A HICCUP PUSHED THROUGH GAUGE TO BERRIGAN THE LESSER
Rick Poinsett
He carries himself with all the uptight, nauseating troubledness of a sore-winner, probably thinking he can misdirect or defuse the doubt and resentment due him by putting on a super-serious mug. You can grimace and grimacing be a token,i a sentimental fave, an undeserving insider. But he mustn’t be grateful. He cannot even be humble, because to be humble implies that one is in fact NOT greater than one’s office. Better to live off one’s cultural trust fund as if it’s a public service to do so. He must be solemn amidst his spoils, being in possession of the twofold fantasy of all ambitious scribblers—ready publication of his work whatever its import, and oversight of the most entrenched venue for poetry in New York. He has to carry it off as if all this is quite burdensome, hard won, poetry’s bitter regency. But the substance of what so radically sets him apart needs to be looked into, needs to be defined. Does his work or person brim with anything like urgent, undeniable literary merit? No, not really. Everybody knows that. Even him, probably. But no one says it, and on he goes, seemingly unconflicted about the inherited underpinnings of his renown. To know on some level that the quality of one’s work isn’t really what accounts for its publication must hurt; to know, “it can’t just be my poems,” must be an abiding source of anxiety—and in this respect he’s to be afforded a grimace every now and again. The readiness to publish him isn’t even commercially motivated—thus, the old standby of “it’s crap, but it sells” doesn’t even suffice to explain it.ii So, given the facts that his work neither aesthetically outstrips that of his contemporaries, nor promises any greater profitability, one wonders at the nature of the cronyism that accounts for his easy publication. To be sure, it’s a cronyism of a peculiar stripe—one that involves a real sticky form of nostalgia on his champions’ behalf—a sentimental indebtedness, their immortal wish for continuity with the high old times of NYC poetics. In return he gains visibility, but it’s all predicated on a gamble. What he thinks he can have is what anyone in his position would want: to enjoy, and to profit by his unearned advantages, and to do so invulnerably—without being called spoiled, exploitative, a connected hack, a mediocre scribbler beloved by sentimental buddies in the small press pobiz—simply, a token. But what about the rest of us? If I for one let this complaint pass unaired, I would in effect be doing him a favor, my silence mitigating the consequences of his gamble. I want the consequences of his gamble to be stark, realized, articulated. I want him to understand that he cannot always depend on the decorum of talented, unsung strangers. And I want him to know that he hasn’t fooled me—and by fooled, I mean that he hasn’t bullied or beguiled me into believing, by his position, that he is the real thing, a wunderkind, a prodigy. His work isn’t any more vital or groundbreaking than is the work of droves of non-dynastic (or disaffected or ambitionless) poets—poets who are unpublished and without position—poets who are unknown, only insofar as they lack connections, or the overweening anxiety to form them. The cronyism and career anxiety that underpin his rush to renown have permanently short-circuited my interest in his actual work. And despite my bitchy take on all his goodies and the use he’s made of them, I’m by no means alone in my general reaction. Yet I’ve an inkling his repute will grow even though his readership has already peaked. Now, considering that I’m one of his utterly powerless contemporaries, and that I’m intent on nothing if not my powerlessness, we will see if my absence from the tight roster of his readership materially impacts his career. It won’t, of course. But it’s more seemly than just bellyaching into a paper bag.
i By this I mean that the gatekeepers have to admit at least one young buck every now and again, lest they appear as desperately bereft of fresh readership as they are.
ii Take heart: my poems wouldn’t sell either—but I wouldn’t trouble myself to prove that point by rushing them into the legitimizing format of a book. If he is at all interested in a real test of both his work and the editorial acuity of his champions, he might consider the results if he were to submit a secret unseen manuscript to one of his most faithful publishers under an assumed name.