{"id":6203,"date":"2011-04-07T07:30:45","date_gmt":"2011-04-07T11:30:45","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/?p=6203"},"modified":"2011-04-06T07:38:16","modified_gmt":"2011-04-06T11:38:16","slug":"6203","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/6203\/","title":{"rendered":"Michael Boughn on Aram Saroyan’s Dismissal of Creeley & Dorn"},"content":{"rendered":"

Below the opening paragraphs of\u00a0Michael\u00a0Boughn’s Galatea <\/strong><\/em>Resurrects <\/em><\/strong>post. You can read the full piece here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\n
MICHAEL BOUGHN Engages <\/p>\n

“The Hero and the Gunslinger: Did Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn lose their way in middle age?” by Aram Saroyan<\/a><\/strong>
\n(<\/em>The Poetry Foundation,\u00a0April 28, 2009) <\/em><\/p>\n

Major and minor bullshit in the new (old) literary discourse<\/strong><\/p>\n

Given all the pressures toward success in the market of today\u2019s neo-liberal cultural grotesqueries, it probably should not come as a surprise to find those old staid measures of literary excellence, major and minor, resurfacing. This, after all, is a time when the president of something called The Poetry Foundation can publicly declare that \u201cthe mind is a marketplace\u201d and not be tarred and feathered and run out of town on a rail by raging poets. On the contrary, they line up in front of him with their hands out. It is a bit surprising, though, to find them popping up and circulating in the writing of poets who claim some historical relation to those poetries which sprang up in the 50\u2019s and 60\u2019s precisely as alternatives to the elegant formal constructions then dominating the academic imagination of what poetry\u2019s limits were.<\/p>\n

That was a time of astonishing creativity and bold gestures, whatever its historical limits and determinations\u2014a time of immense potentialities arising out of a combat with the formal perfections and traditional concerns of the ruling academic verse. Chief among the targets in the temples of literary propriety was the notion of \u201cthe literary\u201d itself and all the tight ass little distinctions used to buttress its walls against the threats of \u201cinferior\u201d and \u201cminor\u201d poetry. That would include concepts of \u201cliterary excellence,\u201d for instance, and the categories that were mobilized to determine it. It would also include those old saws, \u201cmajor\u201d and \u201cminor.\u201d<\/p>\n

Yet here they are once again popping up in the most surprising places. A recent addition to Facebook, for instance, calling itself \u201cTendencies: Poetics and Practice,\u201d advertises itself as \u201ca series of talks by major poets.\u201d The title itself is interesting in the way it gives pride of place to something called \u201cpoetics\u201d and relegates poetry to some vague generalization called \u201cpractice.\u201d At least I assume that\u2019s where the poetry is hiding. They never say. \u201cPoetics\u201d it seems, is the new sexy commodity in the intellectual market place of the English Department of the Soul, as Jack Spicer called it. Recently we were treated to news of a gathering called \u201cRethinking Poetics.\u201d Once again, no mention of poetry, which seems to have gained a reputation as somehow being soft on spirit or something of that order. Soft, anyway. Not theoretical enough where theory (which is what is meant by \u201cpoetics\u201d) provides a hard, material measure that can produce a practice\u2014as well as occasions to have many conferences.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

 <\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Below the opening paragraphs of\u00a0Michael\u00a0Boughn’s Galatea Resurrects post. You can read the full piece here. MICHAEL BOUGHN Engages  “The Hero and the Gunslinger: Did Robert Creeley and Ed Dorn lose their way in middle...<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[36,90,91],"tags":[976,975],"class_list":["post-6203","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-criticism","category-poetics","category-poetry","tag-aram-saroyan","tag-michael-boughn"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6203","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=6203"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6203\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6207,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6203\/revisions\/6207"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=6203"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=6203"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/pierrejoris.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=6203"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}