At The Poetry Foundation website, D.A. Powell, one of the most gifted and original poets writing today, has this to say about literary schools:
'Maybe it’s peculiar to our time, in which actual schools (academies) proliferate and spawn, that we’re seeing so much centrism. What we need is more eccentrism. Who isn’t tired of the contemporary qua contemporary? Who isn’t bored by innovation for innovation’s sake? It has, sadly, become the mode du jour. Not even a school. A monocultural fish farm. An orchestra in which everyone is trying to solo at the same time.'
I've never been what you might call a 'joiner'. Even the groups to which I do belong make me uneasy about the loss of my autonomy to someone else's vision. It baffles me whenever I come across a few people, or more than a few, who give themselves up completely to their little trench of society, who 'buy in' to a manifesto or aesthetic enough to forgo one's independent whims. It's like turning over our right to be idiosyncratic. How does one do that? It's an unteachable trait, probably: you either got it, or you don't.
The only thing more frustrating to me than someone giving up that right, is what Powell calls the mode du jour of today's schools / fish farms: innovation not for the sake of expressing something integral to the time, place, self, or culture, but out of boredom. If someone is that bored with poetry, perhaps they aren't a poet? I'm not sure of that either. More often than not, though, the best thing you can say about these types of work is that it has a neat idea behind it, or a certain playfulness. And beyond that . . . ?
Adherence to one school or another doesn't predicate better art, certainly not — but neither does adherence eliminate the possibility of good art. Talented artists will create quality art, and they don't need a school to do it. However, I think there may be a danger in the sort of groupthink that schools necessitate which could limit an artist. I suppose that danger is where my own reservations lie — call me a curmudgeon, but I'm with Powell: whatever it is that's being branded today, I am probably not buying.
4 comments:
Exactly what kind of expression would *not* be "integral to the time, place, self, or culture" What poet lives out of time, in no particular place, lacks a self, or is separate from culture? Even "boredom" would presumably be an expression of self and of a particular cultural moment. When a poet starts worrying about "expressing" a time or a place, *then* he/she is no longer a poet.
Dan,
I disagree with your last point, and am happy to provide Milton, Wordsworth, Whitman, Pound, Levertov, and Powell himself as, I think, definitive counter-examples. I've read you for quite a while and we may just be at an impasse here.
I also tend to think that some art is not an expression of its time and place, or of the artist even, but rather of a debilitating self-conscious concern for newness, hipness, revolution, etc. These concerns, which I think are limiting, get in the way — an artist might indeed exhibit these qualities, but they'll simply be honest expressions, idiosyncrasies. I think the difference can be seen in the quality of the art.
Being bored by one's life or with other poets or their work isn't the same thing as being bored with poetry itself. Some Visual Poets would be horrified to discover that, in fact, their boredom with poetry means they're actually painters and not poets at all.
Even if I were to agree that most innovation in poetry is mostly about a "concern for newness, hipness, revolution" (I don't), how could this also not be an "expression of its time and place"? You think that our own time is especially characterized by this, but what time and place *doesn't* contain this impulse among some people?
I really can't see that any of the writers you cite were motivated primarily by a desire to "express" time and place, as opposed to the need to write the kind of poetry they were otherwise compelled to write.
Oh I never claimed it was particular to this time. If it seemed that way, I apologize.
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