. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 324-330) John Weiners’ ‘The Address of the Watchman to the Night’ (1963) rejects his earlier bohemianism of depraved excess in favour of a poetics of perpetual alertness to that which is close to hand. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 351-2) Amiri Baraka’s ‘Black Dada Nihilismus’ (1964) (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 420-22) is a more public act of renunciation and realignment: a manifesto poem for black consciousness poetry, arguing the recognition of the symbolic power of black history and the actual power of black revolt. The appearance of this poem on disk, set to aggressive free jazz by The New York Art Quartet in 1965, propels poetics into a strictly performative context. Adrienne Rich’s ‘Poetry and Experience: Statement at a Poetry Reading’ (1964) was a publicly uttered renunciation of her former poetics, as her work became more militantly feminist. (Herbert and Hollis 2000: 141-2)

Denise Levertov’s ‘Notes on Organic Form’ (1965) melds her post-Olsonian inheritance with an older Romanticism, perhaps owing to her English poetic origins in the 1940s, so that Hopkins’ concept of the instress is re-functioned as the shape of an experience as that is negotiated by the shaping of the poem. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 312-317) In contrast, Jackson MacLow’s short ‘Statement’ (c. 1965) outlines his anarchist poetics of procedural technique, allowing minimal intentional interruptions by the authorial ego. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 384-5)

Jack Spicer’s ‘Excerpts from the Vancouver Lectures’ (1965) are transcriptions of extemporised remarks made at a poetry conference, and range from the mystical idea of writing as ‘dictation’ to the identification of the serial poem as way of structuring intermittent consciousness. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 227-234) As academic interest in the New American Poetry grew, the lecture room increasingly became a site for poetics. Both Robert Creeley’s lecture, ‘I’m Given to Write Poems’ (Allen and Tallman 1973: 263-273) and Lawrence Ferlinghetti’s account of the writing of a poem in his ‘Genesis of After the Cries of the Birds’ were delivered at the same conference in Berlin in 1967, thus also reminding us of both the public and the inter-authorial communication at such events at which poetics is disseminated. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 445-449) Creeley’s title recognises the pressure to write and the feeling that a poem is ‘being permitted to continue’ in its improvisatory unpredictable coming into being (to use his description that has been recast into a definition of poetics itself, in the hands of Rachel Blau DuPlessis. She calls poetics 'permission to continue'.). (Allen and Tallman 1973: 263)

Gary Snyder’s heady mix of Buddhism and ecology, ‘Poetry and the Primitive’ (1967), sees poetry as an essential ‘ecological survival technique’, a view that has recently become popular again, thus demonstrating that repressed poetics have the possibility of return in new situations. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 395-406; 395) John Ashbery’s ‘The Invisible Avant-Garde’ (1968) is a lecture to the Yale Art School on the concept of the avant-garde (the irony of the venue is not lost on Ashbery) in which he reflects upon a polito-poetical situation that he has surely experienced; when his or her avant-garde practice is assimilated to cultural taste, a truly vanguard artist must learn to escape this automatic acceptance. (Cook 2004: 393-398) This is ironical, given that as Ashbery was writing, a new avant-garde was just around the corner, ready to take up that challenge. Robert Grenier’s ‘On Speech’ (1971) is arguably the founding document of the poetics of the Language Poets, with its anti-Olsonian admonition ‘I HATE SPEECH’ that emphasises a primarily scriptural context for writing. (Silliman 1986: 496-7)

Ishmael Reed’s ‘Neo-Hoodoo Manifesto’ (c. 1972) is as playful as Reed’s novels in presenting a tricksterish pan-African diasporic energy manifesting in what he calls the ‘Now Locomotive’ of the moment. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 440-41)

Elizabeth Bishop’s ‘Letter to Miss Pierson’ (1975) takes the form of an answer to specific questions from a correspondent; Bishop advocates a course of exhaustive reading (but not reading ‘too much about poetry’) and balances the necessity of hard work (as is evident in her own case) against the mysterious and surprising aspects of writerly process. (Herbert and Hollis 2000:104-5; 101)

