Avant-bourgeoisie. Taking offense is tragic and bullying. And stupid. Well, not 100%. But one thing David Orr got mostly right on poets in coterie: ...we begin to think of real criticism as being "mean" rather than as evidence of poetry's health; we stop assuming that poems should be interesting to other people and begin thinking of them as being obliged only to interest our friends... If this smarts or even if it barely tingles, I am advised. Maybe it's your turn, since several times now I have heard and read the m-word in discourse about another poet's criticism. The word mean and words to that affect, like judgmental. Criticism that's judgmental! Ew. To put it only slightly exaggeratedly, anything less than a tummy rub (i.e., prostrated flattery) will not attain or regain approval of the offended? The m-word and its like are used ungeneratively to wipe out the message / messenger and stop discussion. The core strategy is to shrink the discourse field and the heads that are off putting: The atmosphere or the group is thus rendered more charmingly bourgeois for fun and influence. How shrunken is one's head? I see a new line of criticism that demonstrates how we (or some) turn making discourse about discourse into a kind of friends and family plan.

I'm unsated by both the stimulus and an early response concerning what will be topic du jour for many a jour, greatness in poetry. David Orr in this week's NY Times Sunday Book Review rifles through an established litany of nearly-contemporary candidates for greatness, and, save one, leaves them all dangling, Frank O'Hara, Robert Lowell — even Elizabeth Bishop, who is "great with an asterisk," more a contender because, according to Orr's citing of J. D. McClatchy, she has earned "influence...in the literary culture." Bishop is typecast, nonetheless, by Orr with that telltale asterisk that's keyed to the minors, one who too frequently writes about "tiny objects." May I be among the first to crown Orr a size queen? No wonder Orr finds John Ashbery's big opus exceptional if lacking consistency in its high-in-irony greatness. Half-admiring, Orr prescribes tough love for the giant. I'm not kidding.

When we lose sight of greatness, we cease being hard on ourselves and on one another; we begin to think of real criticism as being "mean" rather than as evidence of poetry's health...we stop making demands on the few artists capable of practicing the art at its highest levels. Instead, we cling to the ground in those artists' shadows — John Ashbery's is enormous at this point — and talk about how rich the darkness is and how lovely it is to be a mushroom. This doesn't help anyone. What we should be doing is asking why a poet as gifted as Ashbery has written so many poems that are boring or repetitive (or both), because such questions will allow us to better understand the poems he has written that are moving and funny and beautiful. Such questions might even allow other poets — especially younger poets — to find their own ways of writing poems that are moving and funny and beautiful.

This is a lazy overreach, a gloved lunge toward Ashbery's cheekbone that misses. Point one, an unargued declaration of boredom refracts through the speaker, beholder of the experiment. Another point, directed to Orr's semi-mitigating queries to help others "find their own ways," is the requirement to revisit Ashbery's cohort, O'Hara (rather than hang him up) in order to comprehend how one so close to Ashbery's influence was emboldened to write very different poetry, achieving work as "moving...funny...beautiful" as Ashbery's, or more so, according to a growing consensus of writers living today. (We know who we are.)

Orr's essay is in tatters. While he finds Ashbery's style of irony a singular achievement, Orr operates from a base for greatness that's extremely mainline, stepping backward from Ashbery or anything "moving" or "funny":

Generally speaking, though, the style we have in mind tends to be grand, sober, sweeping — unapologetically authoritative and often overtly rhetorical. It's less likely to involve words like "canary" and "sniffle" and "widget" and more likely to involve words like "nation" and "soul" and "language."

Orr argues in short for a once-prevailing climate of hegemony, three parts old shoe, one part sociological a la Pierre Bourdieu:

Greatness isn't simply a matter of potentially confusing concepts; it's also a practical question about who gets to decide what about whom. Our assumptions about poetic greatness are therefore linked to the reputation-making structures of the poetry world — and changes in those structures can have peculiar effects on our thinking.

