Thanks to Nate Dorward (N) for posting the paragraphs by Prynne, my best
E-mail reading of the week.
Additional thanks to N for the following.
[snip]
[re Kimball] Why is "Cambridge School" any less meaningful than other
terms like "New York School"? As Andrew Duncan has (polemically) shown
it's possible to think about shared characteristics of this loose grouping.
[/snip]
1) I agree. It's possible to think about shared characteristics of
groupings, loose or otherwise, but (ahem...surely...) the assertion of
that possibility does not in itself confirm a particular grouping is so.
Nor does it begin to persuade us that it might be. To presume that an X
group or an X school exists by one declaring it, or in the instance of
recent correspondence here, by inserting mention of it -- rather like a
declaration en passant (one presuming it already apparent) -- is no more
than a foray into imaginative habits of mind. I like this sort of
habits, myself, and expect this from poets, and I like this especially
when I find it in their poems. But the argument for the mention (or the
declaration) is missing.
2) We proceed to say it's so if we choose. And so -- if not through
argument -- let's get on with describing what it is. Am hesitant to go
along with fresh attempts at more schooling of poetry, but that said, to
see the point of X, I want to request observers and, perhaps,
participants of X group or X school -- to come to cases. In US cases,
for example, and not in any particular order, we have had / we have,
among others, objectivist, confessional, language, postlanguage, new
formalist, Black Mountain, New York. I guess we observe these. But the
degree of validity, the warrant for special attention of each of these
can be investigated intertextually. Zukofsky pitches objectivism as
journalistic legerdemain from the start -- accompaniment to a selection
of poems of his and George Oppen, WC Williams, Charles Reznikoff, Carl
Rakosi, Kenneth Rexroth, Basil Bunting, Robert McAlmon, others -- only
to find the joke stick. An uncomfortable example, for me, of jest's
recursive 'collusions of representation.' Is objectivism a school? There
is a history to the question that in effect makes it so. The question
answered, we can move on. The New York School, first generation, say,
is no joke. When Joan La Barbara sings Morton Feldman's tribute to
Philip Guston's painting occasioned by Frank O'Hara, you have something
like comity that instantiates not only the subjecthoods of the School,
but the sensual interdependencies that create its critical mass. Also,
many fabulously influential observers argue there is (or was) a New York
School, and that fact seems relevant; i.e., the weight of the claims is
persuasive. More relevant, however, is how few participants or
practitioners, let's say, from the first generation notice the School or
their membership in it. Younger practitioners, second and later
generations, who give notice seem to follow a natural path of
ontogenesis, that is, the ontogenesis of new claimants to comity
evolving toward more encompassing adventures.
3) Shamelss of me: but since schools is today's subject: Juliana Spahr's
_Spiderwasp or Literary Criticism_ demonstrates what some might call
distinctly American tendencies -- that would be a loose grouping -- to
unschool poetries and, more, dismember the polarity art v. critique.
I've reviewed _Spiderwasp_ in a survey of other work by Katy Lederer,
Tina Celona and Martin Corless-Smith, available at this URL.
<http://www.jacket.zip.com.au/jacket08/kimball.html>
Apologies for the lateness of my response. I am on digest. Best wishes
to N and all.
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