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

do (he talks of how bitty poetry can be at the end).
Jeffrey Side
You make some very good points. Yes, most of the major and minor establishment poets seem to feel that they
should take a position on religious and spiritual life, as if that, in some sense, added credibility to their muse.
Tom Mandel
Of poetry I read only the old stuff and my friends and some younger poets if they come to me via my friends or by
accident. It’s not a virtue, but I have to say it in order to properly frame the fact that I’ve never read a line of Seamus
Heaney’s poetry. It may be wonderful. Certainly, the fact that it’s “mainstream” (if that is so he applied the term to JA
[John Ashbery] not himself) would not stand in my way. What he says of “avant-garde” on the other hand is not
really false. If you imagine that these terms are ahistorical (i.e. that there is always an avant-garde, always a
“traditional” posture), then you aren’t scratching away at reality very intensely as Dostoevsky might describe it. The
terms are certainly historical, and the avant-garde narrative is *quite* tired by now. It’s a datum inside of
modernism and by now is the repetition of a repetition etc. This has nothing to do with “the new” of course. There is
always something new. Things move to mainstream to make room for the new.
Really, in the above, only my last sentence matters.
Ira Lightman
Actually, Tom, the whole matters to me, a lot; like the Dostoevsky citation a lot, has the bottom that Heaney’s
remarks lacked by being all about only poets, and only some poets at that.
Jeffrey Side
Tom, I have to disagree with you that the avant-garde narrative is exhausted. Certain of its practices and techniques
may be out of date, but its main concerns (which I see as having to do with the nature of poetic language as being
non-functional as opposed to the mainstream view of it as being functional) are, to me, still pressing issues. Certainly,
Heaney has written extensively on why he thinks poetic language should be functional, and his poetry is a
celebration of this.
Charles Bernstein
I am sure if Mr. Heaney read my work more closely he would take back the remark that people like me are not
charlatans.
Tom Mandel
Non-functional? There’s a lot of non-functional language in “mainstream” poetry. Maybe you mean “nonfunctionalist?”
If so, you think that’s less so of e.g. Herrick? to take a random case.
Jeffrey-the problem is that there was never such a thing as *an* avant-garde. It’s a 3d order term, useful largely
in/as rhetoric. But the effectiveness of a piece of rhetoric is situational, and this one is now a yawn.
I’m amazed, Charles, that you recommend “close reading”.
Jeffrey Side
Tom, no I really do mean “non-functional”, as I’m chiefly responding to Heaney’s vocabulary.
I’ve always said that Herrick (and Herbert, for that matter) was always something of an exception in his poetic
milieu due to his pattern poetry, however cautiously that was presented.
The term “avant-garde” may, arguably, be as you describe it (though how one would establish this unmistakably is
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