Calling the Bluff of “Innovative” Poetics

12 December 2007

I have heard, from multiple sources, that there is a movement afoot, especially within academia, to rebrand what I have known as avant garde or experimental poetry as “innovative poetry.” The phrase strikes me as redundant, if not tautological. All poetry worth reading innovates in some way upon language. Furthermore, the four-thousand-year history of written poetry has been punctuated and advanced almost exclusively through innovative techniques. The differential between the poetry of forbearers like Walt Whitman or Gerard Manley Hopkins, and the majority of other Nineteenth-century verse, is far greater than that of any contemporary experimental project as it is compared to mainstream poetry.

While contemporary experimental projects, which often pursue a particular aspect of poetry in the extreme, do advance the art–even as exercising isolated muscle groups improves fitness–labeling such efforts “innovative,” with all this implies about other projects, is the worst kind of synecdoche–as absurd as defending thumb wrestling as the ultimate sporting event. Allowing experimental poets to call themselves “innovative” is like allowing a political party to rename itself–not as Democrat, Republican, or Tory–but as “The Party Which Stands For All That Is Right And Good About Politics.”

Repackaging postmodernism is not the great project of our time, nor is narrowing the scope of poetics down to a few theoretical elements. We must call such bluffs. Any art, in fact, which requires hefty intellectual defense, is unlikely to weather the common sense of individuals who know, on instinct, what moves them. Certain forms of experimentalism do provide a valuable antithesis to traditions like lyricism, but it is only an emergent synthesis–a whole-body poetics, that stands, like a body, complete and functional without explanation–that can truly be called innovative. Making a play to label one’s project as representative of the most fundamental aspect of poetry–innovation–amounts to a dangerous kind of wordplay, if not an all-out attempt to legislate taste.

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Posted in Insights, Poetry | Tagged , , | Comments (6)

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  • http://sharpsand.net joseph duemer

    I see what you mean, but I don’t really see this as any more egregious than Dana Gioia creating the New Formalism back in the 190s, or Robert McDowell inventing the absurd phrase “Expansive Poetry” to describe metrical verse.

  • Robert

    Hi Joe — I do see New Formalism as distinct from a move like “Innovative” Poetics, in that New Formalism describes the movement in fairly neutral terms. Wikipedia also quotes Gioia’s “Notes on New Formalism” where he say a return to formal verse is only one of many possible responses to the bankruptcy of the first-person confessional lyric. Strangely enough, it also seems that the term “New Formalism” was originally coined in an attack on such poets, probably akin to Silliman’s recent coinage of the “School of Quietude.”

    As for “Expansive Poetry” — this does seem like the same kind of political power-play as “Innovative” Poetics, in that the term is vague yet celebratory. I hadn’t heard this term before, and am not really too sure how this movement represents itself as distinct from New Formalists (or even old ones). But then, perhaps that’s case-in-point.

  • http://sharpsand.net joseph duemer

    I see your point, but this doesn’t seem any more egregious than Dana Gioia inventing the New Formalism out of whole cloth or Robert McDowell coming up with the absurd term Expansive Poetry to describe contemporary metrical verse. Those movements were clearly “anti-innovative,” so maybe the Innovatives have a point. At least the term attempts to name a tendency away from conventional poetics in American poetry. I think Ron Silliman’s value-neutral term “post-avant” works pretty well, though I chafe at the sneer implicit in Silliman’s name for poets like me–the School of Quietude.

  • Robert

    I agree the movements you name above seem about as contrived as you or I going off and founding a School of Quietude. Still, it is not the existence of such labels (value-neutral or not), but the misappropriation of the term “innovative” — and implication that the lyric is therefore dead — that irks me. One might as well try to found a “Good Poetry” movement. Poetry /is/ innovation.

  • http://sharpsand.net joseph duemer

    I see what you mean. I was thinking this afternoon that Gioia basing his claim for the New Formalism as one of many things that might follow the death of the lyric poem was misguided because the lyric (like the novel) isn’t dead. It is mostly literary politicians who need to declare some prior movement (usually understood in a narrow & reductive way) “dead.” I feel like writing a manifesto declaring the beginning of a new movement against literary movements. Oh, wait . . .

  • Robert

    What’s in a name? I wish I could recall the details of the treatise wherein someone took a list of generally agreed-upon traits of the Romantics, and then proceeded to demonstrate how none of the major literary figures typically associated with this movement (Keats, Shelley, Blake, et. al.) could actually have more than half of these traits successfully ascribed to their work. Ex-post-facto literary movements are a taxonomical farce; auto-nominal (and pejorative) contemporary movements are a political power-play.