This morn­ing John Latta quoted a bit out of Jed Rasula’s new Mod­ernism and Poetic Inspiration:

In lieu of its “voca­tion of dis­or­der,” Blan­chot won­ders what qual­i­fies as Roman­ti­cism: “Where it man­i­fests itself, rich in projects, or where it dies out, poor in works?” The answer: equiv­o­ca­tion. Or, to use a term the Roman­tics them­selves were fond of, the arabesque, the abil­ity to wrig­gle simul­ta­ne­ously toward con­trary poles. Although such wrig­gling can remain intran­si­tive, and the work uncom­pleted, “‘this supe­ri­or­ity of intel­li­gence over the power of exe­cu­tion’ is the very sign of authen­tic­ity” as Blan­chot puts it by way of Valéry. Exe­cu­tion is tac­itly the domain of the arti­san, so the artist asserts author­ity in a sov­er­eign ges­ture of dis­dain, as if the poet, con­ceiv­ing the mas­ter­piece, says to the reader, you do it, where doing amounts to a labo­ri­ous tem­po­ral extrac­tion of the divine Idea from a patent muddle (in which James Joyce sets his hen peck­ing at a sus­pi­ciously sodden letter in Finnegans Wake). Resist­ing com­ple­tion can also be deci­sive in its pre­var­i­ca­tion between avail­able means; ter­mi­nal inde­ci­sion is hard to dis­tin­guish from poly­va­lent cre­ative options.

John calls the above “another instance of Paul Valéry’s assert­ing form / invention’s supe­ri­or­ity (the par­tic­u­lar words hardly matter),” and “incredibly spark-throwing,” and a sug­ges­tion of “the mantra of the Lan­guage boys,” which strikes me as thrice true.

But there’s some­thing else in there, too, isn’t there?

John Latta reminds me of some­thing I’ve been mean­ing to men­tion around here, even though I sus­pect there’s no need to tell most of you: please, please, go read Susan Howe’s essay in the latest issue of Chicago Review. It’s a thing of beauty about things of beauty.

Work and family have kept my blog­ging time tight of late, so I hope John will for­give my crib­bing his quo­ta­tion, which ought to con­vince you that Fanny’s not the only mystic in the family:

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.

Mayday Mag­a­zine, a new online pub­li­ca­tion, is pub­lish­ing a round­table of responses to Kent Johnson’s reply to Jason Guriel’s “Going Negative” (which showed up in the March Poetry). The site is set to go live May 1, but most of the responses are already avail­able here.

I’ve got a con­tri­bu­tion up, as do DE con­trib­u­tors Joshua Adams and Michael Rob­bins. It’s a big group, and I haven’t yet read any­where close to all of the others, but so far I’ve appre­ci­ated the replies of John Latta, Mau­reen McLane, Barry Schwab­sky, and Ange Mlinko. Check them out…