Stephen Burt's "New Thing" - Some Notes in Response

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Stephen Burt's Essay is here. There are very articulate responses here as well, Stan Apps being great, and these mean I do not have to talk about the reductive characterization of WCW in Burt's piece.

I think Stan Apps sums it up pretty well, that the purported “newness” is not new at all. It seems to be a selective reading of contemporary poetry, finding similarities, and presenting them as indicative of a trend, direction or movement. Critics always seem to need to label and construct a "new big thing", and it does a disservice to vital heterogeneity of the contemporary moment to try and put it in boxes, say "this [and by implication only this] is what is important in poetry now". It's even worse when it's something boring, that people in the past have done a much better job of. In writing this piece Burt not only misrepresents Dr. Williams, but also makes the Objectivists, HD, Robert Duncan and the great Ronald Johnson (one of my favorite poets) seem aligned with this laconic, sparse verse. Johnson's work is Joyful and expansive, even in the parts that seem small, such as that Burt cites:
___________________slant
___________________rain
___________________drops
___________________from
___________________each
___________________prickle
___________________of holly
Johnson's poetic is one in which every part is part of something larger, the smallest detail is part of the great spinning universe, everything is meaningful and contributes to the fullness of the whole in all its metaphysical incomprehensibility. You cannot read his work in a selective avoidance of ARK, in spite of its "daunting and hermetic" nature. That's like pretending Pound was an imagist who never wrote the Cantos.

Here I'm going to go through things in a roughly chronological order. And get lazy and not comment on everything. I think I've got a relatively good argument though.

The General tendency of the essay seems to point more toward what Burt likes in poetry, rather than anything else - I read a lot, and much of what I read, most of what I enjoy, doesn't fit under his rubric, or my conception of poetry in general. The thing that struck me most, made me do a double take, was his latching on to a quote by Rae Armantrout: “I’m phobic, somehow, about ‘making things up’.” Burt latches onto this, praising her for her "accuracy", and I'm left baffled. Isn’t that what poets do, by definition? poesias: the act of making (up). I have said before that, to invert the old Sydney-esque moral justification for poetry (poets use lies in order to tell the truth) I use lies to tell bigger lies. I consider this to be just as “serious” and socially necessary (an interrogation, if you will), as any self-important, faux-Whitman-poet-as-prophet-ism (and more honest through its acceptance of the truths of poem-as-artifice, poem as marginal, poem as functionless).

Later: “…the best new books that seem to have goals in common, that is, to constitute a tendency” The best new books I have read recently surprise me, are various, do not need the assurance of being part of a ‘club’ in order to justify their work. If I want to be reassured about my world-view and aesthetics, that I have good taste and judgement, then I'll read a magazine of the newspaper.

“The new poetry, the new thing, seeks, as Williams did, well-made, attentive, unornamented things”. Poetry in its functionless superfluity, is ornamental. Sparse, laconic, colloquial poems that mirror “real speech” are boring, because real speech is boring. Andrews: “I HATE SPEECH”. This is why the majority of poetry written in New Zealand (my home) is of little or no interest to me.

“humility” in poetry – don’t make me laugh. If you have the ego to think that your poetry is of interest to other people, that they are going to take the time to read it, and maybe write about it, this is nothing more than Uriah Heep-ism.

These are my thoughts.

Addenda:

Methinks there's a realy good essay in the recasting of masculinity in the work of Johnson, Duncan and Robin Blaser. And in the music of Coil.