Well, Sire literally just beat me to it, but I was going to mention not only our Fellow Travellers series, but also Seidel and Billy Childish, who probably rank as my favourite living poets. I would start with those I guess. Ironically I was just enjoying Sam Riviere's "Kim Kardashian's Marriage" earlier this month and was going to recommend that, although it is, quite literally, ripped from the headlines (but in a playful way).
Wow blown away by Billy Childish. Thank you. “i am a desperate man who denounces the dullness of money and status i am a desperate man will not bow down to acolayed or success i am a desperate man who loves the simplicity of painting and hates gallarys and white walls and the dealers in art who loves unreasonableness and hot headedness who loves contradiction hates publishing houses and also I am Vincent van gogh hiroshige and every living breathing artist who dares to draw god on this planet”
Besides our Fellow Travellers, I'd cite jwcurry, Karen Solie, Zachary Schomburg, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, John Beer, Frederick Seidel, Matthew Zapruder, Fred Wah, Kate Greenstreet, Ron Padgett, Matthew "MW" Walsh, Jack Gendron, Billy Childish, Anthony Madrid...
What is the point of hate when it isn’t connected to critique? Vague-posting about networking and unpublished MA theses isn’t exactly a poetics. A good review does a better job of building a coherent aesthetics than this essay which seems afraid to discover what its author really thinks. Raging against institutional poets who can’t even get into the institution is the lowest of lowest-hanging fruit…
This wasn't an article about the relative merits of MA theses. The point is that few people, especially in CanLit, are willing to go to bat FOR their poetics, that it's all just a hob-nobbing party. Compare that to CanLit from the 60s through to the 80s and the antagonism that existed between the various practitioners of "linear" poetry with one another and with, in turn, the proponents of more formally experimental work (who were themselves rather openly dismissive of the other factions and even sub-divided themselves). There were rival scenes, rival styles, rival cities, and so on. Heel's point, as stressed by the end, is not to center some sense of our collective's personal poetics but to ask people to scorn others on the basis of aesthetic antagonisms. To fight each other, to tear each other apart even, over the qualities of one's work because the work is important--more important than simply saying and doing what feels least personally uncomfortable in any given situation.
Literature and its reliant discourses should be more aggressive, they should be combative and dialectical. But the contemporary scene encourages cooperation, and this is systematically enforced via the structure of CW program workshops (consent-oriented focus grouping, flattening of literature, removal of that which might shock or offend) and the "friendliness" required to get a book out (and hey, sometimes people can clumsily fuck their way through half the literary scene and STILL not land a book deal until they're in like their 40s, but sometimes that's just owed to being a shitty lay).
If you look around this blog, you'll find no shortage of reviews, rants, and critiques that articulate the specifics of what me and my colleagues do and do not value in literature—but this is a polemic, intended to make people reflect on the fact that most writers abhor a good portion of what we read. That is a primal drive, as strong as its opposite, that we have been finger-shaken out of expressing outside catty whispers. We ignore its generative potential at our peril. You could even argue it's a healthy way to vent these kinds of feelings so you don't take them out on your friends or your spouse.
I would argue that no one writing anonymously, critiquing anonymous unpublished poets, and not willing to say anything concrete about what they like or do not like in their supposed “manifesto” is “going to bat” for their poetics. I’m all for treating poetry seriously, because I agree there is a general flattening which is too polite to the bad poets and not generous enough to the work that really sings. I wrote the above-mentioned review for that reason. But there has to be a context to that critique, even if it’s just ideological, and gleefully recounting who has or has not published, who’s working as a waiter or whatever is far from that
André, most people already know who I am, just like not using a last name hasn't kept me from realizing who you are, these are scarcely anonymous, especially when one considers that Discordia also throws shows (which "apparently" you've been to, or so I've been told, I wasn't really paying attention). If you want a sense of our collective's specific poetics or ideological bent, that is expressed elsewhere, and isn't the point of this piece. The point here is that there is far too much sewage blocking up the pipes, too much middle-of-the-road bland and inoffensive work bogging down the whole scene and quite literally bogging down the publishers (everyone's got a backlog now, some going on for years, and it's mostly SHIT), nothing that can even arouse much passion in even hating it, and—to put my money where my mouth is—I would put something like Evie of the Deepthorn in that same category. Sheer MFA/MA-core. Flat. Uninteresting. Also contains a painfully inauthentically-rendered phenomenology of a gay Brown guy. Although I suppose I at least feel bad that you had to go with Kwame. Maybe if you'd finished it early enough it could have gone to Fiorentino.
