What is the mainstream in poetry?

[Zeruiah]

Hi,

I was speaking to an editor of a poetry journal a few days ago, and he said that one of the most essential criteria for poetry to be submitted in his magazine was that it must "venture out of the mainstream."

I'm not completely familiar with the "mainstream" in modern poetry, and I wonder if someone could give an example of a piece and tell me why it's despised by the "avant-garde" writers and all the other pioneers and adventurers today. The misinformed image that appears in my head now are of hallmark cards and nursery school rhymes, which I don't think are really what the adult layman reads when he wants some poetry.

Thanks.

[JBI]

Mainstream, I. E. not special, in other words the talking about the mundane which seems central to bad poets. Or talking about relationship troubles, which seems an exhausted subject. As well, I think, also of Nostalgia, and episodes from one's past. I don't think that works either.

Really though, avant-garde poetry just stretches the limits of language more, or used to at any rate, though it seems to have made a very significant switch, in my opinion, in the last 10 or so years.

I'm not American, so I'm really not as involved in contemporary American verse as I would like to be, but from my experience, I think now it has pretty much exhausted its line of "cultural" poetics, and is seeking to get beyond that. Elizabeth Alexander et al, I would argue, are very 1980s, early 1990s. Surely not very current - their ideas have already become convention. Ashbery, Wilbur, etc. too seem conventional, household names. Even names that started off as such strong voices seem also to have absorbed themselves. Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah was a great success and step forward, but I think she didn't really move on well from there.

So today, what constitutes avant-garde? Well, I can't answer that in the American setting, and can only strain to answer that in the Canadian setting. Certainly there seems a shift more, or some would "argue" a return to questions of aesthetics, from the cultural preoccupations of the 80s. I would argue there is a bigger focus on looking at what is beneath the structure, and looking at the power of the word, and also its limitations.

I think Carson is perhaps the best example of this shift - she really seems to go against the deliberate political preoccupation of the 80s, and moves more towards an interrogation of art and its role, and affect (I think now, especially, about Autobiography of Red, and her verse essays).

It really seems though, that post-colonialism, post-modernism, and much of the rest of 1980s discourse is on the way out. I think literature is needing a new model to emulate. If you really want to be Avant Garde though, I don't recommend you try the route of just doing obscure wacky things - I don't think that will really fly. I think you really would need to return to not formalist sound, but a sound that has the same sensual effect, but without the structure, or at least without an obvious structure.

[Zeruiah]

Mainstream, I. E. not special, in other words the talking about the mundane which seems central to bad poets. Or talking about relationship troubles, which seems an exhausted subject. As well, I think, also of Nostalgia, and episodes from one's past. I don't think that works either.

I think that's a very good definition, and could be used for music and visual art as well. Though I think that the immediately political could also be added to that list.


I'm not American, so I'm really not as involved in contemporary American verse as I would like to be, but from my experience, I think now it has pretty much exhausted its line of "cultural" poetics, and is seeking to get beyond that. Elizabeth Alexander et al, I would argue, are very 1980s, early 1990s. Surely not very current - their ideas have already become convention. Ashbery, Wilbur, etc. too seem conventional, household names. Even names that started off as such strong voices seem also to have absorbed themselves. Rita Dove's Thomas and Beulah was a great success and step forward, but I think she didn't really move on well from there.

Yes, I actually just read an article that questioned how the limits of exploration in avant-garde can change in decades and how a piece of poetry can stay eternal. The argument was that Eliot's avant-garde style faded with time, but stayed eternal because he simply did, in his work, whatever gave the effect he was looking for; he didn't care about "shock" and novelties. This is apparent by his rush to classicism after some time with modernism. I believe this is it:

http://www2.eng.cam.ac.uk/~tpl/texts/weaning.html


So today, what constitutes avant-garde? Well, I can't answer that in the American setting, and can only strain to answer that in the Canadian setting. Certainly there seems a shift more, or some would "argue" a return to questions of aesthetics, from the cultural preoccupations of the 80s. I would argue there is a bigger focus on looking at what is beneath the structure, and looking at the power of the word, and also its limitations.

