David Kellogg

THE SELF IN THE POETIC FIELD

L A Structure for Contemporary American Poetry

Note: This section is a line-by-line rewriting, with a few sentences removed, ofJ.D. Watson and F H. C. Crick, 'A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid," published in the journal Nature in 1953i.

Tradition

Self

Community

Innovation I wish to suggest a structure for contemporary American poetry (C.A.P.). This structure has novel features which are of considerable critical interest. A structure for poetry has already been proposed by Eliot ii. He has kindly made his manuscript available to the world for the last eighty years. His model consists of an enveloping tradition, with the dead near the center, and the individual talent on the outside. In my opinion, this structure is unsatisfactory for two reasons: 1) I believe that the material which provides the poetic structure is the living community of readers, not the dead. Without the stacks of coffins, it is not clear in Eliot's model what forces would hold the structure together, especially as the variously interpreted bodies near the center will repel each other. 2) The self of the poem is extinguished along with the self of the poet.
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Another dynamic structure has also been suggested by Bloom iii. In his model the dead are on the outside and the living individuals on the inside, linked together by Freudian anxieties. This structure is rather loosely described, and for this reason I shall not comment on it. I wish to put forward a radically different structure for contemporary American poetry. This structure has two axes intersecting at the same dynamic center (see diagram). I have made the usual poetic assumptions, namely, that each axis maps a set of possible positions.1The two axes are perpendicular to each other, having independent mechanisms of operation. Both axes adjust according to the specific social reality, but owing to the independence of the two binaries, each position-taking is a separate and distinct event. The total configuration loosely resembles Bourdieu'siv model of the cultural field; that is, the actual possibilities are on the inside of the field and the abstract value-identifications on the outside. The configuration of the entire poetic field and its loci of value is proximate to Bourdieu's "autonomous principle," the whole of the poetic field being situated at the autonomous end of the cultural field, where cultural production is directed primarily at other producers rather than a public (heteronomous) audience. There is an effect in the field made by each successive position-taking. I have assumed that the independence of each position-taking is compromised by the presence of other, adjacent position-takings, so that a cluster of position-takings congeals into a stable position on the field. The space of poetry as such is measured by the distance between the center and the four possible sources of poetic value. As these named sources are on the outside, critics have all too easy access to them and critical position-takings in the service of canonicity are predictable (see below). The structure is an open one, and its capacity for change is rather high. At lower change capacities we would expect the axes to shorten so that the field could become more compact. The novel feature of this structure for poetry is the manner in which the two axes are each formed by the formal and social loci of value. The loci of each axis repel each
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A position-taking is any event within the poetic field: this can include a poem, a book of poems, a public reading, a grant, or a critical act. See Steve Evans, "The Dynamics of Literary Change: Four Excursuses [sic] in Lieu of a Lecture," (Impercipient Lecture Series 1.1), 22: "Positions are in Bourdieu's definition in fact congealed position-takings . . . Whereas position-takings are by definition risks taken in time, positions hold a place." See also Evans, 23: "Anyone acquainted with contemporary American poetry . . . is aware that certain basic positions organize the field, that these draw in their wake specific kinds of position-takings, and that what constitutes a viable possibility from the standpoint of one position may well be strictly ruled out with respect to another." My thanks to Steve Evans for providing the useful concept of congealing.