In Orr's hands, greatness is authority, both sternly unapologetic and open for business, a brokerage in reputations.

In quick response, Justin Taylor raises objections regarding Orr's dopey old-shoeness but finds not a few points to agree with, such as Orr's easy generalizations about the lack of ambition in contemporary practice. Taylor's most controversial concession to Orr is acceding to the biz, buzz, power wielding part of authority as if this were greatness: "It's not Ashbery's style you want to aspire to — that's been done, and now done and done – it's his status." Taylor follows this with a stagy script about establishing a goal "to become a lion — let the next guy see you sitting there, and turn tail for fear of his life." I'm beginning to think hunter-gatherers like Taylor, Orr, and me are the last ones who need to pipe up about authority or authority-greatness. The topic deserves more voices, especially those ready to tear down gender-marked constructions, such as "to decide what about whom" and "turn tail."

It's only a snippet, but Keith Waldrop shows up at Nomadics, today. It's the finale of Waldrop's reading at The Project last night. (This is what I call timely blogging.)

Take love, find money.

Friends have helped with a few more tropes. Am I nervous? Traits leader. Before-&-after boutique. Brotherly daughters. Fuck knee. Multidimensional acceptance. Here's a favorite, fashion wife swap.

Tropes from today's blogs restaged as pro-ironic after-avant party ambience. Um:

Think back to Kerameikos. For three nights, we'd eat magnificently.

Eight hundred and sixty-nine, eight hundred and sixty-one, eight hundred and sixty-seven. I wanted to get a good viniyoga tape ever since the early 70s when, as a boy, I suffered a lower back injury in France, when I was pushed out of a slowly moving bus by some schoolmates.

In shifting night mist, a tattered poster. It begins — But should I use quotation marks when I reproduce parts of it? Can it really be “quoted” in any meaningful sense? Existence precedes essence.

I will lead you only to your border.

My rooms are full of helium.

Victor squashed under a train.

Wack Bizz.

Ok. I can see the xtranormal meme has taken over my life and those of some favorite bloggers. Time — before others catch up! — to go for beautiful and haunting. I'm letting loose my lost epic Wendy, full of feeling. (I just found it under a fleshy presence.)

Morose office.

Couldn't wait. Keckler was here first, but now Faint Canto 1 (Sunken garden).

To Pine Corridor.

Some feelings return.

Terpsicore is ascetic, improvisatory, sherbet hued, Erato, a voice of suspicion and many hisses, Clio, a commanding note tumbling as rumors circulate, Melpomeme, all blues and mistaken early on, every beat ridden like a whale gainsaying oomph. An echo of flame, ailing Calliope still makes love in public (the flying public) and requires a stop-start pattern of marriage songs, blizzard, and dance.

The lines break up around Clio's supplicant remains. Polyhymnia I admit was arrested after the bombing of atomic plants, and there was loss of memory preventing her escape to the heliport. She was handcuffed, taken into custody under the Baker Act. If meaningless imagery had been more vulnerable it may not have mattered she created havoc in the lobby area, knocking over chairs and a table, ripping an Our Lady of Hope poster off the wall.

Did Euterpe get paid for that?

No, no one pays for Euterpe's "assemble of pomposity." Her comment has been removed.

My point is... Paul Muldoon and crew exact dignity in rebuttal... they sound like my mother Thalia. Or Urania. She and.

We the vicitmized (the ephebes in corresponding clouds) tried to remind Polyhymnia rules protect everyone but she believed in conspiracy. Theater in this deep mirror. A light snow performing buthoh. She called the FIB & they sent a helicopter to the rescue, but the others wouldn't let her get to the rooftop heliport, which does not exist.

The official lines end here and feeling becomes something else.