Between 1971-5, Bernadette Mayer and the Members of her St Mark’s Church Poetry Project Writing Workshop assembled their ‘Experiments’ (1978), a series of creative writing exercises that has proved authoritative and has been subsequently supplemented by Charles Bernstein and others. (Silliman 1986: 557-560) Clark Coolidge’s ‘from Arrangement’ (1978), an excerpt from a public class at the Naropa Institute, is a lesson in the practical reading of non-referential writing, such as his own. (Silliman 1986: 553-4)

Jerome Rothenberg’s ‘New Models, New Visions: Some Notes Toward a Poetics of Performance’ (1977) argues for the centrality of a paradigm-breaking poetic practice that combines ethnopoetics and the avant-garde, and combines performance strategies with those for the page alone. (Hoover 1994: 640-44) Likewise concerned with performance, but in a specific context, Steve McCaffery’s ‘Text-Sound, Energy and Performance’ (1978) praises the somatic excesses of sound poetry which arguably release repressed energies and (non-)meanings ordinarily latent in language. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 427) On the other hand, Edward Sanders’ ‘Investigative Poetry’ (1976) argues for a new genre of writing as radical historical recovery through a documentarist poetics. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 430-32)

Rae Armantrout’s ‘Why Don’t Women Do Language-Oriented Writing?’ (1978) deals with the sexual political question it asks, but also defines a poetry that is not ‘language-oriented’ at all, but one that, in her characteristic way of cutting to the chase, ‘sees itself as well as the world’, and brushes to one side a binary between text and experience that has both sustained and vitiated American poetry . (Silliman 1986: 544-546; 546) (Coincidentylally, it's a formulation I've recently reversed; let's see the world as well as the poem!) It is almost ironical, therefore, that this short piece, like many that follow from that rising avant-garde, appeared in the poetics journal L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E, in this case, in its founding issue. Ron Silliman’s ‘From The New Sentence’ (1979) furnishes the poetics of a collagist mode of poets’ prose influential with that grouping. (Silliman 1986: 561-575)

‘My Poetry’ (c. 1980), by David Bromige - a wonderful man, whose recent death was a great sadness - is a typically teasing and hyperbolic account of his past works, a parody of pseudo-poetics as an explanatory gesture, but he intermittently reveals an underlying yearning for authenticity. (Silliman 1986: 216-226)

Susan Howe’s ‘P. INMAN, Platin’ (1980) takes the form of a book review, but through it Howe presents her poetics of fractured and discontinuous surface. (Silliman 1986: 555-6) Similarly, Bruce Andrews’ ‘Misrepresentation’ (1980), subtitled ‘A text for The Tennis Court Oath of John Ashbery’, is also a reflection on a book, this time the early (and often rejected) avant-garde work Ashbery published in 1962. It is an effusive endorsement of the kinds of textual exuberance we find in Andrews’ own work (and in his poetics, of which he is a continual practitioner). (Silliman 1986: 520-529) The serial poetics statements of Language Poets Ron Silliman, Barrett Watten, Steve Benson, Lyn Hejinian, Charles Bernstein and Bob Perelman, ‘for Change’ (1982) are terse position-statements sent from one avant-garde to the central magazine of another, French, avant-garde, a mode of poetics exchange not common. (Silliman 1986: 484-490) Carla Harryman’s ‘Foreword’ (1980) is a piece of poet’s prose that resembles her ‘creative’ work, in a refusal of the division between discourses. (Silliman 1986: 483) Stephen Rodefer’s ‘Preface to Four Lectures’ (1981) stands back to explain how the collagist nature of urban experience determined the fractured surface of his serial poem: a musical and painterly structure resembling both a museum and reality beyond. (Silliman 1986: 515- 1981) Charles Bernstein, to whom reference is made throughout this work for his commitment to poetics, and who is the subject of my next chapter, is well represented by the essay ‘Writing and Method’ (1981) which hovers around its central axiom that creative work is itself already a kind of poetics: ‘All writing is a demonstration of method; it can assume a method or investigate it.’ (Silliman 1986: 590) This, in turn, might be thought of the central poetics statement of Bernstein as a poet. (Silliman 1986: 583-598) Barrett Watten’s ‘Method and L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E’ (1984) is part of Watten’s critical journey through several volumes to define the operational social contexts for the writings of the language group, in this case its central journal, and thus of himself; he often alarmingly uses his own works as exemplars, in a way that transgresses pure poetics. (Silliman 1986: 599-612) Lyn Hejinian’s 'The Rejection of Closure' (1984) argues for the ‘open text’ as against the closed, not metrically as in earlier poetics, but in terms of interpretive choices deliberately offered to the reader. (Hoover 1994: 653-658)

