Odds and Ends Essays, Blogs, Internet Discussions, Interviews and Miscellany

poet to have a collected edition published by the Library of America, who-at the age of 80-was selected by MTV to
be its official laureate, can hardly be deemed obscure. Heaney is spot on when he says his is a ‘voice’ that has now
become central, but dead wrong to imply any corresponding change on Ashbery’s part to make this possible.
Jeffrey Side’s Response:
I do mention in my article that Ashbery does have more cachet in America than in the UK, when I say:
[Heaney’s] citing of Ashbery as a belated mainstream voice also makes little sense outside of Ashbery
being published in the UK by Carcanet. Certainly, he cannot be referring to Ashbery’s poetic, which has
yet to receive unreserved approbation by mainstream criticism, at least in Britain.
Rob Stanton’s Critique:
Finally, at root, I think I resent any pronouncement limiting what poetry is and can do, something both Heaney and
Side are guilty of here, Side maybe more so. Poetry is always potentially anything anyone can claim it is, and more.
Always more.
Jeffrey Side’s Response:
I don’t think my article is limiting the definition of what poetry can be, but only pointing out the ways in which
Heaney has redefined and repositioned his poetic aesthetic in various statements he made in his book, The Redress of
Poetry. It is true that I personally don’t think that what he writes is poetry, but that was not the point of my article.
Responses to Critics Part II
Seth Abrahamson’s critique of Jeffrey Side’s Introduction to a feature at The Argotist Online called ‘The
Academisation of Avant-Garde Poetry’.
This appeared on his blog on 10 July 2012
[Quoting from Jeffrey Side’s Introduction to The Argotist Online feature on ‘The Academisation of
Avant-Garde Poetry’] ‘Jake Berry’s essay, “Poetry Wide Open: The Otherstream (Fragments In
Motion)” deals with the issue of certain types of avant-garde poetry as not yet having found favour
within the Academy, or with poetry publishers of academically “sanctioned” avant-garde poetry. The
damaging aspects of this exclusion, and the concept of an “approved” versus an “unapproved” avantgarde
poetry, are also examined in the essay. And these things could well be described as “the
academisation of avant-garde poetry”‘.
This is a good example of the increasing incoherence of avant-garde literary criticism. In the paragraph above,
“Academy” is used as a catch-all to include both literary studies and “creative writing”-two forces that have been at
war for approximately 75 years, that generally have sanctioned and promoted entirely different poetries, and that
are now administratively segregated at most colleges and universities due to the decline and fall of the academicsoriented
creative writing MA (and the subsequent rise of creative writing MFA). So when the above author speaks of
‘types of avant-garde poetry . . . not yet having found favour within the Academy’, no one reading that phrase could
possibly have any idea what’s being discussed. Are we speaking of passive receipt-and translation into scholarship
-of avant-garde literary material by literary studies professors, most of whom are now suffused in literary theory,
but a few of whom are historicists or New Historicists or (even fewer still) neo-New Critics? Or are we speaking of
whether or not these ‘types of avant-garde poetry’ are being taught by working writers in creative writing
workshops-most of whose faculty and students have minimal to no familiarity with or interest in literary theory,
historicism (or the New Historicism), or even (though they may have had some “training” in it in high school) the
New Criticism?
In other words, precisely who is excluding whom? And from where? Who is doing all this “sanctioning”-of what, and
where, and when, and how? Who is doing the “approving”-and of what, and where, and when, and how? Nobody in
these discussions amongst avant-garde poets and critics really knows. But we do have the boogeyman of
159