Don,

I find that when names are ascribed, for persons or movements or what-have-you, it's always about power, or more accurately about control.

And so one comes along and spends much effort trying to define a thing, we'll call it Thing; and then the next comes along who doesn't like Thing being called Thing and bats back a new name or several—for Thing, for the purveyors of Thing, and for the enemies of Thing; and on and on. Maybe this is the ballgame Nemo referenced.

The point of the matter is that it doesn't matter much: control is not possible in the absolute sense, although influence is possible, to varying degrees. Many of the Dead Poets have been able to achieve great influence without spending so much time playing that ballgame—although of course even many of those were also occasional raving critics. (Raving positively; raving madly; or just raving.)

Curtis,

Ballgames are fine. Robbins is going for the balls. Not the same thing!

I think it would be unfair, or perhaps unfortunate, to judge Robbins by his poetry. Prose seems to be his strength. I don't always agree with them, but the commentaries of his that I've read are interesting and sometimes rather graceful in their venemous way, like a spitting cobra.

I wonder if he's being a bit too clever in his review, though, creating an artificial distance between himself and the postmoderns by trashing them.

Best,

Ed

Ed, exactly. The second half of the piece was clearly his attempt to theorize some positive way forward for the avant-garde, the part of it we can only assume includes him. It didn't make any sense to me, but I also wasn't trying nearly as hard as he was. I still enjoyed reading it, which is doubtless more than I could say for the anthology under review.

Quincy's response about 'what's going on in Poetry' seems to me hard to better. Except there is one trend that holds most everywhere: more people write it than read it.

C

BTW, should I say that I reread Alien vs. Predator (the poem, not the book) & it made me laugh. No way it was worth the words we spilled on it those years ago.

Robbins is an establishment figure. He’s published in the New Yorker and Poetry Magazine. Good for him. But if there’s going to be revolution anytime soon it won’t be it those pages – getting back to the original theme of this thread: how Poetry Magazine has lost its edge.

Robbins is politically motivated at least as much as he is aesthetically. That is his right and he is by no means the first. For my blood, he runs too hot in the nihilism direction and I’m just a sappy humanist. He does have taste: the Palmer poem he quotes is exquisite.

John says, What language! I'll bet the bloke's a little person.

Priceless.

There's so much old poetry I need to learn about. Me too, Chris. And so much young poetry I don't. Not you, of course, Athene. Meaning Spherians.

I like Robbins' reconsideration of Dylan Thomas more than his gutting of the postmoderns, by the way; I thought his acerbic wit was put to better use pointing out the shortcomings of a poet whose work he's rather reluctantly fallen back in love with.

With the postmoderns, on the other hand, he basically demonstrated several clever ways to poke a dead horse with a stiletto. There's nothing wrong with that, but it doesn't help me as a reader; I'm never going to spend much time reading poems I don't like, and I can figure out which ones those are on my own. Bashing other poets with savage glee seems to generate more interest, and it can be entertaining in its way, but I doubt it has much nutritional value.

Best,

Ed

Indeed, I'm told that the flesh of dead poets is crawling with dibrachs, tribrachs, dactyls, anapaests, cretics, and all kinds of inedible creepy-crawlies.

The importance of Robbins's takedown of "postmodern" poetry isn't so much that he skewers mediocre poetry but that he points out that these categories and the polemics associated with them have become less about the advancement of poetry (however construed) and more about product placement. The same, really, could be said about every school of American poetry. I'm all in favor of movements and polemics and all the rest--I just want them to have some vitality.

This is an important point. Readers are selfish—they read what they like and avoid what they don't like. And negative criticism isn't going to change minds as much as the poems themselves. There might be a case of being affected by criticism when the poet or poetry in question is unknown, but as they say, even negative criticism can be a positive if it sparks curiosity.

I think Auden wrote in one of his essays that negative criticism is pointless, or that he realized at some point that it would be pointless for him to write negative criticism.* Also, he said that the best criticism, even the negative, is written by those who have some respect or appreciation for the poetry being criticized. He gave the example of Nietzsche's attacks on Wagner: negative; but Nietzsche had at one point loved Wagner's work and still appreciated it on some level.

*Negative criticism that is a full-on attack. Wanted to clarify this point.