We Need to Talk

A New Method for Evaluating Poetry

Michael Theune, Bob Broad

• Publisher: Multilingual Matters
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781783098873
• Topic: Languages & Linguistics
• Subtopic: Creative Writing
• Index: Languages & Linguistics

We evaluate poems constantly: as workshop leaders, competition judges and journal editors. But how do we judge the success of verse in these contexts? The authors propose an innovative method by which anyone involved in the assessment of poetry can be more transparent about how they value verse. This book foregrounds the ethical and professional obligations of poets, teachers and critics to conduct axiological inquiry so they can discover and publish what they value. We Need to Talk suggests why and how people who care about poetry should communally explore and document their shared (and conflicting) values. This is the first book to provide the background and theory, as well as a practical, working model, for the communal, empirical evaluation of creative writing.

1Opening the Doors to Inquiry

…even today, when value judgments are often considered out of order…

Marjorie Perloff, 2015

Evaluation occurs all the time in poetry. Textbook authors and anthologists – including editors of a serial publication that claims to contain ‘The Best American Poetry’ – select some poems for reprinting, and not others. Contest judges award prizes to some poets, and not to others. Readers for poetry contests select a handful of works from the slush pile for a judge’s final selection, turning down many, many more. Critics evaluate published books of poems, giving rave reviews to some, middling or negative reviews to others. Publishers select some manuscripts for publication, but not others. Editors determine which submissions to include in their journals and which to exclude. The faculty of poetry graduate programs evaluate applicants’ writing samples, and some applicants are accepted – some with full funding, some with no funding at all – while many are rejected. Teachers assign top grades to some poetry students, and lower grades to others. Workshop participants offer each other feedback, hoping to help make a rough draft an accomplished poem. Readers determine over and over again what books and poems to pick up or put down, and when.

But let’s be clear, evaluation is not the activity solely of those thinking about or reacting to already-made poetry, it is also central to the activity of poem making. Indeed, the working poet is one of the most active critics, constantly making evaluative assessments regarding a poem in process, asking and answering implicitly or explicitly again and again evaluative questions such as: is this the right word, or is there a better one? Is this the right line break, or is there a better one? Is this the most powerful turn this poem can take, or is there a better one? Is this the right ending, or is there a better one? Is this draft of this poem beautiful? Is this draft of this poem true? Should a poem be beautiful? Should it be true? Have I loaded all my rift with ore? Has all my stitching and unstitching been for something more than naught? Go to archives, examine poets’ manuscripts and see in the crossings out, the corrections and the multiple drafts, the physical signs of evaluation in the poem-making process.

In fact, evaluation is such an integral part of poem making, it is no stretch to say that virtually every great poet has possessed axiological self-awareness. In other words, they are keenly aware of how poetic value is constructed. Of the vast number of subjects that poets have thought about, meditated on and agonized over – love, nature, sex, death – one of the major subjects is poetry itself and how it should be valued. The history of poetry includes vital, energetic, charged statements about the art of poetry. In defenses, manifestos, essays, prefaces, letters, lectures and ars poeticas, great poets have strived to articulate what they value in and about poems. To cite just a few examples by (fairly) recent American poets:

•‘If I feel physically as if the top of my head were taken off, I know that is poetry’ (Dickinson, 1958).

•‘The poem itself must, at all points, be a high-energy construct and, at all points, an energy-discharge’ (Olson, 1966: 16).

•‘A poem should not mean / But be’ (Macleish, 1952: 19).

•‘Ideally a poem will be both mysterious (incunabula, driftwood of the unconscious) and organic (secular) at the same time’ (Guest, 2003: 20).

•‘A sense of cultural responsibility prompts [Black poets] to affirm the place of poetry in the struggle against social injustice’ (Dove & Nelson, 1991: 220).

Such aesthetic statements, and the axiological insights at their core, are not peripheral to poetry, but, very often, comprise a vital part of the action of poem making. By formulating such statements, poets reveal to themselves and others what characteristics they do and do not appreciate in poetry – often such statements reject earlier or commonly accepted values to then formulate, embrace and/or endorse something new and then the statements can lead poets to new creative territory by encouraging them to endeavor to embody their axiological self-awareness in their creative work.

Though evaluation is ubiquitous, reflection on it, and on the values fundamental to it, is surprisingly rare. In this chapter, we examine the recent history and current state of axiological thinking in contemporary American poetry and poetics, which recognize the need for evaluation but remain confounded by problematic theories and methods. Then we turn to consider three key efforts to engage poetic axiology more fully: Alberta Turner’s (1980) Poets Teaching: The Creative Process, Patrick Bizzaro’s (1993) Responding to Student Poems and H.L. Hix’s (2004) Wild and Whirling Words: A Poetic Conversation. While recognizing the invaluable contributions of these earlier studies, we will also show their limitations, and demonstrate how a further step is still required.