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other. The axes join together in the center so that the two axes map a four-sided field when represented on a two-dimensional plane. One axis maps a set of social possibilities and the other a set of formal possibilities. The field is held in suspense as follows: social locus repels social locus; formal locus repels formal locus. If it is assumed that the loci only occur in the present in the most plausible poetic forms (that is, with the canonically central rather than the eccentric configurations), it is found that only specific pairs of mutually repellant values can form axes. These pairs are: tradition with innovation, and self with community. In other words, if tradition configures one position-taking somewhere in the field, then somewhere else in the field must be innovation; similarly for self and community. The sequence of position-takings in a particular poem does not appear to be restricted in any way. However, if only specific formal and social value-positions can be taken in any specific historical moment, it follows that the poet seeking canonization will offer alternative position-takings around the poetic center. It has been found criticallyv,vi that within the poetic field, tradition is always balanced by innovation, and self by community. It is probably impossible to build this structure for poetry with a multivalent sociology of value in place of the self-reproducing canon, as the extra social dissonance would make the political effect too explosive. The previously published critical data`"'""' on contemporary American poetry are insufficient for a rigorous test of this structure. So far as I can tell, it is roughly compatible with the critical data, but it must be regarded as unproved until it has been checked against more exact results. Some of these are suggested in the following sections. It has not escaped my notice that the specific pairing I have postulated immediately suggests a possible copying mechanism for the canonical poetic material.
IL The Poetry Grid

For several years now, I have been working on the project sketched above. One of the goals of this endeavor is to provide a comprehensive guide to the conflicting principles by which poetry is currently valued. It is an open secret of the poetry world that there is absolutely no consensus about what makes a good poem. Instead we have several distinct camps, each with its own criteria for poetic quality. My project focuses on four sets of criteria which, configured around two axes, map the whole in a neat grid.

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This map is general, but not "total."2More axes could be added, but they would explode my model into a phase space of many dimensions, impossible to visualize. Besides, I am not interested in creating a model for determining literary value, but a model for the creation and perpetuation of canonicity. Because these four principles self, community, tradition, and innovationseek to name currently prevailing camps, their relation helps to describe the dynamics of contemporary American poetry, its ability to remain (relatively) stable while constantly changing. Across the axes, basic struggles are enacted. In the corners, new poetries are born.
Self. We know, or think we know, what the poetry of the self looks like. It's "official

verse culture," the Iowa MFA, the Eastern commercial presses. It's Robert Lowell and William Stafford, Sharon Olds and Louise Gluck. It's the scenic mode, the anecdotal epiphany, the free-verse personal lyric. As the quasi-official poetry of the establishment, it is the object of open contempt by the more ambitious young poets, most of whom secretly hope to be assimilated. Its primary tone is sincerity; its primary function is the production and preservation of authorial subjectivity (code name: voice).
Tradition. All poetry is composed with respect to some practice of tradition, but only some is "traditional" in the sense I mean here. I'm talking about a poetry that locates its primary value in the perpetuation of historical continuities. This definition is not limited to poetry using traditional Anglo-American metrical and stanzaic patterns; it implies, however, the persistence of same. The principle of tradition as currently employed evokes Richard Wilbur, Donald Justice, John Hollander, and dozens of others. It also encompasses the New Formalism and its not-quite-self-conscious-enough nostalgia. There are older magazines associated with the traditional pole (Hudson Review, Kenyon Review), and there are some newer ones as well ( The Formalist, Edge City Review). In keeping with its belletristic ambitions, neoformalist criticism typically has an anti-academic and especially anti-theoretical flavor. Yet more academic versions of the neoformalist perspective are available in critical histories by such writers as Wyatt Prunty and Timothy Steele. As for tone, "current-traditional" poetry (to borrow a term from rhetorical theory)ix is supposedly more demotic than earlier formalisms, but its music remains less speech-inflected than the poetry of the self.

I borrow this language from Mark Poster, who in The Mode of Information: Poststructuralisin and Social Context (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990) argues that general theories are valid "at a specific level of analysis or for a defined portion of experience" (22, italics in text). A total theory, on the other hand, "claims to include within its field all social phenomena" (22).