Lol "Eris," did you take a week off to hate read my book? I'm flattered. I still don't know who you are, exactly, and I'm not sure I care enough to find out, but if you want to descend to ad-hominem and unsubstantiated rumours (there's no world I would have ever sent Jon that book) I guess I could if I had a name... Who were you published by, again? Like a medical technology company?
I commented because I object to the piece and the way it uses my review to make a fucking stupid point. The book I reviewed—and it's not like I tried to keep my name anonymous, lol—was listed as one of the "top" poetry books of 2021 by the CBC, which is noteworthy enough to deserve some scrutiny. I don't see anything like that justification here, even though some larger problems are addressed. This manifesto reads like the screed of someone deeply hurt that they aren't at the centre of the literary universe, and who reveals why they aren't, because they are petty and obsessed with the writers they don't think are as good as them, even writers who have ceased writing and stopped mattering to the larger literary community. You know writing is not like running from a bear, where you only have to outrun the weaker writers. It is actually insane to think that you can meaningly speak to the health of a much, much larger literary community by reading and dunking on the unpublished theses of the weaker students in a single undergraduate and master's program at a single university. But yeah, tell me more about how this kind of lazy, pseudo-incendiary manifesto is going to revolutionize the literary community by being petty to anonymous writers who now wait tables
Eris, can you recommend any living poets that don’t write identitarian poetry or responses to the 24 hour news cycle?
Well, Sire literally just beat me to it, but I was going to mention not only our Fellow Travellers series, but also Seidel and Billy Childish, who probably rank as my favourite living poets. I would start with those I guess. Ironically I was just enjoying Sam Riviere's "Kim Kardashian's Marriage" earlier this month and was going to recommend that, although it is, quite literally, ripped from the headlines (but in a playful way).
Wow blown away by Billy Childish. Thank you. “i am a desperate man who denounces the dullness of money and status i am a desperate man will not bow down to acolayed or success i am a desperate man who loves the simplicity of painting and hates gallarys and white walls and the dealers in art who loves unreasonableness and hot headedness who loves contradiction hates publishing houses and also I am Vincent van gogh hiroshige and every living breathing artist who dares to draw god on this planet”
At this risk of sounding like a shill (and also answering a question that wasn't directed at me), we do regularly publish writers who we think meet these criteria: https://discordiareview.substack.com/t/fellow-travellers
Besides our Fellow Travellers, I'd cite jwcurry, Karen Solie, Zachary Schomburg, Mei-mei Berssenbrugge, John Beer, Frederick Seidel, Matthew Zapruder, Fred Wah, Kate Greenstreet, Ron Padgett, Matthew "MW" Walsh, Jack Gendron, Billy Childish, Anthony Madrid...
thanks Sire, ill be checking out the fellow travelers and your list of poets.
What is the point of hate when it isn’t connected to critique? Vague-posting about networking and unpublished MA theses isn’t exactly a poetics. A good review does a better job of building a coherent aesthetics than this essay which seems afraid to discover what its author really thinks. Raging against institutional poets who can’t even get into the institution is the lowest of lowest-hanging fruit…
You're missing the point, ol' sport.
This wasn't an article about the relative merits of MA theses. The point is that few people, especially in CanLit, are willing to go to bat FOR their poetics, that it's all just a hob-nobbing party. Compare that to CanLit from the 60s through to the 80s and the antagonism that existed between the various practitioners of "linear" poetry with one another and with, in turn, the proponents of more formally experimental work (who were themselves rather openly dismissive of the other factions and even sub-divided themselves). There were rival scenes, rival styles, rival cities, and so on. Heel's point, as stressed by the end, is not to center some sense of our collective's personal poetics but to ask people to scorn others on the basis of aesthetic antagonisms. To fight each other, to tear each other apart even, over the qualities of one's work because the work is important--more important than simply saying and doing what feels least personally uncomfortable in any given situation.