I think Carson is perhaps the best example of this shift - she really seems to go against the deliberate political preoccupation of the 80s, and moves more towards an interrogation of art and its role, and affect (I think now, especially, about Autobiography of Red, and her verse essays).

I'll look into Carson. I'm not really sure about avant-garde, or what it takes to be considered "avant-garde," but I believe that many of the artists who go under this classification often do something that's simply missing in mainstream poetry--avant-garde or not: they create an idealized world beyond our own with otherworldly phenomena, one that both teaches and solidifies what's already known--it makes you think. I don't think time can truly corrode it if it's done well.


It really seems though, that post-colonialism, post-modernism, and much of the rest of 1980s discourse is on the way out. I think literature is needing a new model to emulate. If you really want to be Avant Garde though, I don't recommend you try the route of just doing obscure wacky things - I don't think that will really fly. I think you really would need to return to not formalist sound, but a sound that has the same sensual effect, but without the structure, or at least without an obvious structure.

And you're right--models must change and inspiration needs to shift. But I think that meditation on aesthetics from older times and distant cultures can bring beauty in new and different forms for the next step in art. It doesn't necessarily have to be nihilistic and completely new.

[mono]

From what I have gathered, the mainstream involves not thinking; write something that requires thought to write and read. Every time I read something by Billy Collins, John Ashbery, Kenneth Koch, Frank O'Hara, and the recently popularized Elizabeth Alexander, I feel as though I have read The Cat in the Hat - the simple language use, no structure, the substitution of objects instead of emotions, but I love the increased amount of personification. I apologize for sounding so cynical, but I figure modern poetry as the bastard child of the Victorian era and post-modernism - that in-between trend where we should never mention emotions, under any circumstances, but somehow break every other literary rule, such as in metafiction (Borgia), by using elementary language, punctuation, and sentence structure.

Not surprisingly by my above statement, I have received more rejection than acceptance letters, and have published and staged (stageplays) very few places, both out of my own pickiness of where to publish and stage and the editors'/directors' preferences. One editor wrote me a rejection letter, going so far to say that he could not publish my work because, along some lines of, "there is no way around editing my work, since it has so much structured thought that is impossible to reconfigure without ruining its structure. Not many readers want to think that much."
I had never felt so flattered and insulted simultaneously. :)/:(

[Chris Marie]

The mainstream could be the traditional, or the most popular or the most recent poetry. EE Cummings could be mainstream but then Emily Dikinson and Robert Frost could be mainstream.

[quasimodo1]

While Chris Marie makes a legitimate point, JBI has probably got it right. Almost any poet writing today, let's say most, wouldn't want to be considered "mainstream" but may be just that. The term has too much buzz and connotation to really be useful. When e.e. cumming wrote, he certainly was not.

[JBI]

Yeah, but today he is a convention. I confess I don't particularly care for his work. There are far better language experimenters, who don't need to resort to Gertrude Steinism in order to write well. Erin Mouré is 100x the word-stretcher than he is, yet she doesn't get any credit

Either way though, I find his work unlovable - it may be interesting in terms of style, but in terms of content - very little imagination - word-play can only go so far.

I think now, people want a return to beautiful expressionism; maybe I'm wrong, but I think people want raw expression, something like this:


The moon On Friday Night
...................................Erased all paths to Saturday
and swept up footsteps from the day before. It coaxed buttons
to the lips of buttonholes and whispered, "you're beautiful,
so beautiful,' to women who speak the vernacular

of loneliness. Softly it slid into the hands of the men
they werewith and lent its light to everything they touched.
'See,' the moonlight seemed to say, 'there are so many ways
to be naked and so many ways to be far

from home.' The light reminded the women of songs
they know, songs written to gauge distance. Later,
still later on this island of Friday night, they sang
those songs under their breath as the bent


From The moon on Friday night by Susan Goyette originally from The True Names of Birds retrieved from New Life in Dark Seas: Brick Books 25


Notice how the experience, in this case female, and heterosexual is central to the poem. The politics involved here are not really faced. The poem essentially is about the desire for women to be both mother and sexual beings, but it does not come out with a manifesto, it stresses something different. This of course, isn't Avant-Garde, since I don't think Avant Garde really works anymore, or has a purpose - language stretching has become convention. I just think sensuality mixed with desire, or other strong emotions is where poetry is going, mixed with ideas of what I call emerging politics, as I think post-modern politics, which is really post-marxist politics, is on the way out.

