Response to Steve Burt on Abject Motherhood (part 2)

I thought i would follow up very briefly on my note about Steve Burt's essay on mother poetry in the Boston Review.

To begin with, I would suggest you read Joyelle's talk (on this blog, December 20th) in conjunction with this essay. That way you can just immediately see what's at stake: two very different takes on a similar issue.

I appreciate the fact that Steve writes so much about contemporary poetry, and I think this essay is probably a very good way to draw attention to the role of motherhood/child-rearing in post 1960s American poetry. It's interesting that he sees it as a source of "innovation," a term that usually has a very masculinist vibe. (Joyelle's essay rejects the whole idea of "innovation" as positivism.)

However, there is a feature of Steve's criticism that I don't like, and that's the way he assumes the role of patronizing, professorial gate-keeper of good taste, authority, refinement. And I find that particularly troubling in the final paragraph (which I quoted in my last post), where he writes that "inferior poets" - unlike Rachel Zucker (and I want to note that I don't know Zucker's book, this entry is certainly not a critique of her work) - merely "like to break taboos" and shock, but their poetry gets "old fast" because the shocks are not "formal."

In other words: these poets are flawed because form does not equal function. These poems do not lend themselves to a clean close-reading. There is an excess to their writing.

Throughout the piece he assures the reader that in Zucker's poetry - no matter how "beat"-like it may seem - does have aesthetic "goals." In other words, don't be scared, this poet is not chaotic, she knows what she is doing, she is "masterful" in her own way. At one point he says: "the raw feel of which belies its well-paced plot." And though he mentions "form" what he really seems to mean is that the poem's form reflects the very real life (he constantly refers to the poet as the speaker, and repeats Zucker's real life qualities like some kind of mantra of authenticity): poetry is still all about mimesis.

Insisting that something is well-made, well-wrought is of course the standard criteria of criticism of the New Critical lineage. However, I was struck by how often he repeats how "visceral," "raw" and "excessive" it is; how it's about "embodiment" and "the abject"; how it will "gross you out"; how it's coming up with these negative "affects" that are commonly overlooked in poetry.

The constant repetition of the word "excess" in particular is what struck me the most when I first read the review. It is as if he's trying too hard to convince us that it is "excessive" by just repeating the word without actually investigating the term. If I saw this enough times, this will be "excessive" poetry!

And still, most of the essay is meant to reassure us through close reading that this is indeed still well-made poetry, poetry in which the shocks are "formal" not just pointless, *not* just "excessive".

So it seems we have a contradiction here: Steve wants Zucker to be excessive, but also not excessive. It's a bind. And it's a bind that I think comes from Steve seeing criticism as gatekeeping: there is a lot of excessive, abject poetry out there that is challenging his notions of well-made. The way you deal with this is of course not to criticize that poetry (which would draw a lot of attention to poetry that would otherwise not get attention), but to set up a safer poet as a limit and then strangely "abject" the truly excessive poetry out of the essay by criticizing it without giving it a name or giving the poetry any space in the journal.

This is of course the old "I'm neither raw nor cooked", "hybrid" approach. And just like Lowell wanted to deal with the threat of "the New Americans", this is an attempt to deal with tasteless poetry that now threatens Burt's refinement.

I think a more honest approach would be to mention one of these masses of "inferior" poets who are just plain shocking, and to show what he means when he says that they are merely shocking.

(Steve does mention in his 'historical' overview that Sexton and Sharon Olds were "less formally interesting" (as if that were an objective historical fact) but it doesn't seem like that's who he's talking about at the end of its piece. It's very hard to believe he's dragging Sharon Olds out for another horse-beating.)

Also, in an essay that would seem to desire to cast a spotlight on contemporary poetry by women, a patronizing sexism surfaces in this piece, both in the potted-history of the first few paragraphs, in which judgements of taste double up as historical fact, or when he says that the poem about going to a support group "is strange and more demanding than such facts might let you expect," or when the obviously belittling term 'mommy poetry' sneaks into the essay on the second page. The latter example makes it clear why interventions like the Gurlesque anthology are still necessary.

In the end what I take away from this review is a fear of the poetry of Ginsberg, Plath, Sexton and Olds and what they represent. What they have in common is beside being women and queer that their poetry is popular, that is affective, that challenges the idea of poetry as a refined, tasteful, disinterested.

[One more thing: From the quotes in the review it's absolutely obvious that Zucker is deeply influenced by Plath, Sexton, Ginsberg. Why does Zucker have to be rescued from her influences like this? The same way, when Steve wrote about Mark Levine's first book Debt some 10 years ago, he made Berryman into Levine's main influence, when Mark was almost overtly channeling Plath? Why must Plath be written out of our poetry?]