When Jen and I were driving around SF the other day, we talked about my research into poetry in the fifties and how it was a huge cultural war between those who followed William Carlos Williams and Ezra Pound and Charles Olson, and those who followed T.S. Eliot and Wallace Stevens.

And then we marveled at a time when poetry mattered enough to people to draw those kind of battle lines.

What does a huge cultural war look like? What's the battlefield? What are the weapons? The wounded and the casualties?

What does a huge cultural war look like?

Imagine an army line of kittens facing off against another army line of kittens - their mortal enemies. Now imagine them all puffing up their fur in hissing agitation.

What's the battlefield?

Chapbooks, broadsides, academic journals, denunciations from newspapers, lectures.

What are the weapons?

Turns of phrase, character assassination, carefully marshalled arguments, extravagent gestures, pure snark, backstabbing, weak-willed appeasement.

The wounded and the casualties?

Careers may be lost, tenure may be denied, entire departments decimated (just one in ten). Your books may be remaindered and the NY Times stops calling for your opinion.

I have seen an academic argument very nearly turn physical once. Never actually seen any punches thrown, though.

I thought you had a serious point to make, Hec.

William Carlos Williams

Which is why I dearly love The Red Wheelbarrow. It's such a perfect little piece of "fuck you, Eliot."

I thought you had a serious point to make, Hec.

About cultural wars?

It's hard to generalize, but the specifics of the poetry battle goes back to William Carlos Williams (WCW) feeling that Eliot had set American poetry back decades by building on European poetry traditions of heightened, allusive language instead of working toward an American poetry that grew out of native rhythms and pattersn of speech.

(Hence the "fuck you" that javachik alludes to.)

Academia embraced Eliot's aesthetic, but the WCW strain flourished in what were called Little Magazines - basically poetry zines of the 20s and 30s and 40s.

It's the WCW poetic which informs the Beat poets as well as the New York School of the 50s (Frank O'Hara) and Black Mountain (an experimental college in the Carolinas where Charles Olson was King Poet and Theorist).

It's one reason why there was so much hostility towards the Beats in academia for a long time - a bias which is still in place. But Ginsberg winning the National Book Award in the early 70s, followed closely by Gary Snyder winning a Pulitzer signalled a cultural turning point, acknowleding the Beat/WCW/Pound influenced poetry.

One of the ways the cultural wars was fought was by trying to define the canon of post-war poetry. Famously, the anthology The New American Poetry edited by Donald Hall (the most popular and influential poetry anthology of the 20th century) championed the WCW/Beat aesthetic, largely in response to a competing anthology of post-war poets (the title escapes me) which had a completely different cast of poets. (Except, I think Robert Duncan and Charles Olson).

So each anthology asserted different branches of poetic evolution as definitive and essential.

And I was only half joking about losing tenure and stuff. There's no way you could've done a thesis at Kenyon College (home to New Criticism, and hence antithetical to the WCW/Pound aesthetic) about somebody like Ginsberg in the 50s or 60s. If an academic pursued an interest in Gary Snyder over say, Robert Lowell, that would've been a form of career suicide back then. Or it might prevent somebody from becoming the Dept. Chair at some universities.

The usual academic infighting, I guess.

Here's a Bob Bob question:

My nephew asked me for a spacesuit so he can go to Mars.

I asked him if he had a spaceship to get there.

He said if he's wearing the spacesuit, the ship will come pick him up.

I say this is solid logic. Thoughts?

Hmm. Maybe I should start sitting around the house in my ball gown and the limo driven by George Clooney will stop by.

I say this is solid logic. Thoughts?

I'm going to have to cast a dissenting vote for: fallacious.