H. T. Kirby-Smith
Department of English
UNC-Greensboro 
Greensboro NC 27412

                                         Behind the Lines

          In the past twenty years, two movements have appeared in American poetry that seem to  academics who follow the poetic stock market promising areas in which to make investments of time and energy. Both are reactions against the informality of poetic idiom and meter that has been common since about 1965, and  both are in many ways continuations of the polarizations that occurred in the fifties and much earlier (though proponents of the movements will deny this). These are the so-called L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, which aims at the cultivation of language for its own sake and as a creator of reality rather than as a means of communication, and the more easily understood New Formalism. [Click for a frankly hostile critique of New Formalism.] As we shall see, there has been an effort at gathering New Formalism under the same rubric with the "New Narrative," calling them both "Expansive Poetry," a term that is perhaps neither more nor less felicitous than various others, such as Objectivism or even Symbolism. To a large degree these movements are continuations of the raw/cooked bifurcation of American poetry, but they also strongly resemble the division that occurred a hundred years earlier in French poetry, between the Symbolists and Parnassians, as well as the polarities represented by Longfellow and Whitman.
          To put it with reductive simplicity, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry looks at the poem from the inside and produces its effects by employing a dissonant and aleatory music, while the New Formalism sees the outside of the poem and idealizes a sculptural or pictorial regularity and finish. In some sense both are nostalgic harkings back to later nineteenth century verse--a statement that I suspect no one identified with either group would wish to agree with. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets yearn toward a magical or incantatory vagueness, or at times a Victorian nonsensical whimsy, that Wallace Stevens managed to retain in his poetry but which has degenerated into self-congratulatory goofiness in some of Stevens's followers. The New Formalists, for their part, regret the disappearance of scannable meters. Yet I doubt that poets from either school would agree in admiring Rossetti's "The Blessed Damozel" or William Morris's "Tune of the Seven Towers," poems that unite formality and dreaminess. [links show paintings that accompanied the poems]
          Neither movement betrays this nostalgia openly. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets cultivate the quirkiness, the randomness, the opaqueness that one associates with the New York School adding to it an even greater measure of calculated indeterminacy. New Formalist verse marches along in iambics, more or less, employs recurrent or traditional stanzas, and declares its subjects explicitly. These subjects are often conspicuously contemporaneous. When I speak of nostalgia, I do not mean that one finds either knights in armor or days of yore in the poetry of these groups--either the substance or linguistic affectations of Victorian poetry. But in their radically different ways these two schools do seem to aim at reclaiming for poetry some of the mystery that disappeared when human voices woke us and we drowned in conversational free verse. Both want poetry to be different and special--something superior to ordinary speech.
          Neither group seems to be particularly comfortable with the eagerness of academic writers to identify their ancestry. Some L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets, for example, are critical of New York School writing and do not care to be classed as descendants, and some poets viewed by others as New Formalists (or Expansive Poets) do not enjoy being seen as part of a determinedly reactionary cadre. What both--including poets who belong to but who do not care to acknowledge membership in either group--have in common is that they write poetry more or less according to articulated principles, that indeed the poems seem intended to illustrate the success of the theories or convictions upon which they are based. In the case of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets it might be best to say that they write in terms of disarticulated principles--that is, they reject the idea of natural speech as a medium or source for poetry, reject the concept of inheritable tradition of any sort, associate themselves with currents in semiotics and deconstructionism that reduce the authority of received texts or accepted norms of expression, and insist on the necessity of the poet's invention of a private language for the preservation--or the creation--of individual experience. Such experience seems precious, and seems threatened not only by the launching of nuclear weapons or imprisonment in an extermination camp, but likely to be eroded hour by hour through bombardment by billboards, television commercials, electronic mail (although many "Lang Pos" are themselves e-mail addicts), formulaic novels and film scripts, political speeches, talk shows, and, worst of all, the conversation and even poetry of those who have been soaked in these media and whose outlook is determined by them. If brutish ignorance once seemed the enemy of art, contrived and meretriciously sophisticated manipulation of language, music, graphics, and so on--a variety of sameness, now prevails, as in the television commercial that runs week after week. As Charles Bernstein put it, parodying Eliot's (or Ford Madox Ford's, or Pound's) pronouncement, "Poetry should be at least as interesting as, and a whole lot more unexpected than, television."  To these poets, who have mostly kept themselves outside of academic life, the established curricula of English and language departments in colleges and universities seem part and parcel of the linguistic and literary stultification, though sometimes they are polite enough not to insult these well-meaning efforts. They are not necessarily hostile to earlier poetries; indeed, the examples of Emily Dickinson and John Milton inspire them in their isolation, self-sufficiency, fundamental seriousness, and renovation of poetic language.