Of course, this is a very Canadian feel. Canadian poetics in many ways is very, very different than the United States, because of the way Canadians see poets, and the multicultural makeup of our population, amongst other things. In this case, Goyette has blended traditionally French Canadian stylistics with English Canadian verse (though stylistically, it reminds me far more of French Canadian work, in terms of theme, than English Canadian).


To not be mainstream doesn't mean to be avant garde, as I hope I showed. A nice avant-garde artist, who is relatively current (since she is an expert at remaking herself) is Erin Mouré, especially he semi-translation O Cadoiro from Medieval Galician poems (though there is more Mouré in there than Galician). I think she is worth looking into, especially her more recent work, if you are interested in word-stretching and style-bending. Her 1980s and 1990s stuff seems to be more concerned with the politics of language, but her recent stuff is more concerned with post-post-modern exploration of lyricism.

[Zeruiah]

I didn't like cummings either, but I always reasoned that it was because he was shoved down my throat in Freshman English. Very few authors and writers stay on my good side after I'm coerced into reading them for an assignment.

EDIT: But no worries! I do go back and read enjoyable works like that of Joyce and Kafka. Imperare sibi maximum imperium est.

[JBI]

I didn't like cummings either, but I always reasoned that it was because he was shoved down my throat in Freshman English. Very few authors and writers stay on my good side after I'm coerced into reading them for an assignment.

You're in highschool? I find that my appreciation grows now that I'm in university, when I study a poet. One of my professors in particular I find increases my love of poetry immensely. It depends really where you are, and who you study under, and what you study.

I, for instance, am rather bored with post-Stevens aphoristic free verse, that one sees in the works of Ashbery, amongst others. Yet I'm also interested in many Canadian poets, which is out of the mainstream for focus, even in Canada, so perhaps that is just idiosyncrasy. If one is really looking at mainstream, I think one needs to look at tradition.

In the States, the head of the tradition is of course Whitman, and then as a secondary I would argue Stevens. Lowell seems to have also shaped things around him, but he too was caught up in the tradition.

For Canada, the tradition is rooted firstly in a misreading of American poetry, and then a misreading of international poetry. The Canadian focus forces a recognition not only of its own tradition, like the American one, but also of British traditions, and international traditions - finding a figurehead is difficult - certainly the Bible up until 1990 moreso than authentic traditions or even the United States, but from there, I think it varries according to poet - some even try to escape the Canadian sphere altogether, and reach into distant traditions, like China's, making Wang Wei especially rather central, whereas others return to their roots in various other places, or even French Canada. Lorna Crozier for instance comes out of the tradition of Sinclair Ross, Margret Atwood out of Susana Moody, P. K. Page (who is essentially done at the age 92) ultimately comes out of at first political strands, and then when she got really good, the poetry of the Sufi tradition moreso than anything else.

French Canada, I would argue, is rooted in Victor Hugo. Whenever I read anything by French Canadians, I can't help but think of Hugo. To a lesser extent also later symbolists, but Hugo seems to be the most dominant voice sounding behind all of them.


England is hard to say - the poetic culture pretty much ended - perhaps they are still modeled on earlier sources - to me it seems like Larkin marked the end of a coherent movement forward, and emulation has been the driving force. I'm not to sure - maybe I need to look more into contemporary English Poetry, but from what I sense, it seems to have become less central than ever to the cultural climate of the nation out there.

Really though, one would want to break totally from all these people, the way Whitman did. That is essentially impossible - you need to literally be the best poet, in the best climate - but that is the goal of everyone who seeks to be avant-garde, or out of the mainstream, to redefine the mainstream in one's own image.

[Pryderi Agni]

IMO? What was alternative or off-the-beaten-track yesterday!