Post-Avant vs. School of Quietude, First Inning

As a teacher, anything I read is fodder for the classroom, absolutely anything that nudges some unsuspecting 17 year old to think a thought he/she never imagined thinking. As a reader of poetry, I prefer to read work that shows me what poetry is in the process of becoming, that challenges my notions of what a poem is, of what reading is, of who I am as a reader. I only find these in post-avant poetries. But as a teacher, I read with a different audience in mind, with different expectations. I read to find poems that are about inter/intrapersonal issues, poems about place, the InLand Northwest, about people, poems with transparent, immediately accessible language, but also with a depth worth plunging into, worth re-reading. About twenty percent of my reading then is from the School of Quietude, a body of work my students respond to, especially poems about place, about our places near vast forests and often inaccessible terrain.

I know when I first envisioned this sporting contest (January 10, '04) between the post-avant and school of quietude, I was thinking football, but that season’s done. I’m now smelling oil on leather, stretching my hamstrings, trying to pick up the spin from the pitcher’s release point. Find two poems below, from two “Bobs,” taken from my readings of this afternoon. Tell me which one’s a hit for you.

First, from the School of Quietude:

The Afterlife of Moose
for Stephen Dunn

As the moose is obsessed, relentlessly
and with little or no variation, with food,
safety, and procreation, I am myself
obsessed of late with God, though by God
even I am uncertain What or Who I mean:
the word or the Word in the mouths
of those who use the word as a bludgeon;
the fabulous order of all disorderly things
or the perfect chaos that lives in straight lines;
all the succulent preliminary wines and kisses
or the thrust and plunge and plosive release.

I’ve been watching this particular bull
for a good while now, as he feeds
on the rich new shoots and shrub
by shrub moves slowly through the forest.
He knows I’m here. He eyes me
now and then. This morning I am in his mind
as God never is, and what I wish I knew
is whether or not I envy him that constant absence,
or whether doubt might not be
the source of all I love,
all the shimmer of truth, the flavors of beauty.
Only a fool would see the moose’s life
as easier or less than his own.
As for the afterlife, I’ll take his chances.

- Robert Wrigley

Now from the Post-Avant:

Preposteriori

at a glance
the neigh
boring
attendant botches
hunches latched to
nearby
tenements
luge taunted
via simple/ample
(en francais) “existence”

rail chored
upwards of two
fiddlesticks beyond
entattlements that round
out all
the earducts

supposing present tense
were not (a)round
supposing compost did not heap
in prox of anyflowers
and pretend that there were no
colors anymore just
language to confer
upon sketches in our coffers
the precipice of Pravda
this once a kink in
the smoothed over
tendencies

use destitutes ab
use / use further strikes
best where once used
maintaining
record after record
to stabilize (at least)
the tendency to
repeat once
siloed its way
to favor grasp
to prelude
a release

Bob (Sheila) Murphy, appearing in SleepingFishzer0

Comments

[Steve Tills]

Well, the first "poem" has some big problems, for me: (1)it's just prose, and there is nothing wrong with "prose," per se, but WHY would anybody want or need to pass it off as poetry; (2)there is NOTHING at all poetic about it; the linebreaks don't create any extra syntactical nuances; there is nothing in the language or the scoring on the page that produces any kind of extra energy or events or sensations; instead, all of the words simply march to monochrome, one-dimensional meanings that are summed up at the end-punctuation (periods and semi-colons); (3)in addition, the author apparently directs this at a narrow, conventional, traditional readership evidentally eternally turned on by concepts like "God" and cliche terms like "truth" and "beauty" and "afterlife." But anyways, the real problem is NOT a super-biggie: that it really doesn't have a lot of "poetry" to it, that it's essentially just poetry randomly arranged on the page to affect being "lines" or a form that is, at the most "automatic" and "superficial" levels, generally taken to be poetry. Unfortunately, if this thing were on the page as a prose paragraph, or if the line breaks were changed, the piece would essentially be exactly the same, and nothing would be lost or gained by such other rearrangement. Essentially, one CANNOT rearrange most real poetry without having significant loss/modification of its true being. Like, you know the old cliche, "poetry cannot be paraphrased?" Same goes for scoring on the page. Since real poetry generally uses line breaks to affect intense enhancement of "meaning nuances" BETWEEN words and phrases inside sentence units AS WELL AS meaning nuances at the ends of sentence units, and this "poem" doesn't have ANY discernibly NECESSARY LINEBREAK (not a one, as far as I could see, and there are, what, 24 opportunities, yes?) at all, well, WHAT'S THE HECK IS POETICAL ABOUT THAT?

[Wendy Babiak]

I confess I prefer the first. I find it melodious, and it embraces the same agnosticism (and betrays the same love of the natural) that I do.

[Daniel Nester]

I know I'm supposed to say the second, but chopping up consciousness doesn't equal a poem that makes something happen. Except, of course, a chopped-up consciousness, which is good enough for some. And as far as the first, the comment begs the question: who cares if something isn't needed to be discussed? Is poetry a student-centered classroom? It is not. The poet is in charge of the poem. The reader is invited, yes, but not necessarily invited to, like, collaborate in meaning. Sometimes, yes, but this is simply not that kind of poem. It's a meditation. My shibboleth about the first is the anthropomorphism, the idea that a fucking cow can reflect our consciousness. I go with the first, irrespective of the bull, cow, whatever.

[tonio]

*tosses 2 cents into the bucket* The first one's a nice little essay, although it doesn't exactly screech 'POETRY' in a loud voice to me, and doesn't really leave much to be, hmmm, *discussed* since the poet's done all the work already. The second doesn't resonate with me, but I'm also an old and stodgy gen-x'er, so whadda I know? Obviously, despite my apparent alignment with a lot of 'quieter' works, I find the second to be more valuable. I don't *like* it, but that's not very important to me, given the choices. How much a kid *likes* a piece immediately upon reading it, and how important that is to his or her appreciation of it, though, may be another story.