awp/american hybrid/manageability etc

Here are some other random observations:

I went to the American Hybrid panel and it offered an interesting contrast of views. Forrest Gander suggested that the hybrid is in fact a radical, excessive dynamic, using as his example a Renaissance text written in mongrel-Latin. Another presenter - I didn't catch his name - made a similar argument for the hybrid as a mongrel of different cultures. I quite liked these two talks, but they seemed to break with the general argument that has formed around the anthology.

In difference to Forrest and the other guy, Cal Bedient argued the hybrid was a mixture of avant-gardist and quietist poetry, which in this mixture tempered the excessive and utopian aspirations of avant-gardism. He used Adorno. He praised these poets for their "uncertainty" (negative capability?) of these poets. Along the same line, Brenda Hillman said she wanted to foreground the "materiality of the text" "without sacrificing emotion." Here hybrid is a kind of compromise - as opposed to "sacrifice".

I should mention that Norton has already sent me a review copy of the book (Thanks!) and I like a lot of the writers included (Haryette Mullen, Alice Notley etc etc). What I am less in love with is the rhetoric surrounding it: This idea that poetry should be about compromise and moderation; the idea that this is somehow a moral position (Bedient); and perhaps most importantly, that there is an overarching commonality between these very different poets.

While a lot of the poetry is groundbreaking and exciting, a lot of the rhetoric suggests the same old rhetoric that has defined American institutional poetry since the 1970s: moderation over excess, the morality of temperance, the politics of quietism, ann almost purely formalist notion of art (style).

[Again: How is Alice Notley in any way a compromise or an in-between?? The idea is outrageous!]

I would say that this move to encapsulate these poetries in this formalist-moderation-rhetoric is in fact, more than any stylistic devices or author names, the nature of "Quietism." Quietism as a mode of reading, of making canons, of *teaching*.

Lynn Hejinian can be Quietist in other words, if framed the right (wrong) way.

In a strange way, this rhetoric is in sharp contrast with a lot of the poets included. So perhaps this anthology should be read as an attempt to domesticate, make "manageable" a moment of great proliferation in poetry. Perhaps someone could even write an essay about the conflict between Cole Swensen the poet/translator and Cole the critic and anthologist.

And there is of course also the importance of the "American" in the title: performing nationhood. This seems inherently opposed to hybridity as I understand it, but it certainly counters the excess of translation and international engagement (not to mention cross-genre work etc). There's a need to remove international connections in order to make the poetry manageable.

Obviously we need frameworks for reading texts: but not such formalist, reductive frameworks. Not the reiteration of the same old formalism. It's not enough to say something is a formal compromise. What does it do? Not frameworks that make the texts stable and impotent, but frameworks that make the texts more interesting, that pushes up to come up with new ideas.

My main problem is that an anthology and rhetoric like this is that it erases differences (just as the too-static notions of avant-garde and "quietism" does). Lets have discussions about poetry, lets develop different framework for reading in interesting new ways instead of just enforcing norms and canonicity. Canonicity depends on thoughtless acceptance of authority.

In its formalist focus it also isolated American Poetry from 1) the rest of the world 2) social changes 3)other arts. We're back in the American Poetry Wax Museum.