Too Many Values, Too Few Approaches: The Current State of Poetic Axiology and a Recommendation

There is great confusion and skepticism today about the basis, the ground, for judgments about poetry: why was this particular poem or aspect of a poem valued above others? While there are numerous reasons for this confusion and skepticism, two are key. The first problem is that there are now multiple (and often mutually incompatible) grounds for valuing poetry, each with its own criteria for what is ‘best’. The second problem grows from the first: that judgment in the context of these multiple poetic values has been framed as either objective or subjective, two conceptions which both turn out to be evaluative dead ends.

For some time, American poetry has been thought of as a bifurcated field; as Eliot Weinberger (1993: xi) states in his introduction to his anthology American Poetry Since 1950: ‘For decades, American poetry has been divided into two camps’. This divide has manifested itself in multiple oppositions, including Language poets vs. New Formalists, Post-Avant vs. School of Quietude, and elliptical poetry vs. the poetry of argument and wit. Contemporary American poetry, in fact, has been for some time a collection of poetries. According to some commentators, however, binaries do not adequately account for the proliferating multiplicity of kinds of poetry in America now. Mark Wallace (2001: 193) recognizes five ‘major networks of poetry production in the United States’, including:

•‘the proponents of ‘traditional’ formalism’;

•‘the proponents of confessionalism’;

•‘the proponents of identity-based poetries’;

•‘the proponents of the New American poetry speech-based poetics, often associated with Beat generation, ethnopoetics, or New York school writing’;

•‘the avant-garde … among whom the L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E network has been a vital force’.

In Apples and Orangutans: Competing Values in Contemporary Poetry, Charles Harper Webb (2004) lists over 60 of the ‘competing values that exist among poets and/or lovers of poetry in the United States today’. These values include:

•‘Difficulty’, ‘Clarity’ and ‘Indeterminacy’.

•‘Seriousness’ and ‘Wit and humor’.

•‘Sincerity’ and ‘Irony’.

•‘Moral, mental, spiritual, psychological uplift’ and ‘Art for art’s sake’.

•‘Careful crafting’ and ‘Spontaneity’.

•‘Closure’ and ‘Absence of closure’.

•‘Disguised technique’ and ‘Laid-bare technique’.

•(As subsets of ‘A particular world view’) ‘Women’s/racial/ethnic issues’ and ‘White men’s issues’.

Noting that poets have long had their feuds, Webb (2004: 76) suggests that today’s poetic diversity may simply be greater than it has ever been: ‘Comparing poems might not always have been apples to apples, or even crabapples to pippins, but it was not apples to landfills, or dirtbikes, or orangutans, as it often is today’. The literary canon has indeed expanded in the past 50 years to include a vastly more diverse set of authors and schools, and therefore values. While many see this opening up of the canon – the proximate reason for such a seemingly unassessable multiplicity of poetry – as a good circumstance, the effect on assessment persists: there are no set standards, rendering poetry unassessable. As Webb notes, ‘As for critical assessment of poetry—how does one competently assess something when there is no agreement what that thing should be?’

This seemingly impossible situation for assessment is made all the more intractable by the fact that, for the most part, only two options for thinking about and dealing with these values tend to be considered: objectivist – that somewhere in these criteria are the universally correct standards, or subjectivist – that whatever criteria one chooses simply is a matter of taste and therefore immune to inquiry, discussion and negotiation. However, even though some may yearn for objective criteria (including some prominent voices in the field of creative writing studies, as we discuss in Chapter 5), they are untenable; as Webb states, ‘Unlike the 100-meter dash, where the fastest time wins, contemporary poetry can offer few, if any, objective criteria for winning’. But then, within this binary, the only remaining option for selecting among criteria is by subjective means. However, one problem with the subjective is that it is always merely subjective, offering no compelling, persuasive basis for an evaluation. One simply decides what is better or worse. De gustibus non disputandum est. Another problem with declaring poetic value subjective is that it does not jibe with the common experience (as will be shown in later sections of this chapter) that value can and should be deliberated, evaluations discussed and minds changed. After all, if value is merely subjective, why bother arguing about it?

