Sarah Manguso (Editor) & Jordan Davis (Editor)

Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books

Subpress

2004

_____________________________________________________________

Reviewed by Travis Nichols

Sarah Manguso and Jordan Davis have, in Free Radicals: American Poets Before Their First Books, gathered together a group of poets who, by the title’s implication, are free from the restraints and requirements imposed by what Davis calls “the government of poetry-land,” and radical compared to the staid, homogenized poetry cranked out by writers obsessed with the magazine-book-adjunct job-tenured job fast track to Ted Kooser-land. “They are all blessed with the terrible freedom of not yet having published books,” Manguso says in her introduction, with no small hint of nostalgia for her days before Alice James published The Captain Lands in Paradise.

It’s a curious project, one that surely owes its existence in part to the M.F.A. backlash currently being perpetuated by people in M.F.A. programs. No doubt, there is truth to the self-loathing/ bitterly jealous cries of “foetry” and tribal xenophobia that bubble up whenever three or more unpublished M.F.A.ers sit at a bar, but, fortunately or unfortunately, this is not the book to hearten those whose horizons were dimmed by the fact that Geoffrey Nutter won the Colorado Prize in 2001 and the Verse Prize in 2004.

In their attempt to present work outside the “tiny fame” of first publication, Davis and Manguso have merely re-enforced the idea that a dilettante becomes confirmed as a poet only through the rite of the first book. What else besides book publication—in terms of radicality or freedom—could you say distinguishes a poet like Davis from a poet like Jim Behrle? Both are prodigious, paratactic, funny/sad/serious blogging white guys in their thirties, yet Davis is in a position to edit the anthology Behrle is featured in because Davis has been dubbed an “official poet,” at least by this book’s publisher, while Behrle is a Free Radical, or unpublished amateur, depending on how you view the arbitrary line in the sand this book has only made more prominent. If you have any familiarity with the work of either poet, the whole project feels suspect from one look at the table of contents. What’s more, once you move past Behrle’s work into the deeper currents of the unknown, you start to wonder how free or radical any of this work actually is. “Pastoral with Internet Porn,” “Massive Stoner,” “Rothko,” “My Boyfriend, the Infidel . . .” Do any of these sound any more free or radical than “Aqua Teen Hunger Force”? McSweeney’s? Conduit?

If it is a way of gathering budding poets in print, then why not ditch the pretense of an anthology and just publish “Free Radicals: A Magazine of American Poets Before Their First Books”? It would then only, seem slightly less engaging than the last issues of The Canary, Hambone, Skanky Possum and FoArm and readers then wouldn’t have to feel as frustrated as they will with this book’s shoddy idea of radicalism. Maybe you should be looking for a Nation of Islam Manifesto, dear reader? Some poetry of eco-terrorism, perhaps? Some genuine free radicals surely do exist in or around the poetry world, don’t they? Don’t get me wrong; Behrle, Greta Goetz, Tim Griffin, Tonya Foster, and Jennifer L. Knox have interesting and engaging poems in this collection, but “Free Radicals”? Really? It’s like calling J.J. Redick an “outsider” basketball player because he hasn’t yet been drafted by the Charlotte Bobcats.

The idea of gathering the official verse outlaws up for display in an anthology is, of course, an exciting one. When I first saw this title in the S.P.D. catalog I thought how great and useful it would be to have a book that showcased all the myriad ways a poet could engage with the American idiom if she weren’t obsessed with putting together a 48-60 page, three part manuscript with an epigraph from Adorno, Ashbery or Stein. I thought of Dorothea Lasky whose suites of convulsive dressings-down of the classic male voice always stifle the gigglings of the East Coast Poetry dude squads, Christopher Stackhouse, whose aural compositions and line drawings explore the poetic possibilities outside static words on a page, Matvei Yankelevich who will sit in a refrigerator box and make you a “typewriter portrait” for a small fee, Nick Moudry whose cut and mash ups challenge poetry’s idea of an ownership society, Dawn Lundy Martin, Airen McNally, Joanna Newsome, Brad Flis, Devin Tha Dude, Jen Bervin, Sara Veglahn, the 8-Track Gorilla . . . I thought of a lot of people, books or no books, who challenged the government of poetry land, who wrote with a radical freedom, and then I asked my friends who they knew who could fit outside the same umbrella, and my list grew. I thought some more. I read some new books and tried to seek out a wider range of poetry than the tiny pool of Oulipo School of N-E-W-Y-O-R-K Surrealism I had been reading. Not surprisingly, there was a lot out there, but I had to look well past Free Radicals to find it.