How much for your movement's nom de plume?
In the library today after teaching a primo class (I thought), I thought I'd pick up some more books on postmodern poetics to add to the stack of theory I've already accumulated for the upcoming Exam (capital E very much intended). And I found in that section of the 4th floor a book called The Ghost of Tradition: Expansive Poetry and Postmodernism, which, far from being the sterling encapsulation of the poetics I myself am trying to construct and foreground w/tradition (even the ghost of), which is to say a poetics of expansive reach and encyclopaedic scope, turns out that the ed. of said volume (one Kevin Walzer) and others before him chose to label as the "Expansive Movement" NOT the kind of poetics I'm after but rather a needless conglomeration of New Formalism and New Narrative, neither of which I deem worthy of a new designation whether alone or taken in concert.
None of this is to say that New Formalism / New Narrative are poetic movements that lack virtue or verve; quite the contrary, I think that these schools stood and stand as necessary corrective measures to the overabundances of confessional, Deep Image, et. al. schools of free verse that came to monopolize the market after your Eliots and Pounds but mostly after your Lowells and most recently especially your Collinses. Yay for meter & rhyme redivivus, in short - especially when aimed toward the (post)modern situation. In general, of course, this is not the poetry this American moment requires... another story, that; more to the point, why, why, did they have to term this movement "Expansive" when it is anything but, and when, most of all, it would have an ideal term for the theory and praxis I am now daily laboring to craft and authenticate, which is a hard row to hoe with no catchy term for the late-night circuit to bandy about? Because, as we all know the renegade avant-gardists know, "Have term for school of poetics, will bandy."
None of this is to say that New Formalism / New Narrative are poetic movements that lack virtue or verve; quite the contrary, I think that these schools stood and stand as necessary corrective measures to the overabundances of confessional, Deep Image, et. al. schools of free verse that came to monopolize the market after your Eliots and Pounds but mostly after your Lowells and most recently especially your Collinses. Yay for meter & rhyme redivivus, in short - especially when aimed toward the (post)modern situation. In general, of course, this is not the poetry this American moment requires... another story, that; more to the point, why, why, did they have to term this movement "Expansive" when it is anything but, and when, most of all, it would have an ideal term for the theory and praxis I am now daily laboring to craft and authenticate, which is a hard row to hoe with no catchy term for the late-night circuit to bandy about? Because, as we all know the renegade avant-gardists know, "Have term for school of poetics, will bandy."
posted by Wil at
4:52 PM
1 Comments:
Thanks for the response, Kevin. I understand the rationale behind the term, and admire the democratic element it tries to inject into traditional poetic approaches. I enjoyed aspects of the book you wrote but as it happened to blog just after discovering that "Expansive Poetry & Postmodernism" referred to something different than I'd expected - I'd thought that here someone had written a whole work of criticism on exactly my intended poetics, and the title was such a fine one... a general wish that I'd thought of that designation first, I suppose.
I judge Campbell McGrath, Albert Goldbarth, and TR Hummer to be writing in modes that might be termed "expansive" (which will have to be a working term, subject to our own tweaks). Others, perhaps, but to make a case for them I'd have to be less tired than I am.
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Wil, at 11:01 PM
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