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Rumpus Book ClubThe Rumpus Original (Supersized) Combo with Rebecca Wolff
Rumpus: I’d like you to have a chance to respond to Stephen Burt’s essay in the May/June issue of the Boston Review, in which he cites Fence as the emblematic magazine of the most-imitated (elliptical) new American poets, a movement he describes as predating the latest wave of poetics, described loosely by Burt as “The New Thing.”
(A brief excerpt: “These poets were what I, eleven years ago, called “elliptical,” what other (sometimes hostile) observers called “New Lyric,” or “post-avant,” or “Third Way.” Their emblematic first book was Mark Levine’s Debt (1993), their emblematic magazine probably Fence”). Burt characterizes elliptical poetry as “full of illogic, of associative leaps,” and these poems to resemble “dreams, performances, speeches, or pieces of music,” while citing a wide range of predecessors, from Rae Armantrout, to Ashbery and Jorie Graham. “The new poets pursue compression, compact description, humility, restricted diction, and—despite their frequent skepticism—fidelity to a material and social world,” says Burt, and, in the wake of William Carlos Williams’ dictum about the inextricability of ideas and things: “They are so bound up with ideas of durable thinghood that we can name the tendency simply by capitalizing: the New Thing.”
I won’t attempt to do justice to the breadth of Burt’s essay, but do you have anything you’d like to say in response to Burt’s association of Fence with the elliptical school of poetics or his alternate ways of describing the “New Thing” poets (“friendly to nature, but not always averse to the supernatural”)? I do feel the rhetorical questions with which Burt ends his essay (“Is the New Thing—with its documentary cousins—related to 9/11? To the rise of the Web, where most texts seem ephemeral . . . to the depredations of the Bush administration, which cast as irresponsible a Clinton-era poetry of free play? Or simply to the exhaustion of the effusive, associative, neo-Baroque mode that came just before?”) beg an answer, and I cannot think of anyone better suited to answer than you.
RW: My shoes feel too big today.
I will confess to a bit of irritation at Fence’s being consigned by Burt to a dustbin of Burt’s own making, at first reading this piece a few months ago. Steve has a habit of being merely, and somewhat demurely, descriptive but in the process, perhaps because there just aren’t other critics around as visible, kind of corraling or shepherding whole mini-generations of poets into adopting his terms. For lack of better terms, I guess, though it seems with his “New Thing” that he’s preemptively landed on something no one will feel comfortable saying, certainly not about their friends or relatives. The essay on Ellipticism in 1998 or 99 was roundly abused by many for thusly reifying a motion in poetry (some of which, yes, Fence definitely put into print) in the late 90s that was a bit unmoored, a bit superficial. This was an interesting moment for me as an editor, a teachable one: Some poets thought that poetry had political efficacy, and felt that poetry that adopted, magpie-fashion, the attributes of that poetry, without its convictions, was deeply problematic.
I think time has shown that, if not politically dangerous, the most derivative or trivial or unfelt examples of that poetry have proved to be, as Burt says, easily exhausted, style not a conviction in itself. It took the Fence poetry editors a few issues to identify the trendiness and formally move away from it, but move away they did, and I guess what’s really annoying to me about the first paragraph of that essay is that it is a narrow reading of what Fence actually published during that time and continues to publish, which is a truly various collection of different kinds of poetries.
The lasting question for me is what “should” poetry be moored to? There’s that should thing again. Some poets and critics have the strength of their convictions, and some have the strength of action, and some rely on cosmic vibes. I am curious about how this New Thing seems more than anything to resemble a New Quietude.
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October 7th, 2009 at 5:42 pm
Rebecca, This is such a great interview! I’d been looking for it ever since you mentioned it was forthcoming. Really excited, too, about The Beginners…