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

aware of the problematic status of the word.
SETH ABRAMSON: I’m no New Critic, but I’ll note also how generally shabby a job of “close reading” avant-garde
critics often do when they choose to avail themselves of the tools of their oppressors. The fellow writing the above
paragraph defines “establishment”/”Academy” poetry - produced by whom, and where, and when, we don’t
entirely know, but surely somewhere on some kind of campus at some time by somebody - as “anecdotal,
descriptive or prose-like”. These three terms historically have nothing in common. “Anecdotal” poetry could well be
used to describe the highly-social “walking-around” poetries of the New York School, or the literary tradition of the
Black Arts Movement, unless the author means “epiphanic” poetry, in which case we’re speaking of those same
Romantics “mainstream” poetry has lionised and the avant-garde has merely adopted wholesale as to their theories
of “creative genius”.
JEFFREY SIDE: The questions you raise are valid, but they are not relevant to the Argotist feature under examination.
I have written scholarly and other articles that address them.
SETH ABRAMSON: As an anti-descriptive poet-I almost never use metaphors or similes or “describe” anything in
my work, which is quite intentional (I read rather a lot of Dorn in Iowa City)-I know that those who feel otherwise
could as easily claim the avant-garde Imagists as their direct predecessors as anyone else. And “prose poetry” was, of
course, an avant-garde creation entirely. So the aesthetic engagement of the essay-introduction above is minimal; we
might even say it’s only gestural. Which would be less of a problem if the article weren’t entirely grounded in a study
of aesthetics.
JEFFREY SIDE: Again, these issues are covered by me, elsewhere.
MY INTRODUCTION: This Argotist Online feature presents Berry’s essay, the responses to it from poets and
academics it was first shown to, and an interview with Berry where he addresses some of the criticisms voiced in
these responses. Many poets and academics (including those most famously associated with Language Poetry) were
approached for their responses but declined. Other poets and academics that had initially agreed to respond
ultimately declined. I mention this not as criticism but merely to explain the absence of people who one would
normally expect to have responded and taken part in such a discussion.
SETH ABRAMSON: Here we encounter the old “poets and academics” canard. You know, those “academics”-the
ones every other paragraph implies work in creative writing programs and are themselves working poets and not
academics. Or does “the Academy” now mean only literary studies programs, and we ought to presume that no one
in a literary studies course could possibly be a working poet-even though almost every creative writing MFA and
definitely every creative writing MA and definitely every creative writing doctoral program requires literary studies
coursework from its working poets? (The last form of program even requires, too, the same preliminary
examinations as English Literature doctoral candidates take.)
JEFFREY SIDE: Again, your obsession with creative writing and MFAs has crept in.
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