Regrids

I am justly chastised by Jordan for "perpetuating the funny-serious binary." He's right: humor is more of a continuum, with the explicitly sidesplitting (and perhaps vulgar) on one end and the unintentionally funny at the other—not necessarily in a camp sense, rather that a "strong reading" is required to literally "see the humor." Oh, and I screwed up, Gary, I did mean to put your book (not YOU, not even all your poetry, just that book) as -x, +y. My mistake. No one describable as "the Lester Bangs of poetry" could ever be -y.

Here's another, perhaps equally tendentious version of my grid:

                                             Maximalist
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Beautiful——————————————————————————————————Sublime
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                                             Minimalist

This obviously leaves humor completely to one side, but it's a homologous x-axis in that it seems to have something to do with tone, which is closely tied to intent, as opposed to the y axis which is more empirically recognizable. What strikes me about this grid is how much of what I can loosely call postmodern poetry is weighted toward the sublime end. To invoke Kant in a literal-minded way, the sheer volume of avant-garde production (compared to the one book every five years or so model that seems typically quietudinous) (and which tends toward maximalism without being identical with it, since one can publish many many short poems) presents readers with the mathematical sublime, while the action of indeterminacy (still the major move in post-Language poetry, though I think poets like Jarnot and Moxley are choosing a more tangled, "metaphysical," even Donne-ian approach, which fascinates me) imitates the dynamic sublime in confronting the reader with the awesomely unlimited abyssal power of the signifier. Beauty is more often the obvious goal of quietudinous poets, but I'm always drawn to innovative poetry that demonstrates a commitment to beauty in sound and/or image: Barbara Guest strikes me as a n exemplary -x, -y poet on this new grid. Ronald Johnson's earlier poetry seems -x, +y (and yet he so often works by subtraction!); ARK is an interesting limit case because the monumental whole is +x, +y while the individual components, which don't really "add up" to anything but a sense of mathematical/cumulative awe, are exquisitely turned -x, -y poems.

I don't intend these grids as anything other than images of the provisional ledges by which I gain a toehold on the new poetry I come across. They are meant to come dialectically undone under pressure.