Literature and its reliant discourses should be more aggressive, they should be combative and dialectical. But the contemporary scene encourages cooperation, and this is systematically enforced via the structure of CW program workshops (consent-oriented focus grouping, flattening of literature, removal of that which might shock or offend) and the "friendliness" required to get a book out (and hey, sometimes people can clumsily fuck their way through half the literary scene and STILL not land a book deal until they're in like their 40s, but sometimes that's just owed to being a shitty lay).
If you look around this blog, you'll find no shortage of reviews, rants, and critiques that articulate the specifics of what me and my colleagues do and do not value in literature—but this is a polemic, intended to make people reflect on the fact that most writers abhor a good portion of what we read. That is a primal drive, as strong as its opposite, that we have been finger-shaken out of expressing outside catty whispers. We ignore its generative potential at our peril. You could even argue it's a healthy way to vent these kinds of feelings so you don't take them out on your friends or your spouse.
I would argue that no one writing anonymously, critiquing anonymous unpublished poets, and not willing to say anything concrete about what they like or do not like in their supposed “manifesto” is “going to bat” for their poetics. I’m all for treating poetry seriously, because I agree there is a general flattening which is too polite to the bad poets and not generous enough to the work that really sings. I wrote the above-mentioned review for that reason. But there has to be a context to that critique, even if it’s just ideological, and gleefully recounting who has or has not published, who’s working as a waiter or whatever is far from that
André, most people already know who I am, just like not using a last name hasn't kept me from realizing who you are, these are scarcely anonymous, especially when one considers that Discordia also throws shows (which "apparently" you've been to, or so I've been told, I wasn't really paying attention). If you want a sense of our collective's specific poetics or ideological bent, that is expressed elsewhere, and isn't the point of this piece. The point here is that there is far too much sewage blocking up the pipes, too much middle-of-the-road bland and inoffensive work bogging down the whole scene and quite literally bogging down the publishers (everyone's got a backlog now, some going on for years, and it's mostly SHIT), nothing that can even arouse much passion in even hating it, and—to put my money where my mouth is—I would put something like Evie of the Deepthorn in that same category. Sheer MFA/MA-core. Flat. Uninteresting. Also contains a painfully inauthentically-rendered phenomenology of a gay Brown guy. Although I suppose I at least feel bad that you had to go with Kwame. Maybe if you'd finished it early enough it could have gone to Fiorentino.
Lol "Eris," did you take a week off to hate read my book? I'm flattered. I still don't know who you are, exactly, and I'm not sure I care enough to find out, but if you want to descend to ad-hominem and unsubstantiated rumours (there's no world I would have ever sent Jon that book) I guess I could if I had a name... Who were you published by, again? Like a medical technology company?
I commented because I object to the piece and the way it uses my review to make a fucking stupid point. The book I reviewed—and it's not like I tried to keep my name anonymous, lol—was listed as one of the "top" poetry books of 2021 by the CBC, which is noteworthy enough to deserve some scrutiny. I don't see anything like that justification here, even though some larger problems are addressed. This manifesto reads like the screed of someone deeply hurt that they aren't at the centre of the literary universe, and who reveals why they aren't, because they are petty and obsessed with the writers they don't think are as good as them, even writers who have ceased writing and stopped mattering to the larger literary community. You know writing is not like running from a bear, where you only have to outrun the weaker writers. It is actually insane to think that you can meaningly speak to the health of a much, much larger literary community by reading and dunking on the unpublished theses of the weaker students in a single undergraduate and master's program at a single university. But yeah, tell me more about how this kind of lazy, pseudo-incendiary manifesto is going to revolutionize the literary community by being petty to anonymous writers who now wait tables
Cope.