This round­table at Boston Com­ment, which I found via the com­ments sec­tion here, is one of the more inter­est­ing things I’ve read recently about the state of poetry in a post-​Langpo world. Less a dis­cus­sion than a set of coor­di­nated responses to a series of ques­tions posed by Joan Houli­han, the page brings together “five fore­most critics/poets with ratio­nal abil­i­ties and powers of articulation”: Oren Izen­berg, Norman Finkel­stein, Stephen Burt, Alan Gold­ing, and H.L. Hix. (The responses to an ear­lier essay by Houli­han were her inspi­ra­tion for host­ing the round­table, but the absence of female respon­dents is still a little disconcerting.)

The participants’ pro­lix­ity makes the whole thing a bit weary­ing to read on screen, and so I’ve excerpted some inter­est­ing sec­tions below. It’s worth noting too that many of these remarks are con­densed ver­sions of longer argu­ments made else­where. Check the full dis­cus­sion for ref­er­ences to these other works.

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Norman Finkelstein:

Because “avant-​garde” is pri­mar­ily a soci­o­log­i­cal term, I would dis­tin­guish it from “exper­i­men­tal,” which I tend to apply to mat­ters of technique…

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Kent Johnson:

An Amer­i­can poetic avant-​garde? If, as Peter Burger argues in his clas­sic Theory of the Avant-​Garde, the con­cept should be under­stood as defin­ing a col­lec­tive, self-​conscious, and insis­tent attack on the “insti­tu­tion of art and lit­er­a­ture” with the aim of rein­te­grat­ing art “into the prac­tice of life,” then it would be hard to find evi­dence of an “avant-​garde” mer­it­ing of the title today.

…

In his study, Burger also deals at length (as any con­sid­er­a­tion of the avant-​garde can’t help but do) with the aes­thetic theory of Theodor Adorno, argu­ing that the dif­fi­cult formal prac­tices the latter cham­pi­oned for their defi­ant “auton­omy” were des­tined, by virtue of their tacit col­lu­sion with the under­ly­ing “pro­duc­tive and dis­trib­u­tive” func­tions of high cul­ture, to be insti­tu­tion­ally domes­ti­cated and ide­o­log­i­cally con­tained. It’s quite inter­est­ing in this regard, if in the sense of dra­matic irony, that the dom­i­nant pose of cur­rent post-​avant cul­tural pol­i­tics has come to affect a quasi-​Adornean air, inas­much as its poets not only mil­i­tantly priv­i­lege avant-​gardist forms over real­ist ones in prac­tice (i.e., exper­i­men­tal forms pro­posed as his­tor­i­cally nec­es­sary ges­tures of nega­tion in commodity-​driven cul­ture), but also assign them a kind of supra-​historical eth­i­cal value in prin­ci­ple, where the adop­tion of non-​syllogistic modes of poetic dis­course is held as a kind of cat­e­gor­i­cal imper­a­tive, a formal sine qua non for achiev­ing aesthetic-​cognitive levels suf­fi­cient for resist­ing the co-​optations of a hege­monic mass cul­ture. Not that every­one explains the matter to her­self in that some­what Altier­ian, bur­den­some way, but such would be the gen­eral back­ground assumption.

…

How and why has the Amer­i­can poetic “avant-​garde” gone from a vital utopian rad­i­cal­ism to what is now, despite lin­ger­ing self-​proclamations of out­sider status, an open, self-​greased slide toward “pro­fes­sion­al­iza­tion” and insti­tu­tional accommodation?

There are books yet to be writ­ten in answer to that, of course; how­ever, the fol­low­ing can, indeed, be con­fi­dently stated: The denoue­ment was deter­mined in advance by the stub­born fail­ure of the Lan­guage poets to prac­tice what they preached. Polem­i­cally reject­ing in their theory the “I” and “Self” as the ground of poetry, they enshrined it in their prac­tice in the most non­cha­lant ways, fram­ing and exhibit­ing their “avant-​garde” prod­ucts within the func­tional con­fines of Author­ship, with all its atten­dant dynam­ics of cul­tural cap­i­tal acqui­si­tion and pri­vate port­fo­lio posi­tion­ing. And doing so, they failed–pre­dictably, for sure–to self-​consciously inter­ro­gate the col­lapse of the orig­i­nary avant-​garde project they saw them­selves as extending.

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Stephen Burt:

No good imag­i­na­tive writ­ing hews to only one goal.

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Oren Izenberg:

It is nei­ther true nor is it untrue that the poetic avant-​garde of the past quar­ter cen­tury has had a rev­er­ence for inde­ter­mi­nacy. Or per­haps: what one poet who reveres inde­ter­mi­nacy reveres may or not be the same thing that another poet who reveres inde­ter­mi­nacy reveres, and it may be that nei­ther one reveres indeterminacy…. All of that is only say that it does not seem to me that poetic dis­cus­sions of “inde­ter­mi­nacy” take very seri­ously the philo­soph­i­cal prob­lems that go by that name. Rather, the idea of inde­ter­mi­nacy in poetic con­texts tends to be vaguely empow­er­ing, sug­gest­ing that some­thing cre­ative is left for the reader to do, or else it is vaguely dis­em­pow­er­ing, when the so-​called inde­ter­mi­nate text becomes an occa­sion for dis­cov­er­ing our own deter­mi­na­tions by sys­tems of mean­ing not of our own making.

…

But while I do think much of the most inter­est­ing poetry of the last quar­ter, half, or indeed whole cen­tury is inter­ested in a very par­tic­u­lar kind of deter­mi­nacy, I don’t believe it has been much inter­ested in the deter­mi­nacy of mean­ing. In my view, poets are driven time and time again by the brutal urgen­cies of his­tory to con­ceive of poetry, less as an art (nei­ther a mean­ing­ful object, nor a read­erly per­for­mance) than as a prin­ci­ple, a capac­ity under­stood to be coin­ci­dent with the same essen­tial qual­ity that make a person a person…. Such a reviv­i­fied and inten­si­fied poetic human­ism arises as a recon­struc­tive response to a cen­tury of crises that are at once the­o­ret­i­cal (the desacral­iza­tion or cri­tique of the sub­ject) and actual—for the twen­ti­eth cen­tury has unfolded as a series of colos­sal fail­ures to per­ceive per­sons as persons.

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H.L. Hix:

I aspire toward making poems overde­ter­mined rather than inde­ter­mi­nate. From Hobbes, who equates truth with uni­voc­ity, we have inher­ited an ideal of deter­mi­nacy that has had more influ­ence than I believe it war­rants: “The Light of humane minds is Per­spic­u­ous Words, but by exact def­i­n­i­tions first snuffed, and purged from ambi­gu­ity”; “The foun­da­tion of all true Rati­o­ci­na­tion, is the con­stant Sig­ni­fi­ca­tion of words.” This ideal man­i­fests itself most mon­strously in Anglo-​American ana­lyt­i­cal phi­los­o­phy, but also weighs heav­ily on Anglo-​American poetry and criticism.

One way to resist deter­mi­nacy, of course, is inde­ter­mi­nacy, and inso­far as the avant-​garde has resisted the Hobbe­sian ideal I applaud it. I prefer the oppo­site approach, though: not to empty the poem of mean­ing, but to fill it to over­flow­ing. Not one mean­ing or no mean­ings, but many.