Abstract
Tucked away in the “Cultures” section of Mark Wallace and Steven Marks’ recent anthology, Telling It Slant, is a small, detailed half-page cartoon by the writer Gary Sullivan. The cartoon, “America, a Lineage,” parodies a literary concern with origin and influence, with understanding tradition as “DNA passed along from one generation to the next.” The tradition in question begins with “the imagists” who “begat the objectivists who begat Black Mountain who begat the Beats who begat the New York School who begat the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E movement” and the cartoon gently mocks such reductive literary histories whilst acknowledging the anxiety that it produces in the young poet who awakes after this night-mare “filled with anxiety,” wondering “who begat me?!”1 Such a self-conscious approach to literary tradition, demarcating a complex and heterogeneous pedigree whilst eschewing its determining implications, is in keeping with the apparent contradictions that have surrounded recent work in the “parallel” tradition. On the one hand, this writing continues to participate in what has long been one of U.S. poetry’s more marginal poetic communities. Yet, on the other hand, as the opening to the introduction of Wallace and Mark’s anthology notes, “The sales of various types of non-‘mainstream’ poetries, if taken together, likely exceed the ‘mainstream’ center whose shadow they supposedly occupy.”2
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Notes
Gary Sullivan, “America, A Lineage,” Telling It Slant: Avant-Garde Poetics in the 1990s, edited by Mark Wallace and Steven Marks (Tuscaloosa and London: Alabama University Press, 2002), 41.
Joel Kuszai, ed., Poetics @ (New York: Roof Books, 1999).
Steve Evans, “The American Avant-Garde after 1989: Notes Toward a History,” Assembling Alternatives: Reading Postmodern Poetries Transnationally, edited by Romana Huk (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2003), 88.
Lisa Jarnot, “Preface to an Anthology of New (American) Poets,” An Anthology of New (American) Poets, edited by Lisa Jarnot, Leonard Schwartz, and Chris Stroffolino (Jersey City: Talisman House, 1998), 2.
Jena Osman, “Introduction,” The Lab Book, edited by Jena Osman (Buffalo: Poetics Program, State University of New York at Buffalo, 1992), vii.
The Apex of the M’s editorial stance was severely critical of what it understood to be Language writing’s inability to respond to the injustices in the social, suggesting that it is complicit with what it seeks to attack: “Self-conscious opacity in poetry, long before it counteracts or brings an end to the socio-cultural status quo, perhaps compounds the problems resulting from increasing rates of illiteracy and atomization in the public sphere, problems upon which global capitalism, supposedly the enemy of the avant-garde has come to depend.” Lew Daly, Alan Gilbert, Kristin Prevallet, Pam Rehm, “Editorial,” Apex of the M 1 (1993), 5.
Mark Wallace, “With Romantic Materialism,” A Poetics of Criticism, edited by Juliana Spahr et al. (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994).
Pam Rehm, The Garment in Which No One Had Slept (Providence: Burning Deck Press,, 1993), 23.
Lee Ann Brown, Polyverse (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1997).
Ernest Laclau, Emancipation(s) (London: Verso, 1996), 97.
Erica Hunt, Local History (New York: Roof Books, 1993), 57.
Michael de Certeau, “Reading as Poaching,” Readers and Reading, edited by Anthony Bennet (London and New York: Longman, 1995), 157.
Juliana Spahr et al., eds., A Poetics of Criticism (Buffalo: Leave Books, 1994).
Juliana Spahr, “Poetry, Academies, and Anarchy,” Poets and Writers 28, no. 6 (2000), 21–26. Kristen Prevallett, “Why Poetry Criticism Sucks,” Jacket 11, April (2000).
Juliana Spahr and Jena Osman, “Introduction,” Chain 1 (1994), 129.
Juliana Spahr, “Introduction,” American Women Poets in the Twenty First Century, edited by C. Rankine and J. Spahr (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2002), 11.
Juliana Spahr, Everybody’s Autonomy: Connective Reading and Collective Identity, (Alabama: The University of Alabama Press, 2001), 13.
Juliana Spahr, Response (Los Angeles: Sun and Moon Press, 1996), 9.
Juliana Spahr, things of each possible relation hashing against one another (Newfield, NY: Palm Press, 2003), 29.
Juliana Spahr, Fuck You—Aloha—I Love You (Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 2001), 31.
From a personal interview with Harryette Mullen, cited in Kate Pearcy’s “A Poetics of Opposition?: Race and the Avant-Garde,” from a paper given at The Conference of Contemporary Poetry, Rutgers, April 24–27, 1997.
Harryette Mullen, Trimmings (New York: Tender Buttons, 1991), 31.
Harryette Mullen, S*PeRM**K*T (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1992) (unpaginated).
Harryette Mullen, Muse and Drudge (Philadelphia: Singing Horse Press, 1995), 80.
Harryette Mullen, Sleeping with the Dictionary (Berkeley: University of California Press, 2002), 3.
Harryette Mullen, “Imagining the Unimagined Reader: Writing to the Unborn and Including the Excluded,” Boundary 2, Spring (1999), 199.
Harryette Mullen, “Sandra Cisneros’s Woman Hollering Creek,” MELUS 21, no. 1 (Spring) (1996), 4.
Johanna Drucker, The Alphabetic Labyrinth: The Letters in History and Imagination (London: Thames and Hudson, 1995), 11.
Peter Mark Roget, Roget’s Thesaurus of English Words and Phrases (London: Longman, 1962).
Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, “Can the Subaltern Speak?” Colonial Discourse and Post-Colonial Theory: A Reader, edited by P. Williams and L. Chrishman (London: Harvester Wheatsheaf, 1993).
Rita Felski, Doing Time: Feminist Theory and Postmodern Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2000)
and Carolyn Steedman, Landscape for a Good Woman (New York: Rutgers, 1987).
Lisa Jarnot, One’s Own Language, Curriculum of the Soul (Canton, NY: The Institute of Further Studies, Glover Publishing, 2002), 2, 3.
Lisa Jarnot, Some Other Kind of Mission (Providence: Burning Deck Press, 1996), 15.
Lisa Jarnot, The Fall of Orpheus (Buffalo: Shaffaloff, 1993);
Lisa Jarnot, Ring of Fire (Cambridge, MA: Zoland Books, 2001).
Robert Duncan, Dante: A Curriculum of the Soul 8 (Canton, NY: The Institute of Further Studies, 1974).
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© 2007 Nicky Marsh
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Marsh, N. (2007). Romantic Materialism and Emerging Poets. In: Democracy in Contemporary U.S. Women’s Poetry. American Literature Readings in the 21st Century. Palgrave Macmillan, New York. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230607156_6
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