          Although the principled rebelliousness of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry requires that it reject its immediate precursors, Charles Olsonand the New York School, it is a continuation of the submission to chance and the immersion in process that we see in aleatory Black Mountain poetics. John Cage's Norton lectures at Harvard provide official authorization for the tychistic aesthetic, and Olson's insistence on moving on immediately from one impression to the next--without structure or transition--is amply illustrated in L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry. The associational psychology behind Coleridge's conversation poems extends itself into a disjunctive interior monologue, the loci classici for which in twentieth-century literature are Stein's Tender Buttons and Joyce's Finnegans Wake. Actually, for some of these poets, Joyce is too close to denotative language and ordinary human concerns to be of much use. The method is a radical affirmation of the significance of individual consciousness, even when that consciousness disintegrates into aimless reverie, delirium, inebriation, or the last gleams of self-awareness of the dying. It is a Faustian bargain with the ongoing processes of existence, a continual celebration of the passing moment and a refusal to try to arrest it, a Jackson-Pollock-like word painting in place of the repose of, say, a Holbein portrait. The philosophical underpinnings are to some degree Germanic transcendental philosophy, which authorizes the self-creation of the observing point of consciousness. Also important is the self-referential strain in French thinking in which Descartes' Cogito, ergo sum becomes an explanation for the cause of existence more than a reduction to a first principle of truth and which has been carried forward to the end of this century by an array of trendy French intellectuals. A more immediate, if seldom acknowledged, presence for these American poets is the psychology of William James and James's tolerance for eccentric or abnormal points of view. L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry also slips with ease into a schema that I have repeatedly used, that of American exceptionalism, an inner enlightenment that expresses itself most perfectly as an inarticulate humming. The aleatory bias reflects a profound distrust of the evil or spurious purposefulness by which so many individual persons have been afflicted in this century, the application of assembly-line methods to human beings.
          Because L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry aims at disengagement from any sort of predictability, the movement is constantly on the brink of dissociating itself into an infinitude of personalized poetic species and subspecies. Also, it is really a way of being more than a way of writing. The poem is completely subordinate to the poet. What is attractive about most L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets is that they do not seem concerned with achieving dominance as Olson did, or notoriety and pelf, as the New York School has done, but only self-realization. The self-realization, though, is not conducive to a compassionate understanding of other persons and poetries. At best it is merely harmless.
          L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry has as its intention the liberation of the individual consciousness from the conditions and constraints imposed from without, through the invention of a self-satisfying linguistic game that is consoling to the poet and possibly to a few friends. The aim of the poets is not so much to capture a wide readership for individual works as it is to encourage disengagement from the imperialisms of government, news agencies, television networks--indeed from all organized constituencies. I am speaking of what occurs in the poetry; in life itself some L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets are vigorous political activists, at least when governmental support for the arts seems threatened. There is some inconsistency here because the intention is exactly what right- wing politicians accuse the federally supported arts agencies of doing--to use government money to pursue anti-governmental ends. I also have noticed  a deplorable fascination developing among the poets, or at least among the hangers-on, with official mechanisms for recognition, such as the Modern Language Association and the chains of commercial book stores. Originally the view of the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets was that the aim of the "establishment" is to repress and the function of art is to resist. The impositions of these external agencies--of commercial interests, news wires, most of the media, and all government-- begin with verbal oppression; the method of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry is to deconstruct every kind of thoughtless verbalizing by rendering it even more thoughtless and therefore harmless. This can include received texts of the great poets as well through burlesque and parody. Much of Finnegans Wake, an important model for some L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetries, as I have said, is a mélange of literary parodies in which everything from Plato to Tennyson--and later--is disassembled. The nightmare of history is thus transformed into a reassuring and possibly amusing reverie. In this state it is possible to rediscover one's own humanity. "Poetry," says Charles Bernstein, "can, even if it often doesn't, throw a wedge into this engineered process of social derealization: find a middle ground of care in particulars, in the truth of details and their constellations--provide a site for the construction of social and imaginative facts and configurations avoided or overlooked elsewhere."  In practice this leads to a poetics of interminable inventiveness where everything is oblique, nuanced, tangential, and quirky; language becomes the agency for the creation of a personal world. This schizoid foundation of L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry becomes evident whenever it is challenged, and on such occasions it suddenly seems less like a harmless self-indulgence and more like a confederacy of poetic cronies. Answers to critics can be dismissive, illogical, insulting, and contemptuous, evincing something similar to the intolerant spirit one encounters in the American Religious Right.
          L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poets carry even further than the New York School did the reversion to a Paterian impressionism or Symbolist musicality--though their dissonant and nonsequential strains more resemble Cage than Debussy. A few sentences from the "Conclusion" to Pater's The Renaissance describe the poetry as well as anything I have encountered:
 

