"The Genius of This Place Is 'Was'"
2013; University of Chicago Press; Volume: 57; Linguagem: Inglês
ISSN
2327-5804
Autores Tópico(s)Poetry Analysis and Criticism
ResumoThe era of the legendary poetry wars framed partisanship in largely formal terms, open versus closed, and it's taken half a century for this rift to recede to a speck on the horizon. What that face-off sustained was a struggle for the canon. The point about a canon is its modest scale; a canon doesn't encompass faceless hordes, it hoists a clutch of prime instances onto pedestals. The poetry wars had teeth as long as it made Ginsberg/Lowell into an either or equation, but even by the mid-Sixties that became untenable, and once both were inside the canonical sanctuary their courtly retinue threatened to capsize the vessel. And this was before the vaunted challenge of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, which at this date is ancient history for younger poets. We're now at a unique demographic cusp, when poets born after the Vietnam War are about to turn forty, and even poets born during the first Gulf War are appearing in print. An old school canonist' outlook would ask: Who are the major younger poets today?-a question trailing behind it a clanking cavalcade of assumptions easily sustained by the thought that both Ginsberg and Lowell (to say nothing of Pound and Eliot) were securely canonical by the age of forty, with Howl and Kaddish and Lord Weary's Castle behind them. Today, no doubt, the earnest reader could hoist five or ten fingers for their forty-something candidates, but I'd wager that the overlap between lists from one reader to another would broaden like a river delta and we'd quickly have fifty, a hundred, then hundreds of contenders. Moving up the life cycle to nominate sixty-somethings (Jorie Graham, Charles Bernstein, Nathaniel Mackey, C. D. Wright) would only moderately delimit the total. In other words, demographics have squelched the practical compass a canon might provide. The function of a canon, for all its resemblance to an elite country club, is to render visible the figures that can t be denied or evaded. When Basil Bunting compared Ezra Pound to a mountain range he provided the apt comparison. Either you remain ignorant or you make the ascent.For an anthology to be credible now it must pitch its claim on other grounds. The challenge is that the field of noncanonical anthologies is long-lived (well over a century old) and richly stocked (with recent titles like Hummers, Knucklers, and Slow Curves: Contemporary Baseball Poems (1991) and Counting Caterpillars and Other Math Poems (1998)). Suddenly two massive anthologies have appeared with slightly different profiles of ecopoetics, a concept firmly established in the groves of academe. The poetry world has had its own Ecopoetics journal (edited by Jonathan Skinner) for nearly a decade, and more recently the Poets for Living Waters project organized by Amy King and Heidi Lynn Staples is an ongoing web collection originally started in response to the Gulf Coast oil spill in 2010. With photos of the poets accompanying their contributions, the site's replication of social media protocols accentuates the personal while revealing a discomforting phenomenon: demographics have overrun the individualism with which poetry has traditionally been aligned. This means that we now encounter poetry as a collective manifestation, intended or not-a stance invited by both these anthologies with the sheer number of poets they include. As if it were a commercial airliner, The Ecopoetics Anthology crams 208 poets into 575 pages; the 104 poets in The Arcadia Project's have much more legroom. Astonishingly, only fifteen poets appear in both collections. Between them, these anthologies launch an alarming total of297 poets into the ecopoetisphere-all American, no less (apart from three Canadians in Arcadia). Although each of these typically American supersize portions offers considerable name recognition for anyone with even modest exposure to contemporary poetry, they brandish at least 150 names new to me. That a pair of editors was needed for each collection suggests something about the labor involved in contending with the tsunami of poetry currently being published. …
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