In ‘Criticism’s Crisis’, in part a meditation on Zapruder’s ‘Show Your Work!’ (mentioned in the introduction), Brian Henry (2010: 29) encapsulates and bemoans the situation created by a world of numerous, conflicting values without any pragmatic way to navigate, examine or otherwise engage them. Henry states: ‘Poetry criticism seems to be in a perpetual state of crisis. It’s not just that critics cannot agree on which poets or kinds of poetry are the best, but that poetry critics often have no common approaches’. Henry (2010: 30) adds, ‘Poetry critics have been compared to doctors (albeit doctors who diagnose without fixing anything), but doctors at least agree on the basics. There’s no such foundation for the poetry critic to draw from. What one critic considers sophisticated, another considers retrograde; what one considers adventurous, another considers slapdash. This makes the poetry critic’s job that much more difficult and keeps the collective hand-wringing going’.

Fortunately, it is not the case that we can engage today’s various poetic values only with either ultimately arbitrary objective ‘common approaches’ or else mere, isolated subjectivism. Nor is it the case that hand wringing is the only remaining course of action. In Contingencies of Value: Alternative Perspectives for Critical Theory, Barbara Herrnstein Smith (1988) argues that value is more properly considered ‘radically contingent’, that is, ‘being neither a fixed attribute, an inherent quality, nor an objective property of things but, rather, an effect of multiple, continuously changing, and continuously interacting variables or, to put this another way, the product of the dynamics of a system …’. Smith (1988: 11) takes great pains to make clear that contingency offers a way to think about value other than through the lens of objectivity such that ‘contingent’ is not ‘subjective’ and so it does not ‘close the doors to inquiry’.

Instead, according to Smith, it ‘opens them’. Evaluative contingency provides new avenues for axiological investigation: ‘If we recognize that literary value is “relative” in the sense of contingent (that is, a changing function of multiple variables) rather than subjective (that is, personally whimsical, locked into the consciousness of individual subjects and/or without interest or value for other people), then we may begin to investigate the dynamics of that relativity’ (emphasis added).

We now review some previous ‘investigations into the dynamics’ of poetic judgment, recognizing how each moved the poetic evaluative inquiry forward and noting how each study ran up against different limitations.

Alberta Turner’s (1980) Proto-Empirical Project

In the late 1970s and early 1980s, poet, editor and long-time director of the Cleveland State University Poetry Center, Alberta Turner, published the results of multiple separate yet similar inquiries into poetry that reveal a great deal about poetic axiology: Fifty Contemporary Poets (Turner, 1977), Poets Teaching (Turner, 1980) and 45 Contemporary Poems (Turner, 1985). Though the shared subtitle of these books – The Creative Process – identifies most precisely the central object of study for each project, a close reading of all of these texts reveals that axiology is a crucial part of the poetic process. Here, however, we will focus only on Poets Teaching, the project in which axiology plays the most explicit role. We will make clear Turner’s axiological inquiries and findings, but we will also show that much more can and should be done to investigate poetic value.

Poets Teaching is a book designed to reveal ‘what actually happens when the professional teaching poet sits down with the student poem. It allows the reader to look over the shoulder of thirty-two poets while they are teaching’ (Turner, 1980: xii). In it, Turner (1980: xii) collects commentary by 32 teaching poets – who are ‘established’ and whose ‘work and theory are near the center of contemporary poetics’ and yet who also ‘represent a range of age, sex, geographical location, kind of poetry written, and teaching temperament’ – on work by 30 student poets. The teaching poets – including Jon Anderson, Marvin Bell, Albert Goldbarth, Donald Justice, Larry Levis, Heather McHugh, Sandra McPherson, David St. John, William Stafford, Stanley Plumly and Jean Valentine – were organized into 11 groups of 2 to 5 poets, and each of these groups commented on 1 to 3 student poems. A brief orientation to the groups – which includes information on the teaching poets’ relationships with each other and often with the students whose work they will examine (often, the work under scrutiny is by a student of one or more of the teaching faculty) – introduces the student poems, which are then followed by the commentary of each of the participating teaching poets.

Assessment is a central concern of Poets Teaching: ‘any reader interested in contemporary poetry will want to look in order to understand what criteria contemporary poets use to judge each other’ (Turner, 1980: xii). In her introduction, Turner (1980: 4) notes both that ‘[b]efore actually revising student poems, both students and poets need criteria of what a poem should be’ and that ‘[m]ost make no initial statement about criteria, but assume them’. This is not to say that there are no criteria but rather that they are implicit, and so need to be teased out: ‘[N]o student would be long in doubt about what [the criteria] were, for the comments on the poems tend to be more specific than general, and...