Hi Alison, Doug & everyone in response to Bruce Andrews.
I (finally) did read the 'Interview'.  Without having read the interview, I had earlier responded to Andrew's San Francisco reading - which I initially liked, then quickly burnt out on. I burnt out on the 'intentionality' of the tone of it, a kind of 'badgering' that I find implicit in the interview. A righteousness of purpose that I find easy, at least, predictable and, finally, insulting to me as a listener.   I think if an artist/writer/performer is working with a 'social purpose' (which I fully support) it is imperative to be alert to what may or may not work as 'social process'. Does putting 'a bomb' under a reader's 'expectations do that? Or do revolutionary or transformative actions require a more sophisticated tool kit? I think Andrews' work is a failure of tone (predictable), and finally comes off as condescending to the reader he purports to want to alter.  If someone is going through a divorce (about half the world's population), or has an
 'over the top' issue with his/her kid, a killer health issue or whatever, is the poet supposed to say or imply that their situation is irrelevant to 'the social purpose" of poetry?

Or do you, as a socially conscious writer, work on way to integrate/restructure the relations of the deeply private with the the social (public), political, etc.  whole - especially given that there is a often huge and painful divorce between these spaces.  I suspect/believe it is those writers who operate from a vulnerable and genuine position of compassion & empathy - that crosses private and public realms - who are the ones that can provoke insight and social change. (Say, WCW versus Robert Frost).

Yes, Andrews has always had his eyes and ears to the language of the social/corporate/political matrix  but, (hopefully my point is made), I think his language is stuck in a predictive rivet.

Stephen


--- On Tue, 4/6/10, Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: Alison Croggon <[log in to unmask]>
Subject: Re: Bruce Andrews interview - gender
To: [log in to unmask]
Date: Tuesday, April 6, 2010, 3:26 PM

Hi Douglas

There's no doubt that kind of confessional lyric/workshop poem exists.
And that it's very popular, with writers anyway. Like you, I have
noticed it is not gender specific, although it's often identified as
specifically female, and like you, it mostly doesn't interest me very
much.

Totally agree with your other examples - I'd add a few lyrical
Australians, like MTC Cronin, Peter Minter, Emma Lew, Kate Fagan...
and further away, younger poets like Sophie Mayer or Sophie Robinson.
All poets who, for me anyway, do interesting things with the idea of
the "personal" in very various ways, and generate, if you like,
contexts that call for a wider consciousness of how language and self
are shaped.

After reading an interesting discussion by Amy King on her blog about
a new anthology of poetry, Gurlesque,
http://amyking.wordpress.com/2010/03/29/the-gurlesque/  I have been
thinking a bit about burlesque performance, which is deeply inflected
by queer aesthetic. It varies from straight up opera/theatre, like
Barrie Kosky's sublimely subversive production of POPPEA (where he
jammed Cole Porter and Monteverdi) to new circus and theatrical
burlesque and cabaret. The best artists - and there are lot of good
ones here, from people Yumi Umiumare (formerly a member of the Butoh
group Dai Rakuda Kan), to Moira Finucane, (who helped invent new
burlesque with her show The Burlesque Hour and works with all sorts
from the dance and theatre avant garde) to out-there anti cabaret like
Meow Meow. This stuff is consciously political (in obvious and
not-obvious ways), and constantly plays with gender and normative
ideas of sexuality, and there's something profoundly liberating about
it.

I guess performance lends itself to this, because it is already
literally a playing of a role in relation to an audience, which
permits the explosion of expectations. Poetry per se is more
problematic in its relation to an audience/reader, and there does seem
something contradictory in BA's placement of a reader, given (as you
say) that it's often difficult to read his stuff, even with the best
will in the world. He's right about some innnovative practices
alienating readers as surely as "closed" practice, but I'm not sure
about his strategies...

xA



On Tue, Apr 6, 2010 at 4:31 AM, Douglas Barbour
<[log in to unmask]> wrote:
> So I finally went & read the interview too, Alison, thanks.  Interesting,
> that he seems to be asking political questions, & raising his practice as
> one answer, all the way to:
>
> BA: Which is an encounter with their socialized self. It’s not about your
> personal history. And that’s often the identification process. Author writes
> about her personal history, reader sees her personal history reflected in
> their personal history and is enraptured, and blah blah blah. So no, it’s
> about the social context, the social landscape. When I think of explanation,
> which I’m heavily invested in as a concept and a term, I think about
> context, contextualizing, rather than narrative. I want people not to find
> themselves in a story. I want people to find themselves in a meaningful
> network of possibility, of meaning, of value.
>
> and that's really the first place he does that gender thing that bothered
> you (& me). But just before that he also suggests that other forms of
> something like 'lyric,' but he also includes 'performance poetry,' cannot do
> what he seeks to do (although that term 'capacitate' sure doesnt actively
> excite me).
> But aside form your pointing to someone like Carson, I can alo think of
> many, & varied, poets, such as Susan Howe, Rae Armantrout, Erin Mouré, heck,
> Sheila Murphy, & many ohers, who do not do that trad lyric (feminine?)
> thing.
>
> I am reading right now a book by a woman who has 3 kids & is divorced, & her
> books fits his critique, lyrics deeply personal about her life as it played
> out, & so it does not interest me as much as books by the people I named
> above, but just before going through it (these are books from a publisher
> with which I am associated, but I did not choose any of the; here's a fairly
> large & eclectic editorial board) I was reading one by a man which had the
> same problems; so it's not attached to gender. It may be attached to that
> lyric desire & how it is still idealized by many writing programs, etc.
>
> Meanwhile, TL Cowan, in her PhD thesis on performance poetry (which I may
> have mentioned before) made a strong theoretical argument for the political
> power of some of the feminist/queer performances she critiqued.
>
> It's both a complex & a conflicted territory (& then it's all just poetry
> anyway, which few people read, really....
>
> Doug
> On 3-Apr-10, at 5:05 PM, Alison Croggon wrote:
>
>> I got lost where this discussion was happening, so am sending this to
>> both lists.
>>
>> I read the interview, which is actually quite interesting, and it
>> prompted some musing. I'm kind of fascinated that one of his models is
>> Brecht - whom you would think would be at an opposite axis in
>> practice, if not in theory - and another is the ostranie of the
>> Russian formalists. And that he places the reader in the centre of his
>> practice, with the desire to change the reader's consciousness, to
>> make the reader more aware of the social structure which frame him/her
>> (something that's been occupying me, although in very different ways),
>> and an embrace of an oppositional poetics that means chucking out the
>> old to make space for the new, &c (which he also eschews in another
>> breath, when he claims that LANGUAGE poetry wasn't oppositional). Yes,
>> all stuff that's been heard before, but interesting all the same,
>> because of the doubt that seems to be behind some of his answers, and
>> which in fact emanates from where he places of the reader. Unless, of
>> course, I'm misreading him.
>
> Douglas Barbour
> [log in to unmask]
>
> http://www.ualberta.ca/~dbarbour/
>
> Latest books:
> Continuations (with Sheila E Murphy)
> http://www.uap.ualberta.ca/UAP.asp?LID=41&bookID=664
> Wednesdays'
> http://abovegroundpress.blogspot.com/2008/03/new-from-aboveground-press_10.html
>
>                                    The secret
>
> which got lost neither hides
> nor reveals itself, it shows forth
>
> tokens.
>
>                Charles Olson
>



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