There’s a cer­tain kind of lit­er­ary crit­i­cism that takes as its task the cut­ting and brand­ing of lit­er­ary live­stock into herds that are easily com­pre­hen­si­ble to jour­nal­ists and under­grad­u­ates. This mode of crit­i­cism has never much appealed to me, either as reader or writer, because it is so reg­u­larly use­less to every­one except the critic doing the naming.

Qual­ity con­trol is another prob­lem. What begin as well mean­ing exer­cises in gen­er­al­iza­tion all too often end with Pro­crustean cat­e­go­riza­tions, friend­ships con­fused for formal like­nesses, and sim­plis­tic ideas about influ­ence and affil­i­a­tion mis­taken for actual lit­er­ary his­tory. Spend a few days in the vir­tual com­pany of Ron Sil­li­man or Seth Abram­son and you’ll see what I’m talk­ing about.

But set­ting generic reser­va­tions aside, I don’t think anyone would dis­pute that Stephen Burt is far and away the best critic work­ing the mode today, and anyone inter­ested in the cut-and-brand style of crit­i­cism prob­a­bly already knows that he has an essay in the new Boston Review on what he’s call­ing “the New Thing.” (I’m guess­ing–hoping–that’s a bit of know­ing self-​parody.) Burt describes it this way:

The poets of the New Thing observe scenes and people (not only, but also, them­selves) with a self-​subordinating con­ci­sion, so much so that the term “min­i­mal­ism” comes up in dis­cus­sions of their work, though the false analo­gies to ear­lier move­ments can make the term mis­lead­ing. The poets of the New Thing eschew sar­casm and tread lightly with ironies, and when they seem hard to pin down, it is because they leave space for inter­pre­ta­tions to fit.

Around the CR offices we always talked about this kind of poetry as Flood poetry, after the press run by the poet whom Burt names the prime exem­plar of the ten­dency: Devin John­ston, who also hap­pens to be one of our local favorites. (Graham Foust, Eliz­a­beth Tread­well, Mau­reen McLane, and Joseph Massey are a few of the other poets Burt iden­ti­fies as New Thingrates.)

I’ve been on the road all day and my brain is soft from eighty ounces of cherry limeade slush, so instead of a con­sid­ered response to Burt’s pro­posal,* I’ll offer only a quib­ble. In describ­ing the New Thing, Burt notes how many of the poets he’s dis­cussing have some rela­tion­ship to the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago:

This turn among poets to ref­er­ence, to con­crete, real things, has par­al­lels, if not con­trib­u­tory causes, in lit­er­ary acad­e­mia. By 2001 there were books, arti­cles, and antholo­gies devoted to “thing theory,” show­ing how lit­er­ary works depend on the struc­tures and his­to­ries of the “solid objects” (Dou­glas Mao’s term) that they might depict. The best-​known pro­po­nent of “thing theory,” Bill Brown, taught (and teaches) at the Uni­ver­sity of Chicago, where John­ston and McLane earned doc­tor­ates, and where [Alicia] Valles is earn­ing one now. Though Brown does not write about modern poetry, it is tempt­ing to think that he and his senior col­leagues helped put the seeds of the New Thing in the air, or per­haps in the water, around Hyde Park.

The U. of C. con­nec­tion is unde­ni­able, but given all of the places one might search in and around Hyde Park for an aca­d­e­mic com­ple­ment to the lit­er­ary group­ing Burt iden­ti­fies, you have to wonder: Bill Brown?!? Where’s Robert von Hall­berg in that story? Or for that matter, where’s Chicago Review, which both John­ston and McLane worked on during grad­u­ate school, and which one way or another con­nects nearly all of the poets Burt men­tions in his essay?**

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* UPDATE (5/27): John Latta rides to the rescue of my Sonic-​addled skull, offer­ing the due con­sid­er­a­tion I could not. Short story: he is not pleased. To which I say: good for him. He’s exactly right that Armantrout makes an odd prece­dent for this group, espe­cially if Burt wants to claim (and he does) that the latter “treads lightly with irony.” (Speak­ing of which, I think Burt gets things exactly back­ward with this claim. It’s the so-​called ellip­ti­cals who tread lightly with irony, twid­dling the top layer of mud to keep the reflec­tions guess­ing. To appre­ci­ate some­one like John­ston, though, you have to look for irony deep, to seek out a cer­tain slip­ping of the bedrock.) For what it’s worth, Jef­frey Yang seems to me the most obvi­ously out of place person in Burt’s schema; his An Aquar­ium is even fur­ther from John­ston than some of the non-​New Thin­grate Flood authors Latta adduces (Jen­nifer Moxley, Lisa Jarnot, William Fuller). But I think Latta is wrong to imply that Burt is largely seeing only a mirage of his own making, even if he allows that “the New Thing model’ll account for only [a] tiny slice of con­tem­po­rary practice.” The out­lines may be off and the lin­ea­ments and par­tic­u­lars may be mis­ap­pre­hended or mis­de­scribed, but I’ve got no doubt that Burt has his eye on some­thing real, and that John­ston (as editor and poet) is stand­ing at or near the head of it. Which is, of course, to say noth­ing about the value of that kind of judgment—only that Burt is far, far less egre­gious in his pur­suit of it than many others.

** Lest anyone get the wrong idea, this is a ques­tion of accu­racy, not credit–at least when it comes to CR. I wasn’t around then, but from what I’ve heard the mag­a­zine owes much more to Johnston’s edi­to­r­ial vision than vice versa.