New trope of the hour, Gail Collins says for 2009 old is in. Citing recent precedents, Mickey Rourke, Robert Plant, and the amazingly cuddly sleepy-eyed 70-year-old Sussex Spaniel, Stump, winner of the Westminster Kennel Club best of show, Collins has a point. Best example, Hank Aaron pulled out of the freezer like a ham, the nation's homerun straight arrow again since younger contenders after Aaron have been over-enhanced. So, hurrah for these rebounded granddads and hoarse retreads from yesteryear ... except in poetry as in pornagraphy it's still going the other way. Face it. The younger the better. (Surgeon General's Warning: Ethical and esthetic boundaries pertain.)

This hardly means the demise of writers past 40. Writers age differently. And they never grow old on the page if they know how. The same rules have applied since the beginning. We have to write and keep writing like 13-year-olds (or even younger if you're after a demographic that takes everything in intuitively), that's all. Some of the most senior and even the dead among us show how it's done. Zukofsky is young but he seems adult compared to Elmslie, Stein, Cerravolo. Bishop is naïve enough and brilliant about it, but I'll first take Notley, Spicer (who can seem too grown-up, too, so maybe cohorts and precursors like O'Hara, Schubert...), Ashbery. Ashbery! Can you approach a medium-length or longer poem by John Ashbery and not expect to be whacked by his teenage brain? Other avants, language and after-language ppl, processuals-conceptualists of every stripe, all of us have never written so goofily, so adolescently as Ashbery in "Farm Implements and Rutabagas in a Landscape." You know, I don't want to limit my argument to tokens of essentialism, but ageism needs its detractors fully equipped. A black-toothed icon like "Farm Implements" brings poetry down to its screeching youth, a time and place it should never relinquish.

Journalism trope of the hour, technology's fingerprints.

Real off center. Requires teethmarks.

Valentine's this year is shaping up. It's cool to get a bear-gram and an armed robot mini from Hater 1 and Hater 2! Leechvideo sent over a short list of Birdwalk clips that show they're influenced by hands-on literary studies. That's cool too. And coolest, this pre-owned fuzzy pajama top from Goodwill that a tongue-in-cheek friend fed-exed me this morning. Thanks, guys.

No plan is perfect. I have nothing to add to that. Did anyone else hear about the woman who led police on a low-speed chase while driving a U-Haul?

You usually find just awesome service from an old lady. So don't piss off seniors! This time she refused to go along with the rules. She still hasn't figured out why she's restricted to a world without suffering that can't exist.

It is sad we are now separated.

A friend who leaves for a long journey cannot be created nor is she destroyed as soon as the word "GAL-IXY" jumps out.

It's even sadder to think in a while this becomes irrelevant. The Navbar is real and terrifying. Nonconformity of the whole brought to a boil makes crazies!

And does the festival in the run off trample on our rights in other ways? We gather to answer this question and simply the idea of autumn that a boy plays with a flag, a Palestinian boy plays with a Hamas flag. This is why wormholes reject us though there are add-ons with incursive bludgeons as to how a wormhole is merely less sensitive to oblivion.

Bad futures are constantly replaced by hopeful updates. Here's one about poetics opening itself to new mergers of practical and technical knowledge. Dale Smith writes, "And by the new I mean new perspective — not necessarily form. That make-it-new thing is not just located within a formalist machinery, but in a living body of thought and practice that we, as poets, engage in."

Now that everyone has spoken — from fans and foes of irony at [lime tree] to speculators in between at Possum Ego — everyone, that is, who has had something to add, theoretically, and has made her case via blog posts and/or filling up comment boxes with regard to running for class president of poetry, disaster-era semiotics, and other near-anarchic aspects of hesitation and uncertainty in verse — maybe we can turn to concrete reportage? Please, more porridge on the following.

The Trade Books with Fine Art Covers exhibit of over two dozen designs at the Poetry Center Library now through March 7.

Cannot Exist reading, Jan. 29, at Bowery PC.

Boyer and Strickland reading, Feb. 4, at the Project.

Goldsmith & Torres reading, Feb 7, at Bowery.

Just asking.

Pulsing is the new blink.

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