LYRIC POSTMODERNISMS: AN ANTHOLOGY OF CONTEMPORARY INNOVATIVE POETRIES
edited by REGINALD SHEPHERD
reviewed by CARA BENSON

 

 

Counterpath Press, 2008.

 

"that kind of poetry"

Anthologizing can be contentious and complicated. Arguments over inclusion, exclusion, mainstream, outside, and sanctified abound. The contemporary conflict can be seen as beginning with Donald Allen’s New American Poetry in the 1960s; but perhaps the underlying concern with classification has been around since Aristotle made divisions in Poetics. With the rise of the book and publishing, and now the small press, the fact in hand calls a few questions oftener. What do these poets have in common that they don’t with others? And, ultimately, why make a book of them?

Regarding Lyric Postmodernisms: the poets are alive, currently American. Not confessional. Nor quiet. However, LP isn’t too too much “that kind of poetry” as in way out experimental (no vispo, no overt procedurals, no obvious Cage-isms, ...). This collection works to be mostly on the “lyric” side of that edge and exists, in part, to justify and illuminate the position. In editor Reginald Shepherd’s words:

These poets integrate the traditional lyric’s exploration of subjectivity and its discontents, the modernist grappling with questions of culture and history and language’s capacity to address and encompass those questions, and the postmodernist skepticism toward grand narratives and the possibility of final answers or explanations, toward selfhood as a stable reference point, and toward language as a means by which to know the self or its world. (xi-xii)

These are the terms he used to select the poets for this collection. He chose 23 of the about a gazillion more poets publishing now than there were at the turn of the last century when modernism rose. Since then there have been too many worthy anthologies to mention here, but it seems it was time again for a consideration. (Yes, it wages on. As it should.) Just search the internet to hit upon so many working to hit upon a collective approach or a framework for what the heck kind of school or style or movement is emerging or asserting itself currently. Neoformalists. Post LANGUAGE NY “I” aversion reader makes meaning sense making activist neo-retro polypolitical procedural eco naturalist flarf fetishizers anti return to the “I” struck in things ideas images.

In fact, the appearance of this book coincided with a blog debate regarding Schools versus inclinations, etc., and Shepherd was at its center. Blog posts linked from his announcement of LP’s publishing to one of his posts on the term “post-avant.” The title of this review also figured in the conversation. This specific version of  “the other tradition” label originates with Joan Houlihan who used it to disparage experiments in poems. Shepherd invoked it (I think playfully) to describe LP. As in, if you like “T.K.O.P.,” you’ll like this book.^[1]

Then the posts erupted regarding post-avant as a useful or even credible strata in the taxonomy of poetry and ranged from declarations that ___________ is dead, to long live ____________, to dilution of ____________, and who let the _______________ out.

A few highlight quotes:

 

I think that the overuse of the prefix "post-" in a lot of postmodern commentary never actually indicates the foreclosure of a particular, historical paradigm, so much as [it] indicates our impatience that such a persistent, conceptual heritage has not yet been transcended…. (Christian Bök)^[2]

There is no post-avant poetry culture, but there may soon be a pan-avant one. Large numbers of poets are writing under the influence of established avant-garde practice… (Paul Hoover)^[3]

What we're left with is style: mere aesthetics. And that's not such a terrible thing, if only because of the enormous freedom it offers poets and readers…. (Joshua Corey)^[4]

…What could be newer than new, and what comes after the avant-garde if not the post-avant-garde (or the post-avants)?…. But all of this is of bygone days and older frays. (Joan Houlihan)^[5]

 

And of course it isn’t (bygone). As Frank O’Hara said and Bök in his way has echoed, “Why hurry them along?”.^[6] We continue to be in exploration, no? Shepherd, after Wittgenstein, has called the book a collection of “lyrical investigations.” (xi) Though I think this process is about more than style, this freedom can be seen as a good thing. Can’t it?

 

Artistically as well as philosophically, we live in a time ‘when there is no recognized critical aesthetic,’ as Mei-mei Berssenbrugge points out. Ours is a decentered contemporary American literary and artistic world in which there is no agreement even on what practitioners of ostensibly the same art form are doing or trying to do, let alone those efforts’ means or aims or how they could be evaluated. (Shepherd, xiii)

 

I’ve taken the quotes out of their original situations, but you can get an idea. Lots of folks are after a classification or terms by which such varying versions of the art can be considered. That is how the book is framed, and perhaps one of its reasons for coming to be. Otherwise, why not call it Poems I Like (like/dislike the über categorization). None of this is to say that we should abort our attempts or biological imperatives for classification. After all, “[p]art of the fun of being alive is arranging and categorizing….” ( Ramke, 157). Follow this to the poems themselves. Again, Ramke:

 

A poem is a system for sorting: putting words and sounds and commas and semicolons and whatever comes to hand into groups with connections….
…By chance. Poetry, to me, is always and intimately connected with randomness, with unpredictability. Poetry is what we have in lieu of explanation, and in place of consolation. (157)

 

So, what poems and poets are here?

Back to the term innovative rather than avant or experimental in the subtitle. (It even sounds softer.) Reading LP I could feel what Shepherd has said somewhere that on the whole these poets are pushing lyric boundaries from the inside out. The “joinery” (though “wary of narration”) Martha Ronk speaks of and the “connections” (though over a “gap…analogous to the gaps that open up at the limits of familiar sense”) Cole Swenson mentions are evident. (182, 231) Take a few lines from Ronk “If I say I don’t believe you is this impatience / without waiting for an answer which might take days or years. / Hard to sit still to hear what in the interstices might sing.” (184) Or Swenson’s “Of the Insistent Equation of Opposites” which begins: “You build a garden just like you build a fortress – to see the future. / It’s what you see there / that changes / the entire landscape / into the world / we remember”(240). Both considerations of spaces between and slippery time are enacted through a lyric voice.