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Community. The mirror-image of the self, community is the hardest of my four principles to describe, and requires an illustration. Phillip Levine and Adrienne Rich, born just a year apart (Levine in 1928, Rich in 1929), have led somewhat parallel careers. Both have become identified with a certain type of poemcall it the mainstream political lyricwhich offers progressive political critique within a speech-based model of poetic voice. Both have won numerous prizes; both have written powerful political lyrics that have become anthology staples (such as Levine's "They Feed They Lion" and Rich's "Diving Into the Wreck").3Each has blended the personal lyric with political commitment, and while Levine's poems of industrial labor are perhaps not as well known as Rich's work, poetry-world insiders might very likely group them together. Yet I would argue that Levine remains a poet of self, whereas Rich is a poet of community. This is because their poetries are received in different contexts: Rich's poetry in particular helps to form not just her own poetic voice but the very audience that hears or reads that voice. I therefore distinguish between the principles of self and community based on effect. The poetry of the self produces authors, whereas the poetry of community produces audiences. Less important than ethnic, regional, religious, or sexual identity per se is whether a certain poetry participates in, or is read as participating in, the social claims of one or more of these identities. By this logic, Rita Dove is a poet of self, Amiri Baratta is a poet of community; Mark Doty is a poet of self, Paul Monette a poet of community. In addition to poetry built around issues of identity politics, the poetics of community includes other audience-centered movements such as performance and "slam" poetry, as well as hybrids between poetry and other media. Innovation. By definition, the avant-garde seeks to extend the poetic field beyond its

current borders. But innovation is also a live option within the field as currently known. Innovation in this sense is always a question of "more or less." Further, like the other principles, innovation is always understood in relation to a shifting center. A few years ago, in a more conservative poetic climate, almost any use of modernist technique such as parataxis or fragmentation could have been taken as innovative. But since Charles Bernstein and Susan Howe started publishing in American Poetry Review, more radical gestures are required. Indeed, the critical success of Language
3 Both have won the National Book Award (Levine twice), the Harriet Monroe Poetry Award, and the L.A. Times Book Award. Levine has also won the National Book Critics Circle Award, and Rich has been awarded a MacArthur "genius" award. Despite these parallels, however, I believe that Rich is more likely to be canonized: this impression is confirmed not only by the fact that Rich was the first living author to have a Norton "Critical Edition" of her work, but also by Jed Rasula's findings that as of 1994, Rich had 39 anthology appearances to Levine's 27, and that the MLA Internanonal Bibliography contained almost triple the citations to Rich (98) as it did to Levine (34).

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poetry over the last decade has both enlivened the possibilities for the poetry of innovation and raised the bar for what constitutes innovative poetic practice.
The Poets in the Corners. Most poets are not defined simply by one of these four poles;

actual affiliations are much more complex. The neoformalists claim innovation for themselves (a recent neoformalist anthology is provocatively titled Rebel Angels), and the Language poets articulate a tradition going back a hundred years. Similar crossings between self and community may be enacted dozens of times over the course of a long poetic career, and innumerable positions may be taken in the spaces between formal and social poles. Between tradition and community, for example, we find the feminist projects of Marilyn Hacker and Annie Finch. Between tradition and self are the formalized lyrics of Amy Clampitt and Alan Shapiro. Between community and innovation lie poets as different as Robert Duncan, Nathaniel Mackey, and C.D. Wright. Finally, between self and innovation I find a newly emerging, innovative lyric poetry. This emerging position is represented by poets who started out in the "MFA mainstream" and moved toward innovative writing (including Jane Miller, Jorie Graham, Donald Revell, Forrest Gander, and Susan Mitchell), as well as by younger writers for whom terms like "mainstream" and "avant-garde" are simply no longer useful.
Canonical Drift. What if a poet is claimed by two principles which, in my model, appear

as opposites? What if a poet is claimed by all four? To be claimed by all camps at once is, I think, a good working definition of canonization. To be claimed by all four poles is to occupy strongly the center of the field, and to be identified effectively with poetry as such. A contemporary poet on the way to canonization will be seen as both a poet of self and a poet of community, a traditional poet and a poet of profound innovation: most of the poets on my short list for canonizationincluding Adrienne Rich, John Ashbery, Allen Ginsberg, Sylvia Plath, even Elizabeth Bishophave been claimed by all four poles in one way or another. It is not enough for such a poet to strike a compromise between opposite principles; rather, the poet on the way to canonization will occupy the center with enough mass to exert a force on poets at the periphery.