Rachel Blau DuPlessis’ ‘Otherhow, Feminist Poetics, Modernism, the Avant-Garde’ (1985) is an extract from her book The Pink Guitar, from which I have above quoted one of the most useful definitions of poetics; she theorises avant-garde practice as an investigation (jointly) of genre and gender. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 433-435) Canadian poet Lisa Robertson’s ‘How Pastoral: A Manifesto’ (1993) consists of a statement and a commentary that elaborates her list of ‘wants’ and ‘wishes’. Her desire for a ‘poetics of historical responsibility’ is fuelled by a need to haunt the interstices and absurdities of history. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 21-26; 26)

Dick Higgins’ ‘Intermedia Chart’ (1995) is a multiple Venn diagram showing the overlapping of intermedia experiments between elements such as concrete poetry and Fluxus; the gesture of poetics is enacted by the inclusion of circles marked simply with question-marks, reminding us that poetics is a self-generating activity oriented towards the future. (Rothenberg and Joris 1998: 428)

Harryette Mullen’s ‘Poetry and Identity’ (1996) considers her early work, immediately identified as ‘black’ writing, and her later identity as an avant-gardist, which challenges those (and other) identities. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 27-31) Kristin Prevallet’s ‘Investigating the Procedure: Poetry and the Source’ (2002) deals with the inheritance from earlier forms of documentarist poetics like Sanders’, to outline a processual practice she has made her own. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 115-129) Mark Wallace’s ‘Towards a Free Multiplicity of Form’ sees a similar, though wider, inheritance of forms for a post-Language poetry avant-garde, though it sees pitfalls in both automatically declaring some forms (politically) liberating and by delimiting the possibilities of ‘the lyric’, for example. (1996/2002) (Wallace and Marks 2002: 191-203) Elizabeth Willis’ ‘The Arena in the Garden: Some Thoughts on the Late Lyric’ (2002), offers more narrow evidence, around the late 1990s, of a return to lyric in experimental American writing. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 225-35)

A number of recent writers have adopted disconnected forms for poetics which make continuity with their modes of creative writing itself, but possibly reveal a limitation of these poetics. Reading these documents, I feel a need for a more definitive statement, a feeling that the discourse might risk becoming an evasion of poetics as a mode, perhaps has developed conventions and paradigms that – in the true spirit of poetics – need breaking. Andrew Levy’s ‘An Indispensable Coefficient of Esthetic Order’ (1996/2002) is a free and speculative meditation upon what the author’s relationship to (his) poetry might become, which he characterises as a form of silence in which (what he does not want to call) subject matter forms. (Wallace and Marks 2002: 381-394) Tan Lin’s ‘ambient stylistics’ (2002) is a sprawling piece of autobiographical poetics, dealing with the conditions of truth-telling in poetry and with poetry as a deliberate imprecise measure of that which cannot be measured (the world). (Wallace and Marks 2002: 339-365) Sianne Ngai’s ‘Raw Matter: A Poetics of Disgust’ (1998/2002), on the other hand, is anything but impressionistic. A traditional essay, owing to Bataille and other theorists, this piece rejects the ritualistic declarations of ‘desire’ as aesthetic aim or motivation in earlier poetics and replaces this with more negative excesses. But it does not turn to the lyric or any other repressed mode, but sees language itself as abjection: ‘A poetics of disgust, one that accommodates the subject’s negative potentiality in impotence or lack, can only emerge from poetry built from linguistic raw material.’ (Wallace and Marks 2002: 161-190; 180) Whatever one thinks of such abjection, the essay’s focus brings this history of (ongoing) American poetics to a convenient pause and reminds us that poetics is primarily about such ‘building’.