However, these poems are not at all strictly lyrics. As Brenda Hillman puts it in New American Writing: “Lyric is an element in poetry, not a type, rendering human emotion in language; attention to subjective experience in a song-like fashion seems to be key in all definitions of lyric….Since the twentieth century unseated all certainty, the lyric is rendered on torn, damaged or twisted strings.”^[7] So it is fitting to say lyric postmodernisms rather than the other way around. There is more leeway in this arrangement, which suits the collection well.

The poets are mostly mid-career with a minimum of three books out. “Some have been publishing since the 1960’s, some have emerged more recently, but all have been influential on newer generations of American poets.” (back cover) It’s a diverse group, in the way we are now accustomed to the term. The difficult task isn’t coming up with talented and practiced poets working in other than the quietudinally epiphanic vein. Many come to mind who weren’t selected.

Some of the facts of the poems.

Mostly they are left-justified, though
     they     do have
           words that trinkle

                      down
                           the
                              page.

There are prose poems and some poems in columns and with one line followed by two lines of space poems in narrative dated sections otherwise sections numbered dotted. Postmodernisms, after all. The cover image also shows us that pomo plays its part: a young child (awe) has run across a cracked (post) pavement (modern) to the water (more awe). A return, a reflection, yet the concrete figures prominently.

Consider a few lines that portray some of the reach, the plurality of the isms, in the collection:

From the more directly lyric:
“Not to be known always by my wounds, / I buried melancholy’s larvae // and cleaved the air behind you.” (Forrest Gander, 67)

To the staccato and fragmentary:
“Heard (as thought) / but also spelled (?!): ‘a slight’ // –not yet insult, minor, a slip of a”
(Carol Snow, 213)

By way of the syntactically shifting and subtracted in:
“Under a sky, in a garden, there are serious women and beautiful men, were talking.”
(Aaron Shurin, 195)

Enough of Nathaniel Mackey’s vast Mu and Andoumboulou project is showcased to experience its intertwining mythic nature. What’s even better, Shepherd has included a slight wisp of a poem, [“Waters…”], to “wet the / mouth” of the reader to Mackey’s range.

Brenda Hillman’s section includes the couplets of “Air for Mercury” with the uniquely spaced columns of “Air in the Epic.” 

 

For centuries people carried the epic
inside themselves. (Past the old weather         stripping, a breeze is making some
6th-vowel sounds yyyyy that will side
with you on the subject of syntax                    as into the word wind they
go. (107)

 

Here is lyric, tradition, experimentation, nature, postmodern self-referential, language play – Homer on up to, well, up to Hillman. Integration, indeed!

There’s Mei-mei Berssenbrugge’s lengthy meditation on “Fog” and her “Tao Tien” running its long lines up and down the page rather than horizontally and “Safety” and “Safety” and “Safety”. Rosemarie Waldrop’s prose poems, which “gave up stress for distress” (242), and Bruce Beaseley’s re-lettering reordering of words to force the reader’s eye to re-see and reorganize the words for herself.

 

                                    Come back      w
                                    itch

                                    izard in           
                                    aw

                                    bra
                                    str

                                    Brainstraw       Take back (14)

 

Another type of invitation to the reader to enter the poem through her own “map” is C.S. Giscombe’s “(Hand-eye Coordination)”:

 

                                                With sound

                                    and the will
                                                  to trace
                                    back along it

                                                            (as though
                                            sound were a map of the city,
                                   skeletal, just
                                                          the big streets/ piano music
                                              for one hand)

                                        to what-
                              ever is all
                                        & exactly the heart

                                    from which
                              could come/ did come

                                                                 this trouble, (76-77)

 

Ideologically and formally, this poem meets well Shepherd’s terms. The self-referential uttering language that comes later in “things could reach & end at, // as speech does / or the will to speak” and “…the clutter // which poses as narrative, // A to B / to Z,” (78, 80) exists within music. The “sound” and “speak” of the poem feels fragmented and lyrically rhythmic.

Each poet’s statement provides ample context to the work and proves what Shepherd has claimed, that these are writers whose “work explores the poem as a form of thinking, a thinking-out and thinking-through.” (xi) (The thinking person’s guide to awe!) Every statement does exhibit an engagement with, questioning of, and attentiveness to the process and possible meaning of making poems in “our contemporary post-everything world….” (Shepherd, xiii)

And in the “unlikely event that [the reader] is familiar with the work of all of these poets” (Shepherd, xvii), there is enough uncollected work, longer sequences, and rarely anthologized poems to warrant a look. Or, again, to specifically (re)consider a poet in this company. Myself, I wouldn’t have thought to put oh say Forrest Gander in a category with Rosemarie Waldrop. But the unchallenged poetics is not worth reading. If nothing else, this book has provoked a fair amount of examination, no matter what you call it. It’s not the Iowa Anthol; and it’s not the noulipian Analects. LP isn’t supposed to be. It is somewhere in between and as much as says so. Does its presence defeat further exploration or experimentation in poems? Or, as the “not other tradition” would fear, does it send everyone over the cliff of nonsensical whimsy? Will cave humming cease? Time will (or won’t!) tell. Meanwhile, there’s much admirable contemporary work that is aptly collected within this framework.^[8] The writing is already there; Shepherd has formed a book to extend its reach. Isn’t that one of the best reasons to make an anthology?

 

Reginald Shepherd passed away September 10, 2008. He was a tireless writer, critic, and supporter of poetry.