IIL Being John Ashbery

A poet publishes a poem in a journal; this is a position-taking. Several years later, the poem is reprinted in the poet's first book; this is another position-taking. The book in question has won a prize, and the judge of the competition, a poet with an established reputation, has written an introduction; this introduction is a third positiontaking. Other position-takings follow: interviews with the poet, readings at universi-

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ties and bookstores, critical articles by others, the poet's own prose (both on poetry and on other subjects). Again I return to effect as a definitional requirement: an event is a position-taking if it has an effect within the poetic field. Position-takings are negotiated with respect to established positions in the field. Eventually, if a poet starts to become a known reference point for the position-takings of others, that poet's position-takings have started to congeal into a position. Alternatively, a group of poets with which a poet is associated can also become a position. Example: "The New York School" is a position; I would characterize the position of the New York School as "moderately innovative, slightly community-focused." In the diagram above, it would land about halfway between the center and the bottom and slightly to the right. Other critics might locate it differently, especially depending on whether the different "generations" of so-called New York School poetry are to have any purchase. In any case, "John Ashbery" is also a positionI would place the position "John Ashbery" near the center of the field, as he is probably the most widely acclaimed living American poet. (Note, by the way, how Ashbery is claimed by powerful critics for all four poles: Helen Vendler views him as a poet of the self, Harold Bloom as a reviser of tradition, Marjorie Perloff as a formal innovator, and John Shoptaw as a writer of "encrypted" gay poems.) Specific Ashbery books, or even individual poems, if influential enough, might become further positions: in Ashbery's corpus, positions are, in my view, held by The Tennis Court Oath and the title poem of Self Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The actual person John Ashbery continues to offer poetic position-takings; these position-takings are taken in respect to positions already established, including "New York School" and "John Ashbery." Among other things, current position-takings taken by John Ashbery the writer continue slowly to influence "John Ashbery" the positionbut so do numerous other position-takings over which John Ashbery has no control.
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IV. Variations on the Self

My model draws freely on the cultural sociology of Pierre Bourdieu, who theorizes the larger cultural field as
the site of a struggle between . . . two principles of hierarchization: the heteronomous principle, favourable to those who dominate the field economically and politically (e.g. 'bourgeois art') and the autonomous principle (e.g. 'art for art's sake'), which those of its advocates who are least endowed with specific capital tend to identify with degree of independence from the economy.x

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The field is further defined by the axis of consecration, along which works are canonized as "classics" or marginalized as "experimental." Within this framework, contemporary poetry in general remains caught in the autonomous, low-consecration corner of the cultural field, and any appeal to a heteronomous audiencethat is, the marketsignals a departure from poetic economy and a de facto submission to the cultural economy at large. Such submissions tend to be read as betrayals from within the ranks; this is why poetry is always anxious about, yet cultivates, its own irrelevance. Bourdieu's model categorizes events after the fact, and tends to be reductive about genre. I am less interested in economic measures of social location, however, than in modelling the dynamics driving poets to create position-takings, active responses or appeals to the surrounding cultural field. Along the social axis of the poetic field, these responses may be proportionally more internal, deriving from the principle of self (that is, autonomous), or external, deriving from the principle of community (that is, heteronomous). In genre terms, any position-taking makes reference to all four poles, even if negatively. But, since the rise of confessional poetry in the mid-sixties, the self has exerted a kind of hegemony over the other major validating principles. This critical and institutional dominance has produced a strong reaction from poets and critics representing other camps; if one type of poetry is conflated with official verse culture, then alternative poetries are effectively silenced. There is therefore a not-so-surprising consensus among otherwise radically different poets that the contemporary focus on the selfor what Barrett Watten, in a talk on Russian Formalism, calls "the subjective aesthetic bulge" of contemporary writing"seems useless and unreliable." Each camp makes its own arguments on this issue. In the eighties and nineties, New Formalists and their allies published a series of attacks on workshop poetry, linking free verse and a perceived turn in poetry "from broad social concerns to . . . personal agendas." Free verse was linked with self-indulgence, navel-gazing, and lack of discipline, and metrical composition was the proposed antidote. For such poets, meter could also re-connect poetry with a "common reader" and the socius at large. Although the poets identified with community poetics and identity politics do not share New Formalism's belletristic outlook, their diagnosis is similar. Here is Adrienne Rich introducing the 1996 edition of The Best American Poetry: I was constantly struck by how many poems published in magazines today are personal to the point of suffocation.The columnar, anecdotal, domestic poem, often with a three-stress line, can be narrow in more than a formal sense.