  Experience, already reduced to a group of impressions, is ringed round for each one of us by that thick wall of personality through which no real voice has ever pierced on its way to us, or from us to that which we can only conjecture to be without. Every one of those impressions is the impression of the individual in his isolation, each mind keeping as a solitary prisoner its own dream of a world . . . To such a tremulous wisp constantly reforming itself on the stream, to a single sharp impression, with a sense in it, a relic more or less fleeting, of such moments gone by, what is real in our life fines itself down. It is with this movement, with the passage and dissolution of impressions, images, sensation, that analysis leaves off--that continual vanishing away, that strange, perpetual weaving and unweaving of ourselves.

  Ironically, then, I-VI is, as its detractors claim, an unreadable book. But its "unreadability," far from being the consequence of what Rothstein calls "a random collection of atoms bumping into each other," is of course intentional, a carefully plotted overdetermination designed to overcome our conventional reading habits. Thus the elegant format and oversized numbered pages raise expectations that the text purposely deconstructs, engaging us as it does in a "relaxing" reading process that involves making rather than taking: open any place you like and follow whichever path interests you. (216)

            Although American poetry was, as [Joseph] Epstein accused it of being, university-based and professionalized, it was not, as he asserted "hopeless." It was very much alive--more vigorous than at any time in American history. The issue facing poets was not how to get poetry out of the classroom. The university classroom was an appropriate place for it, the main place where books--not just poetry but books of all kinds--were seriously read. The democratization of poetry was a by-product of the democratization of higher education in general, in America. The issue facing poets, most of whom were supported by universities, was how to sustain and, perhaps, even enlarge the franchise of poetry within the university--to maintain its general high quality without reverting to the elitist "difficulty" of the modernists while retrieving some of the didactic, narrative, and discursive subject matter that poets had, during the early modernist period and again during its attenuated recapitulation in the late-modern period, at first almost defiantly (but later, de facto) ceded to prose genres. (49)

            I should note that these chapters, to a degree, resist the conventional divisions of Expansive poetry into its New Formalist and New Narrative wings-- the labels that critics initially applied to these poets in the 1980s, and which are still widely used today. Instead, I use the term "Expansive," first used by Wade Newman in a 1988 essay. The term reflects these poets' interest in expanding both formal possibilities available to poets, and the audience for poetry in American culture. (xiii)

  In fact, Expansive poetry emerged in direct reaction against the entire academic culture that has been poetry's sole patron for half a century. Expansive poetry aims to reach a general audience, using materials of mass culture. (23)

            I used to console myself by saying that Thomas's achievement lay not in his contribution to thinking, and perception, but his language. That where one read Lawrence's poetry for his apprehension of creaturely life, his sophisticated atavism, and his rational thinking (as well as for his language), with Thomas, the poetry relied on its linguistic achievement. Plausible; but the linguistic complexity consists, I now think, of a complexity of attitudes rubbed through each other in such a way as to produce a necessarily complex linguistic result. Yet what are these attitudes? One may easily say they are comprised of sex and religion, yet it is the poems' achievement to be both embedded in these as well as in a perspect ive that overviews them. At any rate, I thought it might be helpful to interpolate the notebook work into my reading of some of the received versions of the poems since the published poems emerge from a general background parts of which are comparatively plain and simple. What one gets is a sense of developing density and complexity, rather than a complexity that otherwise might appear from the published work sui generis, precocious, or even wilful. These strictures are usually made by those who look for (or write) a version of prose-like propositional verse such as is the subject and method of Pope's Essay on Criticism. The objection is not to Pope but to the insistence of such canonical devices so applied that--don't we agree--this is the only way to write poetry. This insistence will frame even such poems as 'The force that through' endowing it with an appearance of docility and mediocrity. Whereas Thomas's achievement (Empson is right) lies in a richness that, in its balance and sanity, sets up a distinct mode of poetry, and adds (confusingly for us all, perhaps) a plurality of awareness, to our ultimate but not perhaps immediate enrichment. The poetry not only pluralizes the vista but extends the limits of our vision. (243)

          There seem to be some interesting ideas here, but the syntax is so tortured that the argument is hard to follow. Yet scattered through the text (all 400 pages of it) are remarks well worth considering:
 

            So accentual verse went under, but not out; and apart from a period between Chaucer and Tudor poetry, it desponded, perhaps through the unthinking confidence of accentual-syllabic verse. Some of this argument may be read in Hopkins' letters in those parts where he is critical of Tennyson's poetry (as was Whitman). But for those who want to read, feel and hear accentual poetry and cannot manage Anglo-Saxon or Middle English (as I cannot), they should read as much as they can of Langland's Piers Plowman and of Hopkins. Read Coleridge's 'Christabel' and his preface to it. Read also the plays of Eliot; and, additionally, catch the form, especially in the durational syllables, as one of the prosodic strategies in his Four Quartets. All this may disclose a form asking to be used, one capable of expressing rhythms with a radiating vitality, often rugged one, different from the smooth confidence of a verse-line that counts stresses and syllables. (271)