from the Academy of American poets website...
January 28: Back Down to Earth
Richard Tayson on Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, now celebrating its sesquicentennial, is the strongest advice I know against Language Poetry, now exerting a force unequal to its achievement in current American poetry. For all it virtues, including a radical emphasis on sonic qualities of ever-various, orgiastic and intoxicating American language, and what Paul Hoover terms its "challenge to the male-dominant hierarchy" and its "actuality in words," Language Poetry’s denunciation of the human behind the words is its dangerous (and, likely for its practitioners, enticing) legacy.1 As Jorie Graham states, one often sees in language poets "the dismantling of articulate speech," the goal of which appears (distressingly) to be " a language free of its user."2 If any poet ever wished to be irrefutably associated, inseparably married to his use of language, it was the body and soul of Walt Whitman.
Since perhaps the mid-eighties, language poetry has gained influence over younger poets, especially those graduating from creative writing programs and publishing in literary journals. The direction that influence has taken has been to focus these youthful works on a lack of narrative, a rejection of closure, an emphasis on textuality, and extreme attention to the material physicality of the shape and sound of words (or even letters) at the expense of what Muriel Rukeyser, a quintessential Whitmanian, terms "a triadic relation" of "the poet, the poem, and the audience."3 Many of our literary magazines now (and increasingly so) contain work that is divorced from daily life, from politics, and—most distressing of all—from the reader whom one presumes is the reason for publishing it in the first place. The result is an onanism that threatens to rob air from the fire of the creative process. Language poetry, which takes its genesis from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, with links perhaps to Ezra Pound (and James Joyce’s linguistic creations?), may also be seen as having ties to surrealism and other mostly European innovations, such as Dadaism and, in its experimentation with typography, Concrete Poetry à la Apollinaire. Perhaps, though this is a stretch, it may reach as far back as George Herbert’s "Easter-wings." Our poets, who Whitman describes as those able to "make every word he speaks draw blood," appear to be dangerously close to creating a bloodless enterprise.
it goes on . . .
January 28: Back Down to Earth
Richard Tayson on Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 Leaves of Grass
Walt Whitman’s Preface to the 1855 edition of Leaves of Grass, now celebrating its sesquicentennial, is the strongest advice I know against Language Poetry, now exerting a force unequal to its achievement in current American poetry. For all it virtues, including a radical emphasis on sonic qualities of ever-various, orgiastic and intoxicating American language, and what Paul Hoover terms its "challenge to the male-dominant hierarchy" and its "actuality in words," Language Poetry’s denunciation of the human behind the words is its dangerous (and, likely for its practitioners, enticing) legacy.1 As Jorie Graham states, one often sees in language poets "the dismantling of articulate speech," the goal of which appears (distressingly) to be " a language free of its user."2 If any poet ever wished to be irrefutably associated, inseparably married to his use of language, it was the body and soul of Walt Whitman.
Since perhaps the mid-eighties, language poetry has gained influence over younger poets, especially those graduating from creative writing programs and publishing in literary journals. The direction that influence has taken has been to focus these youthful works on a lack of narrative, a rejection of closure, an emphasis on textuality, and extreme attention to the material physicality of the shape and sound of words (or even letters) at the expense of what Muriel Rukeyser, a quintessential Whitmanian, terms "a triadic relation" of "the poet, the poem, and the audience."3 Many of our literary magazines now (and increasingly so) contain work that is divorced from daily life, from politics, and—most distressing of all—from the reader whom one presumes is the reason for publishing it in the first place. The result is an onanism that threatens to rob air from the fire of the creative process. Language poetry, which takes its genesis from Gertrude Stein’s Tender Buttons, with links perhaps to Ezra Pound (and James Joyce’s linguistic creations?), may also be seen as having ties to surrealism and other mostly European innovations, such as Dadaism and, in its experimentation with typography, Concrete Poetry à la Apollinaire. Perhaps, though this is a stretch, it may reach as far back as George Herbert’s "Easter-wings." Our poets, who Whitman describes as those able to "make every word he speaks draw blood," appear to be dangerously close to creating a bloodless enterprise.
it goes on . . .
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