[Ed. note: dig­i­tal emu­nc­tion is pleased to wel­come Kent John­son to the wild world of blog­ging. Here­with, his inau­gural post.]

The New Chicago School

My pro­posal: That the clos­est thing we presently have to a “School” of younger, rig­or­ously inno­v­a­tive poets in the U.S. (one that stands clos­est chance of being ret­ro­spec­tively seen as akin in sig­nif­i­cance to the NY School in its first-​generation, proto-​formation years–and when I say “School” I mean in that sense of for­tu­itous con­stel­la­tion, some­thing very dif­fer­ent from a self-​identified ten­dency or “movement”) is what I’ll call the New Chicago School. It’s a list of accom­plished, exper­i­men­tal writ­ers, more poet­i­cally focused as a col­lec­tive, per­haps, than the con­tents list of the City Vis­i­ble anthol­ogy of a couple years back, and more geo­graph­i­cally focused, too, inas­much as all the poets have roots in the city, even though a few of them have recently moved else­where (though in most cases still nearby), and one now lives abroad:

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.