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Rich connects this focus on the personal with white racism and forms of institutional power "overwhelmingly passed on by white men to white men." What Rich calls apartheid of the imagination" is "a blockage in the throat of poetry . . . and cannot be addressed as an artistic problem only." Rich's own editorial solution, mocked by Harold Bloom, is to move beyond aesthetic criteriawhich would likely reproduce the current impasseand choose poems which create "another kind of space where other human and verbal relationships are possible." Significantly, in considering the results of her editorial strategy; she discovers "crisscrossings of voices, dialogues between, arguments among, dissimilar poets"discovers, in other words, that the book has become a kind of living, discordant community.
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Rich, of course, became a poet of community by first becoming a poet of selfby moving from the traditional locus of her first book to the autobiographical detail of Snapshots of a Daughter In Law. For Rich, a move toward the self was a move in the direction of innovation and away from the stifling formalism of her early work; it was only later that she moved from self to community. Let me point out here that Rich's career path developed in a manner neither linear nor predictable. There is a lesson here in how not to write literary history: for we are tempted to understand the self in contemporary poetry by seeking its origins in, say, Whitman or British Romanticism, or the rise of silent reading. My approach is, however, resolutely spatial: it rejects the search for origins and hopes instead merely to trace the present contours of the field. In defense of this perspective, I submit that the question of Romanticism is more or less built into any attempt to write a developmental literary history of current poetry, since such a history assumes a Romantic historical syntax. Poetry is not a unified entity developing its own bildungsroman across the generations and tending toward some currently privileged crisis of subjectivity, but a multifaceted site of struKle that keeps shifting in multiple directions at once.
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In any event, the self keeps returning in the least likely of places. For Rosmarie Waldrop, method is haunted by autobiography:
I turned to collage early, to get away from writing poems about my overwhelming mother. I felt I needed to do something "objective" that would get me out of myself. I took books off the shelf, selected maybe one word from every page or a phrase every tenth page, and tried to work those into structures. Some worked, some didn't. But when I looked at them a while later: they were still about my mother.'-'

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Language writing arose in the context of a New American Poetry that was becoming mannered in its excesses and giddily experiential. The various experiments of early Language writing were, among other things, valiant attempts to move beyond experience as a ground for the poem. But like the corpse in the garden, experience keeps popping up. I want to linger for a moment on the intersection of self and innovation. Opposition to the self in early Language poetry was articulated over and over, and with unrelenting hostility. Yet the last few years have seen a surprising rapprochement. As I mentioned above, this new emergent poetry is largely written by lyric poets who have grown fond of innovative technique, as well as by poets too young to recall in their full intensity the ideological wars of the early eighties. But writers associated with Language poetry have also changed. Here is the first poem from a recent sequence by Tom Mandel, a poet long associated with Language writing:

That one is conscious and not know why like cleaved rock or two that never joined eyes blue in life become brown coals silent as the Kodak into which they stare from the rear of a backyard family gathering. Brothers-in-law caper in the foreground. Seasons, months, weeks, moments flatten against the horizon, forgotten. To whom now do I belong? An infinity of numbers whose factor is three. I saw it was a volume. At sea when I met him, light poured in unrecalled, he offered no answers to the questions I asked whose answers were obvious, and I did not know why.xhI This is the first poem from Prospect of Release, a set of fifty untitled "sonnets" mourning
the death of the poet's adoptive father. It's hard to imagine such a poem being written by a Language writer a decade earlier; it is as though Mandel has leaped back over Language writing to such mournful examples as John Ashbery's "Fragment," from The Double Dream of Spring. It's perhaps even harder to imagine Ron Silliman blurbing any book, as he did Prospect of Release, as "the most intensely felt poems I have ever read." On the other hand, he may be right.

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Barrett Watten excepted, Language writers have never been absolutely opposed to relying on the self as a ground of valueLyn Hejinian's My Life provided an early and powerful example of how subjective experience and innovative method could be productively combined. In the last few years, a number of new literary journals have signaled the emergence of hybrid positions: Chain, COMBO, Explosive, Rhizome, Samizdat. Unlike the self-consciously movement-oriented "post-Language" journals of a few years earlier, these new journals are often playful and goofy; they enjoy publishing writers of vastly different allegiances and styles. This is not, I think, an attempt to move beyond ideology and back to some discredited notion of literary quality. Rather, it's simply an admission that things are changing and that we do not know how, or if, a new arrangement will stabilize. An example of this optimism might be Louis Cabri's "Water proof," from COMBO 1:

How about that, voice. How about that voice. How about that choice. How about that bit. How about that, hoarse. How about that drink forgets it. How about that quartz awhile replaced it. How about that quart. How about that habit dressed to spill now. For instance how about that backyard time. And that body too eh. How about that comma rhyme.xiii
The first stanza brilliantly articulates the dilemma of self (here cast in the role of voice) in contemporary poetry. While the first line is a challenge, the second line recognizes the nice effect of the "voice" in the first line and compliments it. The third line recognizes the "choice" between the first two lines (the "comma rhyme" of the last line) as a choice between self and the challenge to self. And so on through the poem, with the ho(a)rse/bit dilemma in the second stanza reframing the problem and the poem itself given to drunken, rowdy excess. Cabri's poem, like other examples of the new hybrids by Susan Wheeler, Tessa Rumsey, Rachel Loden, and Anselm Berrigan, may not ultimately destabilize the current configuration or overthrow the hegemony of the self. But it does suggest one possible future. 4.-1--

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Notes
i J. D. Watson and F. H.C. Crick, "A Structure for Deoxyribose Nucleic Acid," Nature
171 (1953): 737-8. ii T. S. Eliot, "Tradition and the Individual Talent," in The Sacred Wood (London: Methuen, 1920). iii Harold Bloom, The Anxiety of Influence (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973). iv Pierre Bourdieu, "The Field of Cultural Production, or: The Economic World Reversed," in The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993). v Alan Golding, From Outlaw to Classic: Canons in American Poetry (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1995). vi Timothy Morris, Becoming Canonical in American Poetry (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1995). vii Jed Rasula, The American Poetry Wax Museum: Reality Effects 1940-1990 (Urbana: NCTE, 1996). viii Mary Biggs, A Gift That Cannot Be Refused: The Writing and Publishing of Contemporary American Poetry (New York: Greenwood, 1990). ix See Sharon Crowley, The Methodical Memory: Invention in Current-Traditional Rhetoric (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1990). x Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production (New York: Columbia University Press, 1993) , 40. See also Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1984), and The Rules of Art: Genesis and Structure of the Literary Field (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1995). xi Waldrop, "Thinking of Follows," in Onward: Contemporary Poetry and Poetics, ed. Peter Baker (New York: Peter Lang, 1996), 79. xii Mandel, Prospect of Release (Tuscon: Chax Press, 1996), 9. xiii Cabri, "Water proof," COMBO 1 (1998), 23.

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