Eerie Coincidence

(Note: This post has been updated (1) as of 6:51 PM Eastern on 19 Jan. See below.)

Pay close attention now.

No, dirt aliens: don't waste good mascara, fiber gives you confi-
dence. Spin doctors vs. gravity, do you spandex wooden leg plus spaz
hemp tempi seize the fey crawlspatiality creatures peel off. Barbie pro-
tons slobber the manual seedling wrapped in human skin. Happy puppy
preconscious vouchers don't brownnose your pal's girlfriend, a swagger
unanointed affect in its gob phase. Automated preparation H—a non-
goosing, a midriff melody—stir the rack up…mere child has her
permit.

What's that? You don't get it?

Try this one, then:

Stacked circles (rain down) say green it releases nothing. Bundled
wires. Ellsworth Kelly strides from one red iceberg to the next. Each face
projects onto antennae forging a domain expressed as a skewered pod.
Transparency behind a desk elusive plunge. A dissection of thought into
its components the weight of meat up the wrong street the wrong
backdoor. The blazer missed too as the wiry one observed. Someone
slipped him diet Orangina and he went ballistic. The whole staff cray-
oned their names onto the good luck card while unwitting partygoers
waited for the elevator. Mogul and musician separated at birth one
suggested. Hubris. The directions very specific and yet so many stood
idle. She ravished in black. He charmed in lime.

What? You don't get that, either?

What's the matter with you? Don't you recognize poetry when you see it? They're poems, you bloody illiterate philistines (or extracts from poems; I'm not quite clear on that point). I mean, just because they read like gibberish — vaguely coherent adolescent whines of angst and rage culled willy-nilly from sundry '50s-beatnik-style scribblings on graffiti-sprayed walls, then strung together and broken into poetry-like "lines" — doesn't mean they're not poetry; poetry good enough to be included in the anthology, Best American Poetry 2004.

Well, don't feel too bad. Joan Houlihan — writer, poet, editor-in-chief of Perihelion, a nationally known online poetry journal, senior poetry editor for Del Sol Review, and director of the Concord Poetry Center — doesn't get it either. Writes Ms. Houlihan:

Whatever else can be said of them, the first-person-anecdotal-narrative-confessional (aka “mainstream”) poems that have been outnumbered in this volume [Best American Poetry 2004] by such writings as the [two] above [quoted poems], can at least be critically sorted (some are clearly better than others, regardless of whether or not they fit a particular editor or critic's “taste”). Basic standards relating to the craft of writing in general, such as non-clichéd phrases, use of momentum and pacing, lack of unintentional ambiguities and other grammatical problems, as well as evidence of an organizing intelligence, a sense of inevitability, a convincing and/or compelling style and voice and so forth are at least available to the reader in, for lack of a better word, the “mainstream” poem. Poetry, as Pound observed rightly, should be at least as well-written as prose. Further, it bears reflection that while Pound could improve Eliot's poems through application of standards of craft, no such improvement can take place for either of the poems I've excerpted [the two above quoted], simply because there is no way to discern any purpose or aim.

[...]

Alarming, not so much for their lack of meaning as for their critical immunity, such poems [as the two above quoted] are immune not because of any so-called “difficulty,” or because the poem can only be evaluated in a “historical context” devised and/or approved under the terms of one or another literary canon; their critical immunity exists because poetry is the only field where its practitioners can openly claim that their products are not to be evaluated by others in the same field. As with any highly subjective, paranormal enterprise, having an “outsider” try to “see” how their poem works immediately invalidates the results. You get it, or you don't. Thus, only a true believer can “read” a poem from the church of new writing.

As critical comment, Ms. Houlihan's above remarks, and the essay from which they're drawn, don't sound at all unreasonable to me. They do, however, sound unreasonable — more than unreasonable — to at least two members of the literary blogosphere, one of whom characterizes them as a "know-nothing attack on contemporary poetry," and "worthy only of being ignored [as literary criticism]"; and the other of whom characterizes them as "nakedly hostile and uninformed criticism."

Why is it, I wonder, that the dissing of Ms. Houlihan and her criticism, and the defense of "post-avant" poetry (represented here by the above quoted two "nonorganic" poems) and poets by their champions sound eerily the same as the dissing of the critics and criticism of so-called "New Music," and the defense of such music and its composers by their champions? Could the answer be that New Music and nonorganic, post-avant poetry are eerily the same; near-perfect analogues, each of the other?

Nah. Probably only an eerie coincidence.

In a pig's eye!

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Update (6:51 PM Eastern on 19 Jan): Steve Hicken of Listen comments on my closing grafs. For details, and my response, see this post.