Dave,
I think Candice's point is a fair one. I'm thinking of stuff I've read
recently - from presses such as krupskaya, Edge, The Figures, Hard Press,
Tender Buttons - which doesn't, as far as I'm aware, have university
backing. Although some of the universities presses have taken on left field
poetry, it usually seems to be a case of canonizing established figures (Susan
Howe at Wesleyan, Charles Bernstein most recently at Chicago).
However, as far fantasmic "targets and silhouettes" go, I think there's
something in what you say, perhaps in the sense that the universities are
perceived to have provided sponsoring discourse in a way that happens much
less in the U.K. Creative writing programs in the U.S. may still be
largely dominated by the poetry of lyric anecdote, but L= and its avatars
attract significant critical attention (it's very often a battle fought
around the ramparts of theory). It may be that this, along with the
institutional apparatus (of e.g. the Buffalo list), creates the sense of a
closed and highly stratified world of the avant-garde. I'd certainly want
to contest this, not least because the whole Kentish/Debrutian procedure
seemed so entirely magnetized by the chessboard of reputations (to checker
a metaphor). To put it a different way, my feeling about KJ (particularly
after I'd been treated to one of his backchannel threatfests) was/is that
he should get out more (the last few months providing the kind of further
evidence that none of us needed). I do agree, though, that this was all
projected very crudely and impatiently onto the present list, with all
kinds of misconceptions, as you say.
Best,
Jeremy
>
> what I'm thinking of is the very strong university basis that poetry
> publishing retains in the US as against its more diluted British presence.
> 'Avant-garde' publications have a haven in some US universities which can,
> in the eyes of some, make 'established avant-gardes' like LangPo a
> silhouette of the 'enemy' in the eyes of some US dissident poets, as an
> object with institutional support. I think that the DeBrot/Kent assault here
> was partly based on a misconception of the status of the poets here as
> representing some kind of established hierarchy, as they see, say, Bernstein
> as being. I don't know if I'm expressing this very adequately, but do you
> get my drift?
>
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