An obvious complementary source of poetics (and much else) is the literary interview. While the Paris Review interviews from the 1950s onwards are perhaps the best known and set the standard for its development, this type of recorded exchange is virtually an art form in its own right, with thousands of examples. Barbara Tomlinson’s Authors on Writing (2005), an analysis of metaphors used by writers to describe their processes, is drawn from such interviews; her representative corpus consists of 42 pages of references in small print. To focus on one writer alone, American poet Robert Creeley was a willing interviewee and, much to the delight of his interviewers (including myself) a garrulous and focussed talker. It is no wonder that there exist two volumes of some of these interviews with him, Contexts of Poetry: Interviews 1961-1971 (1973) and Tales Out of School: Selected Interviews (1993). One example, ‘Linda Wagner: An Interview with Robert Creeley 1965’, appears in both books in differing versions (and in yet another version, in the canonical Paris Review series in 1968). In this mutating text, among other things, Creeley characteristically ‘speak(s) personally’ of his method of writing as the articulation in language of a moment’s improvisatory occasion. (Allen and Tallman 1973: 273-292; 281)

The poetic colonising of cyberspace began early and Creeley was one of the earliest pioneers as his Day Book of a Virtual Poet evinces (Creeley 1998). As poet in (virtual) residence he muses on poets, poetry and poetics, such as Williams’ famous poetics sound-bites, ‘Only the imagination is real’ and its qualifying ‘No ideas but in things’, ironically refunctioned by Creeley with reference to contemporary property rights. (Creeley 1998: 24) The internet, with its email lists, websites, and blogs is in a state of constant technological and phenomenological development. Perhaps the most extraordinary blog is Ron Silliman’s www.ronsilliman.com, which has attracted over a million hits, and which is almost daily concerned afresh with poetry and poetics. Slightly more ephemeral, though archived, are the discussion lists, such the British & Irish Poets email list. The danger of online debate is that ‘spats over terminology sputter out into mutual frustration or continue into areas very remote from poetry and poetics’, as Kit Fryatt reminds us in his ‘“Norms and Forms”: 10 Years of the British & Irish Poets e-mail list’. I can confirm this, having been a ‘lurker’ since its inception; the quality of posts in 1996 was higher than it was a decade later. (Fryatt 2007: 88) Fryatt remarks: ‘It is the nature of online communities to mutate, and sometimes to die off altogether, but long before they do, they generate complaints of a nostalgic nature.’ (93) It seems that the poetics discussion list, on both sides of the Atlantic, and in cyberspace, has not lived up to its optimistic beginnings as a forum for discussing poetics as a speculative discourse.



The anthologies used to compile this U.S. and Canadian corpus are Jonathan Cook’s Poetry in Theory. Oxford: Blackwell, 2004, which offers other kinds of writing as well; James Scully’s pioneering Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. London and Glasgow: Fontana/Collins, 1966; Allen and Tallman’s The Poetics of the New American Poetry. New York: Grove Press, 1973, which is an invaluable source; Rothenberg and Joris’ Poems for the Millennium. Berkeley: The University of California Press, two volumes, 1995 and 1998, which contains a selection of avant-garde poetics; Ron Silliman’s In the American Tree. Orono: The National Poetry Foundation, 1986, which was a major poetry anthology of the Language school, and which included sizeable poetics statements; Paul Hoover’s teaching anthology Postmodern American Poetry. New York and London: Norton, 1994, proved useful; Wallace and Marks’ Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics of the 1990s. Tuscaloosa: The Univerity of Alabama Press, 2002, was invaluable for tracking post-Language Poetry poetics; Herbert and Hollis’ Strong Words: Modern Poets on Modern Poetry. Tarset: Bloodaxe Books, 2000, is a book of two halves, presenting a wide selection of avant-garde poetics of the first half of the twentieth century in its own first half. It is less useful for the poetics of recent work.

For poetics reaching into the 21st century I recommend ed. Craig Dworkin’s The Consequence of Innovation: 21st century poetics (New York: Roof, 2008), particularly for Kenneth Goldsmith’s conceptual poetics. This would have featured in the above if it had been to hand at the time I composed the above.

This post was part of an abandoned book on poetics (or rather, a re-distributed book; parts of it became When Bad Times Made for Good Poetry, and others await their day, such as this one.). Here are others:

Part One: Poetics and Proto-Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/06/robert-sheppard-poetics-1-poetics-and.html

Part Two: Through and after Modernism

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/07/robert-sheppard-poetics-2.html

Part Four: Some British Poetics

http://www.robertsheppard.blogspot.co.uk/2009/08/robert-sheppard-poetics-4-some-british.html