There is No Cheese, Only Types of Cheese

from the Samizdat blog:

‘I've always had a mixed reaction to Silliman's mantra. On the one hand, I think I get what he's trying to say, and I agree with it. I suppose he means that there's no such thing as normal poetry, no entity that is the natural state of the art, from which other kinds of poetry are deviations. In his view, it is with poetry as it is with language. Just as there's no such thing as a version of English that has no accent, there's no kind of poetry that is simply "poetry" in an unqualified state. Those people who blithely say "I don't have an accent" do, in fact, have accenta — it's just that their accenta is the dominant ones in their countries, so they think of their speach as normal, natural, pure, and uninflected by class or region. Speakers of the dominant accent have the privilege of thinking of themselves as normal, and of others as deviants, but this is simply the ignorance and insensitivity that so often comes with power. And those people who might think of themselves as poets, pure and simple, are actually writers of a particular kind of poetry, members of some kind of school of poetry, every bit as much as are the writers of less dominant kinds of poetry. It's just that the dominant group doesn't have to give itself an -ism (imagism, surrealism, dadaism, postmodernism, what have you)

What Silliman objects to is that some people go around thinking that their poetry has no accent. I'm with him on this.

It's at this point that Ron, in a gesture both helpful and, I think, spiteful, provides a label for this kind of poetry — his infamous "School of Quietude." I like the idea of a label, just as I like the idea of people with the dominant accent realizing that they have accents. But labels always seem to cause trouble, since there are always people who feel that the level of generalization is too high (this is a problem with accent labels, too, since few people speak in exactly the same accent). [. . .] Ron's term is particularly bad, though, because it comes laden with a negative judgement from the start, implying that those poets who write this kind of poetry are somehow complicit with the bad guys, quiescent in the face of situations of moral urgency. Also, it has even less buy-in from those whom it is meant to label than terms like "language poetry" and "Cambridge poetry" have had. After all, inlike the "School of Quietude," both "Cambridge poetry" and "language poetry" have at times been used by some of the poets they designate. To make things worse, I've seen Silliman create versions of literary history that essentially project his model of the current American poetic situation (the School of Quietude on one side, the Post-Avant on the other) back in time, claiming a history that extends from Whitman and Dickinson to the Post-Avant, over against a history that extends from Longfellow to the School of Quietude. I don't even know where to begin discussing how messed up this is — it betrays a kind of ignorance of the complex ways literary history and influence work, and it betrays a weird kind of will-to-power, a wish to grab the currently respected names from the past and label them "mine, not yours." ’