Poetic Culture: Contemporary American Poetry Between Community and Institution (Avant-Grade and Modernist Studies)

Rating:
Summary: The shot heard round the English department
Review: Aiming to understand poetry within its sociocultural context, while at the same time acknowledging poetry's intrinsic aesthetic nature, Beach's study proposes a middle ground between "sociological" or "institutional" models of canonicity, like those of Cary Nelson, and more purely aesthetic models, such as those advocated by Vendler and Bloom. He begins by outlining a taxonomy of critical strategies for canon formation in American poetry and establishes his goal as being "to not only describe the cultural phenomenon of poetry in this country, but also in some measure to analyze the social and economic structures-the structures of cultural, educational, and economic capital-underlying the poetic community in question." Subsequent chapters offer some provocative analyses of how journals, presses, universities, prize committees, and even television projects negotiate poetry's "cultural capital," but as trenchant as some of his institutional analyses can be, Beach's rather narrow partisanship frequently obscures his arguments. Though he himself protests against it, this study tends toward the reductive binarism of "the poetry wars" that Logenbach, for example, describes in Modern Poetry After Modernism. Pitting Hejinian against Stephen Dobyns, for example, tells us little about the majority of poets who work outside the polarized camps of "new narrative" and Language poetry. His underlying agenda-the promotion of Language poetry and the by now rather hackneyed denigration of "workshop poetry" (as if there were only one kind)-neglects or homogenizes ambitious poets working outside convenient labels (Beach devotes a single paragraph to the possibility of current, aesthetically ambitious poets outside the Language camp, calling them "experimental mainstreamers or mainstream experimentalists"). Beach's attacks on other critics are refreshingly fearless and direct, but he all-too-often deploys the same logical fallacies he attributes to others. For example, he harshly criticizes more conservative critics for their "thoughtless and condescending" dismissal of radical poetics, even as he treats highly ambitious and respected poets like Jorie Graham in the same manner. Likewise, he fails to engage the arguments of important texts closely related to his own, as when he dismisses Shetley's After the Death of Poetry because of qualifications Shetley makes regarding Language poetry. Unless you're of the hardcore Lang Po camp, this book will often be infuriating. Sometimes that's interesting. But ultimately I found myself yearning for a sturdier methodology.